Mahanu🚧 Draft — not final. This page was auto-generated as day-one scaffolding for the project and still needs a human pass before it reads as finished. The blanks and placeholders below are intentional — someone who runs this project should fill them in and delete this notice.
Commonplace book
Not a reading list — a keeper's book. A passage only earns a place here once it has survived contact with an actual week: read, tried, and found to hold. The column that matters is the last one — where it proved true — because that's the difference between a quote collection and wisdom.
Entry format (worked example)
"It's not things that upset us, but our judgements about things." — Epictetus, Enchiridion Tradition: Greek / Stoic The idea: the gap between an event and my reaction is where all the freedom lives. Where it proved true: (a real week it held — the traffic jam, the bad news, the rude email)
(Epictetus is public domain — safe to quote in full. For living authors, keep to a short line and a reference.)
The shelf so far
| Passage / idea | Source | Tradition | Proved true? |
|---|---|---|---|
| judgements, not things, upset us | Epictetus, Enchiridion | Stoic | ☐ |
| Bhagavad Gita | Indian | ☐ | |
| Analects | Chinese | ☐ | |
| Zen stories | Japanese | ☐ |
The rhythm
- One tradition a quarter, one primary text — start small: Epictetus, the Gita, the Analects, Zen stories.
- Collected talks in
sources/are trailheads, not destinations — they point at the primary text, they don't replace it. - Family test: one idea a month tried out loud at dinner. The ones that survive the kids' scepticism are the keepers.