As often happens to me as of late, last night I woke up in the wee hours. My mind started racing, and I had hard time falling asleep again. All kinds of things came to me, most of them so-called action points or things to do in the morning. I dutifully recorded them all in a notebook designated for that purpose. One of these had to do with the lecture I had given yesterday morning concerning corporate real estate management, one of my academic and professional fields. The lecture was a part of a five-day module of a master’s course in corporate real estate and facilities management. The thing to do this morning was to copy one of my short papers and distribute it to the same students today. All this I have already done. The paper, entitled “Ten Principles of Corporate Real Estate Management,” appeared in Facilities,[1] a journal straddling academic and professional concerns, almost ten years ago. However, it was written in May 1992. It just crossed my mind how I came upon this title. A month earlier I wrote “Ten Principles of Bon Buddhism” (April 10, 1992), which borrowed quite heavily from “Ten Principles of Buddhism” by Christmas Humphreys, whose seminal book about Buddhism I was reading at the time.[2] Rereading my corporate real estate paper, I can still discern the voice of the Buddha. Who knows how many innocent-looking professional and academic treatises resonate in the same voice, or that of Jesus, Muhammad, Zoroaster…

Footnotes

1. Vol. 12, No. 5, 1994, pp. 9-10.

2. Buddhism: An Introduction and Guide, Third Edition, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962 (first published in 1951).