the line of beauty

The inner-what is it? If not me, if not you?

stone, star, flower, wind.

When great age becomes child-like again, joins it in simplicity. And the flame of the candle before the sun is not extinguished. The inner sense of your life unfolding: stone, star, flower, wind. The sound before the sound, the darkness of the sun. The inner is a mirror that must be polished, so that I remember, so when I look at me, I shall think of you.

"The sound of Christian bells draws man upward and leads him away from the world; but the heavy and deep sound of the Buddhist bell leaves us motionless, it makes us come down into ourselves...

Beauty is like the sun; it acts without detours, without dialectical intermediaries, its ways are free, direct, incalculable; like love, to which it is closely connected, it can heal, unloose, appease, unite, or deliver through its simple radiance...

The empirical "I" is nothing but a shifting tissue of images and tendencies; when the ego of an individual at eight years old is compared with the ego of the same individual at eighty years of age one may well ask oneself where the real "I" is. And if man could live for a thousand years what would remain of that which was his "I" in the first century of his life?Beings and events would drift around him like leaves scattered by the wind, the sky itself..."

---Frithjof Schuon, Treasures of Buddhism