A Precept For The New Year

"Here’s my new year’s wish to all those of genuine good will and decency:

"May you have the strength and the courage to oppose what should be opposed."

Heidi Li Feldman

(To my sister's succinct and sufficient statement I would append that this be a precept to our enlightenment practice, a reaffirmation of the call to right action, for the impending year and those that follow.)


(Photo courtesy of Sneha Cecil and Unsplash.com.)

In Nerd We Trust

This is a preaching Buddha (not to be confused with a teaching Buddha). As you can see, he's enumerating something on his fingers.

Which makes me smile. I've always been amused by the fixation in my religion with numbered lists.

We're not alone in this, of course. The 99 Names of God; the 10 Commandments; the 7 Deadly Sins; the 285 Rules of Acquisition: didacticism is a hallmark of scripture-based faiths.

But we take the prize. To be precise, we take it to town. Then we get on a ship and take it 'round the world, three or four times. And we're currently working on a way to shoot it into space.

Because we have an astonishing number of numbers. (Though I can't actually report that number here, because – ahem – we've never counted them.)

The impulse is honest, of course. Our insistence on rational analysis and objective experience over revealed truth is, in my opinion, our greatest strength. Several of these lists (the 8 Worldly Dharmas, the 7 Factors of Enlightenment, the 5 Recollections, and certainly, the Eightfold Path and 4 Noble Truths) have made cameos in these pages.

It's true that the power of these teachings is somewhat diffused by our Ancestors' equal passion for the 6 Aspects of Spiciness, the 9 Manifestations of Unrealised Déjà Vu, the 17 Origins of Pre-Supper Sleepiness, and the whole Buddhist canon of catalogues – which somehow exceeds our zeal for verifying whether those things actually exist before we catalogue them.

But if our compulsive Asian bookkeeping does at times get a little precious, it's merely an over-enthusiastic response to a very cogent teaching: that religious practice is for here.

Because if you're really doing a real religion, you're not waiting for some imagined afterlife to see results. Nor do you fabricate evidence of results in this one.

You pay attention. You watch the world turning and you turning with it, and you document daily if and how this crap is working.

And you better believe you count those beans.

Because as any boffin will tell you: in faba veritas.


(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

Beating Swords Into Search Engines

Every so often a host name in my blog stats provokes a moment of reflection. Certain ISPs are a given: schools and universities; Zen centres; private corporations; government servers; and of course, lots of general service providers. But it's the armed-response readers that hit me hardest.

To date I've been "surveilled" (to use a non-word I dislike) by the US Department of Defense; America's Orwellian "Department of Homeland Security"; the US Justice Department; and the Pentagon. And though Yank institutions make up the bulk of this traffic, I've also been visited by the Royal Military College of Canada; the Indian Armed Forces; and the British Ministry of Defence, among others.

Given the predilections of current Western governments, with their brazen rejection of democracy and embrace of pre-Enlightenment concepts of loyalty, these drop-ins always give me pause. We know that such agencies – especially those in the US – collect "intelligence" on unoffending civilians. We also know they're not above working violence on similar, when the whim takes them.

Meanwhile, I've made no secret in these pages of my opposition to those trends and goals, so I suppose I could conceivably wind up on some professional stalker's target list. Still, it's hard to swallow. OK, ordinary innocuous folk like me have recently been investigated, harassed, and worse. On the other hand… really? Government enforcers paid to monitor some half-mad Zen hermit on a desolate beach somewhere out in the North Pacific rainforest?

I'm not buying it. Rather, I believe these civil servants and military personnel are simply surfing the Net on the boss's dime. (A survey of local times at the agencies in question reveals that about half of them drifted in on their lunch hour.)

And that insight changes the whole story. As chilling as it is to find "Pentagon" in one's daily results, in the end, it's probably proof of our shared human nature. You got people screwing off on the job, and following more or less random impulses to satisfy their curiosity on sundry topics. Better still: some of them apparently have at least a passing interest in alternatives to confrontation and "enemy-think". (One happened in while searching "eightfold path".) Will my little Blogspot journal change their lives?

Puh-leez.

But if they keep hunting around in this fashion, they will in fact eventually find plenty of grist for that mill. It's out there; that's how I got here, myself.

Any road. If, honoured reader, you're engaged in the security industry and have surfed in here on the sly: Welcome! We Zenners don't recruit or evangelise; you're free to come and go as you like, and to leave as unchanged as you wish. Peace and wisdom to you, brother or sister, and may we all find Enlightenment at the end of this road.


(Photo of Let Us Beat Swords into Plowshares - 1959 Soviet gift to the United Nations, by sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich - courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

Hermitcraft: Some Eight-Strand Kongo Fudos

Nylon twine cord, malleable washer ring.

Here are a few garden fudos with eight-strand kongo kumihimo cords. (Kongo means "twist" in Japanese; the photos demonstrate why it's called that.)














Kongo is the easiest of all

Mason line, nylon rug-hooking yarn, lotus ring.

kumis, readily done on a homemade card. You'll find a good YouTube tutorial for it here. The demonstrator in the video uses a store-bought foam kumihimo loom, but you can easily make your own from solid (not corrugated) cardboard, as from a cracker box or milk carton. Just cut slits around the edges to hold the strands, and crossed slits in the middle to pull the braid through as it develops.

Eight-strand kongo in fore- ground; 16-strand and 8-strand flat behind.

Eight-strand fudos recall the Eightfold Path. Some of mine also reverse every eight turns, and they do this eight times total; this represents the Eight Worldly Dharmas, the bookended, enlightenment-blocking barriers that Fudo Myō-ō slashes apart with his sword.

Gold mason line, decoy line, red and black rug-hooking yarn.

Eight strands give you almost limitless freedom to experiment, mixing different colours, fibres, sizes, and textures in varying configurations. It's an engaging technique, and an addictive one; the process is a kind of meditation, ending in the joy of having made something beautiful from such mundane materials as seine twine, decoy line, and Red Heart yarn.

Layout disguises the spiral kongo weave of this cord.

Made from acrylic, polyester, or nylon, these fudos can last centuries. I test mine in very harsh conditions. Wearing their worn tassels and bleached colours like okesa, they hold their ground with smug contempt.



All in all, the eight-strand kongo kumihimo garden fudo offers admirable visual impact for moderate effort. The technique is neither complex nor especially time-consuming, and materials can be had for reasonable cost from hardware and craft stores. Just find a nice big ring, and have at it.

Hermitcraft: Four-Strand Shoelace Fudo

This is the second-easiest braid there is, and one of three I use to make hundred-year fudos. The flat four-strand shoelace braid is more versatile than the classic three-strand in that you can produce more distinctive patterns, given multiple colours and beginning positions.

Yet as simple as it is, I found no clear tutorials for this braid online. A few writers got close, but just had to make it complex at some point, calling for a change of hands mid-pass, or braiding behind the back, or standing up and turning three times clockwise every seventeen seconds. So I can't link to another blog for more information, because, amazingly, there ain't none. (Mark your calendars, brothers and sisters: today Rusty Ring scooped the Net.)

But this is easy, even for me, who can't follow a weaving or knot diagram for love or rice. Just follow these instructions, and know that if you just stared at the four strands long enough, you would invent this braid all by yourself. You're just straight-up, old-school, weaving the righthand strand over and under all the others. Over and over until you're done. So easy, some can't resist making it hard.

Observe:

1. Set up a standard three-strand fudo, with ring and knot and hook, but with four strands this time. I recommend strands of different colours the first time, to minimise confusion.

(Note: the "exploded" view in the following photos makes the process look more complex than it really is. If you look carefully, you'll see it's just as the text explains.)

2. Lay the four strands straight and even in front of you, as above.

3. Cross the inside left strand over the inside right strand.

4. Take the far right strand and weave it left, using basic, unfancy weaving: over the next strand, under the next, and over the last. [UPDATE: I forgot to add that it's bent around that final strand, which is not pictured; curl the weaving strand over and around the black strand, so that it finishes between the black strand and the orange one. This will leave the green weaving strand second from left.] "Over-under-over" [and around the last].

5. Tighten up this pass. (Not shown.)

6. Take the new far right strand and weave it left, too: over-under-over [and around the last].

7. Tighten up again.

8. Then take the new far right strand and weave it left: over-under-over [and around]. And then the new far right strand and weave it left: over-under-over [and around]. And so on, until you're ready to knot it off.

That's all. No juggling, no double-clutching, no moonwalking. It makes no difference whether you follow these instructions exactly, or invert them: cross the first two strands the other way, then pass the far right one under-over-under, instead of over-under-over. The important thing is the alternating pass.

To get diagonal stripes, like a traffic barricade (or the shoelace below), lay out your strands in two pairs, one colour left, the other right. Then do the crossing thing, and go for it.

You can play around with two, three, or four colours, in different sizes, textures, materials, and initial layouts, to get new patterns.

TO MAKE ACTUAL SHOELACES (see below), first whip the strands together at one end by tying poly kite string around them, again and again, until you've whipped a good half-inch. Seal it good with nail polish and cut off the strand-ends still sticking out. Then braid. When the lace is long enough, repeat the whipping procedure at the other end.

Four-strand fudos remind onlookers of the Four Noble Truths: that life is a disease; that the cause is known; that it's curable; and that the Eightfold Path is the cure. In practical terms, four-strand fudos look slightly more "deliberate", conveying greater intent and effort on the part of the maker, and so may be marginally less likely than the game old three-strander to be taken down by passersby.

Either way, it's a nice way to change things up.