I have always been taken with the final line of the Heart Sutra, where it says: Gate, Gate, Paragate, Parasamgate, Bodhi Svaha. Loosely translated these words tell us to “go, go, go beyond, go way beyond, awakening … YES!” Or “awakening … Yeah, Baby!” depending upon your preference. Put another way, “go deeper, go further in your search for truth.”

This kind of travel can and should be done on one’s cushion, but I’ve always advocated external exploration as a means of cultivating skills for internal work. Here The Economist puts tested results of expat Upaya into print.

As they report in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, William Maddux of INSEAD, a business school in Fontainebleau, France, and Adam Galinsky, of the Kellogg School of Management in Chicago, presented 155 American business students and 55 foreign ones studying in America with a test used by psychologists as a measure of creativity. Given a candle, some matches and a box of drawing pins, the students were asked to attach the candle to a cardboard wall so that no wax would drip on the floor when the candle was lit. The solution is to use the box as a candleholder and fix it to the wall with the pins. They found 60% of students who were either living abroad or had spent some time doing so, solved the problem, whereas only 42% of those who had not lived abroad did so.

Fiat Lux, and Bodhi Svaha!

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