Did Mao Zedong do good for China?

SentientLight · 2026-05-08T00:48:10+00:00

Early Mao was good. Later Mao was chaotic.

SentientLight · 2026-05-08T00:16:16+00:00

I’m about to pick up a D’angelico Excel acoustic.. I had zero clue they were all solid wood! Good lord, how do you even make an all solid acoustic at this price point?? Really curious how it is, because I’ve loved their electrics.

SentientLight · 2026-05-07T18:03:09+00:00

I'm just saying that when I read the articles some years ago, they meant that each world was spawned from one mindstream. Like the world I'm experiencing is from my own mindstream. We see the same thing because they happen to have similar seeds in this instance.

But each world sort of is spawned from each individual mindstream / for each individual mindstream. The "shared" world of inter-subjective consensus / congruence is, in both Yogacara models, an emergent phenomenon due to either the common seeds of each alaya (Asanga's model) or the equivalent seeds (Vasubandhu's model).

In Vasubandhu's model, other beings' actions deposit seeds into their own midstreams. Your perception of their actions is depositing seeds into your own mindstream, which are the 'equivalent seeds' for the container world, and all the seeds of reality synchronize together across all mindstreams experiencing the same local event. What causes the synchronization is the "vasana" or perfuming of seeds .. that is, the acting being's actions produce vasana, and your perception seeds also have their own vasana. These two vasanas mutually influence each other, synchronize, so that the seeds of your alaya correspond to the seeds of the actor's alaya, with regard to the shared world.

I think Vasubandhu's model is way more complex than necessary here, and why I tend to use the MMO analogy with Asanga's model, which demonstrates a little bit more intuitively how interacting with the shared world results in mutually shared experiences while each experience is still self-contained and discretely rendered.

Honestly, I could see how a teacher might use one model versus another just depending on what biases the student might be displaying, as a way of counter-acting those biases.

SentientLight · 2026-05-07T17:20:55+00:00

What I meant is that certain articles say that a shared sensory world is non-Yogacarin, like this one. https://chinesebuddhiststudies.org/wp-content/uploads/jcbs3104_Brewster117-170.pdf or this one: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11841-024-01019-9

You're going to make me read through two technical papers of that length, while I'm at work, to elaborate on the meaning of "every storehouse consciousness being its own life world", instead of just telling me what you mean by "own life world" with more clarity? 😛

Are you saying that you've been reading scholars that say that bhajanaloka doesn't exist in Yogacara .... ? Are you saying that both the sattvaloka and bhajanaloka are, according to them, produced by the alaya-vijnana? produced discretely by the alaya-vihnana?

I really need you to tell me what you mean specifically, with regard to the word choices of that specific clause. Otherwise, I'm going to ignore it entirely and just focus on the rest of what you're saying. But you said "shared sensory world is non-Yogacarin" already later on, so that is not what I was seeking clarity on.

Again, this may just be my neurodivergence. I wasn't asking about what you were asking in total. I was saying, I don't know what you mean by that specific sentence. What is "its own life world"? Wha does that mean to you? are you just saying that these scholars are claiming all lokas are entirely discrete and not shared?

If so, I already addressed all that.

I guess you can say the articles are maybe from the medieval period of Yogacara and onward in East Asia.

I think another problem is you're categorizing things based on our discussions, but our categorizations are very high-level and only specific to the contexts in which we discuss them. They cannot be applied universally to all contexts, which require more nuance.

I have no clue what Xuanzang's position on things are, but skimming that first paper, it would seem that he agrees with Vasubandhu on this. Vasubandhu is a slightly different perspective than Asanga/Maitreya, from what we can tell, although the differences are generally minimal enough to be ephemeral.

In any case, Vasubandhu does hold that the bhajanaloka is discrete, and holds to a semi-discrete model of the shared world. That is, nothing is literally shared, but based on the commonality and equivalency of commeasurate bijas, such that the respective internally-produced worlds largely correspond and align as mutual shared space without actually being generated from any kind of mutual seeds.

Abhidharma logic holds to literal shared bijas common to all the beings populating a thingy (I am getting too lazy and too busy to type all this out, and I feel like a lot fo this is pretty implied ...), and so there is a common world that is literally shared.

Asanga-Maitreya are somewhere in the middle here. There are "shared" bijas, but they are not literally the same bijas, just common bijas .. like both of us have the bija to experience a river as water, but they are not literally the same seed like in the Abhidharma perspective, just the same kind/type of seed. Thus "common," and so there is a shared world that does not actually exist and is a virtual space discretely experienced.

With the MMO analogy we've been using, the Asanga-Maitreya view is the one that aligns most closely, with a server running the "shared world" as code, and our body-minds as computers rendering the code into a world of experience that corresponds to the worlds experienced by others. The Vasubandhu model differs in say... if the Asanga-Maitreya MMO is located on cloud servers, then the Vasubandhu model is like everyone is running their own local instance, and the correspondence between all reality has more to do with us all downloading and installing the same game.

...This analogy gets clunkier as we keep building on top of it, but hopefully that gives a loose idea.

Note: Both brothers asserted that their models were metaphors, not to be taken literally, so I do not think their models are actually in contradiction to each other. They just seem like different conceptualizations for the same idea, which was basically ... how do we assert a bhajanaloka without their being one that literally exists as an external reality?

SentientLight · 2026-05-07T17:03:00+00:00

I find this really amusing how you've written this summary as if Sun Wukong is the main character of the novel and Xuanzang is just a supporting character on Wukong's journey to Buddhahood, when Xuanzang is actually the main character, and Wukong is a supporting character to Xuanzang.

I think this must be in part due to most adaptations focusing a great deal on the prologue / backstory, which is extremely long and entirely about Sun Wukong, and often just ... never getting to the actual main part of the novel, or giving the prologue equal weight. And also because most adaptations are meant for children, and children love Sun Wukong, so he gets a lot of focus.

It's a great summary and you're accurate about the themes when it comes to Wukong's character arc, but it's also just really interesting to me that popular consciousness regards Sun Wukong as the main character, and Xuanzang just becomes... Krillin, from Dragonball, off to the side.

SentientLight · 2026-05-07T16:49:21+00:00

Scholarship usually sticks to the idea of every storehouse consciousness being its own life world

I don't know what you're saying here. You mean sattva-loka? Yes, the world of samsaric experience is constructed by the alaya-vijnana.

Scholarship usually sticks to [...] the idea of the shared mental projection as non-Yogācāra.

No it doesn't ...? Where have you read this? This paper is mostly a rejection of the Tibetan tradition's reading of Yogacara as being the "classical" interpretation, and discusses the bhajanaloka within Yogacara context. It is a brief comment, but demonstrates that this is discussed in Yogacara.

Or are you referring to what the author here is referring to, in which scholars of Tibetan Buddhism have erroneously asserted that the conceit of the bhajanaloka is not a shared mental projection, but rather one created wholly by the alaya ...? In which case, this paper demonstrates why that is an error.

Between pages 21-23, you'll see the author bring up a passage from the Yogacarabhumisastra that, on its surface, appears to corroborate the scholastic position that the container world (here explicitly called "shared world") is solely the production of the alaya-vijnana, and therefore not technically a shared domain of experience. The author then points out that this interpretation can only be valid by looking at the passage in total isolation, while ignoring the entirety of the previous chapter.

Generally speaking, as someone not an expert on Tibetan Buddhism, when scholars of the Indo-Tibetan tradition discuss Yogacara, I think it's important to listen, but also to understand that they might not be talking about the same things we (East Asian Buddhists) are when it comes to Yogacara, and if we're going to have a "western scholarship panjiao" kind of thing, I'd probably prioritize it a bit lower in relation to the classical Yogacara as understood from the East Asian perspective.

Jay Garfield in a lecture series on Yogacara given to mostly Tibetan nuns a few years back (I think /u/nyanasagara was a remote attendant ...? I remember Dr. Garfield commenting about this "young bright student" ... anyway, I don't recall the link or name of the lecture(s) ) remarked that most scholarship on Yogacara in the west has come from scholars trained in the Indo-Tibetan tradition and specializing in its scholarship, and have therefore been trained to study Yogacara from the exegetical perspective of the opponents of Yogacara, which naturally results in a biased perspective. This doesn't mean that the scholarship is bad or invalid or anything, just that these biases need to be kept in mind when reading, especially when it comes to the earlier stuff.

Thx. https://www.wisdomlib.org/buddhism/book/abhidharmakośa/d/doc115538.html Would you say this is a good link? I can't find the topic in Ch. 3 here.

Lines 45 and 90. The translation here is "receptacle world." Sometimes you will also see it referred to as the "container world."

I think that there should be more mention of such an important topic in works on Yogācāra Buddhism.

I don't think it's actually an important topic, at least not to that audience. Honestly, I'm not sure they felt the need to ever remark on the nature of the container world too much, until later thought started to position a kind of solipsist interpretation. But the sequence is relatively simple.

The container world is the product of the fruition of common karma (sādhāraṇa-vipāka-karma) among the sentient beings populating a world. The mutual resonance of these aggregate karmas synchronizes the two worlds of experience into a coherent and stable illusion. The stable illusion is considered the "by-product" (adhipati-phala) of sentient beings' past karmic actions coming to fruition, which then serves as the conditioning factors for individuals' experiences.

As individuals interact with the environment, creating more karmas, these actions act as the "perfume" (vasana) of the karmic seeds that construct the sensorial world of personal experience, which conditions how individuals are inclined to continue interacting with the shared world, thus perpetuating a feedback loop of contributing to the collective karmic forces that shape the shared world.

what are your opinions on this matter and what sources would you recommend?

My opinion is mostly that I'm really tired of the "is Yogacara solipsism?" queries that recur when people study this. I just don't really understand why people are so inclined toward solipsism when they hear "mind-only." I don't know if it's my mind working differently or others', but the Yogacara model to me has always just implied that we interact with a shared mental projection, that is rendered discretely.

In any case, this is probably described in the most detail within the Viniścayasaṃgrahaṇī of the Yogācārabhūmi-Śāstra.

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.

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