Evocative description of the Buddha

Quoted from an Aeon article :

An important text in the collection is the Muni Sutta (‘Discourse on the Silent Sage’), almost certainly known to the Indian emperor Aśoka (who reigned c268-232 BCE) as the Muni-gāthā (‘Verses on the Silent Sage’), and so in its extant form dating to the 4th century BCE, not very long after Alexander the Great’s Indian campaign (c326 BCE). In this text, the Buddha describes the sage as a radical outsider:

Danger is born from intimacy, dust arises from the home. Without home, without acquaintance: just this is the vision of a sage.

Avoiding the enveloping ‘dust’ of society, the sage remains aloof from worldly values, ‘not trembling amid blame or praise, like a lion not shaking at sounds … like a lotus not smeared by water’. Focusing his attention instead on the quest to cultivate deep states of meditation in the forest, the sage is likened to a swiftly flying swan, whereas a householder is imagined as a blue-crested peacock, beautiful but slow.

 Shadows illuminate the sun

It's a time of the signs

 

        

Indonesian man becomes an instant millionaire as meteorite worth £1.4m crashes through his roof  Nov 17th 2020, 17:57 Josua Hutagalung, 33, was working on a coffin next to his house when the meteorite smashed through the veranda at the edge of his living room in Kolang, North Sumatra.

And-- 

Thai fisherman finds 'the world's biggest' blob of whale vomit - that could be worth £2.4MILLION Dec 1st 2020, 00:05 Naris Suwannasang, 60, saw the Ambergris -while he was walking by the sea in Nakhon Si Thammarat, southern Thailand.

Consistently bizarre

 

How bizarre is it that the word--- bizarre--- has a disputed etymology?

...."Obviously, if a word appears from nowhere and has no ascertainable native roots, it may be a borrowing. And here I must turn to the language of the Goths, which I mention with great regularity in this blog, because Gothic is the oldest Germanic language that has come down to us (if we disregard runic inscriptions from medieval Scandinavia): significant parts of the New Testament, translated by Bishop Wulfila in the fourth century from Greek into Gothic, are extant. Two Gothic kingdoms flourished in the past: one in Italy (with its capital in Ravenna, where tourists can still see Ostrogoth King Theodoric’s Mausoleum) and one in Spain, with the capital in Tolosa. The eastern kingdom existed only from 453 to 555, but this period was the time of the efflorescence of Gothic culture, its Golden Age. The Visigoth kingdom had a much longer span of life: from the early fifth century to 711, when it was destroyed by the Arabs. As could be expected, Modern Italian and Modern Spanish have preserved relics of many Gothic words, some of which did not turn up in Wulfila’s translation. Such words were reconstructed from the dialects spoken today: thoroughly assimilated inserts of Old Germanic in the speech of modern people. Hence the idea that bizarre may be one of such relics, a continuation of an old borrowing from Gothic....

Picture poppies

Tomorrow's Headlines

 

Or maybe next month's:

DELTA HITS THE DELTA AND DESTROYS GULF DEAD ZONE

(an area in the Gulf of Mexico, the size of Massachusetts, with little oxygen.) This will be called ironic, but is nothing like that.

Anybody who got a real glimpse of what Jan Cox was about

 

Anybody who got a real glimpse of what Jan Cox was about will appreciate that Jacques Derrida was a tasty cookie--- store bought goods, but edible. A review of a new biography of the French philosopher at the link.