When Asia Was the World: Xuanzang

It's a cool summer night in Houston. I rode my bike through a quiet Montrose neighborhood, temptingly close to half a dozen quiet cool spots--coffee bars, cheap dives, galleries, ethnic fusions restaurants, and jazz venues--that I'd like to live my life in Houston being a regular at. This is old Montrose, north of West Gray, east of Montrose Boulevard, where the yuppie build ups haven't crowded their 90 degree angle duplexes within inches of the curb and wrapped their trendy paranoia in black faux iron grates.

These are wooden homes with frames and porches, ringed by broad lighted windows and shallow grass ditches where dinner guests struggle to park their cars. The driveways are crumbled concrete when the loamy clay beneath has shifted, risen, and sunk with the seasons to remind us all humans shouldn't live here and we'll all eventually die and leave this damp prairie behind. Fingers of weeds and orgies of ants shuffle out between the cracks, oozing nature at clothed and naked enemy.

Of course humans always live in places they're not supposed to. We're built for sweeping river valleys and thicketed pine green forests. But we build our empires in mountains and over deserts. We crowd thundering bands of grazing hooved beasts out of their savannas and domesticate their children into steady sources of beef. We drain out swamps and marshes and level hills to accommodate grids of asphalt. Then, to consecrate the victory over nature, we subdivide God into theologies and chain him down with doctrines and hammer out truth into geometric patterns and shrines of false remorse. Arrogant chimps, we invent humility and charity to clothe our angry, tumescent root of conquest. Sated, men lie on earth's belly, point an accusing cock skyward toward God's firmament, drape the shaft in prayer cloths, and call the resulting tent a cathedral.

I say this to preface my summer reading project. As many books as I can shove into my days, recorded a chapter at a sitting, and hopefully helping me organize the clutter of human behaviors into teachable units that my students will quickly forget. It's okay, I don't write for them. I write for me, because I remember what I write. But I also invite you look over my shoulder here and see if you won't enjoy it too.

This first book is When Asia Was the World by Stewart Gordon, a collection of overviews of the great travelers of Asia in the nine centuries between the end of the classical world and the beginning of the European age of exploration. Gordon gives us the tales of eight men who left behind records of their crossing between the civilizations ringing from the Eastern Med to the Sea of Japan--the lands of the Silk Road and the great empires that rose and crumbled north of the Indian Ocean.

The first chapter follows the Buddhist monk Xuanzang in early 7th century CE northern China. Though his travels covered most of the known world, his tale remained entirely encompassed within the geographical reach of the Buddhist faith. Before Christianity and Islam conquered the globe, Buddhism was the faith uniting diverse civilization. He was born in the end days of the Sui Dynasty and traveled in the first years of the Tang, his path following a long chain of Buddhist monasteries that stretched from China to Afghanistan to the Deccan plain, to the lowlands of Bangladesh.

Xuanzang was a scholar who enjoyed the great debates about the meaning of suffering and discovering the Middle Way as demanded by his faith. But as the teachings of his fellow monks either conflicted with each other or conflicted with the translations of the ancient Sanskrit texts written by Siddhartha Gautama, Xuanzang determined to travel to India, study the texts for himself, and bring back the true wisdom of the Buddha that his fellow holy men spent their lives pursuing.

The Silk Road beyond the reach of China was a dangerous place in the first few years of the Tang Dynasty. The desert was treacherous and bandits plagued any travelers who appeared weak. The Tang emperor made it illegal for people to travel beyond the Middle Kingdom's border to spare his subjects from harm. By undertaking this pilgrimage, Xuanzang became an outlaw. As he traveled into the arid west, he was deserted first by his fellow monks, then by his guide. Soldiers passed out arrest notices to the Tang outposts that stretched into the desert, but Xuanzang eluded his pursuers until he passed beyond the reach of the emperor's troops. His guide warned him:

The Western roads are difficult and bad; sand streams stretch far and wide; evil spirits and hot wind, when they come, cannot be avoided; numbers of men traveling together, although so many, are misled and lost...

Reaching Danhuang, he was celebrated, then detained by the local king, Xu-wentai. Xu wanted the celebrated teacher to remain and build up the frontier kingdom's prestige as a place of learning. Xuanzang only got away by launching a hunger strike and humbling the king into honoring his journey. Xu relented at last and restored his own good name by provisioning Xuanzang for the rest of his journey with novice-companions, guards, servants, silk robes to use as currency, and a caravan of beasts for trade and food. Xuanzang's party entered the wide desert for the harshest leg of the journey, losing many men and cattle to freezing and starvation.

Xuanzang traveled through the lush valley of Issy Kul, where the nomadic "tent kingdom" rounded up wild horses to trade with Tang China for the silk and grains they couldn't acquire in their own lands, and around the Himalayas' highest points, reaching Afghanistan and then circling south toward the lands where the Buddha lived.

In this age, Buddhism dominated the lands of the Turks and Pashtuns and competed with Zoroastrianism for dominance in Persia. Buddhism, like Christianity in the Greco-Roman world, thrived because its theology contained elements that particularly suited it to being a state religion. It's emphasis on humanistic ethics and spiritual moderation (the "middle way") made it a strong unifying force in the Asian empires comprising so many different tongues, cultures, races, and economies. Stressing righteous living over reverence for any particular god encouraged good obedient citizenship and social harmony. The chain of monasteries along the silk trade routes stabilized commerce and communities. The kings of Asia could build up their own prestige by supporting monasteries, pilgrimage sites, and centers of learning.



Ironically, while Buddhism was thriving in China, Indochina, Persia, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Java, Korea and Japan, the religion was on the wane in its cradle, the Ganges Valley, as monarchs turned more to Hindu folk religions to mollify their subjects. In the Ganges Valley, traveling to the great shrines and temples of the Buddha's homeland. He found the faith torn by rivalries between the Great Vehicle and Small Vehicle sects, with both factions also feuding with the rising Brahministic polytheistic faiths. Still, Xuanzang spent the next 11 years traveling up and down the Ganges, from Bengal to the Deccan Plateau studying at holy sites--both the thriving and the nearly abandoned.

When he finally set out for his return, Xuanzang brought back 657 translated Sanskrit books and a wealth of relics and statues that would revivify the faith in China and protect its legacy from the collapse in its own cultural hearth. After 17 years abroad, Xuanzang approached the Tang's borders and wrote an apologetic explanation to his emperor.

I have accomplished a journey of more than 50,000 li... and now offer my homage with a body unimpaired and a mind satisfied with the accomplishment of my vows. I have beheld the Ghrirakuta Mountain, worshiped at the Bodhi Tree; I have seen traces not seen before; heard sacred words not heard before; witnessed spiritual prodigies, exceeding all the wonders of Nature...

The emperor pardoned him and Xuanzang returned home, becoming a celebrated teacher for a purified faith a living well into his silver years. Xuanzang's travels inaugurated a period of many more missions between China and India over the next four centuries, increased trade, and cemented a sense of world community between the far flung medieval civilizations of the East. Across numerous dynasties, Confucianist China and Hindu India found a mutual interest in militarily containing the aspirations of a growing Tibetan Empire, where Buddhism was just then flourishing, and politically dominating the Indochinese kingdoms of the south. The era that the scholar Xuanzang initiated altered the destiny of civilizations and ultimately weakened Buddhism's domination of Asia in the centuries before the wave of Islam pushed east.

Lightning bugs are beetles

I actually found this out last weekend while moseying about the Houston Museum of Natural Science, but I've been far too busy the last week at work to sit and write down all the shit I've been learning. Yeah, yeah, I know; that sorta defeats the whole purpose of this journal, but that's not what's important right now. What's important right now is that I found out that fireflies aren't flies.

Actually, I kinda knew they weren't flies. I actually considered 'em something like mosquitos (the bugs, not the Central American Indians). But in fact they're beetles. Just like those twisty antlered hardshell battle bugs that roll up piles of poopoo and give sacred shape-shifting, man-killing power to reanimated Egyptian priests from the XXIXth Dynasty whenever English archeologists whose girlfriends look just like an ancient Egyptian princess they used to boff open up their tombs. I woulda never guessed.

Apparently they got the idea to light up their gizzards as an alternative way of pissing out pheromones when it's time for them to make firefly whoopie. Perhaps at one point in geological history, the earth got to be so stinky a place that igniting their cabooses became a more distinctive (and therefor more advantageous) way of signaling potential mates that it's time to mate. So they went visual instead of olfactorial as a means of getting the attention of their paramours. Oddly enough, humans did the same thing--given how we smell less and look more for getting laid, compared to other animals.

Ah, but now humans have gotten so good at mating up batches of replacements that we've overrun the planet with lights--a side effect of human success-pollution. And all this light pollution makes it tough for fireflies to find them some nookie in the areas where humans dwell. Perhaps, if humans stay around long enough to "permanently" adapt the environments of the 2200 species of known lightning bugs, our little hardbody friends will quit lighting up and go back to farting pheromones as the preferred method for meeting available singles.

But for now, candles seem still to trump aromatherapy.

Tetris cures war

I thought it was only good for killing time. But no, Tetris is precisely the opposite of the trauma that combat inflicts on the human psyche. If you or your loved one is suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, it may well be that it's because there isn't a Tetris game in your home.

I'm not kidding about this. As reported in Ars Technica, researchers at Oxford have found that a heady Tetris jones works as a kind of cognitive vaccine to the horrible effects of PTSD. Working with subjects who have recently undergone deeply traumatic experiences of the sort that may later induce PTSD, the Oxonian game therapists have found that playing a lot of Tetris right after some serious shit goes down in your life will keep you from getting freaked out later on.

On the face of it, Tetris seems like such a simple game. You move blocks around on a screen to complete lines, all to a catchy Russian-inspired MIDI melody. But the game's simple appearance belies the complexity within; playing Tetris is an involved visuospatial task that utilises the pathways in the brain associated with visual memory. It's strong stuff too; I'm sure many of you are familiar with the sensation of seeing tetrominos in your head after a long Tetris session. Indeed, this phenomenon has been clinically documented!

[snip]

Since PTSD flashbacks involve a strong visuospatial component, distracting those pathways from their trauma with another activity might be expected to interfere with the condition. And that's just what they discovered.

The [Oxford research] team used an experimental model that involved showing volunteers a short (12-minute) film of traumatic scenes of real life injury and death, a well-established experimental analog for PTSD. After a 30-minute interval (chosen as it's the average wait in an ER in the US), the subjects then either played 10 minutes of Tetris or sat quietly. Following this, they kept a diary for the next week in which they recorded any flashbacks to the film. The Tetris-playing group reported significantly fewer flashbacks both during the 10-minute task, and across the course of the week, than those who spent the 10 minutes sitting quietly.

When I started off my day this morning, I had no idea what the heck a "tetromino" even was! Now I realize that their presense in my brain may be the only reason why I'm even socially functional these days!

How to Clean Your CD

For years I've wiped in circles, you know, like you'd do with a vinyl album. I guess I thought I was clearing any dust that might have been building up in the grooves between the, um, electrons in the programming. Right, I'm stupid.

Well, I'm less stupid every day. Hence this blog.

Here's what I found out you do from the "Get Smart" video I rented today. First, the smart thing to do is use a static free non-lint-producing rag to wipe the dust off your CD. You don't need a special cleaner, but don't repeat don't use a glass cleaner product like windex. Really, all you need is water and, only if desperate actions are called for, a very light drop of dish soap in the water.

But then here's the kicker. You don't wipe the CD in circles. It's not a 45, ya mook. Lateral wipes, if they scratch, is much more likely to damage data burned onto the CD than perpendicular scratches. So you wipe it straight out from the center toward the edge. But then, just to be safe, don't scratch it anyway.

Some companies do produce special CD cleaning fluids, but they aren't much different from slightly soapy water.

Know what else I found out today? Don't fucking rent "Get Smart." The only way it could've been worse is if they had Pierce Brosnan singing in it.

My Readers

This blog is more likely to be read by someone from the San Francisco area than from, say, El Paso. That red dot is Atlanta, I think.

We're all gonna die!!

Well, we're maybe all gonna die.

On April 13, 2029, the near-Earth asteroid Apophis stands a 1 in 50 chance of coming close enough to Earth's gravity field to be pulled down into our atmosphere and slamming into Earth with the violent force of thousands of thermonuclear warheads, probably ending life as we know it.

If you go to page 18 of this PDF document on NASA's website, you'll see the exact trajectory of the asteroid's path of destruction, slaughtering tens of millions of souls across the Eastern Hemisphere (Wait, Eastern Hemisphere? Phew! I was gettin' worried there for a second!)

That trajectory, for those of you who don't like PDF files, runs across Hadrian's wall in northern Britain, across central Europe, the Black Sea, the Caucasus Mountains, over south central Asia, and finally over the northern tier of Southeast Asia. Any one of the countries along that line of impact could become ground zero for the point of impact of the wayward asteroid that will scorch the ground, rip out the atmospheric barrier between the planet's biosphere and the cold vacuum of space, flood the world's shores, and spell the end of human civilization.

Of course, I'll be like 66 years old by then, so if I'm not dead by then, I'll at least be too old to really care. But anyway, that's what I learned today.

Two percent chance. Whatever.

One man, two shoes, and a very, very small measure of justice

My first reaction to the shoe thrower was: "I get his anger, but that's really not too cool". I also worried about the secret service not getting the jump on a violently angry man not 4 yards from the president of the United States.

In the last two days, I have done a 180 on all these thoughts.

1- The Secret Service can only stop shoe throwers if they keep all human beings away from the president. If the guy had anything more dangerous on him, he doubtlessly would have never got past security. His attack was not life threatening or even injury threatening. The NRA tells us that a well armed society is a polite society. I guess now I'd make the same argument about a well-heeled society.

2- It really was a cool thing to do. Again, Mr Bush was in no real danger of anything more than a scratch on his noggin. Compared to the violence visited upon the innocent people of Iraq, compared to the dead and the displaced and the kids with their arms and legs blown off and the women scared to leave their homes and the families torn apart and the communities irreparably divided along sectarian lines by death squads and kidnap squads and the weight of destruction and humiliation brought down on that nation, trying to bean the architect of that chaos with a pair of docksiders is a fitting (and culturally significant) symbol of the scorn of the world.

but my most important reversal of all is...

3- Actually, no, I do not "get" his anger. I live a good life. I drive to work without fear. I pay my bills without fear. I go shopping without worrying about a bomb blowing up the marketplace. If I lose my job, I can be sure I'll soon enough find another job. I spent two weeks without electricity because of a hurricane, but I never doubted I'd get it back; I never worried that terrorists would blow up the generator after that. I send my kid to college halfway across the continent and can worry only that she'll miss her flight back next week. I have not been kidnapped, as Muntadhar al-Zeidi was. I have not been beaten. My sister hasn't been raped; my father has not been murdered; my cousins have not been seduced into joining a ethnic cleansing militia; my mother's door hasn't been kicked down in the middle of the night by foreign troops. I have not seen hell unleashed on my community because some ideological thinktank in another hemisphere thinks it has an intriguing theory for global domination.

So I cannot in any sense get Muntadhar al-Zeidi and what made this man in the truth business flip out on President Bush. More importantly, I cannot judge him. I do not have that right. He has every right to judge us, however. When you look at what has happened in our name, I can only stand amazed that, having judged us, he sentenced us to so light a punishment.