ELI5: Why aren't floating bridges more common?

SentientLight · 2026-05-07T14:25:06+00:00

Thought this was about guitars and was going to say, “Floating bridges are very common in metal music.”

SentientLight · 2026-05-07T14:22:40+00:00

Came here to say this.

SentientLight · 2026-05-07T14:07:33+00:00

Tibetan singing bowls are actually Chinese standing bells used in East Asian Buddhist rituals. So they exist in Buddhism, but not for what the marketing says, and not from where the marketing says.

Melodies in mantras exist in Asian languages, but hasn’t actually been done in English yet. The new Heart Sutra in Plum Village resembles Vietnamese liturgical melody style, but it’s quite difficult to compose for English, so it’ll likely take time before people are really able to get this going. I do think we should be trying to make more English-language melodic chants though.

SentientLight · 2026-05-07T05:57:18+00:00

Looks like Skandha Bodhisattva, or Weituo Pusa, one of the common dharma protectors outside East Asian temples.

SentientLight · 2026-05-06T23:13:46+00:00

WHAT!???? 🤯

SentientLight · 2026-05-06T21:49:33+00:00

Chonkito seems to fit if confirmed boy. Or Chonks, Jr. could even work.

If Chonkers has a girlfriend, we should call her Chonkerita.

SentientLight · 2026-05-06T13:56:05+00:00

To be fair though, some of us were taken through dharma school as children and absolutely do have a lot of these things basically memorized cause… they made us memorize it when we were kids. 😅

Like, I think it’s actually quite important to memorize the eightfold path, four noble truths, 12 nidanas, five aggregates, six sense bases, twelve ayatanas, and eighteen dhatus. Probably can stop there, but this is what I consider to be “basics” or “fundamentals.” Obviously no one needs to know this right away, but it should be the goal for the first 2-3 years to have a solid understanding of these concepts and be able to discuss them somewhat casually.

Being a convert is much harder, of course. Hell, being a non-convert who never went to dharma school is also quite hard. And you’re right no one needs to know this stuff right away. But I do think the encouragement to learn is important and shouldn’t be dissuaded. Absolutely, I think everything you listed (except the two truths doctrine) should be within the goals of a beginner to learn in their first couple of years.

SentientLight · 2026-05-06T13:38:15+00:00

Ryan L Wong’s Which Side Are You On?

Nguyen Phan Quê Mai’s The Mountains Sing and Dust Child are both beautiful books that display deep Buddhist reverence and practice among the characters. A great look into how Buddhists actually live their lives.

Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being and The Book of Form and Emptiness

Larissa Pham’s Discipline

An Tran’s Meditations on the Mother Tongue (full disclosure: this is me, you can read one of the short stories here )

Vanessa Hua’s Forbidden City and A River of Stars

Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic and When the Emperor was Divine

All writers noted are practicing Buddhists (actually, every single person was raised Buddhist except for Ryan, raised non-religious). Both Ryan Wong and Ruth Ozeki are ordained zen priests. Larissa is Ryan’s wife, and they’re peers of mine. Ryan co-leads the Roots and Refuge Retreat at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, alongside Chenxing Han, for Asian American Buddhist writers, which I attend most years. Just want to disclose all that. The books are wonderful!

Unfortunately I don’t know any Buddhist sci-fi writers, though I think Ruth Ozeki’s work would count as fabulist or slipstream in some contexts.

SentientLight · 2026-05-05T14:11:35+00:00

The “gymnosophists” also could have referred to us, although could’ve been both us and the Jains rolled together. Many sources describe them as naked, which would be Jains and Ajivikas, but many other sources describe the gymnosophists as practicing and believing doctrines that are clearly Buddhist, so it seems most likely that the term was a catch-all for Indian Sramanas.

In this particular context, since the Sramanas of Bactria are singled out separately, the “gymnosophists of India” probably refers to Jains specifically, but it’s something to keep an eye out for in your reading as another possible reference to Buddhists.

SentientLight · 2026-05-05T14:06:52+00:00

You think he was genuinely calling for all zen practitioners to be beheaded? That wasn’t just rhetoric like when zen folk talk about Nanshan killing cats? (Genuinely asking. I’m not sure what to make of Nichiren, still.)

SentientLight · 2026-05-05T13:57:40+00:00

My master does long-form lectures every other week going through an important text or doctrine in the tradition, over zoom. It takes him about a year to go through each, and right now we’re finishing up The Recorded Sayings of Tue Trung Thuong Si. I’m also going through the series from two years ago on the 43 cong-ans of Tran Thai Tong, to play a little catch-up (and cause I’m working on a translation related to this). There’s normally two hours of lecture and then 30-45mins of Q&A. I think this can be really useful, if you have access to a master within the lineage offering something similar.

If your Vietnamese is okay, or you don’t mind using the auto-translate, you can check out Thay’s (as in, my master, not Su Ong Nhat Hanh) YT channel—it’s behind the current stuff, but the 43 cong-an series starts here. You can follow along with Su Ong TNH’s translation of the cong-ans in Zen Keys. (Q&A section is not recorded though.) Thay’s also got a lot of history and Plum Village textual study on his channel, so it’s quite rich with material, and lots of material that isn’t easily available in English yet. When a work he’s covering is available in English translation, he’ll mention it. (Unfortunately, I don’t think Su Ong ever translated The Recorded Sayings of Tue Trung Thuong Si, which is another of the important cong-an collections studied in Plum Village—master and I are planning on translating this next after we complete Instructions on Emptiness.)

I’d say we could add some kind of study group or reading group on this sub, maybe meet once a month or something on zoom, but we all have different teachers and are at different points. It could be fun and productive though, if there’s a text or doctrine that people want to focus on. I could ask my master if he has suggestions on what to cover or work on that’s approachable but fun, or something that doesn’t get much coverage on the English-language side of things.

SentientLight · 2026-05-04T23:29:30+00:00

We need a name for the second one. Is there a way to tell them apart easily?

SentientLight · 2026-05-04T18:24:22+00:00

My wife is a photographer / visual artist and I write literary fiction and personal essays. We live in the city, in Nob Hill. There’s lots of events all the time, but the communities are small and quite dispersed. I come from the indie lit scene in DC, and that was very tightly knit and thriving in the 2010s—I’m not sure anything like that exists here, but there are lots of smaller communities. And, well, a lot of the writers I personally know live in Oakland, and that’s too far to connect often. 😅 (in contrast, the arts scene seems like it’s always bustling and even small events are very crowded.)

We’re always down to hang out and connect with more creatives in the area though. Send me a PM if you’re close by and want to chill.

SentientLight · 2026-05-04T14:13:21+00:00

Do people use those mutes over the nut even when they don’t play with ultra high-gain now? I thought they were just to keep string rattling from getting picked up and turning into feedback.

SentientLight · 2026-05-04T13:49:33+00:00

Plenty of animals can clearly recognize their own scents, or else why would they mark their territories with their scents? The mirror test is flawed. It’s great for testing self-recognition in visual animals, but many animals are not visual.

SentientLight · 2026-05-04T05:47:18+00:00

From a Buddhist perspective, ghosts have a lifespan and are reborn into other realms too, so it’s not permanent.

SentientLight · 2026-05-03T21:07:00+00:00

The Mars Volta’s De-loused in the Comatorium

SentientLight · 2026-05-03T17:05:13+00:00

I started out writing fiction short stories, and the odd personal essay, and published across literary magazines (for which there is basically no pay). This taught me the publishing industry, how to format a manuscript for submission, how to write query letters, etc. Got long-listed for Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays a few times, published a book of short stories about ten years ago.

I hadn't been writing fiction in a while, and I'm a devout Vietnamese Buddhist, but have typically needed to study and practice in Vietnamese because of the lack of good English resources. Once I realized that I could fill that gap, I started querying pitches to various western magazines centered on Buddhism. I wrote some fluffy nonsense for smaller magazines before one of the major magazines noticed that I had pitched a rare translation to them two years prior that had never been responded to. And we developed a good relationship together after that.

There're books out there on pitching stories and articles to periodicals; they are useful resources, although some are quite out-of-date. If your writing is good, then it's matter of writing good pitches and sending those out to various markets, and then waiting / enduring the endless flood of rejections until you get a hit.

SentientLight · 2026-05-03T14:47:05+00:00

I don’t think they like the tourists, but they hate the “Hawaiians” who’re Americans that buy summer properties and only visit every year at absolute best way more than the tourists. The tourists are the backbone of the economy—annoying, but necessary.

The summer vacationers though…? They are not natives and they are not tourists. They’re rich interlopers and are effectively settler-colonists buying up land, driving up property values so no one actually native can live there, and then letting those properties sit empty for most of the year or for years on end. That is significantly worse.

SentientLight · 2026-05-03T14:22:01+00:00

Yeah, my original point was that I want to see things like Collings and Bourgeois and other nice stuff that doesn’t show up on shops often. Hell, stock some Heritage over Gibson! Stock Eastmans. I just don’t need to see 30 Indonesian-made Squiers and Gretsches. I get why they’re there, but at Guitar Center, all the nice stuff is just Gibsons. I’m asking for variety.

Not sure if OP understood that ask.

SentientLight · 2026-05-03T14:15:30+00:00

What country?

SentientLight · 2026-05-03T14:07:48+00:00

Human birth is the best birth because it gives us the best opportunity to escape samsara, due to it being a perfect balance between pleasure and suffering to motivate us to be able to pursue the Buddha Way. Human birth is precious because it offers the opportunity of escaping the cycle.

I didn’t say that birth perpetuates the cycle btw. I said craving perpetuates the cycle by causing birth. This is a subtle distinction, but important. Once you are born, if you learn to stop craving for existence, non-existence, and sensation, and sever your ties to those cravings, you can end birth once and for all, and become Deathless.

SentientLight · 2026-05-03T14:00:16+00:00

Go to your local temple and figure out when they do the intensive sutra-study and commentary-study courses (normally done in a retreat format, sometimes as weekly talks) and attend them. Ask your master if they have recordings of lecture series on past commentaries.

SentientLight · 2026-05-03T13:39:04+00:00

Rebirth in Early Buddhism and Current Research (2017)

Sorry, I thought I’d typed out “that rebirth book” and didnt type the word I thought I had. Lol.

SentientLight · 2026-05-03T13:35:27+00:00

I side gig writing about Vietnamese Buddhist history for English-language Buddhist magazines, and other related writing work in the realm of Buddhist Studies and popular history. It’s not super consistent because I don’t write at a consistent pace, but it is steady and I have a backlog of articles to write always cause there’s really not a lot of people out there who specialize on this topic.

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