© UnknownLeo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy, as a famous French writer Anatole France put it, "saw with his spiritual eyes the horizons that are still invisible to us. I can compare Tolstoy with Homer. He will be studied in the millennia to come. His alleged utopias have already partly found confirmation. The old world is falling apart ... Tolstoy is a prophet of new humanity."
One hundred years ago, in November 1910, at an unknown railway station in Astapovo, Russia, there ended, as Ivan Bunin wrote, "not only the life of one of the most extraordinary men, who had ever lived in this world, there ended a unique in its force, length and difficulty heroic act, an extraordinary fight for 'liberation.'" Yet one hundred years following his death, Tolstoy's spiritual voice, shaped by his obsession with Eastern philosophy, lives on through his words.
On the Religion of the FutureAlbert Einstein said, "The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description. If there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs, it would be Buddhism."