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…
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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.
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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.
Idleness
Sunday May 21, 2006
Recently I looked in the mirror to see my furrowed brow, thought about the one hundred and one things with which my life was filled and decided to get organised.
This is part of the problem with working freelance: you have so many different things to keep track of that it can feel, well, overwhelming. And it wasn’t as if my slapdash approach to organising my life was particularly helping.
I only needed to glance at my desk, stacked high with paper, to see the extent of the problem. There was hardly room even to put a cup of coffee down. And I was fed up, every time I had to fill in a form or reply to a letter, with the ritual of spending at least ten minutes, sometimes thirty, trying to track down the damn thing (checking with increasing desperation the pile on the left of the desk, the pile on the right, the pile on the floor, the recycling, the bin, the heap of post downstairs, the sheaf of papers that, unaccountably, had found its way to the top of the cupboard in the kitchen where it could only be reached with the help of a chair…). Something had to be done.
With enormous trepidation, I went into the bookshop and wandered into the business management section: hardly my natural environment. There is a certain lustre to the spines of books on business management that breeds fear in me. And all those soft-focus images of smiling management gurus with unhealthy tans and mouths over-full of perfect teeth give me the heebie-jeebies. Nevertheless, the problem could no longer be circumvented or ignored; so, keeping my fear in check, from amongst the rows of books I plucked Dave Allen’s Getting Things Done, paid for it and went home to try and sort out my life. I opened the first page, and read the following:
It is possible for a person to have an overwhelming number of things to do and still function productively with a clear head and a positive sense of relaxed control. That’s a great way to live and work, at elevated levels of effectiveness and efficiency.
Overwhelming. Yes, that sounded close to the mark. Clear head. I certainly wanted that, wanted to be able to sit in meditation in the morning and actually meditate rather than running through to-do lists. Relaxed? That wouldn’t be bad either. And if a slight chill somehow ran down my spine as I read those opening words, what did it matter? Something had to be done, chill or no chill.
So I read the book. I bought a filing cabinet, an in-tray and a label printer. I gathered together all the piles of paper from every nook and cranny, put them on the floor in one huge mound of stuff, and began to sift through. It would take, Dave warned, two days. It did. But it was worth it: at the end of it, when my filing system was up and running and everything was in place, I was overcome by a feeling of lightness. My new system was easy to use. It worked smoothly. My head and desk were clear. The pile of paper had disappeared from the top of the kitchen cupboard. Life seemed somehow far simpler than it had seemed before. And I can now report that, several months later, it is still working. Getting Things Done has been of inestimable benefit to my life. No more desperate searches (or not as many…) for that lost bill. No more thinking, “I’ll just check the refrigerator. You never know… I might have put it in there in a moment of absent-mindedness.” And yet, for all this, that brief chill still remains when I re-read that first paragraph.
Why the chill? It seems to me that there is something wrong about the reduction of human to an accumulation of projects and activities, to endless productivity, efficiency and effectiveness. Surely there is more to life than this! I am not talking here about leisure here. Leisure is merely a way of refreshing us so that we can plunge back into the ceaseless round of productivity with renewed vigour. I am talking about something else. Call it idleness, if you like; or the loafing and leaning of which Walt Whitman writes in his Leaves of Grass:
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
Whilst on retreat last month, I found myself not only reflecting upon this kind of idleness, but actually loafing and leaning in a way that I rarely do, being so tangled up in the various projects of my life. The thing about being on retreat is that unless you are eating or meditating or working or sleeping, there is simply nothing to do. There are no demands upon you. Nothing to read. Nothing to write. No conversations to have. No e-mail to check. Nothing. No tasks to fulfil. Nothing to produce. Nothing to be efficient at.
For the first two days of my retreat, still caught up in thinking in terms of projects, I told myself that in the spaces between scheduled activities on the retreat programme I should do something: go for a walk, drink tea, reflect upon this or that aspect of Buddhism, fit in another half hour on the meditation cushions, have a sleep so that I might be wide awake for meditation later in the afternoon… and so on. But after a couple of days, this feeling and the mindset that went with it died away. After all, why do anything at all if you don’t have to? So soon I simply found myself, in these empty spaces, lying down on my bed and doing nothing other than simply lying there, for a half hour, an hour, sometimes more. Sometimes as I lay there I dozed – not because I wanted to doze or planned to doze – but merely because my mind slipped into the right kind of state for dozing. A lot of the time I just lay there looking at the ceiling, not really doing anything, not really thinking anything. Thoughts came and went, as the breath came and went, but I didn’t feel under any pressure to actively think them. Time passed, the bell rang, and I got up and went to do whatever was the next activity.
This kind of idleness is, I think, a rare and precious thing. It breaks with our obsession with our various projects. It allows us to settle more deeply into the astonishing fact of our being here at all. It allows us to see that, beyond the frenzy of outcomes and goals and targets and purposes, life simply persists as it will: the birds go on singing; the clouds pass through the sky; the blood continues to pulse in the veins; sounds, thoughts, sensations, ideas, impulses, moods come and go.
I have been back from the retreat for quite a few weeks now, plunging back into the mass of projects and tasks that make up my life. And it is no doubt good to get things done: as the great singer-songwriter Jeff Lewis says, “We’ve all got good things to do, and it’s good when we do them”. It is also no doubt good to do these things with a clear head and without too much stress and strain. But at the same time, I keep reminding myself that getting things done is only half of the story.
I went back to the business section of the bookshop to find out if anybody had written a counterpart to Dave Allen’s book, called Getting Nothing Done. Now, that’s a book I’d like to see…
But I came away disappointed.
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Access to Insight - Search Plugin
Tuesday May 16, 2006
Access to Insight has long been one of the best online resources for Buddhism, offering excellent translations of a huge range of Buddhists texts from the Pali language. Now they’ve just gone one better, and added a very handy little tool for Firefox users: a search-engine plugin which allows you to search their site from the Firefox search bar, at the drop of a hat.
This little screenshot shows this cunning little device in action. It is simplicity itself to insall and to use.
To get the plugin you’ll need to install Firefox, then you can go to the Access to Insight search page and click on the link. That’s it! Your plugin is installed. Now to set to work on the insight…
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Turnips
Wednesday February 8, 2006
Yesterday I bought myself some Chinese brushes and a bottle of ink, and I spent last night painting pictures of turnips. I was inspired to do this by looking at the wonderful paintings of Sengai, the eighteenth century Zen master and painter. And given that just looking at the paintings seemed like a poor way of going about understanding them, I thought I’d have a bit of a go with the brush and ink myself.
Sengai’s paintings look simple. In fact, they are simple. But it is hard to be as simple as Sengai, to put aside all ideas of art and success and failure and just to let the brush flow naturally. My first attempt, I must confess (and having said this about success and failure), was not a great triumph of artistic production, but my second effort produced a fairly reasonable turnip. Here are the results: the first one (the good one) is by Sengai, and the second is by me.
Sengai’s turnip
My turnip
Not too bad, although there’s a long way to go until I can match the skill of Sengai’s own lines. I was going to say “not too bad for a beginner”, but perhaps the difficulty is not being enough of a beginner. Perhaps Sengai’s genius is in his beginner’s mind; and to return to such a mind probably needs practice not only with the brush but also on the meditation cushions. Which brings me to the verse that accompanies Sengai’s own turnip:
A turnip and a monk in meditation
Are best when they sit well.
This, then, is what I’ll be doing in the coming days: sitting like a turnip. And I’ll see how well I do when I pick up the brush once again.
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