Monthly Archives: June 2020
Quote for the Week
Most extremely healthy people frequently experience of intense affirmation and certainty; Maslow called these “peak experiences.” No one had made this discovery before because it had never struck anyone that a science calling itself “psychology” and professing to be a science of the human mind (not merely the sick mind), ought to form its estimate of human beings by taking into account healthy minds as well as sick ones. A sick man talks obsessively about his illness; a healthy man never talks about his health; for as Pirandello points out, we take happiness for granted, and only begin to question life when we are unhappy.
–Colin Wilson; courtesy of Wikiquote
Some Summery Music from Mozart
This is the first Friday of the summer, so enjoy some summery music from the great Wolfgang Amadeus!
Quote for the Week
Science seeks to explain everything—but maybe we don’t want everything explained. We don’t want all the magic to go out of life. We want to remain connected to the secret parts of our inner beings, to the ancient mysteries, and to the most distant outposts of the universe. We want to believe. And as long as we do, the fairies will remain.
–Skye Alexander, Fairies: The Myths, Legends & Lore (2014); courtesy of Wikiquote.
Quote for the Week (Slightly Belated)
That time either has no being at all, or is only scarcely and faintly, one might suspect from this: part of it has happened and is not, while the other part is going to be but is not yet, and it is out of these that the infinite, or any given, time is composed. But it would seem impossible for a thing composed of non-beings to have any share in being.
–Aristotle, Physics, as translated by Joe Sachs (Rutgers University Press: 2011), 217b30; courtesy of Wikiquote.
Pratītyasamutpāda
One of the most important concepts in all schools of Buddhism is pratītyasamutpāda (in Sanskrit–the Pali form is paṭiccasamuppāda). The word is a very long one in either of the classical languages of Buddhism, but it is not only a key philosophical notion in Buddhist thought, it has a much wider applicability, particularly in the modern, industrial, interconnected world in which we live. I have referenced it here and there in different places on this blog, and in various comments I’ve made on other blogs I frequent. Despite this, I’ve not spoken about the term in and of itself at any length. That’s an omission that needs to be rectified, since pratītyasamutpāda easily deserves a post of its own, particularly as a resource for future reference in discussion in which it turns up.
The first step in discussing pratītyasamutpāda is to translate it–what the heck does it mean? Edward Conze, one of the most important Western scholars of Buddhism in the mid-20th Century, delightfully translates the Sanskrit mouthful as an English mouthful: “conditioned co-production”. This is actually a petty good root-by-root rendering of the Sanskrit, but it is, as noted, quite a mouthful and perhaps not so delightful to the general reader. Other renderings include “conditioned arising” and “dependent arising”. The most common rendering I’ve seen is “dependent origination”, so this is what I’m going to use for now. So, we have a translation; but still, what does it mean?
Quote for the Week
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes that ‘if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression’, human rights should be protected by the rule of law. That just laws which uphold human rights are the necessary foundation of peace and security would be denied only by closed minds which interpret peace as the silence of all opposition and security as the assurance of their own power.
–Aung San Suu Kyi, “In Quest of Democracy” (1991); courtesy of Wikiquote
The Chequer-board of Nights and Days 