True Religion: The Story that Tells All Other Stories

On my way to the library this morning, I looked down at my wrist and saw the wooden beads I had put on in the morning as a reminder. The beads are meant to remind me to practice mood — observing the physicality of breath permeating my body as I moved through the day.

I was waiting for the light to turn on my bike when I took a closer look at the beads themselves. They were almost uniformly dark brown except for the one adjacent to the Chinese knot that held them all together. That one was green and tan with crystalline patterns that made me wonder whether it was stone rather than wood. As I looked closer, I also noticed that each of the dark brown beads were incised alternately with the image of the seated Buddha and the Chinese character for Buddha.

The character for Buddha in Chinese is a character formed of two parts. The left side is the character for man. The right is the image of two sticks bound together with rope. As I thought about this, two other word origins came to mind. Religion comes from the Latin religiar, meaning ‘to bind.’ And yoga comes from the Sanskrit, meaning union or yoking. It seemed clear that whatever religion is, what it does is bind.