Thursday, October 11, 2007

I like reading Taoist stories. They have some philosophical insights and are quite beautiful to read.




Dreams

Chuang Tzu, ancient Chinese Taoist, once experienced a dream in which he was a butterfly fluttering to & fro. In the dream he had no awareness of his individuality as a person; he was simply a butterfly. Suddenly, he awoke and found that once again he was a human laying in bed. But then he thought to himself, "Was I before a man who dreamt about being a butterfly, or am I now a butterfly who dreams about being a man?"




In Your Hands
A young man caught a small bird, and held it behind his back. He then asked, "Master, is the bird I hold in my hands alive or dead." The boy thought this was a grand opportunity to play a trick on the old man. If the master answered "dead", it would be let loose into the air. If the master answered "alive", he would simply wring its neck. The master spoke, "The answer is in your hands".



Zen Master lived the simplest kind of life in a little hut at the foot of a mountain. One evening, while he was away, a thief sneaked into the hut only to find there was nothing in it to steal. The Zen Master returned and found him. "You have come a long way to visit me," he told the prowler, "and you should not return empty handed. Please take my clothes as a gift." The thief was bewildered, but he took the clothes and ran away. The Master sat naked, watching the moon. "Poor fellow," he mused, " I wish I could give him this beautiful moon."

1 comment:

Rockybru said...

hi luxen,

thanks for dropping by at my posting on Nurin. you asked if i hadn't done the same thing when I was with the Malay Mail. the answer is "no". when those devils did little nurul huda in JB three years ago, the MM had pictures but we did not use it. we received photographs of accident victims daily but we refrained from using them. sure, MM was known for being a bit more sensational but then it positioned itself as a "real" tabloid (the Star and the Sun are never tabloidish and the NST does not know what it wants to be -- a broadsheet in a tabloid's body?).

I was known for my preference of publishing pictures of Baywatch-like bodies in the paper. Got many "love" letters from KDN for that but not for exploiting the many pictures of dead men, women and kids to push up sales.

One exception I observed was with regads to pictures of war victims. even then, I tread with care so as not to make you lose all your breakfast upon seeing them pictures.

I believe that the pretty picture of Nurin sends a stronger message to the public about the beasts still in our midst. not a mugshot of the brutalised, dead kid.

thank you.