>>2602588I can see some parallels. Tons of people have commented that pipe smoking is beneficial to having a wise or philosophical outlook because it makes you slow down what you are doing and be reflective. There's a little difference that in the Eastern tradition the incense and other rituals are explicitly spiritual--the person depicted is usually a trained monk or ascetic who has devoted his life to spirituality, and the incense is something that is used according to a specific formula, not just thrown around willy-nilly--while in the West the pipe is more casually and kind of implicitly spiritual. Wise old philosophers smoke them, sure, but so did room temperature IQ alcoholic fishermen who liked to beat their wives. The difference is that the incense (at least in its origins before it became commercialized) was *only* used in some kind of spiritual context, not so with a pipe.
