The ​Snow Leopard 1 csillagozás

The Nepal government takes yeti seriously, and there is a strict law against killing them.

121. oldal (Vintage, 2010)

Why is death so much on my mind when I do not feel I am afraid of it?—the dying, yes, especially in cold (hence the oppression brought by this north wind down off the glaciers, and by the cold choppiness on the cold lake), but not the state itself. And yet I cling—to what? What am I to make of these waves of timidity, this hope of continuity, when at other moments I feel free as the bharal on those heights, ready for wolf and snow and leopard alike? I must be careful, that is true, for I have young children with no mother, and much work to finish; but these aren’t honest reasons, past a point. Between clinging and letting go, I feel a terrible struggle. This is a fine chance to let go, to “win my life by losing it”, which means not recklessness but acceptance, not passivity but non-attachment.

140. oldal (Vintage, 2010)

Confronted with the pain of Asia, one cannot look and cannot turn away. In India, human misery seems so pervasive that one takes in only stray details: a warped leg or a dead eye, a sick pariah dog eating withered grass, an ancient woman lifting her sari to move her shrunken bowels by the road.

22. oldal (Vintage, 2010)

Especially in India and Pakistan, the hoofed animals are rapidly disappearing, due to destruction of habitat by subsistence agriculture, overcutting of the forests, over-grazing by the scraggy hordes of domestic animals, erosion, flood—the whole dismal cycle of events that accompanies overcrowding by human beings.

24. oldal (Vintage, 2010)

A child dragging bent useless legs is crawling up the hill outside the village. Nose to the stones. Goat dung, and muddy trickles, she pulls herself along like a broken cricket. We falter, ashamed of our strong step, and noticing this, she gazes up, clear-eyed, without resentment—it seems much worse that she is pretty. In Bengal, GS says stiffly, beggars will break their children’s knees to achieve this pitiable effect for business purposes: this is his way of expressing distress. But the child that lies here at our boots is not a beggar; she is merely a child, staring in curiosity at tall, white strangers. I long to give her something—a new life?—yet am afraid to tamper with such dignity. And so I smile as best I can, and say “Namas-te!” “Good morning!” How absurd! And her voice follows as we go away, a small clear siling voice—“Namas-te!”—a Sanskrit word for greeting and parting that means, “I salute you”.

30. oldal (Vintage, 2010)

In GS’s view, Asia is fifteen to twenty years behind East Africa in its attitudes toward conservation, and the gap may well prove fatal. All of the region from western India to Turkey, and all of northern Africa a well, has turned to desert in historic times, and yet a country such as Pakistan, with but 3 per cent of its territories left in forest, is doing nothing at all about the impending disaster, despite a huge idle standing army—sponsored, of course, by military-industrial interests in the United States—that could just as well be out in the weary countryside planting new trees.

32. oldal (Vintage, 2010)

The sherpas are alert for ways in which to be of use, yet are never insistent, far less servile; since they are paid to perform a service, why not do it as well as possible? “Here, sir! I will wash the mud!” “I carry that, sir!” As GS says, “When the going gets rough, they take care of you first.” Yet their dignity is unassailable, for the service is rendered for its own sake—it is the task, not the employer, that is served. As Buddhists, they know that the doing matters more than the attainment or reward, that to serve in this selfless way is to be free.

40. oldal (Vintage, 2010)

Maya is Time, the illusion of the ego, the stuff of individual existence, the dream that separates us from a true perception of the whole.

68. oldal (Vintage, 2010)

In other days, plain levitation was described in Christian and Muslim faith alike: thus, Saint Joseph of Cupertino, in times of ecstasy, was observed to fly into low trees, and on one occasion, according to a seventeenth-century witness, rose “from the middle of the church and flew like a bird onto the high altar, where he embraced the tabernacle.” Such unusual gifts, whether cultivated or not, may deflect the aspirant from his path to true mystical experience of God, and have never been highly regarded by great teachers; one of the four cardinal sins in the monastic order of the Buddha—after unchastity, theft, and killing—was laying claim to miraculous powers. It is related that Sakyamuni once dismissed as of small consequence a feat of levitation on the part of a disciple, and cried out in pity of a yogin by the river who had wasted twenty years of his human existence in learning how to walk on water, when the ferryman might have taken him across for a small coin.

144. oldal (Vintage, 2010)

[…] the onions seem much heavier than, in their onion nature, they have any right to be.

163. oldal (Vintage, 2010)