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:

    Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.
    F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)

    For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible. Our science has always desired to monitor, measure, abstract, and castrate meaning, forgetting that life is full of noise and that death alone is silent: work noise, noise of man, and noise of beast. Noise bought, sold, or prohibited. Nothing essential happens in the absence of noise.
    Jacques Attali (b. 1943)

    Females serve as ever-present reminders to developing males of what they must not become.
    Ethel Strainchamps, U.S. author. Woman in Sexist Society, ch. 16 (1971)

    The cohort that made up the population boom is now grown up; many are in fact middle- aged. They are one reason for the enormous current interest in such topics as child rearing and families. The articulate and highly educated children of the baby boom form a huge, literate market for books on various issues in parenting and child rearing, and, as time goes on, adult development, divorce, midlife crisis, old age, and of course, death.
    Joseph Featherstone (20th century)

    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)

    Politics at all times lead to bloody wars, and not only politics, but also religions as well as social and economic systems of all times are spattered with blood. Invariably the big ones devoured the little ones, and the little ones the tiny ones.
    Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)