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.)
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.)
