The patch in winter I’d quite bare but it is still amazing that this much grows this time of the year.
(First shots from iPhone and trying direct upload.)
Author: Warren Tang
I write about linguistics and philosophy. I also write poetry and take photographs.
New Year’s resolution for SD
btw HNY.
This year’s NY resolutions are
- meditate more
- help the world more
- blog more
Hope together we can do more for ourselves spiritually as well as for the world.
A place where Buddhism and alcohol mix?
Having started out Buddhism from Zen Buddhism (and now with a bit of Theravada) I cannot fathom what drives some monks to think they can run a bar and still think they can still call themselves Buddhist monks. It wasn’t mentioned which sect these monks belong to but my guess is that they are from the Jodo Shin sect.
I am not against Jodo Shin sect at all but rather misinterpretations by people of what its original founders had intended. Like all societies and their religions there will be radical offshoots. Is it okay to start a prostitution house just because you have a sympathetic ear?
A line has to be drawn somewhere and it has to be drawn with common sense even though common sense can be problematic at times.
Art and the environment – Emma Lindsay
Artist, Emma Lindsay, is driven to speak up for the environment and our highlight our impact upon it. Watch this space for updates on this very talented artist … who happens to be a good friend.
The world economy only works if there are IMFs
Hasn’t anyone figured out that the world’s economies only ever seem to work with bailouts. Something is very wrong here.
The link between the environment and war
Did you know that 40% of world’s civil or internal wars in the last half century have been fought over for natural resources?
Today is International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment in War and Armed Conflict. We should remember the (illogical) reasons why we are fighting in the first place. Then, may be, we will put down our weapons and make peace instead.
Just how many nuclear tests have we done?
Here is a art video representation of nuclear tests 1945-1998 by Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto created in 2003.
And to get up to date a graph from wikipedia showing the frequency of nuclear tests.
6,999,999,998 … 6,999,999,999 … 7 billion people … 7,000,000,001 …
Apparently we are counting down (up?) to person-number-seven-billion expected to be born on 31 October.
Our population has increased at a phenomenal rate. We reached:
3 billion in 1960,
4 billion in 1974,
5 billion in 1987, and
6 billion in 1999.
And now – 2011 – we shall reach 7 billion.
Just how many people can this little planet of ours support? As John Feeney succinctly put it growth is madness. Why we should countdown as if it is a celebration is beyond me. And if the above pattern is anything to go by we should reach 8 billion by 2022.
Will we be counting down then again? Will we be thinking this is a momentous occasion?
If the world were a food village of 100 people
This is an English translation I made of an essay called If the world were a village of 100 people: food edition by Ikeda Kayoko (ISBN 9784838770045). As far as I know it is only available in the original Japanese. There are many interesting and important facts in it, so I felt it important to get an English translation out there. This translation is under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 unported licence.
Grilled salty pike and simmered taro, with rice, miso (bean paste) soup and pickled vegetables … that was the hearty meal one have in Japan forty, fifty years ago.
Everyone had 112kg[1](*see notes at the end) of rice to eat for one year – twice as much as we have today.
Do you still think this is a poor person’s meal? Back then, Japan produced close to 80 percent of all its food needs.
And now in the twenty-first century … the world has 6.7 billion people.
If the world were a village of 100 people and we look how we live with food what do you think this would look like?
Continue reading “If the world were a food village of 100 people”
Mornings are the best time to meditate
I used to meditate at night because it was the only time I could do it … or at least that was the excuse I gave myself. Actually while I was at Bukkokuji Temple in Obama, Fukui the routine was to meditate once in the morning (twice during winter) and three times at night. So my belief for a long time was that night meditation is the best.
But this is simply not true.
For lay people a morning session is usually the best because it is the time when we have least to do, less rushed by life. It is also quiet as everyone is still asleep and therefore one can concentrate better. One is also fresh from rest.
At the Temple as monks one can concentrate because that is the life monks have chosen, to devote their lives to save all others. Lay people do not have this “luxury”.
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