World Religions

I've been about as a busy as a butterball at a four-course buffet. With what, you ask? Confucianism, Daoism, Shinto, Jainism, Sikhism, Zen (and Chan) Buddhism, Pure Land Buddhism and Tantric Buddhism, to be exhaustively precise. Of course, that's only my current preoccupation. A couple of weeks ago, it was Hinduism and (the various forms of) Indian Buddhism. In a few weeks, it'll be Judaism, Islam and various African tribal religions. Why all this? Because my mean old professor said so. He said, "read three hundred pages out of Theodore M. Ludwig's Sacred Paths, and two hundred pages out of Eastman's Ways of Religion by next week . . . and make sure you memorize it all!" Well, it wasn't quite that bad . . . we did get a syllabus warning us such things would happen, but still! So anyway, tomorrow I have a test on all of this stuff, and it's probably gonna be very difficult. Then again, I guess that's the whole point in my school - making things difficult for us. On the positive side, I do feel much wiser, having been forced into a position of relative competence in the area of comparative religion. Pretty soon I'll be able to start a cult of my own, incorporating various forms of whatever a good number of people will like enough to give me a whole lot of power fast. That was a rather convoluted way of saying that I'm a megalomaniac. Anyhoo . . . I should be back to studying - but that's what's going on with me these days.