This article focuses on the relationship between Buddhism and science illustrated by 一行 Yīxíng’s (683–727) participation in [Chinese] calendar formulation.

Why not
tend to your own horse

A poem in response to Auden’s poem about Bruegel’s painting about the fall of Icarus asking what it is that we owe one another and what is the correct response to the tragedy of craft.

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat…

… one camera
for every ten heads.
Most of the time,
I can’t even recall
my own reflection …

Mendicants, the eye of the past and future is impermanent, let alone the present.

Tyrant, why swell’st thou thus,
 Of mischief vaunting?

An analysis of a poetic (prophetic), sixteenth century translation of Psalm 52 which shows how religions can provide a dignified response to times of tyranny.

Theories of consciousness are not ethically neutral.

Peter Hershock makes his case for a Yogacara-inspired view of consciousness, especially in the face of emergent technologies.

In 2025, in 1812, in 2000 BC, the death of a young child is the worst thing that could happen to any parent.

We can put an Egyptian mummy in a museum and it’s nice and exotic, but we’re not gonna learn anything from it. That’s how we tend to think of tradition. We don’t literally destroy the past, but we render it something that we can learn nothing from.

people have been claiming to be modern since at least the third century BC.

At a time when bandits are strong, kings are weak…

Darwin showed that organisms are derived imperfectly from their history and it’s these imperfections, the radical historicity of life, that is our clue to it having evolved.

This use case that Apple is proposing is a near exact replication of a technology imagined in Kathryn Bigelow’s 1995 dystopian sci-fi film Strange Days.

have a good morning

“It’ll Be Alright on the Night” was an outtakes show. It compiled mistakes, technical errors, and flubs from television and film…

An homage to a moment of British television history and to those who put in the effort to do things well.

Word got around. The family’s library of physical films and books became a kind of currency. Neighbors offered bottled water or jars of peanut butter for access. The 1989 Tom Hanks comedy The ’Burbs was an inexplicably valuable commodity…

On the continuing relevance of movie disks in the era of streaming.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and the road to environmental destruction is paved with hope, which is shaped like a phoenix.

You were between two animals.
Between two attributions.
At the crotch of a river’s fork.
At a loss, at least…

What it feels like to have to make a decision.

They were very disoriented, obviously, after flipping. They got out of their seat belts and out of the car and, because I had skidded, my head was bleeding profusely…

A scientist talks about the difficult process of recovery after her traumatic head injury.

His colleagues concluded that the crisis was an example of what’s known as a ‘Mass Sociogenic Illness’—what used to be called ‘Mass Hysteria.’

Every generation is susceptible to mimetic panic.

For the time being stand on top of the highest peak.
For the time being proceed along the bottom of the deepest ocean.
For the time being three heads and eight arms.
For the time being an eight- or sixteen-foot body.

All being is time.

One of the greatest illusions in life is continuity…

For the fascinating story of how we learned about this special day, millions of years ago, see Preston, 2019.

And for an alternate theory of what killed the dinosaurs, see Kurzgesagt’s video on the Deccan Traps.

… but if you were to move your hand slowly over a fly it would perceive your hand much like we would perceive grass growing or ice melting or paint drying: it would be too slow to be visible. So here is a good life hack if you ever want to catch a fly with your bare hands: take your time.

Besides serving as the condition for the possible arising of craving, feeling tone is also part of name-and-form. Exploring these two contexts helps to put dependent arising into temporal perspective.

But historical scholarship did more than substantiate a single pivotal argument. It framed the majority’s broader understanding of marriage as an evolving institution…

first bright-red manicure, first
chipped nail, first note taped to the door
saying don’t come in…

Then happiness became an egg that broke…

A poem on how children focus us on the present moment.

To wake when all is possible
before the agitations of the day
have gripped you

To come to the kitchen
and peel a little basketball
for breakfast…

Sunday morning, the wind has washed our minds,
the streets are bleak…

What shall meadow hold to please me,
Spreading wide its scented waving…

That summer we’d hop fences
and call them gates…

Backward crossovers into years before: airy
afternoons licking the wooden spoon…

O New Day, I get to build the boat!

Windowless now, roofless, tucked
under the first, sheltering hill of a range
that ran all the way to Mexico…

A frog leaps out across the lawn,
And crouches there…

Is it difficult to get away from it all once you’ve had a child?

It turns out however that I was deeply
Mistaken about the end of the world…

… Mistaken for a child running to tell of a bomb
That did not knock before it entered
In Gaza with its glad tidings of abundant joy…

An inability to engage with our communities hurts everyone

While the article is a bit parochial (focusing on the pandemic-era United States) its conclusion is broadly true under advanced, global Capitalism.

We find the claim that time is not real in both Western and Eastern philosophical traditions and, more recently, in contemporary physics. Yet it seems unlikely that when McTaggart, Godel, Barbour, and Dzogchen practitioners say that there is no time, they are denying the existence of the same thing. This essay is an attempt to set out a taxonomy of different views about what it takes for there to be time and, alongside that, a taxonomy of views about whether or not there is time.

The biggest danger we face today isn’t that industrial civilization will choke on its own exhaust or that democracy will crumble or that AI will rise up and overthrow us all. It’s that we will cease believing in the one force that raised humanity out of tens of thousands of years of general misery: the very idea of progress.

most waking hours are spent on activities intended to achieve direct outcomes for human minds and bodies (9.4 hours per day), while 3.4 h/d are spent modifying our inhabited environments and the world beyond. 2.1 h/d are devoted to organizing social processes and transportation.

We distinguish activities that vary strongly with GDP per capita, including the time allocated to food provision and infrastructure, vs those that do not vary consistently, such as meals and transportation time.

If you know Python/Jupyter, you can even play around directly with their data by downloading it here.

When the next generation starts its career, the stocks have further declined, but it is the stocks at that time that serve as a new baseline. The result obviously is a gradual shift of the baseline, a gradual accommodation of the creeping disappearance of resource species, and inappropriate reference points for evaluating economic losses resulting from overfishing, or for identifying targets for rehabilitation

The classic 1995 paper that introduced the term for how humans have a hard time seeing intergenerational change.

People change when they think others are changing, but people misperceive others’ changes.

How public opinion in the United States has actually shifted over the last few decades, and how well (or not) those shifts correlate with mass discourse.

Time is now currency: it is not passed, but spent.

We follow archaeological research and employ skeletal records of women’s and men’s health from 139 archaeological sites in Europe dating back, on average, to about 1200 AD to construct a site-level indicator of historical bias in favor of one gender over the other using dental linear enamel hypoplasias. This historical measure of gender bias significantly predicts contemporary gender attitudes, despite the monumental socioeconomic and political changes that have taken place since.

We also show that this persistence is most likely due to the intergenerational transmission of gender norms, which can be disrupted by significant population replacement. Our results demonstrate the resilience of gender norms and highlight the importance of cultural legacies in sustaining and perpetuating gender (in)equality today.

Picture the splash of a pebble falling into pond water, but on a planetary scale.

Of course, it is worthy and noble to be passionate about people and causes you care about. It’s also easy to fall into the trap of attempting too much in the pursuit of trying to have it all.

Eall þá óþer cild mid findġum soccum
Sċulon betera rinnen, cwicra þonne mín boga

What will our culture look like to people a thousand years from now?

shamans endowed with powers to cure the sick, predict right times of planting and harvest, and invoke the souls of ancestors to guide the deceased to the afterlife.

But the single mass of water at that time was utterly dark. The moon and sun were not found, nor were stars and constellations, day and night, months and fortnights, years and seasons, or male and female. Beings were simply known as ‘beings’. After a very long period had passed, the earth’s substance curdled in the water. It appeared just like the curd on top of hot milk-rice as it cools. It was beautiful …

In contrast with the brahmin’s self-serving mythologies of the past, the Buddha presents an account of evolution that shows how our choices are an integral part of the world.

… the days began to walk.
And they, the days, made us.

Three hundred and sixty-five short vignettes of life across the ages.

The age of haste, its cinematographic succession of point-like presences, has no access to beauty or to truth. Only in lingering contemplation, even ascetic restraint, do things unveil their beauty, their fragrant essence.

A spirited defense of slowing down in a world obsessed with acceleration.

Has humanity ever really learned from the past and been able to apply the lessons?

A short defense of studying history, despite its difficulties.

I felt for the first time this is what I was supposed to be doing.

A song about feeling nostalgic for the past, hopeful for the future, and focused on the present.

When those seven days have passed, having emerged from their hiding places and embraced each other, they will come together and cry in one voice, ‘Fantastic, dear foe, you live!’

In illustration of his dictum that one should rely on oneself, the Buddha gives a detailed account of the fall of a kingly lineage of the past, and the subsequent degeneration of society. This process, however, is not over, as the Buddha predicts that eventually society will fall into utter chaos. But far in the far future, another Buddha, Metteyya, will arise in a time of peace and plenty.

We’re living in a time-travel golden age. But why? What happened to time?

A short history of time travel, including the Yahoo time capsule and the birthday party Steven Hawking only announced after the fact.

It must’ve been quite a dangerous job. Particularly for an older woman. You’d have to be pretty tough.

The story of English railroads, the knocker-uppers, Beijing Time, and Daylight Saving.

Wasn’t Bulgaria, in all of its dinginess and provincialism and unpredictability, exactly the kind of frontier I was looking to explore, where the clock was still ticking forward toward some unknown horizon?

It’s not that complex—the idea of agriculture. But because the brain of most animals is not particularly good at linking cause and effect across large periods of time, agriculture wasn’t invented by other animals. So this ability to create the future, this ability to engage in what we call mental time travel, is really, in many ways, the defining cognitive signature of our species.

My first thought was, ‘Wow, I’m going to view history and then get wiped off the map.’

Three stories of people confronted with a hard deadline and the choices they made when faced with impermanence.

… there is complete correspondance in regard to the number of days of the week and import in their names based on appellations of seven planets. Besides, relation of these planets to the signs of Zodiac is also the same.

On some marked similarities between two ancient calendars.

Although buddhas and bodhisattvas came in the past,
Their activities pervading throughout the three realms,
Now they are no more, and only their names remain,
Still, in this they are teachers of impermanence.

Könchok Tenpe Drönme’s response to his disciple, Zhabdrung Ngawang Drakpa, who requested advice in verse on how to meditate on impermanence.

When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.

What happens after all your culture’s ways of making meaning disappear? How can you move forward when the future is literally inconceivable?

A philosophical meditation on the courageous life of the great Apsáalooké (Crow Indian) Chief Plenty Coups.

For a further teaser, see the review in The Marginalian.

Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.

We are brothers in what we share.

In 1911, a Native American man, the only member of his community to survive a genocide, encountered the new Anthropology department at the University of California, Berkeley.

Learn the recitation passage and analysis of One Fine Night, mendicant, memorize it, and remember it. It is beneficial and relates to the fundamentals of the spiritual life.

The verses from MN 131 are explained in a different way by Venerable Mahakaccāna.

Where are we?

Humans have cooperative sentiments usually assumed to be absent in rational choice theories. On the other hand, the slow rate at which cooperative institutions evolve suggests that considerable friction will afflict our ability to grow up commons management institutions where they do not already exist and to readapt existing institutions to rapid technological and economic change.

An answer to the question of how selfish genes produced cooperative people.

We do have something that is very unique about us as animals. And that’s that we can build alliances with any other species […] to build loving, supportive, safe relationships to save us from the difficulties of life

On how advances in science are undermining the dualities we have long assumed separate us from the “lower” animals, and a proposed alternative narrative for what makes humans so special.

… municipalities of Spain with a history of a stronger inquisitorial presence show lower economic performance, educational attainment, and trust today. The effects persist after controlling for historical indicators of religiosity and wealth

… the limbs are flabby & wrinkled; the back, bent forward

When Ānanda sees the Buddha’s sense faculties fading, the Buddha speaks on the decrepitude of old age.

… these five things lead to the decline and disappearance of the true teaching

Loves  How I  love  you…

Friends I am here to modestly report
seeing in an orchard
in my town
a goldfinch

Against my cheek, my tree was comfort

Witless fools behave
like their own worst enemies,
doing wicked deeds…

The deity Khema utters a series of verses in praise of good deeds. The Buddha responds with a simile for someone who departs the path of the good.

Targeted groups came to be attributed a biological or timeless essence, not because this was inevitable, we argue, but because of these failures to historicize inequality.

[T]he great, irreplaceable potentiality of fiction is that it makes possible the imagining of possibilities.

When future generations look back upon the Great Derangement they will certainly blame the leaders and politicians of this time for their failure to address the climate crisis. But they may well hold artists and writers to be equally culpable—for the imagining of possibilities is not, after all, the job of politicians.

This book began as a set of four lectures, presented at the University of Chicago in the fall of 2015. The lectures were the second in a series named after the family of Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin.

The bee sting is nothing: get out of the well!

… life as a human is short, brief, and fleeting, full of suffering and distress. Be thoughtful and wake up! Do what’s good and lead the spiritual life, for no-one born can escape death.

Araka was a famous teacher long ago, when the life span was much greater than today. Nevertheless, he still taught impermanence; how much more is it relevant to us today.

… here is something that will certainly pass for an apocalypse until the real thing comes along.

Bhikkhus, there are these four Dhamma factors, primal, of long standing, traditional, ancient…

Contentment, good will, mindfulness and convergence are basic principles of the Dhamma.

We were thirty-one souls, he said, in the gray-sick of sea…

[Hunter-gatherers] considered themselves affluent and enjoyed a degree of affluence as a result of that. Yet we seem to be trapped in this cycle of ever pursuing more and greater growth, greater wealth, greater anything. It seems that our aspirations now grow endlessly.

A conversation on how consumerism is making us unhappy and what a different culture might look like.

How US prison inmates turned to Buddhism to face execution, and the truth of a space “strike”. Plus, decoding the Ebola virus and we hear the world’s oldest song.

This volume emerges from a symposium entitled ‘Inevitable Ends: Meditations on Impermanence’, held at Aarhus University in May 2019, and an accompanying exhibition at the Moesgaard Museum, ‘Museum of Impermanence: Stories from Nepal, Papua New Guinea and Tibet’ (on display from 9 February to 19 May 2019)

Blessed be the bitterness
at your core, that quiet light…

i google: can dogs eat watermelon?
       google says: yes, but not the
       seeds…

sometimes i want to ask the earth,
was it beautiful      here
without us…

I am writing to you
from deep in the bad days,
hoping you will hear me
wherever you are

I was just beginning
to wonder about my own life
and now I have to return to it…

Where am I going? I don’t quite know.

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert….

Once I heard a scientist with
Alzheimer’s on the radio, trying to
figure out why he could no longer
draw a clock.

A poem based on this radio show about a scientist losing his mind to dimentia.

They want to make clear that other ways of thinking about humanity that are based on conceptions of biological difference and hierarchy are wrong.

On the study of “human nature” after World War II.

Deep down inside, you’re really worth getting to know.

… what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?

The fact that some intersections are still using incandescent bulbs is a little odd.

Musings on the nature of technological progress in a democracy.

Without all of those stories—without the physicist’s story, without the philosopher’s story, without the artist’s story—you’re telling an incomplete narrative.

A renowned physicist on his current view of the cosmos and our place within it.

I found the world so new

A two-pound chicken tastes better with friends
A two-pound chicken tastes better with two
And I know where to find you
So, listen to the words I say!

A spirited defense of socialism for dark times.

I have no head to hang in grief
But there’s no hope for me
I’ve been set free
There’s no breeze
No ship on my sea

Phil Elverum explains how his unusual recording technique led to this one-of-a-kind break-up song.

We must stay hopeful;
We must stay patient –
because when they excavate the modern day
they’ll find us: the Brand New Ancients

An epic poem about inglorious Brits, a morality tale with a potty mouth, and a crafty myth without artifice, Brand New Ancients attempts to tell the story of human life through a series of interwoven vignettes.

… the belief that we humans occupy a realm of being separate from the rest of nature encourages what he all-too-politely refers to as “environmentally irresponsible behavior.”

A history of modern conceptualizations of “nature” and an early defense of the so-called “first/second nature” split—a concept we now call “the anthropocene.”

Just as a river is geographically conditioned to flow in a certain direction, [compassionate] efforts are predetermined to move toward success (as sentient beings are endowed with Buddha nature). But just as a river will never dry up, their project will never end.

A lengthy summary of Tan Sitong’s 仁學 (Rénxué), which outlined his eclectic Buddhist defense of non-discriminating compassion’s agency in the unfolding of history, this paper shows how one Chinese philosopher grappled with the challenges of modernity emerging at his time and how his themes continue in the work of Buddhists such as Thich Nhat Hanh.

People are so difficult to be with —
The good ones won’t lead the way, and the bad ones never stop.

せせらぎが止まるよ 重なる髪かざり
せせらぎが止まるよ 風向きが変わるよ

An exuberant celebration of youthful disaster.

See also the heart-warming Tonofon Remote Festival Version recorded during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in June 2020.

異なる声の元が
喉元までとどく
そこまで見えたものが
消されてしまう前に

There is some sinister hysteria in the air out here tonight, some hint of the monstrous perversion to which any human idea can come.

The world is not a logic puzzle.

Angkarn Kalayanapong (1926-2012) was arguably Thailand’s most famous poet of the modern period. His career spanned the era from the 1940s to the 1980s when Thai society was fundamentally transformed by rapid development and the process of globalization. His poetry is a testament to the massive disruption, dislocation, and alienation caused by these changes, and a lament for cultural loss.

Love of hate acts as an axis uh huh
First it wanes and then it waxes
(Hmm so, procreate and pay your taxes)

… a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems

A few case studies of humanity setting out to fix the environment.

By zooming in on tiny fish and out to the entire stratosphere, it beautifully captures the staggering scope of climate change and its challenges. In highlighting the scientists and engineers working on it, the book offers a somewhat more hopeful picture of our possible future: less apocalyptic but still incredibly strange. See 99pi’s “Model Organism” for a taste.

The book also makes a strong case for being skeptical that we even can engineer our way out of climate change. While it nods to the “but what other choice do we have” counterargument, I hope that readers come away from this tension in the book more confident than ever in our need for decarbonization and I hope that readers won’t leap to even worse ideas than those highlighted in the book, such as fatalism or population control. As one character in the book memorably put it:

Pissing your pants will only keep you warm for so long.

We’re already geo-engineering the planet, we’re just doing it accidentally and badly

Ezra Klein has a wide-ranging conversation with novelist Kim Stanley Robinson (of Mars Trilogy fame) about his “cli-fi” book, Ministry of the Future, and how strange our society is.

For the likes of you, the qualities of the path
Will go on increasing

Furtwängler’s Bach is no smug or mindless adaptation of Bach to the style of Wagner. It is a reaffirmation of the presence of Bach in Wagner and the simultaneous, reciprocal presence of Wagner in Bach.

A forceful argument against the modern trend of “historically authentic” musical performances.

The song goes on forever then it stops. Its basic idea is that time can be defeated for an hour if everyone breathes together, but songs are not made out of ideas

When a space is enclosed by sticks, creepers, grass, and mud it becomes known as a ‘building’. In the same way, when a space is enclosed by bones, sinews, flesh, and skin it becomes known as a ‘form’.

The Venerable Sāriputta shows how all of the teachings fit inside the Four Noble Truths.

I give you back 1948.

A poem about what time can do to a person.

… these hours were often spent in the company of close friends: women and adolescent girls used the twilight to enjoy the company of female friends, while some youth reported visiting friends’ houses where they played and listened to music, completed their homework or chatted. Others spent their pocket money on movies or karaoke.

On the nightlife of the Karen refugee camps.

The universe doesn’t allow perfection.

A classic of popular science books, A Brief History of Time—along with its sequel, The Universe in a Nutshell (Bantam Spectra, 2001)—provides a whirlwind tour of modern physics from one of the field’s preeminent minds.

Our inability to recall how we really felt is why our wealth of experiences turns out to be poverty of riches.

A classic of modern psychology, Stumbling on Happiness explains in detail the cognitive biases that prevent us from accurately predicting what will make us happy.

If history shows anything, it is that there’s no better way to justify relations founded on violence—to make such relations seem moral—than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it’s the victim who’s doing something wrong.

A thorough deconstruction of the idea of money and a scandalous exposé of the history of our global order from the perspective of one of man’s most powerful ideas.

A dispute about livelihood or about the Pātimokkha would be trifling, Ānanda. But should a dispute arise in the Sangha about the path or the way, such a dispute would be for the harm and unhappiness of many

Hearing of the death of the Jain leader, Nigaṇṭha Nātaputta, and their subsequent disputes, the Buddha encourages the Saṅgha to swiftly resolve their own disputes. He lays down a series of seven methods for doing so, which form the foundation for the monastic code.

“Why, exactly, do you teach some people thoroughly and others less thoroughly?”

The chief Asibandhakaputta asks the Buddha why, if he has equal compassion for all, he teaches some more than others. The Buddha answers with a simile of a field: a farmer knows to put most of their effort into the fertile land.

Suppose a trustworthy and reliable man were to come from the east. He’d approach you and say: ‘Please sir, you should know this. I come from the east. There I saw a huge mountain that reached the clouds. And it was coming this way, crushing all creatures.’

Old age and death roll in upon all like mountains approaching from the four directions, crushing all in their path.