Of solitude is this glory

I love – when winter comes, the sky is engraved with bare twigs, like notes that have long been waiting for a fair spare stave to jump in. And that smoke permeating the night sings a song exactly the same, which recalls the wanderer wrapped in a sheer sheet of light for me. Of solitude is this glory.

via Photo Challenge: Solitude

p.s. and I like Gjertsen’s entry

 

memory and self?

If the faculty of memory is enough to prove a continuous sentient entity, which we’d call the “self”, then why do we forget?

6 Jan, Embrace of the Rain

 

gamaka

gamaka “capable of expressing (the meaning intended by the speaker)”. See SA, Introduction, p. vii.

JAF. Roodbergen, Dictionary of Pāṇinian Grammatical Terminology, BORI, 2008.

How about the gamakam in Carnatic music? Sounds inspiring!

ratnapadmavikramī bodhisattvaḥ

Just for fun — I would like to share with you some pictures which may have witnessed the imagery we encountered this morning in class: 寶華承足 “having lotus supporting one’s feet” or “steping/moving on lotus”. 

Sitting or standing with both feet on a single lotus is seen regularly from the earliest stage of Buddhist art, but this particular design with two feet respectively on two lotuses (or only one feet in a single lotus) may have been inspired by texts as we read today, I speculate…

A considerable number of such images can be found in early Dunhuang paintings, and later in Swat and Tibetan art. They seem to be pretty much bound with certain Bodhisattva figures: Avalokiteshvara is one of them, but Buddha also shared the feature. 

Yet, considering the late dating (mostly half century later than Saddharmapundarika as far as I searched), this form simply can be a late visual rendering (maybe an innovation on the silk-road?). But anyway this is a nice one, in my view, as it captures skillfully the movement mentioned in the text.

(One of other occurences in the Chinese canon –《佛說羅摩伽經》T294/860c28: 寶花承足，步虛而來 — seems to spell out that these ratnapadmavikramin bodhisattvas are walking in a miraculous way. And Sanskrit evidence shows the crystalization of this figure into one bodhisattva entitled with this very name.)

I have been wondering if these feet-lotus imageries as a whole were created to be a visual counterpart of padakamala in the first place, and later artists reinvented such a karmadharaya analogy into something else, some other “compound”. There must be some research on the topic. If any of you happen to know any, I would be very happy to know. 

A bad photo

The lens failed to focus, in resonance to the woman’s eyes,
To my constantly wondering mind,
To the universe that awaits no answer.

Ajanta, Feb 2015

Alice

In the end of each alley, there’s a paradox,
Into which if one falls, it’s a garden.

note: Madhyamaka philosophy, Alice in Wonderland. I might be totally wrong, but these two worlds of ideas resonate with each other in such a beautiful way! Despite of the seemingly logical approach of Nāgārjuna, his appeal for the absurdity of ontological language eschew the possibility to reach the insight with reasoning. Alice, meanwhile, found a smile without face 🙂

Dream (1)

It is part of me, who dreamt a thousand times of being lost on her way home.
It is the home of my childhood, in a messy shell of illegal houses.
The lichen on the tarnished walls, the smell of mildew, the dim dull darkness fed me with songs of raindrops –
I want to keep quiet now to let you hear it.