Status Updates From Our Oriental Heritage (Stor...

About one of Japan's greatest Confucian philosophers: "Togai’s pupils pointed out that he had written two hundred and forty-two books without saying an unkind word of any other philosopher. When he died, they placed this enviable epitaph upon his tomb: He did not talk about the faults of others... He cared for nothing but books. His life was uneventful."

Fashionable ladies rouged their cheeks, colored their nails, & occasionally gilded the lower lip; to complete their toilette 16 articles were required in the 17th century, & 20 in the 18th. They recognized 15 styles of front hair & 12 styles of back hair; they shaved their eyebrows, painted crescent moons or substituted for them 2 little black spots high up on the forehead to match their artificially blackened teeth.

China ... is one of the oldest & richest of living civilizations: a tradition of poetry reaching as far back as 1700 B.C.; a long record of philosophy idealistic & yet practical, profound & yet intelligible; ... the most effective morality to be found among the peoples of any time; a social organization that has held together more human beings, & has endured through more centuries, than any other known to history.

I want to avoid violence. Nonviolence is the first & the article of my creed. But I had to make my choice. I had either to submit to a system which I considered had done an irreparable harm to my country, or incur the risk
of the mad fury of my people bursting forth ... I do not ask for mercy. ... I am here, therefore, to invite and cheerfully submit to the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon me. -Gandhi

Prose is largely a recent phenomenon in Indian literature, and might be termed an exotic corruption through contact with Europeans. To the naturally poetic soul of the Hindu everything worth writing about had a poetic content and invited a poetic form.