Archive for the ‘9th dan’ Category

Theo Jansen

Walking on compressed wind from the "wind stomach," Theo Jansen’s work is beyond amazing. His work literally flies…

My Ninja, Please! 2.7.11 : Reincarnation

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In one of history’s more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is "an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation." But beyond the irony lies China’s true motive: to cut off the influence of the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled spiritual and political leader, and to quell the region’s Buddhist religious establishment more than 50 years after China invaded the small Himalayan country. By barring any Buddhist monk living outside China from seeking reincarnation, the law effectively gives Chinese authorities the power to choose the next Dalai Lama, whose soul, by tradition, is reborn as a new human to continue the work of relieving suffering.

At 72, the Dalai Lama, who has lived in India since 1959, is beginning to plan his succession, saying that he refuses to be reborn in Tibet so long as it’s under Chinese control. Assuming he’s able to master the feat of controlling his rebirth, as Dalai Lamas supposedly have for the last 600 years, the situation is shaping up in which there could be two Dalai Lamas: one picked by the Chinese government, the other by Buddhist monks. "It will be a very hot issue," says Paul Harrison, a Buddhism scholar at Stanford. "The Dalai Lama has been the prime symbol of unity and national identity in Tibet, and so it’s quite likely the battle for his incarnation will be a lot more important than the others."

.:huffingtonpost.com->

DIY: How to Win a Nobel Prize

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I went on to work out equations of wobbles. Then I thought about how electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there's the Dirac Equation in electrodynamics. And then quantum electrodynamics. And before I knew it (it was a very short time) I was "playing" a working, really a with the same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos: my thesis-type problems; all those old-fashioned, wonderful things.

It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams andAthe whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.

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Gandhi’s Invisible Hands

On September 4, 1915, in the sticky heat of late summer, Mahadev Desai and Narahari Parikh walked without speaking along the Sabarmati River, on the outskirts of Ahmedabad, a city in northwestern India. Desai and Parikh were best friends who shared everything, so the silence between them was uncharacteristic. Their day, however, had been highly unusual, and they were both lost in reflection on what had transpired. When they reached the Ellis Bridge, which spanned the surging waters of the Sabarmati and supported a steady flow of carriage, mule, foot, and, occasionally, car traffic from the bustling city, they stopped and faced each other. They were both thinking about a meeting they had had a few hours earlier with a 46-year-old lawyer who had recently returned to India after living for two decades in South Africa.

Desai finally broke their prolonged silence: "Narahari, I have half a mind to go and sit at the feet of this man." This statement, in which Desai contemplated abandoning his nascent legal career in order to devote himself to the service of someone he had met for the first time that day, changed the course of his life. It also helped change the course of history for a colonized nation seeking freedom and its entrenched imperial rulers. With these words, the 23-year-old Desai began a journey that would produce one of the most important partnerships the modern world has known. The lawyer they had met had extraordinary ambitions that were growing by the day, and he had started to assemble a team of gifted individuals to help him achieve his visions. That lawyer's name was Mohandas Gandhi, and in Mahadev Desai the future Mahatma had found a crucial partner for his historic cause.

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Albino Candidate Overcomes Prejudice

Tanzania’s first elected albino MP said yesterday the result was a breakthrough for albinos in the east African country, where scores have been murdered for their body parts to be used in sorcery. Salum Khalfani Bar’wani won the southern Tanzania Lindi Town constituency seat, beating a ruling party candidate who had served in parliament for 15 years.

.:timeslive.co.za->

Secrets of the Centenarians

My ninja, please! Most ninjas don’t make it this far… but the elders live far past 100. But, seriously, this is an interesting photo essay/article/interblog from the NYT profiling some venerable old human beings. If you get the chance to take a peek, say in the next 100 years, you will be amazed, astounded, and regaled.

OK, maybe not. But I thought it was interesting.A Here’s the link: click me.

Stephen Fry : What I’d Wish I’d Known When I Was 18

Einstein on Buddhism

Buddhism has the characteristics of what would be expected in a cosmic religion for the future: It transcends a personal God, avoids dogmas and theology; it covers both the natural and the spiritual, and it is based on a religious sense aspiring from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity.

and:

The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description. If there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism.

.:tricycleblog->

Pele as a Comedian

Pele doesn't strike me as a religious experience, then. He strikes me as a comedy, or better, as a comedian: not as a stand-up comic or a satirist, but as the opposite of a tragedian, the author of the kind of classical comedy that always ends with a wedding, the kind that revels in turning the order of things upside down so that it can give you the giddy satisfaction of seeing them turned right-side up again. This kind of comedy is in the business of reconciliation: The king turns out to be wise, the lovers love each other, and the villains reveal themselves to be failures, however things look for a while. When Titania is in the forest with Bottom, everything is wonderfully backwards: The queen of the ideal is enslaved to clumsiest physicality.66 A Midsummer Night's Dream is a little like soccer, come to think of it. Then Puck flies through, Pele scores his goal, and all the faculties go back to their right places. It has no effect on the real world, or on whatever moves in the dark, and if the real world is a place of despair, then the most it can do is to keep despair at bay. It's rigged, like all art, and it feels like a game because it is a game. But there are worse things than keeping despair at bay. The terrible thing about happiness is that it can't answer any questions. But when it comes, you don't need it to. And when it goes, well, what would you want it to say?

.:runofplay.com->