Jayarava - Bricolage

Jayasiddhi at Gampo

2009-05-13T16:46:00.002+01:00

Not that anyone reads this anymore but my friend Jayasiddhi is living at Gampo Abbey for a year and is keeping a blog.

The Essential Sangharakshita

2008-12-14T08:45:00.003Z

Wisdom Publications have announced the publication of their anthology of writings by Sangharakshita. Looking forward to seeing that they have decided to include! It's good to see Sangharakshita getting some mainstream recognition for his intellectual contribution after all these years!

“His contribution to the transmission of the Dharma form East to West has been immense.” -Professor Damien Keown, University of London.

Order from Amazon UK

Essential Sangharakshita: A Half-century of Writings from the Founder of the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order

or

Amazon.com

Edward Conze

2008-07-12T10:19:00.004+01:00

I stumbled on this dedication by Dr Conze to Miss Horner in a copy of Conze's translation of the Abhisamayālaṅkāra. It's in the Asian Studies Dept. Library of the Cambridge University.

I happened to be reading Conze's memoir at the time as well. Not very PC the late Dr, but an interesting man and a great translator.

Well OK one more post...

2008-03-19T08:50:00.002Z

Couldn't resist writing about this. I was looking around for information on the question of whether or not the Śakyan tribe were Aryans (in the sense that they were related to the Vedic speaking authors of the Ṛgveda) - I gather there is some doubt due to the lack of caste consciousness for instance. I found lots of opinions but two in particular that struck me as making an interesting pair. I won't link to the pages as I do not wish to endorse either view.

View one.

The Buddha was either African, or at least of an Afroid (ie African looking race). The evidence here was largely visual, utilising "the earliest" images of the Buddha with frizzy hair, a broad nose, fleshy lips etc - which *this site* said proved that the Buddha was black (note: Black is still an acceptable term in the UK for anyone of African descent, and was used on the website in question).

I thought some of the images looked like they were from Java actually, and certainly some were not from India but South-east Asia which undermines the claim to be "early". But this theory might explain the traditional tight curls the in the hair of the Buddha. There were "people" in India about 400,ooo years before the present, and another wave of African immigrants is thought to have arrived around 70,000 years ago. There is a theory that the descendants this wave are the ancestors of all non-African peoples in the world. (It was in Michael Wood's doco on India).

View two.

The Buddha was fair skinned and blue eyed, the Śakyans (in this view) can be identified with the Scythians who are said to have originated from around the eastern shores of the Black Sea. As such the Germanic peoples and the Aryans in fact are linked, and more closely related that more dark skinned Indians. The "evidence" is from the Dīgha Nkāya.

Although I haven't checked the references I do think the person in this case has made a stupid error. The Scythians do indeed feature in Indian history but not until well after the time of the Buddha, post Aśoka; and post the Indo-Greek realm established in Gāndhāra, the most famous king of which is Menander (aka Milinda). In order to get to Indian before this, the Scythians would have had to cross Achaemanid Persian territory and that seems a bit unlikely as they were at the peak of their power at that time - Alexander did not smash the great empire until the 320's BC. At the time of the Buddha the Achaemanid's ruled Indian up to and a little beyond the Indus river. This may explain why no scholar, to my knowledge, has ever linked the Scythians to an Indian tribe.

Whatever the truth of the Buddha's origins I find this desire to claim him is fascinating. Hindus too claim him as an Avatar of Viṣṇu. In the West the Buddha is being absorbed into popular culture. I wonder how long it is before someone claims he was a European of some sort... perhaps they already have?

2008-03-15T21:06:00.003Z

I no longer post here. I do still post on Jayarava Rave which is for short essays on mostly Buddhist subjects. I also do some blogging for visiblemantra.org - either what is new on the site, or interesting stuff on Siddhaṃ

Christian Zionists must be stopped

2007-10-29T11:17:00.001Z

I've been off-air due to a prolonged bout of ill health but this has got my goat enough to write about it!

My mother began to be involved with a fundamentalist Christian group in Australia a couple of years ago. She mentioned at the time that quite a few of them were Zionists, but it didn't occur to me what that might mean. More recently she has been working in Jerusalem for an organisation called Bridges for Peace - they operate a food bank, and care for Jewish refugees amongst other things.

In talking about the middle east I was a little surprised to hear my mother coming out with strong anti-Palestinian views. Especially after quizzing her and realising that she had never met a Palestinian. Last week she sent me a newsletter from her organisation that contained an article which decried the two-state solution in Palestine, and expressed very negative views of the Palestinian people. Ironically she had met and liked a Kurdish man on a trip to Turkey last year.

I expressed my concern that Bridges for Peace, ostensibly an aid organisation, were involving themselves in Israeli politics and my Mother countered with some statements which I found rather alarming. Bridges for Peace position on Palestinians is this:

"There must be no talk of a Palestinian state—no money, no land, no release of terrorist prisoners as goodwill gestures, in exchange for “commitments.” - from their top news story 29-10-07.

My Mother echoes it in statements like: "they want domination and they want what they want and they will do anything to get it, even talk about peace". The Palestinians have no part to play in the future of Israel. According this this view, " In fact Palestine does not actually exist".

Hearing this kind of propaganda made me wonder, and I began to look into it. BFP are linked with an umbrella organisation for Zionist Christians called the Unity Coalition for Israel. UCI lobby the mainstream media and was the source of the anti-Palestinian article, although they carefully phrase their agenda in terms of being pro-Israel - their website makes no mention of the Palestinians. UCI apparently have links with Christian fundamentalist groups in the USA, and with the most militant right-wing Jewish Zionists in Israel. One reporter in the US, writing about the UCI said this:

"While rejected by all mainline Christian churches in the United States, Christian Zionist ideology is aggressively promoted by a small minority of fundamentalists linked to the Jewish Zionist lobby in the United States and allied to the most militant extremist elements of the Israeli political spectrum."

But why are Christian aid workers spouting anti-Palestinian propaganda, and why are Christian groups supporting right-wing Jewish groups? Why would Christians be working for Jewish domination of Palestine, and the complete subjugation of the Palestinians? The answer, apparently, lies in biblical prophesy. The old testament cedes the land of Palestine to the Jews: "Christian Zionism is confirmed throughout the Hebrew Scriptures" - from www.christian-zionism.org. Apparently however:

"Most Christian Zionists would agree that Israels reemergence on the worlds scene, in fulfillment of Gods promises to her, indicate that other biblically-predicted events will follow." - from www.christian-zionism.org

Once the Jews are in control of the Holy Land other Biblical prophecies are activated. With the removal of the Muslims from the Holy Land the Jews will be able to take down the Al-Aqsa mosque and rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem. This will be the fulfilment of prophesies in the Revelations of St. John - they are trying to bring about the Apocalypse. So Jewish and Christian fundamentalists, with no apparent commonality, manage to find common cause in the elimination of the Muslims from the "Holy Land".

I can't begin to say how much I hate the notion of Christian fundamentalist manipulating the dreadful situation in Israel/Palestine, and lobbying world powers for the purposes of fulfilling a biblical prophesy from which they believe themselves to be the only benefactors. Selfish Bastards! It's the crusades all over again.

They are mental and they need to be stopped. I have passed his story onto a number of media organisations, the Israeli embassy in London, and to a couple of Pro-Palestinian groups. Hopefully bringing it to light will help to curtail any influence they may have. A pox on fundamentalists everywhere, may they fail in every ill conceived project. May the consequences of their greed and hatred find them soon.

Visible Mantra Blog

2007-09-19T09:05:00.000+01:00

I've had to lay off the internet for a few months now - more or less. Have rethought my life a bit and decided to focus on the Visible Mantra website. What's new, questions answered, interesting stuff on Siddham and mantra, and Buddhist calligraphy and epigraphy all feature on the (newish) Visible Mantra Blog.

NKT Succession

2007-05-03T16:19:00.000+01:00

Vishvapani has written a blog post on the succession difficulties being experienced by the New Kadampa Tradition. It is a very interesting subject for Western Buddhists. The NKT approach is quit different from any other group. Assessing the success of their approach adds to the richness of our understanding of Western Buddhism. Vishvapani is not engaging in polemic here, but analysis which can help us evaluate how our organisations function.

BTW Congrats to the NKT for their excellent new website!

Amazing Aussie Critters

2007-04-27T09:39:00.000+01:00

One of the things I like about Australia is the critters. You got your snakes, spiders, scorpions, marsupials, sharks, and then there's the ants. Aussie has ants! My friends will probably all recall my description of the Bull Ants at the Vijayaloka Retreat Centre.

These incredibly aggressive little Aussie bleeders are about an inch long, and they see you coming they stop what they are doing to watch you, their whole bodies tracking you as you move. If you stop then they run towards you with clear intent to injure. And they sting if they get a chance, and yes it hurts like hell. Some people may have thought I was exaggerating, but National Geographic this month have a feature on them, and you can see that I wasn't!

Google - why I still like them, 2

2007-04-17T20:25:00.000+01:00

I've been spending some time on maps lately. If you follow the link you can see a high res image of the site of the ancient city of Mohenjo Daro - (see also left) one of the cities on the Indus River which date (depending who you talk to) from about 4000 BCE or perhaps as old as 7000BCE. This is the Swat Valley/Gandhara region home to many innovations in Buddhism - and closest approach to the silk road. Here is the Mahabodhi Temple marking the site where the Buddha meditated and Awakened.

I don't care what anyone says... this is way cool.

News from Home

2007-04-03T15:57:00.000+01:00

I don't see much news from home in the UK papers. So I thought I'd celebrate this one from the Guardian 31 March 2007. The comments of the spokesman are troublesome of course since he assumes that education must show a profit - what a dismal view of the human being this represents.

For those who don't know what a "bogan" is, there is - surprisingly - a lengthy and referenced Wikipedia article on the subject.

Meanwhile two NZ school girls found that, contrary to claims of the manufacturer, ready to drink Ribena contains virtually no vitamin C. Ouch!

New Blogger

2007-03-30T19:29:00.000+01:00

Finally had to sign up for the new Blogger. It was mostly painless. Conversion wasn't obligatory so I didn't have to do much work on my six blogs (six!). However I have converted the jayarava rave over, and that necesitated a change of template. Actually I think it looks better now.

For a great dose of artisto-Buddhist weirdness take a look at Gunasara's MySpace - the blue robe he's wearing is his ordination robe :-) Touch of Dada there. A gentle trickle of FWBO people making it onto MySpace - it's an easy way to get a webpresence I suppose, although I'm not convinced that it is any better than having a webpage and a blog (or six). Many of the MySpace layouts - which are created on 3rd party websites - suck terribly. Too wide, can't read the text because of back ground images, and sound files that start whether you want them to or not. Yuck.

The latest rave goes back to Gombrich and the 2006 lecture series - metaphors. Cool stuff and I can only hope that he'll publish them soon. There's an interview with Gombrich on the Ordinary Mind wesbite which is interesting.

I've been relistening to the 2003 BBC Reith Lectures by V. S. Ramachandran on The Emerging Mind. His theory of language, particularly metaphor, involving cross activation in the brain (aka synaesthesia) is very interesting and one that I hope to work into my thesis on mantra.

This looks promising

2007-03-14T10:09:00.000Z

Newish Buddhist blog: Old Pond. Most recent post is on Buddhism and science. And they link to me, so they can't be all bad :) I don't get much time to read blogs these days. I've been writing a big chunk on Buddhist archetypal psychology which has been a joy. Freed from the leash of references and citations, and simply drawing on my own experience most of the time I have been able to just write and it has been flowing quite freeely. The manuscript is out with a reader at the moment, and I hope to have something finished before the end of the year. A few things have been falling into place in my thinking, and resulting in a few good Raves coming up.

Support Call

2007-02-17T11:24:00.000Z

You might think that this is a fiction. That people aren't this stupid. You'd be wrong. This is based on a true story. I know. I was in it. All you tech support people... you know what I'm talking about don't you!

Thanks to Pema for this. I'll write soon Pema!

Book Review on FWBO News

2007-02-13T20:20:00.000Z

I've just published my review of British Buddhism : Teachings, Practice And Development by Robert Bluck over on fwbo-news.org. This is a very interesting book. Bluck is an academic who has made a detailed study of the seven largest Buddhist groups in the UK - the book is based on his doctoral thesis. Amongst the clamour of internet self-publicists it is very refreshing to read a real attempt at a neutral point of view by someone with no obvious agenda. Bluck is not uncritical of the FWBO, but he concludes that most of the criticism from sources such as the until recently anonymous FWBO Files (actually written by Gary Beasley) is unfair.

Bluck suggests that the conscious isolationism of the FWBO during it's teens and twenties has been a major reason why the criticism has continued, because it prevented a dialogue from taking place about the FWBO's innovative approach to Dharma practice. The FWBO now has members on the executives of the Network of Buddhist Organisations, and the UK Network of Engaged Buddhism, as well as being active in pan-Buddhist organisations such as the European Buddhist Union and the International NEB. These connections are beginning to bear fruit in a more open and understanding relationship between the FWBO and other Buddhist groups. One good place to follow some of the meetings that are going on at which the FWBO is represented is Dhammarati's blog.

Perhaps surprisingly Bluck concludes that the various Buddhist groups have a lot more in common than it seems at first glance and that they share many of the same dilemmas in trying to transplant the Dharma in the west, even if they come up with different solutions to those dilemmas. I found his treatment of the NKT and Soka Gakkai equally even handed, and learned a lot in reading about them - again they have often been criticised unfairly. All in all the book is a very useful outsiders view of the FWBO and some other prominent UK Buddhist groups.

Unfortunately the book is hideously expensive so it may not get a very wide circulation - I'm suggesting that every centre buy a copy which might help to create a demand for a paperback edition. I plan to circulate a precis of the FWBO chapter so that people can get an idea of what it says.

Jayarava Rave Nominated

2007-01-31T15:54:00.000Z

My short essay on the Red Rite - one of the magical tantric rites - which was posted on the Jayarava Rave website in July last year, has been nominated as one of the best blog posts of 2007 (along with eight other posts). The Blogisattva Awards are run by the guy who does Blogmandu (I think). It's been a while since I looked at Blogmandu, so it was good to be reminded about it.

Highly sensitive people of the world unite!

2007-01-22T21:30:00.000Z

How do you relate to these questions?

Are you easily overwhelmed by such things as bright lights, strong smells, coarse fabrics, or sirens nearby?
Do you get rattled when you have a lot to do in a short amount of time?
Do you make a point of avoiding violent movies and TV shows?
Do you need to withdraw during busy days, into bed or a darkened room or some other place where you can have privacy and relief from the situation?
Do you make it a high priority to arrange your life to avoid upsetting or overwhelming situations?
Do you notice or enjoy delicate or fine scents, tastes, sounds, or works of art?
Do you have a rich and complex inner life?
When you were a child, did your parents or teachers see you as sensitive or shy?

Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes!

If you also answer yes to these questions then you probably feel like shit. You probably don't understand why. I've found this new book by Elaine N. Aron which is shedding some light on my life. The book is The Highly Sensitive Person: How To Thrive When The World Overwhelms You. Available in all good books shops on and offline. Read it, it just may change your life, although don't blame me if you still feel like shit.

Internet Radio

2007-01-20T17:58:00.000Z

This is cool: Internet Radio by Pandora : music genome project. You put in a seed artist and it plays back music from that artist and from artists which the creators have decided are kin of similar. It did throw up some interesting stuff that I'd never heard before, Tears and Fountains of Wayne for instance. However there is a heavy bias to US bands even when I put in a New Zealand artist (well I would wouldn't I?). I left it running for a while and it seemed a pretty good sound-track to my afternoon. Aliens will have to fake a US zip code - I like 90210 - because as seems to happen quite often the designers can't imagine that the rest of us don't actually live in the land of the free.

Downside is that you ca only skip so many songs per hour. I skipped 3 or 4 and got stuck with a bogus track. However reloading sorted that one out!

I'm back!

2007-01-11T17:32:00.000Z

Almost 6 months since I posted anything here! I've been suffering from "non-specific upper-limb pain" which has kept me clear of the keyboard for a while. Still adjusting to life with chronic pain, some days are better than others.

My current fav site is "What Tarot Card are you?" - which is actually available in lots of places but this one comes near the top on Google. I am The Heirophant (apparently) and the Heirophant's purpose, according to the website you understand, is "to bring the spiritual down to earth".

I'm in the process of moving FWBO & TBMSG News onto WordPress which is fun. The new site will launch in a few weeks and feature an FWBO blog aggregator - with 20 blogs on it and only three of them mine (which is partly why I thought I'd better write something here.

Oh and I have a MySpace site now for what it's worth. See you.

Being Jackson Pollock

2006-08-11T20:09:00.000+01:00

Clever little web app which allows you to be an action painter on the web. Saving is difficult and this is a screen shot. Looks about right for my current state of mind. http://www.jacksonpollock.org/

Google - why I still like them

2006-07-16T13:00:00.000+01:00

The whole China debacle took the shine of Google to some extent didn't it? But I have to say that I still use Google, and not just the search engine, but also things like Sitemaps. What draws me to Google is innovation - they are constantly innovating. Two examples of interest to those with an astronomical bent are:

moon.google.com which is like Google Maps for the moon. Places where the Apollo missions touched down are marked, and they have little popups telling you who was in the mission. I loved this stuff as a kid! try zooming in to the maximum magnification...

And then there is Google Mars which is much more sophisticated. It combines a number of sets of data so that you can see colour coded topo maps, infared, or visible spectrum views of the planet's surface. There is also more info on mountains, spacecraft, canyons etc.

Both of these are potentially useful I suppose, to someone, but the beauty of them lies not in the usefulness, but in the vision of a company that would allow it's employees to work on something cool like this that brings in no direct revenue what so ever. They might have done a bad thing with China, but that doesn't mean they are a bad company.

More Happiness

2006-07-10T21:15:00.000+01:00

Martin Seligman of "Authentic Happiness" fame is being invited to the UK to give happiness lessons to children aged 11 - a crucial age apparently. The story in the Independent seems to confirm Seligman's celebrity status here in Blighty. This was front page news yesterday although I'm not sure if other papers covered it. The article and at least one other go into Seligman's background, and he has already been a very influential fellow in the world of psychology. Worth a read.

Avalokiteshvara Mantra... in Klingon?

2006-06-18T19:16:00.000+01:00

Yes that's right. I have added a Klingon script version of the Avalokiteshvara Mantra, aka the Six Syllable Mantra, aka the Mantra of Compassion, om mani padme hum, on my Visible Mantra website. This is, I believe, a world first! Why Klingon you may ask. Well I remember reading somewhere that there were now more speakers of Klingon than Esperanto. There are a number of websites which are dedicated to the language, and even a few that compare Klingon with Esperanto, and Omniglot provides a Klingon alphabet, so I thought, why not? There is no reason to assume that speakers of Klingon, or even Klingons themselves, might not benefit from hearing/seeing the mantra. I also fancy that there is a vague resemblance between Klingons and pre-Buddhist Tibetans, who were a vicious and much feared warrior race given to attacking outlying Chinese settlements and Silk Road wagon trains, and look what happened to them once the mantra took hold. Now that they've made peace with the Federation, who knows what is possible?

I've also added the mantra in the Elvish script. Actually to be accuarate I have written the mantra in the Tengwar script, using the Quenya mode. Tengwar is the script that Tolkien invented to write Elvish languages, which he also invented. Quenya seemed the better of the two main modes to write mantras in - being sometimes described as "High Elvish". The Elves have a long tradition of magic and magical words and letters, and I suspect they'd take to mantras like ducks to water. Tengwar is not an easy script to write Sanskrit in, but it's easier than, say, Japanese which has a more restricted sound pallet.

I plan to do a few more Elvish mantras, but Klingon is a bitch to do calligraphy for, so I think I'll just have the one for novelty value.

Live long and prosper __\\//

The Power of Google

2006-06-17T09:07:00.000+01:00

Surf to "www.google.co.uk"
Type "liar"
Click on "I'm feeling lucky".

The resulting page does not contain the word liar. It would be surprising if it did, since it is the official UK Government biography of Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of the UK. How does this happen?

Well, if on my page I have the word liar linked to Mr Blair's bio, (as I do back there), then Google adds a little weight to that site wrt to the keyword liar. If 10,000 people link to a site using the same keyword, then Google starts to think that that site must be important for that keyword. Obviously at some, unspecified, threshold the page can begin to rank highly - even to the point of becoming no.1! - even though the word doesn't appear on the page at all. The Google wise will tell you that typically to rank highly for a keyword you include it in the url, title, meta-tags, headings, text, alt tags, image names, etc of your page multiple times.

So how many people must link to Tony's biography using the word liar in order to rank no.1 for a word which does not occur anywhere on the page? One can only guess at present, since I know of no application that will tell you the content of the link text that link to a page, but it must be tens of thousands of links, surely? But if you do a links check on the site Google reckons that it is linked to by "about 1150" other websites - this is chickenfeed on the web!

Maybe this another example of the Google programmers sense of humour? An example of this is to type "french military victories", and click on "I'm feeling lucky" which turns up no hits at all and asks you if you meant to search for "french military defeats" - I tried it today and it's still there. If you do an ordinary search for "french military victories" you do actually find plenty of hits. Ergo this is something programmed by a Google emp somewhere. But no, in the case of "liar" even a standard search turns up the same page.

Has someone at Google got it in for Tony? Or is it the revenge of the internet as a medium for political activism?

BTW If any of you non-brits are wondering, it is widely thought, and said, here that Tony Blair and George Bush lied about the reasons for invading Iraq, and have been lying ever since.

Violence in music

2006-06-17T08:18:00.000+01:00

Recently in the UK, the leader of the parliamentary opposition complained that the BBC was broadcasting music which might encourage violence. This letter to the editor in the Independent last weekend, caught my eye...

Sir, I agree with David Cameron wholeheartedly in his condemnation of broadcasting by the BBC of music which may encourage violent crime. Only last month I heard a BBC transmission of music by a man called Wagner. It contained graphis illustrations of theft, robbery, incest, a number of murders and a very nasty bout of boar hunting (with chorus). There was clearly incitement to carry weapons, with spears, swords and hammers in abundance. It also glorified bling, which is one of the most distasteful aspects of society today. Well done David Cameron! Wake up BBC!

John Mackeonis
London W6

2006-06-16T20:18:00.000+01:00

DMOZ

2006-06-13T20:17:00.000+01:00

I'm now the DMOZ category editor for the obscure category: Society: Religion and Spirituality: Buddhism: Lineages: Friends of the Western Buddhist Order: Publications: Personal Pages. Since this more or less coincides with my FWBO People Directory it shouldn't be too arduous. I want to make sure everything on FWBO People is on dmoz.org - dmoz is used by all the big search engines, so an entry on dmoz is like submitting your website to all of them at once (eventually as some of them take their own sweet time about it). Having a website without a dmoz entry is, like, social suicide! And serious websters should edit at least one dmoz category, just as they should have a few Wikipedia pages.

The Monkey Chow Diaries

2006-06-06T19:54:00.000+01:00

Can a human subsist on a constant diet of pelletized, nutritionally complete food like puppies and monkeys do? One man, an angry Canadian man, a foolish man perhaps, but a man none the less, has made it his mission to find out. And you thought the Supersize me guy was stupid.

Visible Mantra... reprise

2006-06-05T19:53:00.000+01:00

OK, I have the new Visible Mantra site up and running in it's new home: www.visiblemantra.org. Thanks so much to Paul Powell for the hosting.

If there is a mantra or a seed syllable that you are interested in that you can't see on the website, please get in touch and I will see if I can do one for you. I have one commission for a 'mai.m' already and that should be on the website by the end of the week.

Visible Mantra

2006-06-02T17:56:00.000+01:00

I've just updated the Visible Mantra website. I've added step by step instructions on writing the letter 'a' in the Siddham script - an internet first I think. I have also found some charitable hosting, so should be in a position to launch visiblemantra.org sometime soon.

Enjoy!

I'm listening to...

2006-05-31T09:36:00.000+01:00

95bFM on the internet. It's making me homesick like crazy, but it has served to remind me that Kiwi music is different from the rest, and that it is good!

History really is bunk

2006-05-28T11:37:00.000+01:00

I'm reading Authentic Happiness by Martin Selgiman at the mo. He's a scientist who is interested in positive emotions, and I am struck by this paragraph in which he sums up the evidence for the influence of childhood trauma on adults:

"The major traumas of childhood [such as the death of a parent] may have some influence on adult personality, but only a barely detectable one. Bad childhood events, in short, do not mandate adult troubles. There is no justification in these studies for blaming your adult depression, anxiety, bad marriage, drug use, sexual problems, unemployment, aggression against your children, alcoholism, or anger on what happened to you as a child" - Authentic Happiness, p.67.

Wow! What he emphasises is that how we think about our childhood is a much stronger determinant of adult unhappiness than what actually happened.

I feel a rave coming on...

ALT vs TITLE

2006-05-27T19:25:00.000+01:00

I was getting steamed up because, on the advice of my geek friends I switched to Firefox, and now suddenly I find that my alt attributes are not popping up little messages about the images in my various blogs. Apparently this is because that attribute was never intended to do that, and the specs say use a "title" tag to do it. I never knew that. Thanks to Gadgetopia for sorting this one out for me. Now I have to retrofit all my images, and of course Blogger doesn't automatically add a title attribute to images, but I'm not bitching, really I'm not, I just like to know where I stand!

More Happiness

2006-05-26T23:06:00.000+01:00

I'm making the BBC happiness page my homepage! Still exploring all the bits, but it is facinating. I took the test on the Authentic Happiness Page and found that my my signature strengths are:

Creativity, ingenuity, and originality
Love of learning
Curiosity and interest in the world
Judgment, critical thinking, and open-mindedness
Spirituality, sense of purpose, and faith
Appreciation of beatuy and excellence

Sigh...

Happiness

2006-05-26T22:26:00.000+01:00

OK, this is really only for people with broadband, which now includes me! The BBC has an interesting streaming video (real player required, but hey you've got broadband, right?) on the subject of Happiness. A subject which tends to puzzle me. Quite an intriguing 10 mins.

Dictionary of Pali Names

2006-05-08T20:18:00.000+01:00

Good score! Found the Pali Dictionary of Pali Names online tonight. Bonus!

Batchelor's blog

2006-05-07T16:35:00.000+01:00

Yikes, these long breaks in posting to Bricolage are getting longer... Just discovered the blog of Stephen Batchelor (left) on the Tricycle Magazine Website. I was particularly struck by this recent post on the Two Truths. This is a good thought provoking article, which confirms for me that you can't take the tradition on it's own terms. We must investigate, reflect on, and test the tradition. In this case Batchelor draws attention to a development of a teaching, probably after the parinibbana, which obscures the fundamental insight of the Buddha, which he describes as: "the radical contingency of all existence, devoid of any intrinsic self-essence or God.

Harry Potter deja vu?

2006-04-05T14:38:00.000+01:00

"... so let's forget about them and follow instead the destiny of Harold Potter, gardener, and tax official, first victim of Creatures from another planet" - Monty Python's Flying Circus : just the words. Vol. 1. (London, Methuen :1989) p.84 [first broadcast: 30 Nov 1969]

And the question on everyone's lips now, apart from when will HP #7 be finished, is did J.K. Rowling watch this episode of MPFC, and steal the name of her famous character? Not that I'm suggesting that of course, because that would be slander, I'm just imaginging in a sort of journalistic way, that on reading the name Harold Potter occured in a MPFC sketch in 1969 people might start asking questions. Probably no relation of course, because this Harold Potter's distinction is to be turned into a Scotsman by the Creatures from another planet.

This amazing fact was found, not on the internet, but in one of those old-fashioned book things. I have a number of them lying about, but found this one in an Oxfam shop and bought it for a mere UKP 2.99, which is not bad considering it has the script for the Parrot Sketch in it, eh! The script is also online here

For the sake of completeness Uncle Dynamite - P. G. Wodehouse's 1948 novel, includes a character named Harold Potter.

Wikipedia updated.

Busy week

2006-04-01T12:01:00.000+01:00

I've been busy all week redesigning, and then moving and setting up redirects for my FWBO People website [heads up webmasters - change your links please]. This is a directory of personal websites by people who have some kind of connection with the FWBO - and that's about as strict as my selection criteria are. It's a labour of love doing this kind of thing. It takes hours, and I already work full-time, but I learn a lot doing it. This time I learned about w3c validation of html and css, I learned about floating divs and a bit more about css. I've been thinking that html has come a long way since I first learned it. You can now create a website using html/css that would have required screeds of Javascript, and or other non-Google friendly tech. It's all very interesting, but I couldn't have done it without help from my geek friends - thanks guys if you read this, which I don't think you will.

I've also been adding dates to a third-party calendar app which I like. Calendarhub is nicely designed and with a little fiddling does what I need it to. And that is to create a "today in history" type application - actually my first implementation of it is on FWBO People - in the middle column and down a bit. It's javascript so Google doesn't see the links, but people will and that might make them come back to visit, eh! I'm going to use it on all my FWBO sites.

So all told I haven't had any time at all to think about writing for the Jayarava Rave which means I need to get out, get some light and air, and then head for Heffers Bookshop and their nice little cafe, and figure out what I'm going to write that is remotely related to Buddhism this week: websites, or the dental treatment I had this week, or what? It's a tough assignment. 1000 words by the end of the day, or I get hell from my editor (which is me, but I'm a tough editor!)

Check out FWBO People - I think it says more about our movement than most other sites, with the exception of fwbo.org and even that has an institutional feel. The sites I list have a raw quality that is not so much about presenting the FWBO in a good light, and more about what real FWBO people are actually interested in and doing.

Prayer and the Placebo effect

2006-03-31T13:31:00.000+01:00

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

2006-03-25T20:01:00.000Z

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

2006-03-25T12:50:00.000Z

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

2006-03-23T21:52:00.000Z

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?

2006-03-21T20:39:00.000Z

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!)

Early Tibetan Mandalas

2006-02-15T23:45:00.000Z

Been ill lately, and worn out. And feeling stuck. Too much to do, not enough time to just have fun. Sigh. I'm hoping to get some funding for fwbo news which would enable me to stop using Blogger - it's a little eccentric these days - I never know whether I'm going to get through or not.

I'm reflecting a lot on belief, and paying attention lately.

Anyway here's nice little online collection of old mandalas from Tibet. Asianart.com. Ah - that's more like it. Some soothing mindless surfing.

Worship Not These False Idols

2006-02-05T12:51:00.000Z

I like the tone of this rant by a Wired staffer. Wired
He asks the questions of why people idolise businessmen who have gotten rich by exploiting the foolishness of the masses. I'm not a great fan of any ideology which assumes conflict, as does Marxism, and there is a flavour of Marxism about Long's rant. However I'm willing to be tolerant in this case. Gates and Jobs probably don't have our best interests at heart, and I don't see why we should give either of them our loyalty or praise.

Don't get me wrong, I like computers, but they're just tools. If it hadn't been Gates manipultaing the markets to get his product out there it would have been some other greedy bastard. Sure now that he's got billions he can afford to be generous, but he wasn't and isn't generous in business. The money he's giving away was gotten through exploitation.

Anyway there are a lot of other opinions expressed on the Wired page so if you don't like mine I'm sure you can find one that you do agree with.

The Whole Brain Atlas

2006-02-02T22:45:00.000Z

Since finding Incoming Signals, I have enjoyed it very much, and, of course, plundered it for blog entries. (Is that too many commas?). IS was one of the blogs that made me want to blog. And the reason? Well check out The Whole Brain Atlas, and I think you will see that this is really fascinating and geeky. I love stuff like this, and I so seldom find stuff like this, except when I look at IS. My friends, visit Incoming Signals, take some time, scroll down, and savour the work of a real artiste.

The Lama and the Neuroscience Community

2006-02-01T10:01:00.000Z

I've been a fan of Wired magazine for many years now. The Jan 2006 issue has an interesting article about the appearance of the Dalai Lama at the Society for Neuroscience's annual conference. Apparently some of the scientists were a bit unhappy about his attendence, because, like, what does he know about neuroscience? Mind you a lot of the people who are complaining about him are Chinese. Say no more.

Apparently scientists are skeptical about the findings that compassion is a skill that could be learned. Well duh! Those of us who have been paying attention to loving kindness and meditating on it for any length of time have no doubt. And this is not just a religious belief, its the result of concentrated efforts over time. For the record I have a degree in Chemistry and think I understand the scientific method pretty well.

Actually this wooing of scientists, this seeking to justify Dharma through science, is IMHO a waste of time. The Dharma is something to be experienced for oneself. Scientists, like the guy in the Wired story, who have any kind of personal involvement in their own experiments are held to be suspect. But there's no benefit to standing and watching someone else meditate. It is ehipassiko - come and see for yourself. I like science, read popular science stuff still, and think it worthwhile to pursue scientific research. But while scientists can say a lot about the appearance of gamma wave oscillations in brain-wave patterns, that doesn't tell you anything about compassion. And even if it did, so what. The easiest way to confirm it is to meditate, and hard-core scientists are unwilling to do so because they think it would compromise their integrity. Like everything else in the world, the intergrity of scientists is an appearance, an illusion, like a soap bubble...

Wired

Dayamati Online

2006-01-29T11:29:00.000Z

Just wanted to give a plug to this new website by Dharmacari Dayamati, aka Professor Richard Hayes, aka Mubul. Dayamati is wonderfully erudite and witty. He founded the academic listserv Buddha-L so many years ago that only he can remember it now, and has always been ready for a good robust debate. His book Land of No Buddha is a very good read. This site combines more formal writings with stuff edited from Buddha-L, and also provides links to his academic.

My Art

2006-01-28T09:17:00.000Z

I haven't got around to getting photo's of artwork I did while on my ordination retreat, but I stumbled on a photo taken by Ashvajit while he was out for the ordinations. The image shows two works. A spire in the background (left a bit) was about 2m tall, took several hours and kept falling over. The arch was one of 6 or 7 and happens to be the best of the bunch. In a sense I think of it more of as a cascasde from the higher rock to the lower.

Another photo by Ashvajit. This time of a bundle of sticks representing the water element and the southern direction. Part of a planned series of four, but was the only one completed.

Other examples of my outdoor art can be found at jayarava.org.

Life without numbers...

2006-01-24T08:34:00.000Z

... or colours... apparently. This caught my ear on the BBC 3 program Word of Mouth last Sunday. The Amazonian Piraha tribe have no words for number, or colours. They use three vowels, and seven or eight consonants. Actually men and women use different consonants, talk about gendered language!

This site appears to summarise an article from the journal Science, and has a number of fascinating factoids about the Piraha.

Blangha

2006-01-16T20:27:00.000Z

Contrary to my earlier wailing about being left off Blogmandu, I am delighted to say that I do get a mention in the latest of 4 long posts covering the month to Jan 14. (see comments) I think I'd better stop being so obsessed and just relax into being noticed or not.

A while back Will of ThinkBuddha wrote about the online community of Buddhist bloggers and mentioned that it is friendly and helpful. So far I find myself in agree with this, and I must say it is very pleasent after the acrimony of Usenet and similar forums.

I note from perusing Blogmandu that there is a now a newsfeed aggregator called Blangha. Currently it seems to focus on Zen related sites, which mine are not, but who knows perhaps the idea will take off and the scope will broaden out. It's quite a good place to stop and take in the breadth of what Buddhist bloggers are writing about.

The Zero Dollar Homepage

2006-01-16T13:53:00.000Z

The last pixels on the million dollar webpage have been sold on ebay. But what I really want to tell you about is the Zero Dollar Homepage. LOL! Courtesy of Wired's Monkey Bite Blog

Bricolage

2006-01-15T14:57:00.000Z

Argh. I've been too busy doing other stuff to do much fun blogging lately. Finding I have more input than I can process so having to take a bit of a break from cramming stuff into my brain and waiting for some of it to leak out. I've written a rave about imagination which I thought was quite good. It even got a comment! Hooray! Continuing to scribble away in the back ground to create a backlog of writing as well.

I've managed to scrape together a few posts for FWBO News but keep wondering how I can other people involved. I have a poster ready to send out to FWBO centres, oh the ignominy of resorting to print to advertise a website. But I can't think of any other way to reach my target audience. I'm still in the top ten on Google, but also rating well on Yahoo!, and I'm numero uno on MSN. Not that I'd ever use the MSN search engine other than for vanity purposes.

Blogmandu is going again, but I don't get a mention. Oh cruel fate. Ah well, that's the worldly winds for you!

Upholstered Dave must be pleased that samsara-hq has finally moved ahead of this blog when you google samsara-hq :) Dave's been following my shining example and registering his blog on directory sites, although I'd call it attention seeking rather than whoring! I like the burning Wicker man Wikablog icon he found!

Obligatory cool/geeky website here. I've just finished reading all six Harry Potter books again, and find myself really excited about how it's going to end. It might have something to do with my fast approaching 40th birthday. Argh! Mugglenet is well beyond train-spotting and into obsessive compulsive disorder territory. However it will give you something to do while you wait another year and a half (most likely) for book 7.

Oh, and my MBTI type is INTJ - Mastermind! Finally some recognition.

Blog In Space

2006-01-02T19:37:00.000Z

Send your blog, or your special one time message, out into space so that the aliens know that you care. Blog In Space .
I shit you not! Stuff like this really needs no comment does it? But in case you don't scroll down, yes, they do sell Blog in Space teeshirts.

Jayarava Rave

2006-01-02T13:18:00.000Z

I uploaded a new essay on The Jayarava Rave in the weekend. In it I argue that awareness is better than having a lot of rules. I'm kinda hoping to get a response to this one, to get some comments. It's a fine line between saying something completely outrageous and offensive, and saying something thought provoking and interesting. I do try to err on the side of the latter, but I find that unless people disagree they tend not to interact.

Google Blog Search

2005-12-26T17:19:00.000Z

Google now have a blog search engine - it returns a very short list of blogs which I can't believe are all that it has in it's vaults, as well as individual post mentioning your search terms. It's still in beta, so I guess we can look for improvements.
Google Blog Search

Getting your blog noticed

2005-12-26T10:20:00.000Z

I've been spending a lot of time trying to make my blogs more sticky and more noticable lately. Have become obsessed by Google ratings which I've been tracking on Digital Point's Keyword Tracker . BlogPulse have an interesting app that analyses searches for specific keywords, and back links and creates graphs so you can see trends. Not sure of the technology behind it. Have just added my three blogs. It actually takes hours of plugging away to make sure that any particular website is visible on the web.

Stumbled Upon

2005-12-24T14:17:00.000Z

I just stumbled upon Stumble Upon which is a kind of social networking site. I have my own profile there which includes a kind of auto-blog (I'm enjoying coining new blog words!). As I stumble upon a new website I rate it good or bad, and Stumble Upon keeps track of my preferences. Social Networking is one way to deal with the enormous amount of information available on the internet. The logic is that people like me will like stuff like me. I can find people who like the same sort of stuff as me by joining social networking sites and making my preferences known.

Note that Stumble Upon requires you to download and install their tool bar in order to participate.

Virtual Economy Bleeds Over into Real Life

2005-12-19T19:26:00.000Z

Spent the weekend at my brother's house. He's a very keen MMOG* player and I got quite interested in his hobby. EVE, which my brother plays, is a small game with only 70,000 players. World of Warcraft which is probably the largest game has about 1.5 million players!

The really interesting thing is that the currency used in his game, ISK, is starting to be traded in real life. People with a lot of ISK are auctioning it on Ebay for instance. The thing is that money makes the online world go around, and earning it is a bit of a drag, especially at the beginning. So if you have real money, why not get a headstart by buying some ISK? Seems like standard capitalism. But ISK is only useable in a virtual computer game world. Apparently all this currency speculation is causing inflation in the game economy. The going rate for 100 million ISK seems to be about US$20. Playing the game costs �12 per month which is also about US$20. As I write this there are 282 ebay items listed under EVE Online ISK. Chris tells me that it is so profitable that there are places in China where people constantly play EVE in ISk factories creating virtual cash to auction online

I notice that things like character accounts, space-ships (essential for the game), and other equipment are also for sale. My brother's speciality is trading - the game has it's own Ebay equivalent and through careful speculation it is possible to be very successful in virtual terms.

EVE has it's own player magazine, and contributors are paid in ISK! See this article for instance: Clickable Culture - Virtual Cash Buys 'EVE' Magazine-Ads, Pays Writers

Julian Dibbelhas investigated this type of thing and reckons one could make a tidy income trading imaginary goods from online games (Ultima Online in this case). His blog entries are a follow up to a Wired MagazineThe Unreal Estate Boom from 2003 - so this is not a new phenomena by any means. Dibbell points out that some serious money is from these virtual worlds - larger than the GNPs of some fairly substantial countries (Bulgaria for instance).

Another blog discusses the phenomena and speculates that Ebay might become the "duct tape" between the real and virtual economies. In a comment added to this blog entry there is a note that it may be possible to have EVE Online Ebay, just as you have Ebay for whatever country you are in. This adds a whole new dimension to online communities don't you think? I mean, Paypal, might be pretty cool, but what happens when amazon starts accepting ISK as legal tender?

Online gaming has gotten very personal these days. Voice over IP allows person to person, and conference calls to be built into the game. Players meet up in real life. Apparently one friend murdered another in real life when he was betrayed in a game! I'm sure that Philip K. Dick would have loved this blurring of the distinctions between real and virtual! I was writing about the cellphone and community in my other blog only a few days ago. Suddenly I feel very very out of date! I'm thinking of another friend who I hardly see these days because he spends his non-work waking hours playing a MMOG. Is that kind of community really more satisfying than a real one?

* Massively Multiplayer Online Game

Buddhist meta-blog

2005-12-15T23:10:00.000Z

This is cool. I was thinking of a meta-blog* for Buddhist blogs, and of course it already exists. Blogmandu

*a meta-blog is a blog that only blogs other blogs.

Buddhist Bloggers

2005-12-15T22:48:00.000Z

Will at thinkbuddha.org has posted a nice little piece about the blangha - the online community of Buddhist bloggers.

SETI vs intelligent design

2005-12-11T09:28:00.000Z

Last week I wrote a kind of off-the-cuff reposte of the idea of intelligent design (ID) on my other blog. My position being, essentially, that even if you accept some sort of design hypothesis there is not a lot of evidence of intelligence in the design of the universe. I've just coined this the Stupid Design (SD) hypothesis. The Panda's Thumb has a lot more on this subject, and in particular is relating it to the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Apparently one of the ways that the ID people might seek to 'prove' ID is to look for "intelligently caused signals - God's radio presumably? As Frank Zappa was heard to remark - and I've seen a video of the interview where he does - "hydrogen is said to be the building block of the universe because it is the most common element. However I think stupidity is the most common element in the universe." I think the ID people supports FZ's hypothesis and therefore my own SDH. I do love a good TLA. Tip of the hat to Danny Yee for alerting me to this one.

New Stuff

2005-12-10T18:34:00.000Z

The observant amongst you (and I use this term loosely - 'you' that is) will have noticed a lot of new gimicky things added to the sidebar to try and generate a bit more traffic, and to link my blogs and other websites into a self-referential network. It's all very well being a blogger and an author, but one needs an audience, and so I'm going in search of one. Mainly through The Jayarava Rave - this is an example of shameless self quoting in order to fool Google that I'm more popular than I really am. But it's not all just hype, because I think the essays on that site are good. I've been trawling for FWBO News... if I start writing comments on my own blogs, someone please stop me! Reminds me I haven't put the paypal donate money button on any of these sites yet...

Calvin and Hobbes

2005-12-06T13:07:00.000Z

Long article about Bill Watterson the cartoonist who created Calvin and Hobbes (IMHO the finest comic strip of all time!) Washington Post

Hey Pema he lives in Cleveland!

Official C&H site

directory for all things Calvin and Hobbes

Wikipedia have a pretty good article as well

IVR Cheat Sheet

2005-12-05T12:13:00.000Z

Paul English is actually an American. He has compiled a list of ways to get around automated phone answering systems, or interactive voice response (IVR) systems. In other words he tells you what to do if you want to beat the system and talk directly to a human being right away. Yeah! IVR Cheat Sheet

Bricolage is passe already

2005-12-05T11:47:00.000Z

Damn! Wouldn't you know it. I thought about moving this blog to a new url to reflect the new title, but bricolage.blogspot.com is taken. Don't bother looking, it's crap. Then I had a hunt around and bricolage, despite being my new word of the day, is already old hat in the polyhedrical world of the internet. I don't even rate in the Google top ten for "polyhedrical". Although I am still the only Jayarava, and Mahaabaala is still unique. Which is something I suppose.

While I've been off sick with a lousy cold I've been adding my blogs (is three blogs too many?) to lots of directories and stuff to try to get noticed - story of my life but you don't want to know that. Still it's good to have a few interesting little bits and pieces. I'd never have time to do this unless I was too sick to think about more important things.

FWBO News is almost in the top ten for Googling "FWBO" and I'd like to get it a bit higher to edge out some of those 'other' sites that I'm not even going to mention. I'm starting to think that it may be worth getting FWBO People it's own url because it doesn't appear on the radar yet. Although a search for "FWBO People" does find it, it ain't #1. Could it be that Google is prejudiced against Yahoo's Geocities? Wouldn't surprise me.

Oh... btw if you had any fun at all on this site, please consider clicking on an ad or two so that I get some money. Thanks.

Jackson's gorilla 'true to life'

2005-12-04T17:30:00.000Z

Haven't blogged the Herald much recently but this is a nice story about taking the director of the Bronx Zoo to see King Kong. The dear fellow is very complimentary about Jackson's gorilla and his recreation of 1930's NYC. NZ Herald
Jackson for Prime Minister!

The Forgiveness Project

2005-12-04T16:50:00.000Z

This was a story in the Indepedent yesterday that caught my eye. Without wanting to get dewy eyed and sentimental, I think this is what I'm working on in my life. Forgiving all the bullying and violence; and seeking forgiveness for when I turned the tables and became a tormentor. The Forgiveness Project

Unfortunately the Independent have decided to make this article one that you can only see by paying for it. So not much point in linking to them. However The Forgiveness Project site is good.

Jayarava Raving

2005-12-01T09:29:00.000Z

I decided to have another blog called The Jayarava Rave. What?! Another blog? Isn't one enough. No, apparently it is not. On this page I will collect bits and pieces of stuff, hence: Bricolage. Over on the other blog I'm going to put rants and raves which I write from time to time anyway. These will, like the Hitch-hikers guide to the Galaxy, often be apocryphal or at least wildly inaccurate, but hey, this is the Internet yeah? I'm going to have a third site www.jayarava.org (don't look it ain't there yet) for my really serious writing, stuff that has been published for instance. At present my artwork is going to stay on mahaabaala.me.uk unless I get sick of having so many websites. The good thing is that if I interlink all of them it will help them rate better on Google.

Dalai Lama Gets Meditation Lesson

2005-11-30T15:50:00.000Z

The Dalai Lama was in Washington, D.C., earlier this month, meeting with President Bush, giving a public talk on the subject of global peace -- and learning about meditation from Western scientists. Wired

Madhyamavani Magazine

2005-11-25T22:26:00.000Z

Must have missed the launch of this, but better late than never. This is an important resource for the FWBO. Madhyamavani

God bless America!

2005-11-23T09:16:00.000Z

Ever find one of those stories that capture your attention - cool, macabre (sp?), scary and fun all at the same time - and then when it comes to blogging it you just can't think of a way to describe it... Economist

English to Hindi/Sanskrit converter

2005-11-20T12:57:00.000Z

This is a nice little app for anyone with Indo-philic inclinations. Transliterate to Sanskrit/Hindi
As you type roman characters into a window on the left the right hand window shows you the Devanagari transliteration, and another window gives you the HTML equivalent.
My name, Jayarava, looks like this जयरव
Cool.

BBC NEWS | Health | How singing unlocks the brain

2005-11-20T12:17:00.001Z

How singing unlocks the brain BBC Just wanted to tag this because it ties in with my research into what makes mantra chanting an effective spiritual practice. One of the threads I intend to follow when I get time is this idea that singing together is beneficial in many ways: emotional resonance with other people... rhythm seems to be important as well. Trying to track down the research to support this hypothesis is a bit tricky, but there is some.

New Word

2005-11-18T09:14:00.000Z

Cacographer. (click for a definition)
This is why I prefer to type these days, and even though they are knot infallible, why I love speling chequers.

Google Base

2005-11-15T20:51:00.000Z

This what makes Google interesting... always something new. Apparently Google emplyees have 20% of their time to just muck around and come up with stuff. This new stuff is interesting. It's a database that uses upload directly to - you describe it, and Google indexes it, and anything with a high Google rating will get into the main index as well. People are uploading recipes, job ads, stuff for sale, etc. Cool. Google Base

Koha - Open Source Integrated Library System

2005-11-13T12:58:00.000Z

I'm starting to think about doing library work again after a three year break... Pema sent me this to help get me in the mood :) Koha - Open Source Integrated Library System

The Jayarava Rave

2005-11-13T12:53:00.000Z

If I blog myself... will I go blind? The Jayarava Rave

A study of the Galaxy Song by Eric Idle

2005-11-13T12:37:00.000Z

Blogging is for people with too much time on their hands... like Paul Kohlmiller who took the time to analyse the Monty Python Galaxy Song to see how accurate it was/is. Get a blog Paul!

Meditation Associated With Increased Grey Matter In The Brain

2005-11-12T17:39:00.000Z

Meditation Associated With Increased Grey Matter In The Brain. Sci Daily

Changes

2005-10-03T14:49:00.000+01:00

Hey wow! There's a Shingon Buddhist Temple in Bristol! Have emailled the guy and hope that we can find stuff to talk about. Still fascinated by Shingon and by Kukai.

FWBO People

2005-09-15T21:03:00.000+01:00

Have never intended this to be one of those internet exposes on my inner world. I'm bored by what most people think in anycase and assume the same is true for you. But, and this is really making me feel miserable at the moment, a young woman I know is in the process of deliberately starving herself to death. And that is about the saddest thing I can imagine at present. She's bright, attractive, friendly, and dammit life is so bad that she just wants to die, and what's more she's been at this little project for a year (in which time she hasn't taken solid food). And now her body is beginning to pack up and she is really going to die if she doesn't start eating. And it is breaking my heart.

gratitude unlimited home page

2005-09-05T19:29:00.000+01:00

Express your gratitude or appreciation of something or someone... go ahead, it will probably change the world.gratitude unlimited

MahaBlahBlah

2005-09-02T19:41:00.000+01:00

Fantastic Adjectives
Have been reading about Buddhism and Semiotics lately. The wonderfully loquacious and logorythmic Fabio Rambelli - the Italian academic who lives in Japan and publishes in English, Japanese as well as Italian (he apparently speaks French as well!). His title, Associate professor of semiotics of culture and Japanese religions and intellectual history , says it all really.

A small sample:

He describes Kukai's work as polyhedrical. Of course Fabio knows all about polyhedricality. My old favourite adjective was Autumnal. No more. One must change or become monohedrical.

Two words in Japanese (mon and monji) are synynomical variants of each other and are polysemic and ambiguous.

Plain English? Piss off!!

And finally on this topic... why is there no other words for "synonym". www.synonym.com. I also checked in my Oxford Thesaurus?! Nada, nothing, naught, nil, Sweet FA, zero, not a sausage!

Samsara H.Q.

2005-08-18T13:46:00.000+01:00

DoubleChocolate is no more... My friend David has upgraded his blog. I think you'll agree that he's really quite a funny man. And not funny peculiar either... well not much. Samsara-HQ

The Buddhist Channel | North America | Worshipping at the Cleveland Buddhist Temple

2005-08-14T09:07:00.000+01:00

Worshipping at the Cleveland Buddhist Temple. For my friend in Cleveland :-) The Buddhist Channel

Automatic Email Munger: hide your email address from spammers

2005-08-14T09:01:00.000+01:00

If you have a website it's a good idea to hide your email from spammers who use computers to trawl the web looking for emails to add to their databases. This site is a very nice way of doing it. Automatic Email Munger

George Lakoff: Metaphor and War, Again

2005-08-08T20:34:00.000+01:00

OK This is just a tentative restart - not sure if it will be sustainable. But I'm really interested in Lakoff and his ideas about metaphor. It all ties in very nicely with Margo Magnus and the stuff about phonosemantics.
George Lakoff: Metaphor and War, Again. Language in Extreme Situations

Yahoo! Groups : fwbo Moderators : 1 - 2 of 2

2005-01-01T15:15:00.000Z

Well it's pretty obvious that this project has ground to a halt. And what's more I'm going to be away from most of this year. In Feb I'm heading down under for a visit, and then from Apr - Aug I will be on a long retreat in the mountains in Spain - during which I will be ordained into the Western Buddhist Order. It will then take some time to sort out who I am and what I am doing. I may come back to blogging... I just dont know.

Most of my time these days is being spent working on my book on Mantra. Just collating all the Western/Eastern scholarship on the subject, or at least what is easily accessible to an amateur like me, is complex and time consuming. So much has been written about mantra that is obscure, misleading, or plain wrong that it requires a lot of sifting.

However I also intend to apply the ideas of Phonosemantics to mantra - something which to my knowledge has never been attempted before. This requires me to understand in some depth a few different areas of linguistics and semiology: phonology, phonetics, semantics, pragmatics, and of course Margaret Magnus's material on phonosemantics. It's heavy going. I recomend Margaret's book Gods of the words (it's on Amazon), and one by George Lakoff called Women, Fire and Dangerous Things.

I know at least two people read Mahablahblah on something like a regular basis - thanks.

Best wishes for the year ahead (2005)

Mahaabaala (aka Michael)

Albion Moonlight Butters

2004-12-15T20:10:00.000Z

Yikes, it's been ages since I blogged - busyness and sickness have kept me at bay.

This is an interesting article on Mantra. The Meaning of Mantra

Weekly World News: Two-Ton Alien Hairball Found in Australia

2004-11-26T15:05:00.000Z

Two-Ton Alien Hairball Found in Australia. Especially for Snooter. space.com

New Zealand News - NZ - Dolphins saved us from shark, lifeguards say

2004-11-26T09:14:00.000Z

A pod of dolphins saved some swimmers from a shark attack. Gave me goose bumps! NZ Herald

Conversational Grunts in English: Home Page

2004-11-25T22:37:00.000Z

I'm interested in Sound Symbolism again. This comes from computer geeks trying to make computers more fun to talk to. Which raises questions about why of course, but let's leave that aside for a moment because what they discover is relevant to my understanding of the meaning which inhers in vocal sounds. Conversational Grunts in English: Home Page
(With nuts to all Saussurean linguists!)

FWBO People

2004-11-25T21:18:00.000Z

Knocked up a new website for the FWBO underground tonight. This is for people's personal sites. I thought I'd better do this because some people are going to struggle with the challenge of getting on the webring. FWBO People

Michael's new homepage

2004-11-25T14:58:00.000Z

Mahaabaala is back online after disappearing - I forgot to pay my bill... sigh.

New Zealand News - NZ - Mother who breastfeeds pup 'didn't want to waste it'

2004-11-18T09:18:00.000Z

Mother who breastfeeds pup 'didn't want to waste it' NZ Hearlad

New Statesman - Books

2004-10-31T19:23:00.000Z

I don't usually do book reviews, but this one looks interesting.
An End to Suffering: the Buddha in the world. Pankaj Mishra. New Statesman

"The Simplest Life" by Sasha Issenberg

2004-10-31T19:19:00.000Z

Why Americans idolise the Amish. Washington Monthly

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | TV and Radio | Legendary radio DJ John Peel dies

2004-10-27T13:22:00.000+01:00

RIP John Peel.

Obituary. BBC

Who is John Peel?

John Peel's favourite song was Teenage Kicks by the Undertones. For more info see
SALON

My old band The Heretics used to play Teenage Kicks - great song.