Mogami picture taken after Midway

John Everett Millais - The Blind Girl

 

Empire of the Sun (4th edition)

 

Wisdom of the Ages

 

Friedrich Schlegel

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schlegel/




Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) is of undisputed importance as a literary critic, but interest in his work among philosophers has until recently tended to be confined to a rather limited circle. However, as scholars have come to reassess in the last several years the philosophical importance of early German Romanticism—both as something of a counter-movement to German Idealism and as a contributing factor within idealism’s development—so interest in Schlegel’s distinctive philosophical contribution to his era has increased. The entry below will consider the philosophical aspects of Schlegel’s development and their relation to his contributions to literary theory and practice.

Standard Ebooks

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Rabana-Merquly: a fortress in the kingdom of Adiabene in the Zagros Mountains

Mycenae : a narrative of researches and discoveries at Mycenae and Tiryns by Schliemann, Heinrich, 1822-1890

Alec Soth (rhymes with both)

 https://alecsoth.com/photography/

The Discourses on Salt and Iron

Titanic

 

Westworld Score

 

Amitābha

Many people in the West interpret Buddhism as a path of meditation leading to enlightenment.

What many may not know is that this interpretation differs vastly from its practice in East Asia.

I have spent many years observing Buddhist temples in Taiwan and mainland China, and my research culminated in the book “Chinese Pure Land Buddhism.” This form of Buddhism teaches people to call upon a buddha named Amitābha in the expectation that when they die he will take them to his pure buddha-land, an ideal place to pursue the practices that will lead them to become buddhas, or fully enlightened and liberated beings.

This form of practice – central to Pure Land Buddhism – arose from Mahayana Buddhism, a branch of Buddhism that emerged in the first to sixth centuries A.D.

Buddhism in China

One of the innovative teachings of Mahayana Buddhism was that the cosmos is inhabited by millions of buddhas, not just the historical founder of the religion. Since all these buddhas had to reside somewhere, and their environments had to be as pure as they were, it followed that there are many buddha-lands.

Pure Land Buddhism taught that the pure land of Amitābha was accessible to regular people after they died. Prior to the development of Pure Land Buddhism, the only way to enlightenment lay through an arduous path of study and practice that was out of reach for most people.

In China, the Pure Land teaching made the prospect of liberation from suffering and the attainment of buddhahood feasible for ordinary people. While Pure Land Buddhism spread and became dominant in other East Asian countries, China is the land of its birth.
The theory of karma

Buddhists believe that all living beings are stuck in an endless loop of birth and rebirth and the good or bad fortune they experience results from karma. Karma is a moral force created by the deeds one does: Virtuous deeds give one better fortune, while evil or even just ignorant deeds bring misfortune.

Karma is said to determine the future life in terms of gender, intelligence and other personal attributes as well as one’s environment.

As a buddha is believed to have completely purified his karma, his body and mind are free of all defects and the land he inhabits is perfect. Several Buddhist scriptures describe “buddha-lands” as paradises with no moral evil and free of all taints.

Many Buddhists hope for birth in a buddha-land so they can complete their path under a buddha’s direct supervision.
The founding story

According to the Sutra, or scripture, on the Buddha of Infinite Life from no later than the third century, a monk named Dharmākara resolved to become a buddha. After much study and deliberation, he made 48 vows that detailed what kind of buddha he would be and what his buddha-land would look like.

Most of these vows laid out a scene familiar to believers: As a buddha, he would be powerful, wise and compassionate. His land would be magnificent, and the beings who shared it with him would be so accomplished that they would already have many of the powers and attributes of a buddha. These included perfect eloquence and the ability to see and hear from great distances.

But among the vows recorded in the Sūtra, it was the 18th that changed everything. This vow stipulated that anyone who merely brought him to mind before death would be reborn in his buddha-land:

“If, when I attain buddhahood, sentient beings in the lands of the ten directions who sincerely and joyfully entrust themselves to me, desire to be born in my land, and think of me even ten times,” Dharmākara is quoted as saying.

The fact that he realized his goal and became the buddha named Amitābha meant that the vow became reality. However, the term “ten times” referring to thoughts of Amitabha was vague. Another scripture, the Sutra on the Visualization of the Buddha of Infinite Life, clarified that one had only to say this buddha’s name ten times.

In addition, Dharmākara had also said that those who “commit the five grave offenses and abuse the Right Dharma” would be excluded. This Sutra eliminated such restrictions. The two scriptures allowed ordinary Buddhists to aspire to a rebirth in this Pure Land.

Pure Land in China

Buddhism entered China around 2,000 years ago and developed a following slowly as scriptures became available in translation and missionaries learned to communicate their message.

The story of Dharmākara’s vows proved especially popular. The Sūtra on the Buddha of Infinite Life was translated into Chinese several times, and scholar-monks lectured and commented on the Pure Land sūtras.
Chanting the name of Buddha Amitabha.

Monks and nuns chanted the Amitābha Sūtra during their daily devotions. This sūtra, along with the two already mentioned, became the “Three Pure Land Sūtras” that anchored the emerging tradition.

The earlier Chinese commentators on these sūtras held that one needed great stores of good karma from the past to even hear of these teachings. They also preached that if one’s mind was not purified through prior practice, then one could not see the Pure Land in all its splendor.

In the sixth and seventh centuries, three monks named Tanluan, Daochuo and especially Shandao provided new interpretations and practices that gave the ordinary believer complete access to the Pure Land without them needing to earn or deserve it.

First, they said that rebirth in the Pure Land is an “easy path” compared to the “difficult path” of traditional Buddhist practice.

Second, that the Buddha Amitābha helps the practitioner by adding his “other-power” to the believer’s “self-power.” In other words, the buddha’s power assisted the believer directly and brought him or her to the Pure Land. “Self-power,” or the believer’s own effort, might have beneficial effects but it was not enough for liberation. The addition of the buddha’s power guaranteed liberation at the end of this life.

Third, they defined the main practice as calling Amitābha’s name aloud. In the original texts it was not clear whether the practice consisted of difficult meditations or oral invocation, but they made it clear that just repeating “Hail to Amitaqbha Buddha” would cause the buddha to transport one to the Pure Land.

The Pure Land was not a final destination, like heaven in Christianity. The point of rebirth there was to be in the perfect environment for becoming a buddha. One would still need to strive toward buddhahood, but one’s own power with that of Amitābha would guarantee the final result.

Think about being on an escalator. If one cannot walk at all, it will carry one to the top, but if one can walk even a little, one’s speed will combine with the motion of the escalator to get one there more quickly.

Chanting Buddha’s name

Pure Land believers may recite “Hail to the Buddha Amitābha” silently or aloud while counting the repetitions on a rosary; they may participate in group practice at a local Buddhist temple; they may even take part in one-, three- or seven-day retreats that combine recitation with repentance rituals and meditation.

Rephrenology

Phrenology, as everyone knows, is a way of reading someone’s character, aptitude, and abilities by examining the bumps and hollows on their head. Therefore–according to the kind of logical thinking that characterises the Ankh-Morpork mind–it should be possible to mould someone’s character by giving them carefully graded bumps in all the right places. You can go into a shop and order an artistic temperament with a tendency to introspection and a side order of hysteria. What you actually get is hit on the head with a selection of different size mallets, but it creates employment and keeps the money in circulation, and that’s the main thing.

Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House

Danton

 

Theatre Europe

 

The Conditional

 

Webb’s First Deep Field

Webb’s First Deep Field (NIRCam Image) Extended Description This image shows many overlapping objects at various distances. They include foreground stars, galaxies in a galaxy cluster, and distorted background galaxies behind the galaxy cluster. The background of space is black. Thousands of small galaxies appear across the image. Their colors vary. Some are shades of orange, others are white. Most appear as fuzzy ovals, but a few have distinctive spiral arms. In front of the galaxies are several foreground stars. Most appear blue with diffraction spikes, forming eight-pointed star shapes. Some look as large as the galaxies that appear next to them. A very bright star is slightly off center. It has eight blue, long diffraction spikes. In the center of the image, between 4 o’clock and 6 o’clock in the bright star’s spikes, are several bright, white galaxies. These are members of the galaxy cluster. There are also many thin, long, orange arcs. They follow invisible concentric circles that curve around the center of the image. These are images of background galaxies that have been stretched and distorted by the foreground galaxy cluster. 

Alt-Text Thousands of small galaxies appear across this view. Their colors vary. Some are shades of orange, while others are white. Most appear as fuzzy ovals, but a few have distinct spiral arms. In front of the galaxies are several foreground stars. Most appear blue, and the bright stars have diffraction spikes, forming an eight-pointed star shape. There are also many thin, long, orange arcs that curve around the center of the image.

San You

 

16 Circles

 

All That Jazz

Old Virginia

 

Peter Grimes

 

Vattu

http://rice-boy.com/vattu/




Vattu is an award-winning anthropological fantasy epic; a story following a member of a nomadic culture caught in the midst of a clash of cultures. It was started in July 2010 and is updated three times a week. Follow along via Tumblr, Facebook, or RSS. Vattu is being serialized online as a Webtoon.

Lenin vs. Gorky in April 1908 in Capri

 

Bloodborne

 

the Dewa Sanzan– the Three Sacred Peaks of Dewa

THE RENAISSANCE STUDIES IN ART AND POETRY by Walter Pater

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2398/2398-h/2398-h.htm




Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find a universal formula for it. The value of these attempts has most often been in the suggestive and penetrating things said by the way. Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have. Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty, not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, to find, not a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.

"To see the object as in itself it really is," has been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever; and in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one's object as it really is, is to know one's own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly. The objects with which aesthetic criticism deals—music, poetry, artistic and accomplished forms of human life—are indeed receptacles of so many powers or forces: they possess, like the products of nature, so many virtues or qualities. What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to ME? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? and if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence? The answers to these questions are the original facts with which the aesthetic critic has to do; and, as in the study of light, of morals, of number, one must realise such primary data for oneself, or not at all. And he who experiences these impressions strongly, and drives directly at the discrimination and analysis of them, has no need to trouble himself with the abstract question what beauty is in itself, or what its exact relation to truth or experience—metaphysical questions, as unprofitable as metaphysical questions elsewhere. He may pass them all by as being, answerable or not, of no interest to him.

The aesthetic critic, then, regards all the objects with which he has to do, all works of art, and the fairer forms of nature and human life, as powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations, each of a more or less peculiar or unique kind. This influence he feels, and wishes to explain, analysing it and reducing it to its elements. To him, the picture, the landscape, the engaging personality in life or in a book, La Gioconda, the hills of Carrara, Pico of Mirandola, are valuable for their virtues, as we say, in speaking of a herb, a wine, a gem; for the property each has of affecting one with a special, a unique, impression of pleasure. Our education becomes complete in proportion as our susceptibility to these impressions increases in depth and variety. And the function of the aesthetic critic is to distinguish, analyse, and separate from its adjuncts, the virtue by which a picture, a landscape, a fair personality in life or in a book, produces this special impression of beauty or pleasure, to indicate what the source of that impression is, and under what conditions it is experienced. His end is reached when he has disengaged that virtue, and noted it, as a chemist notes some natural element, for himself and others; and the rule for those who would reach this end is stated with great exactness in the words of a recent critic of Sainte-Beuve:—De se borner a connaitre de pres les belles choses, et a s'en nourrir en exquis amateurs, en humanistes accomplis.

What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects. He will remember always that beauty exists in many forms. To him all periods, types, schools of taste, are in themselves equal. In all ages there have been some excellent workmen, and some excellent work done. The question he asks is always:—In whom did the stir, the genius, the sentiment of the period find itself? where was the receptacle of its refinement, its elevation, its taste? "The ages are all equal," says William Blake, "but genius is always above its age."

Often it will require great nicety to disengage this virtue from the commoner elements with which it may be found in combination. Few artists, not Goethe or Byron even, work quite cleanly, casting off all debris, and leaving us only what the heat of their imagination has wholly fused and transformed. Take, for instance, the writings of Wordsworth. The heat of his genius, entering into the substance of his work, has crystallised a part, but only a part, of it; and in that great mass of verse there is much which might well be forgotten. But scattered up and down it, sometimes fusing and transforming entire compositions, like the Stanzas on Resolution and Independence, and the Ode on the Recollections of Childhood, sometimes, as if at random, depositing a fine crystal here or there, in a matter it does not wholly search through and transform, we trace the action of his unique, incommunicable faculty, that strange, mystical sense of a life in natural things, and of man's life as a part of nature, drawing strength and colour and character from local influences, from the hills and streams, and from natural sights and sounds. Well! that is the virtue, the active principle in Wordsworth's poetry; and then the function of the critic of Wordsworth is to follow up that active principle, to disengage it, to mark the degree in which it penetrates his verse.

The subjects of the following studies are taken from the history of the Renaissance, and touch what I think are the chief points in that complex, many-sided movement. I have explained in the first of them what I understand by the word, giving it a much wider scope than was intended by those who originally used it to denote only that revival of classical antiquity in the fifteenth century which was but one of many results of a general excitement and enlightening of the human mind, of which the great aim and achievements of what, as Christian art, is often falsely opposed to the Renaissance, were another result. This outbreak of the human spirit may be traced far into the middle age itself, with its qualities already clearly pronounced, the care for physical beauty, the worship of the body, the breaking down of those limits which the religious system of the middle age imposed on the heart and the imagination. I have taken as an example of this movement, this earlier Renaissance within the middle age itself, and as an expression of its qualities, two little compositions in early French; not because they constitute the best possible expression of them, but because they help the unity of my series, inasmuch as the Renaissance ends also in France, in French poetry, in a phase of which the writings of Joachim du Bellay are in many ways the most perfect illustration; the Renaissance thus putting forth in France an aftermath, a wonderful later growth, the products of which have to the full that subtle and delicate sweetness which belongs to a refined and comely decadence; just as its earliest phases have the freshness which belongs to all periods of growth in art, the charm of ascesis, of the austere and serious girding of the loins in youth.

But it is in Italy, in the fifteenth century, that the interest of the Renaissance mainly lies,—in that solemn fifteenth century which can hardly be studied too much, not merely for its positive results in the things of the intellect and the imagination, its concrete works of art, its special and prominent personalities, with their profound aesthetic charm, but for its general spirit and character, for the ethical qualities of which it is a consummate type.

The various forms of intellectual activity which together make up the culture of an age, move for the most part from different starting-points, and by unconnected roads. As products of the same generation they partake indeed of a common character, and unconsciously illustrate each other; but of the producers themselves, each group is solitary, gaining what advantage or disadvantage there may be in intellectual isolation. Art and poetry, philosophy and the religious life, and that other life of refined pleasure and action in the open places of the world, are each of them confined to its own circle of ideas, and those who prosecute either of them are generally little curious of the thoughts of others. There come, however, from time to time, eras of more favourable conditions, in which the thoughts of men draw nearer together than is their wont, and the many interests of the intellectual world combine in one complete type of general culture. The fifteenth century in Italy is one of these happier eras; and what is sometimes said of the age of Pericles is true of that of Lorenzo:—it is an age productive in personalities, many-sided, centralised, complete. Here, artists and philosophers and those whom the action of the world has elevated and made keen, do not live in isolation, but breathe a common air, and catch light and heat from each other's thoughts. There is a spirit of general elevation and enlightenment in which all alike communicate. It is the unity of this spirit which gives unity to all the various products of the Renaissance; and it is to this intimate alliance with mind, this participation in the best thoughts which that age produced, that the art of Italy in the fifteenth century owes much of its grave dignity and influence.

I have added an essay on Winckelmann, as not incongruous with the studies which precede it, because Winckelmann, coming in the eighteenth century, really belongs in spirit to an earlier age. By his enthusiasm for the things of the intellect and the imagination for their own sake, by his Hellenism, his life-long struggle to attain to the Greek spirit, he is in sympathy with the humanists of an earlier century. He is the last fruit of the Renaissance, and explains in a striking way its motive and tendencies.

The "True Bruce Lee" - A Black Dial 1969/70 Seiko 6139-6010 Proof/Proof, Likely with Hong Kong Day Wheel

 https://www.dcvintagewatches.com/the-seiko-6139-true-bruce-lee

Remembering Summer in the depths of Winter