Buddha Died After Eating ...

[caption id="attachment_1421" align="aligncenter" width="665"] The cause of the Buddha's death may be a subject of theological dispute but the event itself has inspired countless artists and sculptors down the ages. This 19th century Japanese print shows women and a cat mourning the suicide of actor Ichikawa Danjuro VIII in a scene reminiscent of traditional artistic conception of the Buddha's deathbed, in which animals are often depicted grieving alongside humans.[/caption]

“I forgot today is the Buddha’s anniversary and ate meat!” the Buddhist lady lamented from the back of the car as we cruised along the Princess Highway from Sydney to a South Coast destination.

“Why?” I replied. “The Buddha himself is said to have died after eating pork!”

This was a revelation to the devout lady, who, after a shocked reaction, retreated into silence.

The cause of the Buddha’s death - mahaparinirvana in the Buddhist canonical jargon – is a matter of theological dispute between the two major Buddhist traditions of Theravada and Mahayana.

It is an article of faith in the Mahayana tradition, which has traditionally held sway in Nepal, India, Tibet, China, Korea and Japan, that the Enlightened One died after eating a meal of mushrooms. For the adherents of Mahayana, it seems that anything less than the Buddha’s imagined vegetarianism detracts from his divinity and precept of karuna (compassion) and ahimsa (non-violence).

On the other hand, the more orthodox Theravada tradition, which took root in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand and Cambodia, takes a comparatively more relaxed view on this delicate matter, holding that the Buddha died after eating a meal of pork near Kusinagar, India. For the doctrinal purists of Theravada, the Buddha’s system seems to rest on a more substantive foundation than his dietary habits.

Almost half a millennium passed before the Buddha’s life and teaching were committed to writing. Needless to say, myth and legend were pressed into service to embellish his actions and utterances and also to promote the agendas of rival claimants to his “true” teaching.

As the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero wrote, “There are many questions in philosophy to which no satisfactory answer has yet been given. But the question of the nature of the gods is the darkest and most difficult of all…. So various and so contradictory are the opinions of the most learned men on this matter as to persuade one of the truth of the saying that philosophy is the child of ignorance…”

Eating Rice and Mutton Curry from Brass Plates While Thinking About Home

“Come, eat rice and mutton curry from brass plates – just like back home!” read an advertisement for a Nepalese restaurant here in Sydney, playing on the homesickness and ingrained culinary habits of local Nepalese residents.

I habitually pick up free Nepalese newsletters from various Indo-Bengali-Nepalese grocery stores that dot Sydney’s “ethnic enclaves” to read not so much the news and articles but the advertisements for various products and services.

These advertisements paint an accurate picture of the aspirations, hopes, triumphs, heartaches, struggles and yearnings of the Nepalese people here and elsewhere in Australia.

In the world of print media, there used to be two competing views about the place of the "fourth estate" in the body politic (Admittedly, free community newsletters may not be able to claim membership of the fourth estate as their voice is hardy audible in the cacophony of the national discourse still dominated by a few media corporations).

One of these views proclaimed newspapers to be the raw material of history, or even history itself in the making, while cynics disparaged them as little more than vehicles for selling advertisements and for peddling and perpetuating ignorance, falsehood and bigotry.

The undercurrents of these dichotomous views of the print media can be detected even in humble community newsletters. They definitely convey a sense of history in the making (albeit a peripheral one) and they peddle products and services as well as news, gossips and opinions. They editorialize as if they have the power to shape opinion and guide the hand of history - if not here, then at least back home.

A recent newsletter that I grabbed from a local Nepalese grocery store had an advertisement for a “Roaming pest control”, reflecting growing home ownership in the Nepalese community.

Another advertisement for a Nepalese consultancy promised an “entire gamut of IT and Telecommunications services to your organization”. A bulleted list spelled out what an “entire gamut” meant: e-commerce solution, IT application for enterprises, project management, data migration services, quality assurance and testing, and so on.

Interestingly, the same consultancy also offered “cheapest international flight tickets, low domestic flight tickets in Nepal and India”, and, best of all, “... a lifetime journey to the magistical (sic) Himalayan adobe (sic)”, including Bhutan.

Advertisements like this one signify the presence of a viable local Nepalese market, and the pleasing fact that the diaspora is acquiring wealth and entrepreneurial flair.

In keeping with the zeitgeist, another colour advertisement posted by a “business consultant” asked: “Looking for an Exciting Business Opportunity?”, offering to “make it easier to find you a perfect business with finance”. The business consultant also promised to find finance for car loans, even for students, which told me that the fortunes of Nepalese students have improved dramatically since my own days as an impecunious overseas student.

However, the vast majority of the advertisements are still for overseas student services that range from finding colleges, changing courses and education providers to advice for permanent residency, which still remains the ultimate goal of most Nepalese students.

Perhaps inevitably, even the afore-mentioned IT consultancy-cum-travel agency offered services for international students, revealing the full extent of its “entire gamut”. In the full-page colour advertisement, it posed what it hoped to be a rhetorical question: “Finding it hard to select right Collages (sic) / Universities?”

"The System Failed Us"

Too often, the “system” is blamed for all sorts of failures and tragedies, but especially for misfortunes arising from refusal to take personal responsibility.

Some time back, I remember watching an Australian man on TV blaming the “system” for the death of his child from starving. By transferring blame to an abstract entity, he was trying to absolve his own role in the tragedy and whitewash his conscience.

To be sure, a robust system of social safety net is a hallmark of civilised societies – there is zero social safety net in third world dictatorships, theocracies and kleptocracies, which are often one and the same thing.

However, you know things have gone too far when people who shirk personal responsibility blame their misfortunes on the “system”, and when politicians of all stripes try to outdo each other in pandering to an overriding sense of entitlement.

So, it was no wonder, then, that many took umbrage at Gina Rinehart's comment last week, when she stated the obvious: "Do something to make more money yourself - spend less time drinking or smoking and socialising, and more time working."

The fact that Rinehart herself did not work her ass off for her billions - she inherited it from her father - does not disqualify her from making such comments nor does it invalidate the thrust of her comment.

Dead Worshipers Tell No Tales

[caption id="attachment_1371" align="aligncenter" width="355"] Cicero, Roman philosopher and statesman.[/caption]

Cicero recounted the following story:

A non-believer named Diagoras was shown painted tablets depicting some worshipers who had prayed and then survived a shipwreck.

Diagoras was not impressed. He wondered about the portraits of those worshipers who had prayed but still drowned.

Apparently, drowned worshipers told no tales.

Think of this story the next time

• you think the supermarket queue you join always moves slowly. Is it because you tend not to remember the times when queues move fast?


• someone tells you that dropping out of university is a smart career move ever since Bill Gates left Harvard to found Microsoft. People and the media do not seem to talk a lot about university dropouts who end up with mediocre careers


• an astrological prediction seems to come true


• you meet a rude person


• you read the story of how the self-exiled New Castle mining magnate Nathan Tinkler literally punted his house on a risky mining venture and amassed a fortune within the span of a few years

Meaning of Life and Color of Jealousy

[caption id="attachment_1350" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Richard Dawkins, biologist, author and atheist.[/caption]

Who has not quested and pondered on the meaning of life?

My own misguided, adolescent quest for the meaning of life led me to the ashram of a yogi, the sermons of J. Krishnamurti, the glib utterances of the charlatan Osho Rajneesh, a university course in Shada Darshana (the Six Schools of Indian Philosophy), and the popular works of Bertrand Russell and other Western thinkers.

One of these thinkers was an eccentric Austrian named Ludwig Wittgenstein, who had become a cult figure by the time he died in Cambridge, England at the age of 62 in 1951.

When Wittgenstein first came to Cambridge in 1911 to study the foundations of mathematics with Russell, his lordship could not decide if Wittgenstein was a crank or a genius but eventually settled for the latter.

In 1929, Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge for a Ph D, occasioning the economist Keynes’ letter to his wife in which he noted: “Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train.”

Wittgenstein’s philosophy of logical positivism inspired a group of thinkers called the Vienna Circle. Its central tenet was distilled in the aphorism “The meaning of a sentence is its method of verification.”

According to this "method of verification", a sentence had to satisfy one of the following conditions to be valid:

1. True by definition. “A triangle has three sides.”
2. Empirically verifiable: “Mt. Everest is taller than Mt. Druit.”

Conversely, the following sentences are not valid as they are neither true by definition nor empirically verifiable:

1. A thing of beauty is a joy forever
2. Jesus was born of immaculate conception
3. God is great
4. In my End is my Beginning

Logical positivism had a grand ambition: To smash metaphysics and, with it, all the “ultimate” questions. It ran into a familiar epistemological hurdle: itself.

By the yardstick of logical positivism itself, the sentence “The meaning of a sentence is its method of verification” is a nonsense. Perhaps, this is why, despite Wittgenstein’s modest belief that he had solved all philosophical problems by analysing language, we keep asking the ultimate questions.

Fast forward to 2012 and an epiphany of sorts!

A recent ABC TV’s Q & A panel discussion pitted Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney, against the British evolutionary biologist and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins.

At one point, Dawkins, arguing that life has no meaning beyond itself, said that just because you can ask a question does not mean it is a valid question.

“What is the color of jealousy?” is one such invalid question, according to the renowned biologist and author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion.

Dawkins’ argument resonated deeply with me. I wish I had come across such an insight during my adolescent meanderings. Then, perchance, if not abandon my futile search for the miraculous, I might at least not have given up the study of calculus in favor of canard.

More Dog Whistling TV Programs, Please!

Who says prime time current affair programs on free-to-air TV channels are rubbish? I propose that they can be edifying.

In a recently aired one such TV program, a colleague apparently heard the phrase "ethnic enclaves" for the first time. In a low, conspiratorial whisper to another colleague, my colleague gingerly pronounced the word "enclaves" a few times like a jittery rugby fullback juggling a high ball before gathering it safely into his arms.

It was apparent that my thirty something colleague had never come across this phrase before, but thanks to the current affair program, my colleague had finally learned a new phrase and, with it, a new category of evils lurking in the suburbs.

This got me thinking. If my colleague had never heard the phrase "ethnic enclaves" before, what about associated words and phrases such as "ethnic cleansing", "pogroms", "dog whistling", "xenophobia", "yellow peril", "Asian horde", "concentration camps", "Lebensraum" and so on? Surely, the Balkan wars took place within the living memory of my colleague’s generation?

Please, explain!

To sum up, we need more dog-whistling current affair TV programs advocating ethnic cleansings, pogroms and concentration camps so that the suburbs can be ridden of undesirable ethnic enclaves and this fair Continent of carefree surfers and cricketers shielded from the imminent dangers posed by the yellow peril and swarthy hordes.

Ambushed by Outlier

On Saturday morning, I reached a radiology in a neighbouring suburb for a dental x-ray at 9:30, hoping to wrap up the visit in 15 minutes. I ended up waiting for an hour - twice punctuated by my inquiries about expected waiting time  - before an amiable, bespectacled radiologist materialised and led me to the x-ray room.

When asked why I had to wait so long when this type of x-ray should be a fairly short affair, he only murmured, "I don't know. It was a misunderstanding."

Back at the main waiting room, I handed the slip of paper that the radiologist had asked me to hand in to the reception, repeating to one of the receptionists what the radiologist had told me, that I had waited an hour as a result of a "misunderstanding".

The receptionist conferred with a colleague to her right and said something like, "You'd to wait as long as you did because the x-ray room has another machine that was being used by another patient for a procedure that takes time."

"You're unlucky," she added as she apologized and wished me a great day.

***

To begin with, what us lay folks call being "unlucky", experts from quantitative disciplines such as economics, social sciences and statistics may call being victims of "outliers", which are nothing but rare, out-of-the-ordinary events.

Examples of outliers include winning a lottery, the volcanic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD that buried Pompeii, air crashes in developed nations, Australia's national rugby team Wallabies posting a win against New Zealand's All Blacks ... and, apparently, waiting for an hour to get one's "missing/crowded" teeth x-rayed.

Since my dentist indicated that I will have to make a number of visits to the radiology, I am mainly concerned with two questions.

First, what is the probability of my being "unlucky" in the same radiology's waiting room in my next visit?

For the sake of argument, let's assume that, on average, 1 in 100 dental x-ray patients on a Saturday morning gets "unlucky" in that particular radiology, ending up waiting an hour. This means the probability of getting unlucky is 1 percent or 0.01.

From this, assuming that two visits to the radiology for dental x-rays are independent, i.e. the first visit does not influence the waiting time of the second visit, the probability that I will again be "unlucky" on the second visit is still 0.01.

A slightly different question is this. What is the probability that a patient like myself will be "unlucky" in two consecutive visits? Intuition tells us that it has to be lower than 1 in 100. In fact, it is 0.01 x 0.01 = 0.0001 or 1 in 10,000.

On the other hand, I may reason that since I was already unlucky in my last visit to the radiology, the probability of getting unlucky in the next visit is lower than 1 in 100. If I reason like this, assuming that the previous visit has no effect on the waiting time of my next visit, I have just fallen victim to the gambler's fallacy.

The next question I am interested is this. If I am not unlucky in my next visit to the radiology, what should I expect the waiting time to be? To put it another way, what is the average waiting time for a dental x-ray on a Saturday morning?

Assuming that waiting times are normally distributed and a waiting time of 1 hour lies in the upper 1 percent of the distribution, i.e. 99 percent of waiting times are less than 1 hour, the average waiting time is around 35 minutes, with the standard deviation of around 11 minutes.

This means that my initial hope of wrapping up the visit in 15 minutes was a forlorn hope. From the properties of the normal distribution, it can be estimated that there is less than 3 percent likelihood of a waiting time to be 15 minutes or less.