bodhi tree swaying

It’s only Thanksgiving in the US, of course, but I hope it’s a happy day for everyone.

I recently wrote a post on Wildmind on saying “Thank You” as a form of meditation practice. I’ve found it to be very effective in creating a sense of gratitude and joy.

Also, Cecilia, who was on a recent meditation and Buddhism course that I taught at Aryaloka Buddhist Center, was kind enough to post the following on her blog:

To Bodhipaksa: When I was struggling this last summer with some health concerns and feeling as though that recent brutal New England winter had done me in for good, I happened upon a CD of yours on Audible.com called Guided Meditations for Calmness, Awareness and Love. This became for me a beacon of light in a life that had long neglected a regular mediation practice. Feeling inspired, I knew I needed to find a

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I published another article on Wildmind:

From time to time people write to me with interesting questions or observations. Often, the less time they’ve been practicing Buddhism and meditation, the more interesting the questions are. As Suzuki Roshi said, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” (I don’t think Suzuki is entirely right here, but he’s certainly not entirely wrong either).

The other day a fellow called Boon wrote to me from England. He’d been reading the Dhammapada, which is one of the most ancient Buddhist texts, written in an archaic form of the Pali language. He’d been wondering about criticism, and its role in spiritual practice. He’d seen passages …

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Here is a document the USDA doesn’t want you to see. It’s what the agency calls a "technical review"—nothing more than a USDA-contracted researcher’s simple, blunt summary of recent academic findings on the growing problem of antibiotic-resistant infections and their link with factory animal farms. The topic is a serious one. A single antibiotic-resistant pathogen, MRSA—just one of many now circulating among Americans—now claims more lives each year than AIDS.

Back in June, the USDA put the review up on its National Agricultural Library website. Soon after, a Dow Jones story quoted a USDA official who declared it to be based on "reputed, scientific, peer-reviewed, and scholarly journals." She added that the report should not be seen as a "representation of the official position of USDA." That’s fair enough—the review was designed to sum up the state of science on antibiotic resistance and factory farms,

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My name in Cherokee. Sometimes one gets these whims. The closest approximation to Bodhipaksha in Cherokee seems to be Quo Di Qua Ka Sa.

The name was put together with the help of this web page, and a Cherokee font that I happened to have on my computer. I love Macs!

Comic sans — the font beloved of school teachers, typographically naive secretaries, and newbie web-site creators, but despised by almost everyone else — has one more thing going against it. Yes, comic sans can actually make you stupid.

Here’s the scoop from the Boston globe:

Researchers gave people 90 seconds to memorize fictitious biology data and then distracted them for another 15 minutes. People who had been given the data in a somewhat-hard-to-read font recalled 87 percent of the data correctly vs. 73 percent for an easy-to-read font. To see if this could be repeated in real classrooms, the researchers asked teachers in a public high school in Ohio to hand out worksheets in somewhat-hard-to-read fonts to one of their sections, while worksheets in easy-to-read fonts were handed out to another section. Students in the sections with the harder-to-read fonts performed better on tests.

The research is from the brilliantly titled: Diemand-Yauman, …

So far, Dragon dictate has been little different from using MacSpeech Dictate. It has the same quirks, including getting utterly confused if you move the cursor, and sometimes of randomly adding a letter to the end of everything you say. Tonight it insisted on adding a W after the cursor, and there was nothing I could do to delete it except intervene manually. O Perhaps it’s a Republican program. O

If you’re wondering what the strange O’s are, it’s because the program has now started randomly adding that letter to the end of what I’m dictating. It looks rather lyrical, don’t you think? I’m going to leave them in just for fun.

O
Using Dragon Dictate has so far been incredibly frustrating and irritating. David Pogue gave Dragon a great write-up in the New York Times. I can only assume that he was using the Windows version and that’s it’s much better …

My experience with AT&T has been pretty awful recently. At my home, which is also my office, the signal bounces around between zero bars and two bars. Most of my calls are dropped. Even when they aren’t, the quality of the calls is so poor I can barely be heard by the other party, and I often have to step outside the house to get a decent quality of connection. According to AT&T’s maps, I have “good” coverage. Presumably this is how they can claim to cover 96% of the US population.

I had someone from AT&T contact me on Twitter, and he offered to look into the service in my town. I was thrilled. And very surprised. But after his promise to look into things he ignored my tweets and emails politely asking whether there had been any progress with his investigations.

The problems aren’t just in my home. …

• Nirvanity n. being attached to one’s supposed spiritual attainments
• Buddhacious adj. being unconventional by dint of one’s insight and the freedom it brings
• Sangha Claus n. 1. the red bodhisattva of generosity toward children, 2. one who gives generously to the spiritual community
• Amateur dharmatics n. the act of seeking powerful “spiritual experiences” because of a lack of appreciation for the ordinary
• Skandhal n. the outrageous belief that a self can be found in the mind or body
• Bodhisattvacation n. when spiritual aspirants take a week off so that they can help more sentient beings in the long term
• mahayaya n. the periodic arising, in the most sober of Buddhists, of the desire to be a rock star (as in the phrase, “get your mahayayas out”)

From the Wall Street Journal:

Do the languages we speak shape the way we think? Do they merely express thoughts, or do the structures in languages (without our knowledge or consent) shape the very thoughts we wish to express?

Take “Humpty Dumpty sat on a…” Even this snippet of a nursery rhyme reveals how much languages can differ from one another. In English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we say “sat” rather than “sit.” In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can’t) change the verb to mark tense.

In Russian, you would have to mark tense and also gender, changing the verb if Mrs. Dumpty did the sitting. You would also have to decide if the sitting event was completed or not. If our ovoid hero sat on the wall for the entire time he was meant to, it would be a different form of the

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It’s ironic that just as science is beginning to discover how creativity works, it is (in the US at least) in the midst of a marked decline. A Newsweek article reports that while IQ has been steadily rising, generation by generation, creativity began to decline steeply after 1990.

It’s a fascinating article (that I’m only half-way through), but in case one day you ever need to remind yourself what creativity was, here’s how it used to work:

When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available

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Feelings and emotions are funny things. Emotional pain doesn’t involve any physical damage to the body, but it hurts just as much as a physical pain does. And it seems that some of the mechanisms of emotional pain may be similar to physical pain, given that recent research demonstrates that analgesics (painkillers) actually blunt feelings of being emotionally hurt.

Everyone has experienced pain and sickness at some point in their lives. For such physical ailments, one of the first things we do–or are instructed to do by medical providers–is take a pain reliever, like acetaminophen (a.k.a., Tylenol). But physical pain isn’t the only kind of pain. Our feelings can also be hurt. So researchers wondered whether acetaminophen, which acts on the central nervous system, could blunt social pain, too. In one experiment, healthy college students were randomly assigned to take acetaminophen or a placebo twice a day for three weeks. Those

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It’s long been known that children from homes that have books in them do better in school. A new study suggests that introducing books into homes produces significant educational gains. David Brooks writes:

Recently, book publishers got some good news. Researchers gave 852 disadvantaged students 12 books (of their own choosing) to take home at the end of the school year. They did this for three successive years.

Then the researchers, led by Richard Allington of the University of Tennessee, looked at those students’ test scores. They found that the students who brought the books home had significantly higher reading scores than other students. These students were less affected by the “summer slide” — the decline that especially afflicts lower-income students during the vacation months. In fact, just having those 12 books seemed to have as much positive effect as attending summer school.

Read

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Really, I should stop giving fake numbers to my Fake Buddha Quotes. This one’s on Brainyquote.com.

I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.

That didn’t look at all like something the Buddha would have said, especially since he mentions fate. The Buddha also, as far as I’m aware, never talked about what he “believed.”

A quick search revealed that the quote is actually from an essay by G. K. Chesterton, “A Visit to Holland.”

Well done, Brainyquote!

I love this Star Trek mashup, although I’m slightly disturbed by how many scenes I instantly recognized. Signs of a misspent youth, adolescence, and adulthood?

It’s lovely it ends with a shot of Nichelle Nichols. What a beautiful woman.

A Battlestar Galactica version would be great!

This image from an EIZO medical imaging “pinup” calendar reminds me of an ancient Buddhist deconstructive technique that aims to remind us of impermanence and to lessen sexual craving.

Here’s a late example from Shantideva’s Bodhicaryavatara:

She … on embracing whom you experienced the highest bliss;
She is nothing but bones … why do you not willingly cuddle them and feel bliss?

This next one’s older. It’s by Rajadatta, who was a monk at the time of the Buddha. This is him describing how he became Enlightened:

I, a monk, gone to the charnel ground, saw a woman cast away, discarded there in the cemetery. Though some were disgusted, seeing her — dead, evil — lust appeared, as if I were blind to the oozings. In less time than it takes for rice to cook, I got out of that place. Mindful, alert, I sat down to one

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Above is my great grandfather, Lewis Stephen (1872-1962). He died when I was one year old, so I never knew him, but I’m told he was a lovely man.

This is my grandfather, Robert Drummond Stephen (1900-1942). He died in an accident when my dad was 9 years old.

This is my dad as a boy, with his sister, Roberta (Bertha).

This is me, with my kids, Maia and Malkias.

Yay for dads!

Last year, a week after returning from Ethiopia, I got roped into narrating a movie that was being submitted to the 48 Hour Film Festival in New Hampshire. As well as narrating, I helped brainstorm the plot and had a small onscreen role. I was asked to participate again this year, but since my wife works at weekends, when the competition takes place, I had to say no. But Newmarket is a small place…

So when the kids and I went down to Crackskulls Cafe for icecream, I bumped into the crew and was invited to be an extra. Fame! Again!

So here are two shots of my brief appearance onscreen. You really need the stills, otherwise you’d miss me!

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Sunday was the day for the monthly New Hampshire Media Makers meetup in Crackskulls Cafe and Bookstore in downtown Newmarket. Shrijnana had Maia at the inaugural young Sangha meeting at Aryaloka, so I took Malkias along with me. Considering it was a two hour meeting with lots of adult chatter, he did great. He even fell asleep for 40 minutes or so.

In the photo above, I’m sitting with the Nebula Award-winning author, James Patrick Kelly.

The guy above with the yellow t-shirt is a filmmaker, although I can’t remember his name. There are a lot of amazing people at NHMM.

Both photographs are stolen from John Herman‘s Flikr photostream.

Update: And here are three more pics from the mighty E. Christopher Clark (“Geek Force Five!“)…

I came across this ripe Fake Buddha Quote today:

The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground. ~Buddha

You’ll see this on Twitter, Facebook, and many web sites, as well as on incestuous and stunningly careless quotations sites like these:

Brainyquote.com
Quotesdaddy.com
Quotegarden.com

(I call quotes sites “incestuous” because they appear to copy one another’s quotes quite relentlessly).

Anyone half-way familiar with the Pali canon will know that the Buddha didn’t say things like that (or if he did, it’s not been recorded). The idiom is completely foreign.

So where’s it from?

A bit of searching revealed that it comes from Ernest Wood’s 1971 “Zen Dictionary” (page 91-92) where it’s part of the essay explaining the term “Naturalness.” The words are Mr. Wood’s, and not the Buddha’s.

Then the sloppy attributions start.

We have 1978′s “Vicious Circles and Infinity: An Anthology of Paradoxes,” by Patrick Hughes and George Brecht, which attributes the quote …

This, sadly, isn’t that different from some of the stuff you’ll find attributed to the Buddha on many quotations sites.

HT to @nivarasa for this.