Ancient Wisdom

In Book VIII of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle draws a distinction that modern professionals desperately need. He identifies three types of friendship: those based on utility, those based on pleasure, and the rare philía teleía—complete...

In 1953, when Tenzing Norgay summited Everest with Edmund Hillary, Western newspapers celebrated the conquest of the world's highest peak. Sherpa communities in the Khumbu valley marked the achievement differently: they noted that both men...

In the palm-wine markets of 18th-century Igboland, a peculiar leadership practice would have baffled any European observer. The eldest man of the umunna—the patrilineage council—would preside over dispute resolution for exactly one market week...

When a Ju/'hoan tracker from the Central Kalahari prepares to follow kudu spoor into the bush, he performs a practice that seems counterintuitive to pursuit: before moving forward, he turns completely around and studies the terrain behind him....

In 1469, a fourteen-year-old boy entered Andrea del Verrocchio's Florentine workshop expecting to learn painting. Instead, he spent his first year grinding minerals into pigments, his second year preparing wooden panels, and his third year...

In 14th-century Japan, Zeami Motokiyo revolutionized theatrical performance by creating a rule that seems designed to destroy ambition: aspiring Noh actors spent their first ten years solely as observers. They couldn't perform. They...

Marcus Tullius Cicero prepared for his most dangerous speech—the prosecution of Gaius Verres in 70 BCE—by walking through the colonnade of Verres' own confiscated villa. Not metaphorically. Physically. He paced the actual marble floors,...

In 17th-century Central Java, a Dutch merchant named Rijklof van Goens recorded a puzzling observation in his trading journal. When he approached skilled keris-makers in the villages around Surakarta with a lucrative order for fifty ceremonial...

In traditional Hawaiian communities, ho'oponopono sessions began with a practice that would make modern conflict resolution specialists uncomfortable: before anyone could accuse another person of wrongdoing, they had to publicly confess their...

In the Theravāda monasteries of Northeast Thailand, particularly within the Thai Forest Tradition lineage established by Ajahn Mun Bhuridatta in the early 1900s, monks practicing dhutanga (ascetic practices) own precisely one object that serves...