Buddhist Hopscotch

According to the Brahmajala Sutta, a part of the Buddhist canonical writings that may go back as far as 500 BCE, the monasteries had some problems with the behavior of their monks.  Amidst the usual sort of prescriptions about proper monkish behavior is a list¹ of games that should not be played, including but not limited to chess (or the local equivalent), mental chess, dice, twenty questions, Pictionary (or the local equivalent), and hopscotch.  It's a very precise list¹, which rather makes you wonder what was going on that such a proscription was deemed necessary.  I'm including links to a fairly typical loose translation² (I've seen more or less the same text in a couple of places), as well as a more literal translation³ with minor exegesis that explains that "hopscotch" is actually "parihārapatha," wherein a diagram is drawn on the ground and one has to jump in the allowable spaces avoiding the lines.  Not that different, is it?

¹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddha_games_list

²http://tipitaka.wikia.com/wiki/Brahmajala_Sutta

³http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/dn/dn.01.0.bodh.html

Word for the Day-- God's Penny

According to the Big Book, God's Penny is ": a penny or small sum paid as earnest money esp. on concluding a purchase or hiring a servant."  It's like saying, "I promise I'll pay you, but in the meantime here's a little something from God to tide you over."

On the one hand, it's kind of nice, since you're getting a little extra.  On the other, the more I think about it the odder it gets.  "Hey, God, what, you can't spare more than a penny?"  Or alternatively, "Um, why does God need a starship servant?"  Also, "You're paying on behalf of God?  Shouldn't that be the Pope's job or something?"  Seriously, the more I think about it the stranger it seems.

Hmm.  A little more research shows that it's not actually supposed to be money from God, but rather money given in the sight of God-- sort of equivalent to "As God is my witness, I will pay you the agreed upon money."  Which is still odd, but I guess not quite as odd.  Because you're still suggesting that the money has some sort of significance to God, which, what?  I mean, that works if you still worship Mammon or something, but the Judeo-Christian God is sort of supposed to be beyond all that.

Mm.  Black's Law Dictionary (or at least what appears to be a poorly edited OCR scan of it) suggests that the small sum was customarily then given to charity or as alms.  Which does more or less finally make sense of the name, actually.  I'm actually sort of disappointed.  This was much more fun when it didn't make any sense at all.  Alas.

Papal update

Yesterday, whilst discussing the length of the papal reigns, it occurred to me to wonder if Benedict XVI would keep the name after he retired or not.

It turns out that there may actually be some official uncertainty about that very subject.  According to the Daily Mail (not always the most reliable source, but there you go):

"The Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales said firmly on Monday that the Papal name of Benedict will be dropped and the Pope will resume his old name of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.  However, yesterday a Vatican spokesman said that he would actually keep the name Benedict and added that his title might be ‘Emeritus Bishop of Rome’ – in other words, a second Pope.  Padre Federico Lombardi [Vatican spokesman] said of Benedict’s new title: ‘His name will remain Benedict XVI. This remains for life, until he dies. It will be interesting to see how we address him, how he will be called.’"

There is precedent-- the last Pope to resign was Gregory XII, and he apparently kept the name Gregory until his death.  So if Ratzinger decides to stay Benedict, there will be some justification.

Meanwhile, he'll be living in an apartment block/monastery inside the Vatican grounds (as soon as it's finished being renovated).  Hopefully, he'll keep the partying to a minimum.

And that is a pope fact

It's been a week now, so I assume that everyone knows that the Pope is stepping down.  He is, in the words of the wise old Facebook icon, an ex-Benedict.  Actually, that's an interesting question-- will he keep the Pope name or does he have to go back to being Ol' Joey Ratzinger?  I don't know the answer to that one-- yet.

Anyway, all issues of religion and etc aside, my first reaction (and presumably a lot of other people's as well) was, "So soon?  He's only been in office, what?  A few years?"  And then I looked it up and found out that it was/will be a bit shy of eight.  But that still doesn't seem like very long.

So-- to the researchmobile!  Atomic Googles to power... Factoids to speed!

As it happens, our perceptions of the length of papal occupancy have been somewhat colored by Benny's predecessor, Pope John Paul George Ringo, who was in office for about 27 years; the second longest reign in recorded history (which doesn't count Peter, the First Pope).  According to a lovely pair of charts at the Popes and Papacy blog, we can see that the average (mean) length of a papal reign is just over 7 years, making Benedict's reign actually slightly longer than average.  However, this is an excellent case study in why averages can be tricky-- after all, there were nine Popes who lasted less than a month!  This can skew results.  So let's forgo the mean and look instead at the mode, more or less.  This technically would be the length of office that corresponds to the most Popes.  However, since very few popes had exactly the same terms, the "true" mode would be something like 33 days (Popes Benedict V and John Paul I).  So we'll break up the range into sections, which can be misleading depending on how the groups are created, but can still be interesting.  According to the Popes and Papacy blog referenced above, we can see that out of the 260ish Popes (depending on how you count), the largest grouping held office for between 1 and 5 years--again letting Pope Benedict XVI beat the average.  So this idea that he wasn't Pope for very long is actually almost entirely a misperception.

[Edited because I screwed up the terminology-- see the comments]

St. Kazimiers

There's a... well, a building, next town over from our place, of superficially indeterminate function, with a sign hanging outside calling it "St. Kazimiers."  This is not a saint of which I am familiar (to be frank, there are a great many saints of which I am not familiar, so this is no great surprise), but eventually I became curious enough to do a little research.

Kazimier is the Polish spelling of Saint Casimir, originally Casimir Jagiellon, prince of the Kingdom of Poland in the late 15th century.  He died a few years before Columbus sailed, if that gives you a better reference point.  I know it does for me-- I always have trouble keeping historical dates distinct unless I can cross-link them to something else I'm vaguely familiar with ("ok, when popcorn was introduced to the American settlers, it was before J. S. Bach, but after Shakespeare...).  Anyway.

Caz (may I call you Caz?  Thank you.) was an ardent Catholic, supporting Christian Poland against the Turkish encroachment.  He was offered the Hungarian crown as well as the Polish one, but was rebuffed in his attempts to travel to Hungary to accept, and had to retreat a fugitive.  He was extremely devout, a fact that unfortunately led more or less directly to his death-- his excessive devotions (fasting, mortification) left him weak, and he apparently contracted lung disease, maybe TB, and expired.

Several online articles about him mention "various miracles" but do not specify, so I have no idea what he is supposed to have done to qualify him for canonization, except possibly to be both royal and devout, which may have been enough if you're cynical like me.  He is now considered to be a patron saint of Poland, Lithuania, and the young.

Oh, and so the building is the St. Kazimierz Society, I guess somewhere between a church and a fraternal lodge.

The Kosher pig?

According to traditional Jewish law, the pig is unclean basically because it has cloven hooves, like a cow, but does not chew its cud; the specifically allowed animals are all cloven hooved ruminants.

Well, a couple of years ago, they discovered a new form of pig that departs from the normal pig-type-- to wit, it has a single, non-cloven hoof.  Unfortunately, this is the wrong element of the rule to switch on.  Having a solid hoof and not chewing its cud just makes it even more unclean.  However, I see this as a sign of hope-- clearly, the forces of God or evolution or man (it's unclear whether the mulefoot pig was deliberately bred or not) are trying to bring the gift of bacon to all mankind.  A noble goal, to be sure.

Coptic pope

When the Coptic Pope (technically, the "Pope of Alexandria and Patriarch of all Africa on the Holy See of St. Mark the Apostle", or in full at least according to Wikipedia the "Pope and Lord Archbishop of the Great City of Alexandria and Patriarch of All Africa on the Holy Orthodox and Apostolic Throne of Saint Mark the Evangelist and Holy Apostle that is, in Egypt, Pentapolis, Libya, Nubia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea and all Africa") dies, a new pope is chosen by having a bunch of names of nominees put into a hat (not literally a hat, apparently, but at least a box) and having a child from the congregation pick a name out.  When this happened in 1971, the child was even blindfolded, to make sure the choice was "in god's hands."

Full details of the various election processes (including the current one as revised in 1957) can be found in a PDF here.

A bible for the 21st Century

The 21st Century King James Version of the Holy Bible (copyright 1994) is not a "new translation," but rather a careful updating; specifically, in their own words, "words which are either obsolete or archaic, and are no longer understood by literate Bible readers, have been replaced by carefully selected current equivalents... The updaters have used as their principal authority in matters of English usage the greatest and most complete of all American dictionaries, namely, Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition, Unabridged, published by the G&C Merriam Co.*, and in print from 1933 to 1967."
That's the SECOND edition, folks.  The one written in 1934, and significantly superseded by the infamous Third Edition, written in 1961.  So to make a 21st century bible at the end of the 20th Century, they picked as their most appropriate dictionary one that had become obsolete thirty years earlier, having being written 30 years before that.

Now, to be fair, they do have a rationale-- for example, they were extremely impressed by the Second's overblown and unwieldy size and heavy use of the original King James Bible as source for illustrative quotes. Still, if your stated purpose is to make your version accessible and understandable by modern audiences, maybe you should use, I dunno, a current dictionary?  Just a thought.

*Now known as Merriam-Webster, Inc, aka the people who pay my tasty, tasty salaries, for those not keeping track at home.

Bifur, Bombur, and Herschel

Following on the heels of yesterday's post, it seems that J.R.R. Tolkien drew some of his inspiration for the Dwarves of Middle Earth from a rather unlikely place-- the Jews.

The Dwarves, especially in The Hobbit, are depicted as having been scattered from their homeland, much as the Jews were.  The more martial aspects of their culture stem from Old Testament depictions of the fighting Israelites, and their skill with metallurgy comes both from the traditional Norse image of a dwarf and from a Medieval stereotype of Jews as "makers of beautiful and well-crafted things."  There are even supposedly parallels between Tolkien's descriptions of Dwarf music and that of medieval Jewry.

I'm honestly not quite sure what to make of this.

The source of this information, according to Wikipedia, is The History of the Hobbit, John Rateliff, Harper Collins, 2011; a combination of Tolkein's notes and drafts and Rateliff's commentary.  Google Books doesn't have the complete text, so I can't verify it, although everyone participating on the Wikipedia discussion page seems to accept it as truth.

How today helped me understand religion

[Warning-- after reading through this, I felt the tone came out a little weird.  Just to be clear, this was not meant to be entirely serious.  Take with salt.]

As a science-y person, I look at my watch, and I see that it is mid-afternoon.  By the strict rules of logic, I can infer that time has passed since I arrived at work this morning.  This is evidence.  This is data.  I have to give it credence.  And yet, if I consult my own anecdotal memories and experiences of the day, I am at a loss.  I mean, I remember eating lunch.  And I think I answered some e-mails.  And I finished up that one batch I was working on most of yesterday.  But that couldn't have taken that long, surely?  Not 5 or 6 hours?

This discrepancy between what the evidence tells me and what my conscious awareness tells me to be true can be awfully disturbing, and it's tempting to chuck the data and go with my gut.  I've been trained to understand that human awareness is flaky and imprecise, where logic is not, and so I can make the deliberate effort to ignore what I deep down know is true (that nothing's happened since I got to work and therefore it must somehow still be 10 AM) in favor of what must be true in light of the evidence (Hey, look at the clock.  Almost the weekend already.).

But on the other hand, I can absolutely understand the natural tendency to place the evidence of your personal experience first.  The clocks must be wrong.  Or I fell asleep over my morning cocoa and I'm dreaming.  Maybe I'm still in bed and I haven't even gotten to work yet!  But according to the inexorable ticking of science, I've done just about as much work as I'm going to do this week, and soon it will be time to rest.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying it can be all too easy sometimes to go with what feels right instead of what can be proven. 

I am a proud card-carrying member of an evidence-based reality. But today, I gained a little insight into why some people belong to religions.  Some things science tells us are difficult to accept, because they don't seem to make sense.  But some of the things that are easy to accept don't always fare so well under scrutiny.