Friday 20 June 2014

A lesser-known saying of the Buddha

"I have some friends who are considered, well, modern-day prophets, and one of them said, ‘It must be wonderful for your children to have such a conscious father—when did that happen?’ And I said, ‘I’m mindful of a quote attributed to Buddha, which is that you don’t find the pearl of enlightenment lying around on the beach. You gotta go through a lot of oysters, and you gotta scrape your knuckles and break your fingernails opening all the motherfuckers up. And then one day’ ”—he beamed and grasped the air—“ ‘there it is! The fucking pearl of enlightenment!’

To be fair to Don Johnson, who is the subject of the New Yorker interview from which this quotation is taken, perhaps he was not ascribing all of those words to the Enlightened One.



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