Dear friends,
A dozen letters into this Little Buddhist Days experiment—thanks for reading along / sticking with!—and spring is officially here. Birds and buds emerge, jovial rebuttals to the bleakness of global affairs. Augurs of change, a time for new cadences.
💌
2026 marks the tenth year since the death of my college roommate Amy. A decade ago I left Eugene with a portion of her ashes. Earlier this month I flew back from Eugene with two envelopes containing another kind of granular gift.
Amy’s collages hang on walls across the country; I’m looking at two of them as I type these words. The time density of these artworks stuns me. Amy once told me that she had spent years gathering words and images toward a collage intended for her brother—and that she would need more time. She knew at an impossibly young age that hers would be a life foreshortened—yet she never rushed, in her creating or in her living. (Were living and creating separate for her? I doubt it.)
It took me hours to pore through the contents of the encyclopedia-thick stack of envelopes her widower, Alex, brought over to Eugene. Many of the words were so tiny that my breath sent them flitting to the carpet like whirlybirding maple seeds. It was almost painful to encounter her creative process so tangibly, to brush untold hours of labor against my fingertips. I didn’t look through the envelopes marked for other friends, but I took home the envelope labeled CX and another one labeled RANDOM.
🌴
After finishing Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just, palm trees will never be the same (“lashing with light… a brush with beauty,” p41).
It has taken this book and the past decade to help me understand why beauty was foremost among Amy’s core values.
[T]hough human beings have created much of the beauty of the world, they are only collaborators in a much vaster project. The world accepts our contributions but in no way depends on us. (108)
The perceiver of beauty experiences a radical decentering of the self. This state of beholding, at once pleasurable and anattā-revealing, guides us to
the active site of creating—the site of stewardship in which one acts to protect or perpetuate a fragment of beauty already in the world or instead to supplement it by bringing into being a new object. (114)
How many of us have regarded beauty as suspect? For its frivolity, for being a waste of time, for distracting from justice, even? I’ve certainly been guilty of seeing justice as a necessity and beauty as an extravagance. To which Scarry offers a sharp rejoinder: Aesthetic fairness supports ethical fairness.
Justice itself is dependent on human hands to bring it into being and has no existence independent of acts of creation. Beauty may be either natural or artifactual; justice is always artifactual and is therefore assisted by any perceptual event that so effortlessly incites in us the wish to create. Because beauty repeatedly brings us face-to-face with our own powers to create, we know where and how to locate these powers when a situation of injustice calls on us to create… (115)
The work of justice begins with our creative acts. The work of decades begins with the daily.
📿
For millennia, the translation of Buddhist texts has been painstaking, slow, and undertaken by groups. So it was for Vimalakīrtinirdeśa: The Teaching of Vimalakīrti, translated from the Sanskrit by Luis Gómez and Paul Harrison with the Mangalam Translation Group. The introduction acknowledges, by my count, twenty-four people who aided the decade-long translation process. More if you include editors and encouragers and previous translators of this celebrated Mahayana text.
The result is a rollicking pleasure to read, funny and magical and phantom-filled. There’s a buddha-realm, Sarvagandhasugandha, where they teach by fragrance alone (pity us with our janky reliance on words). When the householder (read: enlightened lay practitioner who puts all the monks to shame) Vimalakīrti invites 90,000 (!) denizens of the Realized One Gandhottamakūṭa’s realm to share their fragrant leftovers with the visiting assembly of 3.2 million (!!) who have gathered at Vimalakīrti’s home in Śākyamuni’s realm, they’re told to suppress their fragrances and hide their true beauty (we wouldn’t be able to handle it here in the Sahā world).
In chapter 3, “Dispatching the Disciples and Bodhisattvas,” a stream of monks recounts the ways that Vimalakīrti has shown them up time and again. Their mortified recollections culminate with Sudatta, who was making sacrifices at his father’s house when the enlightened layman comes to scold him. Why make sacrifices of food and material things when the sacrifice of the Dharma is the highest offering? Right then and there, two hundred brahmins conceive the aspiration to perfect, unsurpassable awakening. Overwhelmed, Sudatta offers Vimalakīrti a pearl necklace worth hundreds of thousands.
He did not take the pearl necklace. I said to him, “Take this and bestow it upon him in whom you have serene confidence.” Taking that necklace, he divided it in two. One portion he gave to the poorest man in the city, the one in that sacrificial hall who was despised by everybody. The other portion he gave to the Realized One Duṣprasaha… [in whose world it appeared] in the form of a beautiful, multicolored peaked pavilion made of strings of pearls, symmetrical and well proportioned with a pillar at each of its four corners.
After displaying this miracle he said to me, “The sacrifice of Dharma is fulfilled when a generous donor makes a gift in a spirit of great compassion and with no expectation of reward, in the recognition that the poorest man in the city is just as worthy of gifts as the Realized One and that there is no difference between them.” (46–47)
The pearls-turned symmetrical pavilion embodies beauty’s proliferation and equality’s balanced proportions. Beauty and justice, like the daily and the decades, are never separate. May we gather them in abundance, so that we might create in plenitude—systematically and at random—for ourselves and each other and this beauty-strewn, justice-wanting world.
Til the next quarter moon,
~Chenxing
