Costica Bradatan at Commonweal:
One day, an ancient anecdote tells us, Diogenes the Cynic walked around backward in the public arcade. When people started laughing at him, he promptly admonished them: “Aren’t you ashamed that while you’re walking in the wrong direction along life’s path, you scoff at me for walking backwards?” As often happens with a Cynic anecdote (or a chreia, as they called it in ancient Greece), it’s largely irrelevant whether the story is accurate or not. Such anecdotes, about real or imagined events, point to a larger and more important story about the human situation, one that trumps our narrow concerns with historical accuracy. How much is factual and how much is imagined in what we know about the Buddha’s life? But does it really matter? Prince Siddhartha may well have been entirely fictitious—like Don Quixote, Madame Bovary, or Ivan Karamazov—and that doesn’t have much of an effect on his spiritual significance or the impact of Buddhist anecdotes on people’s lives. The same goes for Diogenes.
In this chreia, Diogenes urges us to turn our lives around—literally, to revolutionize our existence. In its original sense, the word “revolution” signifies precisely that: a rotation, a rolling back, a turning around.
more here.
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