WHERE IS BEAUTY?

We say tritely, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." Or sometimes, more naively we say, "Beauty is in that lovely sunset or that tree or that human face." Yet have we ever really thought about how we discover beauty for ourselves? When I was in India, I had heard so much about the Hindu religion, yet it was very puzzling— I couldn't find Hinduism anywhere. The people I met didn't talk about their religion; in the temples, no one was preaching about Hinduism— no matter where I looked, I couldn't locate anything directly connected with this religion. Then one day, after several months, it suddenly dawned on me: it was all Hinduism. Hinduism was so all-pervasive that it influenced everything and everyone in that culture. And suddenly, everywhere I looked, I saw it. From the taxi driver lighting an incense stick to a Hindu deity to the street vendor fingering his prayer beads— everything I was seeing was Hinduism; it had been so close, so immense, so interwoven with everything that it took a long time for me to see it. So, too, with beauty. It is in all and is all— don't miss it.