Where Master Nan appears
19 total
…f chaos and dating back to a time before rational calculation and scientific progress - offered hope. I asked Master Nan where he would begin on a quest to understand this age and how best to prepare. How to cultivate oneself? “You know you...
water, where it has stayed in the years since. Master Nan’s particular passion, | learned that night, was a branch of Chinese Ch’an Buddhism that had, about 1000 years ago, provided the seeds for the Japanese school of “instant illumination...
…st officials, particularly those at the absolute top of the system. The Master my friend was referring to was Master Nan. Though he was largely unknown outside of China - I am sure you had not heard of him until a few pages ago - in China h...
institutions and kingdoms and beliefs of Europe and in a process of revolution, of invention, of destruction and creation, they put a period at the end of one era, and began the very first lines of a new human story. These forces produced w...
ruggle between those who have the Seventh Sense – who are born with it or trained to it – and those who don't. New, network forces all around us will take on old, established ones – they already are – in business, politics, warfare, science...
with the sentiments of a slower culture that Master Nan embodied, passed like delicate and still-warm tea, with so much calm in the face of all this urgency? It’s not only because of Master Nan’s insight that this world is tearing at our mi...
…nting world around us now by the shores of Lake Taihu? Why begin with the sentiments of a slower culture that Master Nan embodied, passed like delicate and still-warm tea, with so much calm in the face of all this urgency? It’s not only bec...
new one. Impulses and connections we don’t fully understand and can’t yet control are at play. Our imagination is beggared too now. Often. These forces are, we have to confess, wiping away one system. But they are also producing another. Wh...
ltural habits, so we’re likely blind to urgent pressures of our own. Surely you’ve felt this creeping anxiety yourself, the exciting nausea of movement coming from you know not where? The ability to sense and feel the deeper chord changes o...
as butchered thousands of oxen, But the blade is still like it's newly sharpened.” He was cutting not with his knife, but with an instinct – and the result was the highest form of mastery: accomplishment with nearly no effort. This our our...
…future and protect ourselves against what is even now descending upon us. A consciouness exists in the world, Master Nan would say. It extends over borders, across differences, between people. And it becomes, on networks now, visible in new...
…r and with machine intelligence, biological innovation and the tremors of a globalizing world will be, to use Master Nan’s word, “epochal.” Most of us find ourselves torn now. Not just between future and past; not merely between the habits...
according to which a people, a society, a human being has lived, the ‘divinatory instinct’ for the relationships of these evaluations, for the relation of the authority of values to the authority of effective forces): this historical sense,...
feeling for history. Surely, he felt, an instinct for ancient balances and truths would provide a guide rail of sorts as the world lurched into a new age, along an uncharted road. 3 If you could say “This has happened before” or “This is ho...
s speech picking up pace. “But in the end, he learned. Su Qin learned. You should study him. If you do this, if you are sincere, if you work hard, if you learn these ideas, you can understand. Can you be that disciplined?” The room was dead...
…f chaos and dating back to a time before rational calculation and scientific progress – offered hope. I asked Master Nan where he would begin on a quest to understand this age and how best to prepare. How to cultivate oneself? “You know you...
…ld. After wearing his guests down with relentless dinner-time questioning that first night I was at Lake Tai, Master Nan began to offer his views of our age. What he saw, he explained, was a world pressing too hard on a fault line. We faced...
…overlooking the lake and sat down quietly on benches and meditated for three hours. And on our first evening, Master Nan sat with us during dinner, looking young and vital and 20 years short of his 92, barely eating. Above the bridge of his...
my friend was referring to was Master Nan. Though he was largely unknown outside of China – I am sure you had not heard of him until a few pages ago – in China he was an icon. After his return to the mainland in the 1990s, his books about B...
