Tricycle | Awake in the World

A couple of years ago, Sento-kun, a half-deer, half-Buddha boy mascot, was chosen to represent the 1,300th anniversary of Japan's ancient capital being relocated to Nara. At first, the baby-faced boy with antlers (the deer is considered a sacred animal in Nara) was not well-received. Many found it ugly and disrespectful toward Buddha. Now, however, Sento-kun—designed by Satoshi Yabuuchi, a sculptor and professor at Tokyo University of the Arts—is being praised by Nara authorities for the amount of attention that he has brought to the city. More »

Sometimes I like to imagine David Foster Wallace meditating. It seems like maybe Zen or Vipassana might have been the perfect venue for the writer to explore, if not release, the pressure that clearly built up in his head. In his fiction, the protagonists are always thinking, thinking about thinking, and it’s footnotes all the way down. I would like to believe that he tried sitting. Anybody who has read his commencement address at Kenyon College, in 2005, knows that he was a Buddha ancestor. From that speech: More »