Saturday, August 07, 2004


unseasonably cool

i expected to be drinking iced coffee today, but the unusual weather has me finishing up the last of the old batdorf dancing goat in the cafetiére (a.k.a. french press.)

à propos of my recent post on the best edition of the yoga sutras, the fabulous carl "upside down" horowitz informs me that the ultimate yoga sutras is the cd-rom version available for US$25 at t.k.v. desikachar's bookstore. this multi-media version has printable texts, an english translation, and audio files so you can hear what the sutras traditionally sound like.

i might order one, since it seems a little handier than carrying around the entire
heart of yoga just for the sutra translation.

recently, the unofficial alumni listserv for st. john's has featured a lot of discussion on "eastern thinking," which is pretty funny for a group who've devoted themselves to the program, which used to be naively called "the great books," or by the truly crazed, "the canon."

it's astonishing how people unafraid to wade through hegel's wacky phenomenology, straight text, no chaser, sans commentary, fear likewise reading something simple like the gita or the sutras.

gimme the gita any day over hegel! what's more surprising is the embedded prejudice that eastern classics are illogical mysticism that must be irrational and can't be discussed.

um, folks, what about plotinus? that's mystical. but seriously, altho' the alumni are educated people who know the indians invented or discovered zero and the arabs algebra, that the "east" preserved aristotle when it was lost to the "west," they seem to resist the idea that one can rationally talk about these books.

in fact, it almost seems like an emotional need that these works be "inscrutable," especially among the alumni who've gone po-mo and drunk the school of paris cant. they are the worst "orientalists" of all, even as they think they are so chic and liberal.

they should know better than to argue we can't understand these books because english has "closed our minds" to the "foreign structure" and "ineffable referrants" of sanskrit ideas with me! as if sanskrit can't be learned -- i mean, i know literally hundreds of yoga students who study and chant it every day!

but i really think the alumni can learn otherwise, which is why i've been seeking the best translation of the sutras for them to explore. i refuse to lead any seminars on it tho!

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