The world #
Here's a tanka for today by "Herbert, a retired chemist":
Consumed with anger,
The world is an ugly place.
Bathed in happiness,
The world is a wonderful place.
But, aha! the same world.
— Found on page 203 of Taitetsu Unno's Shin Buddhism : Bits of Rubble Turn to Gold. New York: Doubleday, 2002.
/misc | Jul 17, 2021
Mechanical meditation timers: gongs, cymbals, bells, and bowls #
Tibetan Phone Bell and Timer, $149.95
"The timer can be set from 1 to 99 minutes. The striking mechanism can be set on high or low... the timer counts backwards to zero and strikes the bowl-gong. Strikes gradually increase in frequency over a 10 minute period..."
PrannaTimer, from $175 with singing bowl
"Our timers are simple and elegant, use no batteries or electricity and are made of beautiful hardwoods. ... Pull back the free swinging hammer and attach it to an incense stick. When the incense burns away, the stick swings into a singing bowl, which rings to signal the end of the sit. ... The incense sent with the timer ... will burn for over an hour, but most meditators will break the incense to sit for shorter periods."
Dayasa, from €489 with singing bowl
"[A] hand-made singing bowl that is resting on a beautifully shaped wooden corpus. At the set time, a clapper strikes the bowl and creates a gentle gong sound..."
'Just About Now' by Maarten Baas with Laikingland, £3,600.
"[A] sand timer that indicates the passing of time with the sounding of a gong... more or less after the amount of time you indicated."
/misc | Jun 17, 2021
Who exactly are "they"? #
Alexandra David-Néel in The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects:
In reality, although the well-read among them deny it, some of those who call themselves Buddhists—Mahayanists of the Northern countries as well as Theravadins of the South—have practically remained attached to the belief in a jiva,4 that is to say in an ego, an entity which transmigrates from life to life, forsaking its material body at the moment of death "as one throws away wornout clothing to put on new clothes".5
4 The equivalent of that which Westerners call the soul. Jīvātman is the principle which gives life to the body, and that which, according to the Hindus, is reincarnated. The Jīvātman is, according to the Vedanta, the Paramātman in its individualised form.
5 Bhagavad Gîta II, 22.
This belief is, however, formally and continually denied by the Doctrine of the Buddha, of which Doctrine the negation of the ego is the fundamental article and marks it off from the orthodox Hindu doctrines.
The Buddhist creed, as a matter of fact, consists of two short, incisive statements:
"All aggregates are impermanent"
"All things are devoid of self (atman: "ego" or "soul")".
This means that if we discard the component elements which form that which we call a man, a horse, a tree, a mountain, a star, or no matter what, if we abstract the qualities which make them perceptible to us, we discover nothing which is distinct from these constituent elements, from these qualities, we do not, in any way, find the man, the horse, the mountain in itself. These names apply only to a collection of elements.
...
[I]f from a man you take away the physical form, sensation, perception, mental activity and consciousness, what remains? Where will you find the man existing in himself outside the corporality and mentality?
In the Secret Teachings great importance is attached to propounding this negation of the ego as a fundamental doctrine. Those who lag behind in the belief in an ego, it is said, do not understand the meaning of the Teaching, they are in no way Buddhists, they cannot attain to liberation, to salvation, for without understanding (of a transcendent insight) of this absence of any ego, they will not perceive the means by which to go beyond being and non-being. [emphasis added]
Since, according to the author, there is no in-dwelling self/atman/ego/soul, who exactly are "those who lag behind", who "cannot attain to liberation, to salvation", who "will not perceive the means by which to go beyond being and non-being"?* Why, according to her, there are no such beings!—simply impermanent, arbitrary aggregates.
Note too the confusion and conflation of "soul" and "ego" for "atman", which is more accurately described as:
Ātman, sometimes spelled without a diacritic as atman in scholarly literature, means "real self" of the individual, "innermost essence", and soul. Atman, in Hinduism, is considered as eternal, imperishable, beyond time, "not the same as body or mind or consciousness, but... something beyond which permeates all these". In Advaita vedanta, it is "pure, undifferentiated, self-shining consciousness," the witness-consciousness which observes all phenomena yet is not touched by it.
The foregoing conflict results in such mental gymnastics as:
The tulku, on the contrary, is the incarnation of a lasting energy directed by an individual with the object of continuing a given kind of activity after his death. The tulku does not coexist with his ancestor.
and casual attempts to dismiss reincarnation out of hand:
An amusing point to note on this subject is that the person "reincarnated" generally boasts of having been, in his preceding lives, an important personality, or even several such in succession. No one seems to remember having been an obscure cobbler or a humble farm labourer. At least one does not hear of such.
In fact, such ordinary existences are just about all one does hear of in the research:
* Cf. this dialogue on HN.
/misc | Jun 05, 2021
Two GIF processors added to graphics page #
🌱 Gifsicle 1.92 [173k] {S}+ Cross-platform, "command-line tool for creating, editing, and getting information about GIF images and animation". 📺
Microsoft Gif Animator 1.0 (101) [1082k] Create and edit GIF animations conforming to the GIF89a file format specification. (SHA1 hash of gifsetup.exe as retrieved from msdl.microsoft.com: f98a4e76545161b191d105dda07a81c961a11bd8.) 📺 💾
/windows | May 24, 2021
Remove loop from animated GIF #
with Gifsicle:
$ gifsicle in.gif --no-loopcount > out.gif
Available via Homebrew, but building from source is as easy as:
% curl -LO http://www.lcdf.org/gifsicle/gifsicle-1.92.tar.gz
% tar xvzf gifsicle-1.92.tar.gz
% cd gifsicle-1.92
% ./configure --disable-gifview --disable-gifdiff && make
Find the gifsicle binary in the src directory.
Quick Look loops even non-looping animated GIFs.
Additional keywords: prevent, stop, disable GIF looping
H/T: DWB & Studer
/mac | May 23, 2021
Emulating Windows XP x86 under M1 Mac via UTM & QEMU #
While VMWare does not plan to support x86 emulation on M1 Macs and Parallels support staff only offers misdirection when asked, thanks to UTM & QEMU you can emulate x86/x64 Windows versions like XP and 7 on Apple Silicon right now:
- Download UTM, the requisite template (Windows XP in this example), and SPICE Guest Tools and QEMU Drivers for Windows.
- Unzip windows-xp-x64-utm.zip and open Windows XP.utm in UTM.
- Click "CD/DVD" at the bottom of the window and select your Windows XP installer ISO.
- Start the VM and install Windows normally (if Windows hangs after installation with "Please wait", turn the VM off and on again).
- Replace the Windows XP installer ISO with the SPICE tools ISO (spice-guest-tools-0.164.iso) and run spice-guest-tools-0.164.exe.
The result is surprisingly performant: MP4 | GIF
Notes
- jdb8167 found a few tweaks markedly improved emulation: right click VM in UTM's main window → Edit → System → Show Advanced Settings:
- CPU: Enables all features supported by the accelerator in the current host (max)
- CPU Cores: 4
- check "Force Multicore"
Multicore Processor Licensing
Windows XP Professional can support up to two processors regardless of the number of cores on the processor. Windows XP Home supports one processor.
Verify number of processors and cores:
C:\>wmic computersystem get numberofprocessors & wmic cpu get numberofcores
NumberOfProcessors
1
NumberOfCores
4
Related
/mac | May 22, 2021
Added to system page: New Linux-on-a-floppy distro #
🌱 Floppinux 0.1.0 [1440k] {S}+ "An embedded Linux on a single floppy". Released May 2021. Includes build instructions. 📺 | HN discussion
/nix | May 22, 2021
Rare addition to the graphics page #
μGiffer 0.9.12 [108k] + Simple screen-to-GIF recorder by the author of Bvckup 2 and Hamachi. 📺
/windows | May 08, 2021
Bluetooth promixity lock for macOS #
Takeshi Sone has generously crafted and shared (under an MIT license) BLEUnlock, "a small menu bar utility that locks and unlocks your Mac by proximity of your iPhone, Apple Watch, or any other Bluetooth Low Energy device." Unlike Unlox (formerly MacID), no iOS app is required and scripting is supported. Vital for protecting data from laptop snatchers. For a wired solution, see Introducing BusKill: A Kill Cord for your Laptop.
/mac | May 06, 2021
How do you measure, ♫ measure a kalpa? #
"If you take a mountain six miles long and six miles wide and six miles high, that’s the distance a bullock walks in a day. And a bird flies over the mountain once every hundred years with a silk scarf in its beak and brushes the tip of the mountain. In the length of time it takes the scarf to wear away the mountain, that’s how long you have been doing this."
—Ram Dass, The Idea of a Soul Mate (2010)
"Beyond human perception, in the life cycles of universes, time is measured in a unit known as a kalpa. How long does a kalpa last? Imagine a block of stone, one cubic mile in size. Now imagine a man approaching this enormous stone and rubbing it, once, with a silk cloth. Every 100 years, the man returns and rubs the stone once again. At this rate, the stone will be polished down to a tiny, smooth pebble long before a kalpa has elapsed."
—Patrick Farley, The Jain's Death (1999)
"[I]f there were a range of mountains a league in length, a league in breadth, a league in height, made of adamant, without a cleft or a crack, and once every hundred years an eagle were to fly across it with a silken streamer in its beak and were to swish the mountain just once with the streamer, the length of time that would be required for the mountain to waste away would be less than an aeon."
—W. Norman Brown, Man in the Universe: Some Continuities in Indian Thought (1966)
"Suppose, brother, there were a great crag, a hill one yojana wide, one yojana across, one yojana high without chasms or clefts, a solid mass. And a man at the end of every hundred years were to stroke it once each time with a Kāsi cloth. Well, that mountain in
this way would be sooner done away with and ended than would an æon."
—The Book Of The Kindred Sayings (Sanyutta-nikāya), Part II, Nidāna-vagga, ch. XV, Kindred Sayings on the Incalcuable Beginning, pgs. 121-122, translated by Mrs. Rhys Davids & assisted by F.L. Woodward (1922)
"Let it be supposed, say Buddhist writers, that a solid rock forming a vast cube sixteen miles high, and the same in length and breadth, were lightly rubbed once in a hundred years with a piece of the finest cloth, and by this slight friction reduced in countless ages to the size of a mango-seed; that would still give you no idea of the immense duration of a Buddhist Kalpa."
—Monier Monier-Williams, Buddhism in its connexion with Brahmanism and Hinduism and in its contrast with Christianity (1889)
"In Lower Pomerania is the Diamond Mountain, which is two miles and a half high, two miles and a half wide, and two miles and a half in depth; every hundred years a little bird comes and sharpens its beak on it, and when the whole mountain is worn away by this, then the first second of eternity will be over."
—The Shepherd Boy, from Grimm’s Household Tales, Vol. II, translated by Margaret Hunt (1884)
"A description of the duration of a kalpa can only be given in the language of Buddhism. Take a rock forming a cube of about fourteen miles, touch it once in a hundred years with a piece of fine cloth, and the rock will sooner be reduced to dust than a kalpa will have attained its end."
—Friedrich Max Müller, Lectures on the science of religion; with a paper on Buddhist nihilism, and a translation of the Dhammapada or "Path of virtue" (1872)
"[T]here is a stone four cubits square: a god dressed in white muslin passes this stone once in a hundred years; the muslin robe waved by the wind touches this stone as it passes; when, by the attrition this occasions, the stone shall have been reduced to the size of a grain of mustard, one antagh kalpé will have elapsed."
—George Annesley Earl of Mountnorris, Voyages and Travels to India, Ceylon, the Red Sea, Abyssinia, and Egypt, in the Years 1802, 1803, 1804, 1805, and 1806, Volume 1, pg. 433 (1811)
/misc | May 04, 2021
Subscribe or visit the archives.
