From the NYT - article about Buddhist chef Jeon Kwong, popular in Manhattan
Kwan deferred to the dharma: “If you want to be inspired and create, you need to empty yourself out and accept and let desire go,” she explained. “Too much ego and you cannot accept new things.”
It takes so much time to be "into" food. I really want to eat to live these days. Let myself be concerned with natural beauty, and my presence to it.
This is what Western philosophers term “epistemic humility” — a deep Socratic sense that one knows that he or she doesn’t know. For Shinran, this is a pivotal form of spiritual prostration — a laying low of the last vestiges of selfhood. Everything in human existence is equally meaningful or meaningless, take your pick.
This is not unlike what Western ethicists call the “problem of dirty hands”: the difficulty of tidying up the world’s atrocities with hands that can never be washed clean, and may get dirtier in the process.
