Parabola's Spring 1987 issue: The Knight and the Hermit The Knight and the Hermit can be said to represent two states of beings, or from the point of view of spiritual development, two stages of becoming, which we could call engagement and detachment or action and contemplation. Sometimes they are depicted as being at extremes, and as such could be said to delineate the two ends of a spectrum of states in which the hero, like ourselves, may find himself. The Knight, symbol of the human being in the realm of action, makes himself felt in the world, exerts a force through external relations with others. In particular, he is the one who is in active service to a King, representing divine authority. The King occupies the higher position for the Knight, and as such, is not only the person to whom the Knight is in service, but what must be served. The Hermit, or symbol of the contemplative aspect of human search, is detached from the world, as such, and exerts a force through his relation to God. He attempts to serve the divine authority directly, not through an intercessor, whether priest or king. As stories about them attest, neither represents human perfection: they are incomplete, the Knight having an undeveloped inner life, and the Hermit an undeveloped outer life. As extremes, the Knight and the Hermit, that is, being-in-action and being-in-contemplation, apparently exclude one another, the distance between them constituting a polar opposition. We must remember, however, that looking at the image in this way entails a linear symbology, which is only one among several models that can elucidate a multivalent meaning behind the symbol. --from "Quest and Question" Cover: Head of a Warrior, Mayan National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City Scala/Art Resource, New York In this issue:

• "Meditation and Action" by Eknath Easwaran
  - Fusing the inward and outward currents of life
• "Le Chevalier Perdu" by P. L. Travers
  - Coming to the end of the world
• "Seeking the Spirit Path" by Lewis P. Johnson
  - Diary of a vision quest
• "The Solitary Ones" by Thomas Merton
  - Monks of the desert
• "Quest and Question" by Paul Jordan-Smith
  - Finding the balance
• "From Warrior to Holy Man" by Sybil Thornton
  - Buddhist and Confucian ideals in Japanese tradition
• "Mountain Songs: Chinese Hermit Poems"
• "Why Did Henry David Thoreau Take the Bhagavad-Gita to Walden Pond?" by Barbara Stoler Miller
  - Arjuna in Concord
• From Markings by Dag Hammarskjv?ld
• "Spirit and the Warrior" by Nobuyoshi Higashi
  - Movement as meditation
• "Jews, Myth, and Modern Life" by Elie Wiesel
  - History and beyond

Tangents - Reviews

• "Beyond Duality" by Frederick Franck
  - A review of Moon in a Dewdrop: The Writings of Zen Master Dogen
• "Awakening Conscience" by Beverly Moon
  - Matter of Heart, a film about Jung and his ideas

Epicycles - Traditional stories from around the world

• "Father Joachim" / Greek
• "Fasting of the Heart" / Chinese
• "The General and the Abbot" / Japanese
• "Leaving Things Alone" / Chinese
• "Arjuna's Penance" / Hindu
• "The Bottomless Boat" / Chinese