Burma
Friday May 9, 2008
Last night I heard from a friend at the Burmese Buddhist Vihara in Birmingham, to let me know that they are running a fund-raising appeal to help get aid to those who are most in need in Burma. The funds collected will be forwarded to the British Red Cross, and I’ve added a copy of the appeal leaflet below if you want to make a donation. Donations can also be made directly via the Red Cross. The website for the British Red Cross is here, and the American Red Cross, for website visitors from over the water, is here.
Download:
emergency appeal.pdf [869.31KB]
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Happy New Year
Tuesday January 1, 2008
Happy new year to all visitors and friends, and thanks to all of you who made writing thinkBuddha in 2007 such a pleasure. It’s been a stimulating twelve months, and I look forward to your company in 2008.
All the best,
Will
Have your say! [3]
The Middle Way?
Saturday December 15, 2007
Yesterday I was in Moseley, which is probably the Buddhist epicentre of Birmingham, and as I was wandering down the street I passed by two men involved in earnest discussion. The snipped of conversation that I overheard was, I thought, well worth preserving for the sake of posterity. It went something like this:
Man A (fervently): The thing is, you can’t talk about Buddhism all day.
Man B (sagely): I know what you are saying.
Man A (with conviction): It would become boring. You’d become a Buddhist bore.
Man B (philosophically): Right. You need to take a Middle Way...
Have your say! [3]
Our Ancestors
Tuesday August 7, 2007
I have just returned from the Bulgarian National History Museum in Boyana, which is an impressive collection by any standards. Some of the Thracian material is breathtaking. But at the same time, I always find something giddying about museum collections that go back to the very beginnings of human history. Not because the timescale is so large, but because it is so small.
Think of it like this. As a rough guess, averaging over human history a generation may be, say, fifteen years. If, for example, we say that Homo sapiens emerged around 250,000 years ago (I’m going by the figures dredged up from Wikipedia, but these calculations vary depending on who you listen to), then rounding down, this makes something like 16,000 generations or so. A decent sized football stadium might contain three times this number of people. Which means that if you tried to fill a decent sized football stadium with your mother, your granny, your great-granny and so on, then long before the stadium was full you’d be admitting folks who you might be somewhat wary of considering as family.
When it comes to human history, things are just as disturbing. Let’s say that human civilisation – that is, this business of living in cities, or at least in townships – goes back around twelve thousand years to around the time of the agricultural revolution. Then we have eight hundred generations. Eight hundred people is the population of a rather small village. Thinking like this seems to make human history appear vanishingly small. Suddenly some of those craftspeople who were forging gold objects in Thrace in the fifth century BC seem much closer – one hundred and seventy or so generations. Why, these generations could fit together into a decent-sized room…
This is why I find history unsettling. Because when you start looking at it, our present way of life, our present apparent securities, our present certainties are all far more fleeting than we imagine. And here I am, not so long after the first modern human, a strange and cunning ape writing words onto an odd little grey machine, whilst outside it pours with rain. And there you are, another strange and cunning ape, reading these same words from your vantage point elsewhere in the world. And standing behind us those few generations of those who were like us, several thousand, no more. How very peculiar it all is…
Have your say! [5]
Pali Resources
Friday May 18, 2007
The list of resources below is for those who are beginning to learn Pali, rather than for big-shot international scholars with professorships coming out of their ears. It is an attempt to bring together some of the materials that I have found useful whilst taking my first steps with the language.
If you have any suggestions to add to this, I will have a look at them and make any changes that I think are useful.
Books
There are lots of books out there. Perhaps the clearest and closest to a ‘teach yourself’ book is Lily da Silva’s Pali Primer, available for free online (see link below), but hard to get hold of in paper format. That aside, here are a few more that may be useful:
A New Course in Reading Pali
Introduction to Pali
Pali Buddhist Texts
Pali Grammar for Students
Fonts
First off, you’ll probably want a Roman Pali font, so you can type in the extended Roman alphabet often used for writing Pali. I tend to use Times Extended Roman, which is attractive and can be found here.
There is also a good range of fonts at the Association for Insight Meditation. See their fonts page.
Although I’ve not tested them, I’m told that the public domain DejaVu fonts also support Romanised Pali. Find them here.
Some people recommend Times Norman for writing Pali. Heaven knows why. It messes up my line breaks. Horrible.
Typing Pali
Now you’ve got your fonts installed, you don’t want to spend hours fiddling with the character map to actually type the stuff, do you? So you need to get hold of a Pali keyboard tool. The one here works on windows, and is the one that I use. It is very good indeed, and cuts down on a lot of the hassle of fiddling with cutting and pasting. Most letters in the extended Pali Roman set are accessed by using Ctrl + Alt + the nearest equivalent in the Roman alphabet, so to get a long ‘i’ (written ī), you simply press Ctrl + Alt + i. How much easier could it be? I’m still looking for a way of inputting Pali easily on my linux laptop, however.
If this keyboard doesn’t work for you, the Association for Insight Meditation, once again, have another Pali keyboard, still in the beta stages. Pay them a visit here and give it a go.
Dictionaries.
The Pali Text Society’s dictionary is archived online here. Those Victorians knew how to be thorough.
Nyanatiloka’s Manual of Buddhist Terms is helpful too.
The Dictionary of Pali Proper Names is good as a Who’s Who, but also has place names as well. See if you can find out how many characters in the Pali texts met their end by being mown down by cows in bad moods. Cows in those days were obviously much grumpier than today.
Grammar and Reference
There’s some excellent stuff out there. Lily da Silva’s Pali Primer is available online, and although the formatting isn’t beautiful, it does a good job at setting out the basics.
Another invaluable resource is the Pali Primer Guide, which is available as a PDF, and which summarises the grammatical rules from da Silva’s Pali Primer, and includes the glossary from the book.
Those folks at Buddhanet also have a range of resources and e-books, which can be found here, including a load of Pali learning materials in PDF format.
Texts and Readers
The digital Pali reader is worth taking a look at. It runs in your browser, and is a very handy resource. It is a bit rough, ready and not beautiful, but it seems to do a very good job.
Also one to watch is the Pali reader which has a lovely interface, although it is still in a beta version, and is a bit buggy at the moment. But do keep a watch on this one, or if you are in any way technically inclined, download it an submit any bugs that you find to help the author out.
There’s an online database version of the Pali Canon here. I’ve not tried this yet, but it is searchable and may be handy.
Miscellaneous.
For vocabulary learning, jMemorize, a flash-card learning program is great. You’d need to import your own Pali word list via excel or Open Office or something like that. I’m planning to sort out my own word-lists for this one, and when and if I get round to it, I’ll post a download link here on thinkBuddha.
Have your say! [2]
Oi! Are You Looking at My Triangle?
Tuesday March 6, 2007
The other day I stumbled across a nice little story in New Scientist about a piece of research undertaken by Sara Kiesler at Carnegie Mellon University. In this experiment, participants were asked to watch a film in a large triangle and a circle tussled with a smaller triangle. Half the participants were told that they ‘owned’ the smaller triangle, whilst half were not. Apparently a far higher proportion of those who had been told they were the owners of the small triangle were ready to criticise the large triangle for being aggressive. There’s a link to the research here, and a PDF of the findings (click here).
The project as a whole was about anthropomorphism, the projection of human-like agency and narrative to non-human entities; but whilst it says something about this, it also says something about the curious power of being told that something is “ours”. This is from the research report:
people who own possessions value them more highly than the possessions of others (Beggan 1992; Nesselroade, Beggan, and Allison 1999). Ownership also implies many other changes in a relationship—changes in knowledge, communication, attention, and feelings…
Whilst a sense ownership may lead to a greater commitment and care (see the PDF report), there is of course a down side: the projection of the narrative “that big mean triangle is bullying that little defenceless triangle” onto the shifting of shapes on a screen leads not just to a positive relationship with the little triangle, but to a negative response to the bigger triangle. As is often the case, the source of that which we think of as good – care, commitment, affection – may be the same as the source of that which we condemn – lack of care, fecklessness, hatred. Both evaluations are the result of the same story that we project onto the world. And this is why ethics, if it is to be handled at all, should always be handled with the utmost care…
No Faster Than a Camel Can Walk
Saturday January 13, 2007
It’s said that there’s an old proverb that the soul can travel no faster than a camel can walk. Now, I’m not entirely sure that I’ve got a soul, or how I’d know if I had one, but at the same time I like this proverb. Our obsession with speed, with ends rather than means, is not only exhausting, but it also does not seem to be doing much for the planet.
Currently I’m planning a couple of trips to Europe for later in the year, and – aiming to avoid flying as much as possible – I’m planning to go by train which is not only less damaging environmentally, but is also a much more satisfying way of travelling. Distance means something when you go by train, whilst sitting in an aircraft is a wierd and vaguely hallucinatory experience.
Whilst trying to find out the best way of getting from Birmingham to Sofia without having to fly, I stumbled across Seat61.com, the kind of independent website that puts the massed powers of all the rail companies in Europe to shame. If you want to find out how to get from Belgium to Moldova or from Estonia to Iceland (well, perhaps not…) by train, Seat61 is the place to go.
And whilst on the subject of travelling, why not go by foot? If you live in London, walkit.com is a great place to go for finding out how to get from A to B in London without even setting foot on a bus or a tube. It’s a routefinder for those who prefer to travel under their own steam. As yet, walkit is still in the early stages (in beta as they say in the world of the web-savvy). It is restricted to London at the moment, and sadly there’s no information on how camel-friendly the routes suggested are. But if you live in London, visit walkit.com, get your walking shoes out and lend the site your support.
