Rudolf Koch’s Book of Signs

jinko, the fine aloeswood incense which D. T. Suzuki called “the smell of Buddhism.”

As the universe manifests itself as an infinite variety of patterns and forms, the more any individual realizes himself to be one with that universe, the more of an individual he becomes.

Several years ago the students of Stanford voted him the best teacher on the faculty, which must have enraged his colleagues because you cannot maintain proper status in an American university without cultivated mediocrity. You must be academically “sound,” which is to be preposterously and phenomenally dull. Once I had a professor who was teaching

J. P. de Caussade’s Abandonment of the Divine Providence,

Ali Akbar Khan, the sarod player,

reading Lafcadio Hearn’s Gleanings in Buddha-Fields,

He explained how the grain followed those same watercourse patterns that we admire in clouds, drifting smoke, marble, jade, and flames, and how one might so flow with one’s own nature as to live each moment of life with the same grace. When students pressed him to define all this more precisely he would sometimes shout out, “What’s the matter with

un-English style of life. For me she became the archetypal representative of relaxed, urbane society seasoned with wit and fantasy—which is what I would like to be understood by the word “civilization.” Francis Croshaw was a