Ruth Fuller Sasaki - Early Life and Developing Interest in Eastern Religions

Early Life and Developing Interest in Eastern Religions

Ruth Fuller was born and grew up in Chicago, and enjoyed wealth and privilege. She took piano lessons in Switzerland for several months in 1913, and also studied French and German with private tutors in Europe for a year and a half. In 1917, she married Edward Warren Everett, a trial attorney twenty years older than herself. At the end of 1918, a daughter was born, Eleanor. From 1938 to 1948, Eleanor was married to writer and Zen philosopher Alan Watts.

In 1923-24, Ruth and Eleanor went to the Clarkstown Country Club in Nyack, New York, for rest and healing. This resort was led by Pierre Bernard, and offered adult education in yoga and Eastern philosophy and religions. Then from 1927 to 1929, she studied Sanskrit and Indian philosophy at the University of Chicago.

Read more about this topic:  Ruth Fuller Sasaki

Famous quotes containing the words early, life, developing, interest, eastern and/or religions:

    Franklin said once in one of his inspired flights of malignity—
    Early to bed and early to rise
    Make a man healthy and wealth and wise.
    As if it were any object to a boy to be healthy and wealthy and wise on such terms.
    Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)

    Every life and every childhood is filled with frustrations; we cannot imagine it otherwise, for even the best mother cannot satisfy all her child’s wishes and needs. It is not the suffering caused by frustration, however, that leads to emotional illness, but rather the fact that the child is forbidden by the parents to experience and articulate this suffering, the pain felt at being wounded.
    Alice Miller (20th century)

    By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that evolution is a natural process, history a human one.... Insofar as we treat man as a part of nature—for instance in a biological survey of evolution—we are precisely not treating him as a historical being. As a historically developing being, he is set over against nature, both as a knower and as a doer.
    Owen Barfield (b. 1898)

    The yuppie idea of the future ain’t my idea of a future. Your safe car, and home, and job, and all the time rushing between the three—let’s make people feel they can grow up and have some education, some interest in life! That’s what counts!
    Joe Strummer (b. 1952)

    The eastern light our spires touch at morning,
    The light that slants upon our western doors at evening,
    The twilight over stagnant pools at batflight,
    Moon light and star light, owl and moth light,
    Glow-worm glowlight on a grassblade.
    O Light Invisible, we worship Thee!
    —T.S. (Thomas Stearns)

    The ancients adorned their sarcophagi with the emblems of life and procreation, and even with obscene symbols; in the religions of antiquity the sacred and the obscene often lay very close together. These men knew how to pay homage to death. For death is worthy of homage as the cradle of life, as the womb of palingenesis.
    Thomas Mann (1875–1955)