The Unique Strengths Each Character in Books: Maya Angelou, Jon Krakauer, Soko Morinaga, Ruthanne Lum Mccunn

Soko Morinaga entered Zen practice after graduating from high school and was ordained as a monk in 1948, and later trained in a monastery. With this quote, he meant that the purpose of practice is not to increase knowledge but to see life in a clear vision. With practice, an individual comes to see the reality of life. When in the Zen monastery, he came close to encountering situations that the terms were a moment of his idiocy. Morinaga had to endure sleepless nights, empty stomach and a strict master who would make him have the experience of knowing that he needed.

He learned how to manage his feelings for being superior and also inferior. What Morinaga needed was an ego that was broken, and in the Zen practice, he accomplished just that. It requires strength to be able to endure such in order to learn something, such as patience and being adverse.   4. A thousand pieces of gold - Ruthanne Lum Mccunn    “ You must learn as I have to let your mind take flight.   Then you won’ t feel, and if you don’ t feel, nothing anyone does can hurt you. ” (Mccunn, pg 46, chapter 3). Lalu, a thirteen-year-old girl is sold into a brothel, then again to a slave merchant bound for America.

When she enters a new country, she is given a new name, Polly, and eventually, the auctioned to a saloonkeeper. She gets an admirer, Charlie, and he frees her from slavery, eventually proposing marriage and finally lives together. She has undergone faced challenges and learnt that life is harsh, gathering from what she has been through. She shows how she has struggled and survived in the harsh conditions during which she has become a slave to many masters, including prostitution.

She eventually lives happily after she is freed from slavery by Charlie.   The challenges people face determine what they become in the future. How individuals manage to overcome those challenges defines them. What matters most in an individual’ s life is not where the person has originated from, but where they are headed.