Prayer and the Placebo effect

A few weeks ago I was writing on my Jayarava Rave site about belief, and in particular about the significance of the placebo effect. A new report suggests that prayer by distant believers does not help, and in the case of the study in question the patients prayed for had worse complications than the control group!

I bet if they designed the study right it would show that prayer helps if: a. you believe in the power of prayer; and b. you believed you were being prayed for. All of which proves that prayer is powerful, but only if you believe it to be so.

Definitions of believe

Virtual Chang-an

This is one of the coolest things I've seen for a while. Some of the the propeller heads at the National University of Singapore have created a virtual Chang-an, the ancient capital of China. It's interesting to me because I've been thinking a lot lately about Kukai's journey to China and spent a bit of time reading about Chang-an as back ground.

I've also found, or redicovered this film of the life of Kukai. Call me rash but I sent money to someone, also apparently in Singapore, to get the 2 VCDs of the movie. Let's hope it arrives and it works, and it's not too crap. Leave the sound on when loading this page, there's a groovy Asian ambient sound loop playing in the background. OK it does actually get anoying after a while... but I liked it for the first 30 seconds or so.

Another convert

Bodhipaksa of Wildmind has jumped on the blogging bandwagon, after a conversation with yours truely, and his blog Bodhi Tree Swaying is already looking quite interesting. Today he notes his concerns about religious freedom in the USA. Although being an alien he'd better be careful, else they might deport him eh!

domanassa : depression from the buddhist perspective

Picked this link up from blogmandu which I'm happy to see are still reading the Jayarava Rave. Depression is something I'm all too familiar with. No time yet to even begin to read everything, but it warms my heart to see sites like this popping up. domanassa : depression from the buddhist perspective.

Also, slightly late, I recommend Will's article on ThinkBuddha.org on conditionality. I like this very much.

Where do they hide?

Ah... It's been so long since I blogged. Where does the time go? What's jolted me back into action is finding, serrendipitously, a fantastic website. I can't believe that in 3 years of scouring the net for anything on Kukai I have not found this before. Bless you Ronny Green. Ronny has written book length bio of Kukai - extracts on the site, and translated some of his poetry. It so happens that I've been dusting off my little book on O Daishi Sama as well. I've got a little bio and my typed up notes on his major works with commentaries and interesting tidbits. I've been thinking of it as a thorough beginners guide the Kukai - something for the people who find Hakeda a bit too much, and Abe positively hair raising!

I'll all excited about another bio being available as Kukai is just about my favourite historical Buddhist, after the Blessed One himself of course. And the last one that I stumbled on, by Shiba, was such a disappointment. Thankfully I interloaned it so it only cost me 1 pound, but believe me it's rubbish. The extracts on Green's Site look great, full of insteresting detail for a Bodhisattva Spotter like moi. His photo looks kinda weird though... don't you think?

A good web introduction is available on Wikipedia. I can vouch for this article because I wrote it :-) and I have read it recently and it appears not to have been too heavily vandalised (don't get me started on the Wikipedia and edit wars!)