So let me get this straight: HTML was originally built to have markup and style both in the same containers, and it was clunky and hard to maintain, so CSS was invented, to abstract away the styles so that content and style could be separate. And that worked pretty well. And then someone came along and said: you know what would be great? Removing all the useful abstractions and going back to the HTML 1.0 way of putting it all in one container. And rewriting HTML in JavaScript to make it less maintainable. And so on. Am I getting this right? Correct me if I'm wrong.
It's not great design. It's a dirty hack that might work for some people, but is a non-standard practice that abuses JavaScript to achieve a certain effect. Overriding scrolling behavior might work if you're scrolling with a mouse or trackpad at a consistent speed, that that might even work for a majority of the site's visitors, but for others it breaks. If you press the PageDown key to get to the next page, it doesn't work. If you scroll half a page down using another key combination, it doesn't work. If you use a text-based browser, it doesn't work. I didn't test it using a screen reader or other types of browsers, but I can't imagine it would work that well there, either.
This blog post, and the one it references, on the jhanas[1], belong to this weird genre which is basically in the vein of Buddhist writing, but without more than a passing reference to Buddhism, its scholarly tradition, its terminology, or its taxonomy. Here's Nadia:
> The word jhana comes from Buddhist scriptures, where they were first described. However, as many meditators like to point out, jhanas predate Buddhism. ... I am not a Buddhist, nor would I describe myself as a meditator.
She seems to be taking pains to extract Buddhist techniques from Buddhism, and discuss them independently. Even if these practices predate Buddhism, Buddhism is the system of thought that contextualizes them, and has been developed and enriched over thousands of years, to provide a systematic framework for understanding them. This is especially true of Zen Buddhism—the word "Zen" is even derived from "jhana."
It'd be like if you tried to describe the properties of sulfur dioxide or something, without acknowledging that an entire academic discipline—chemistry—has been doing that for centuries. You don't have to "be a Buddhist" to study Buddhism, any more than you have to be a chemist to study chemistry.
I think Buddhism still (arguably rightly) doesn't sit entirely well with non-religious Westerners. I have studied with a Zen Sangha and transmitted teachers on and off for a bit and have found their explanations helpful. However, it's absolutely undeniably that the Buddhist cannon is full of batshit insane stuff, just like any other religion. You can write them off as skillful means, but in some ways I think it's more honest to say that you practice meditation with Buddhist characteristics than to say that you're a real Buddhist if you don't have the time of day for spirits and dieties.
Again, this isn't saying that Buddhist modernism is bad. I'd argue that having clear eyes about what parts of Buddhist practice you're willing to take and leave is good.
> it's absolutely undeniably that the Buddhist cannon is full of batshit insane stuff, just like any other religion
Buddhism is not like Christianity, where the source of truth is a book or a canon, and that the book must be believed in order to subscribe to the belief system. Speaking of Zen, at least, it's one of the foundational tenets that it's "a separate transmission, outside the scriptures." In fact, there's a lot written about how Zen isn't a religion at all, at least not in the Western sense, with beliefs, faith, and doctrines. You don't need to believe anything to be a Zen Buddhist. So even if the "Buddhist cannon" has "batshit insane stuff," who cares? Shakyamuni was a great teacher, but that doesn't mean that he can't be wrong.
> I think it's more honest to say that you practice meditation with Buddhist characteristics than to say that you're a real Buddhist if you don't have the time of day for spirits and deities
You might be under the impression that Buddhism is somehow theistic or dualistic. But the Buddha, for one, outright rejects mind/body dualism, which therefore rejects the possibility of spirits and deities. Some traditions, like Tibetan Buddhism, have tantric practices like deity yoga, which involve visualizing deity-like figures, but even then, there's no presumption that these deities actually exist, in some kind of spirit realm. But even if there were Buddhists who believe in "spirits and dieties," again, who cares? It's not like you have to believe anything to study and practice Buddhism.
My main point is that, if you're writing about meditation, or meditative practices, that either originated with Buddhism or were developed through Buddhism, it's fairly disingenuous to completely divorce it from its context.
As a student of Zen Buddhism, I'm always a little bothered to see yet another thing called "Zen" that has virtually nothing to do with Zen, or Buddhism. The authors seem to think that "Zen" is a synonym for "calm," even though calm abiding is only one small aspect of Zen. If you read any of the classic Zen literature, like the Gateless Gate or the Blue Cliff Record, you'd come away with the impression that Zen is very active, vital, and vigorous.
But with a name like Zen, I at least expected the browser to be one of those tabless ones that encourage you to focus your attention on the present task, by enforcing one web page at a time. Or a text-based one, like w3m, that removes graphics to allow you to focus on the words. While the Zen browser interface is a little cleaner, with fewer buttons and things, that doesn't necessarily translate to "calmer." Calm is what you bring to the browsing experience, not what you take away from it.
> Most versions of Zen are made-up export products designed to flatter Westerners. Kind of like the samurai movie honor bushido stuff.
I don't think so. If you go to a zenkai or a sesshin held by a western zendo, and then go to one at a Japanese temple, you won't notice too many differences, apart from the language. Many American zen teachers trained in Japan at some point, or their teachers did, and they brought these practices back more or less verbatim. In fact, in many American zendos, students chant the same sutras, _in Japanese_, as in Japanese zendos. Plus, there are regulatory bodies, like the Soto Zen school, that certify affiliated western zendos as authoritative. It's not made-up, it's hardly an "export product," and it certainly isn't designed to flatter anyone.
That seems like a rambling, self-published book by a Vajrayana practitioner with an axe to grind against Zen, for some bizarre reason. But there are plenty of real books about the rise of American Zen, or Buddhism in the west, that are well-researched. _Zen in America_ by Helen Tworkov is one.
> Japanese people think Buddhism is a thing you do at funerals.
Not at all. Buddhism, and Zen especially, permeate Japanese culture very deeply. Japanese aesthetics, architecture, landscape design, visual art, calligraphy, the tea ceremony, and the martial arts, have all been strongly influenced by Zen. And it's all over pop culture, too—just think of how pervasive Daruma dolls are—that's Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen. Sure, Buddhism is at funerals, but it's everywhere, else, too.
> If you get into it more seriously, I vaguely understand it's mostly a religion that tells you not to have sex.
Maybe you're thinking of Christianity? Unless you're a monk, attitudes towards sex are fairly liberal in Buddhism. There are bodhisattva precepts that caution against misusing sex, but nowhere does anyone tell you not to have it. In fact, it's largely unconcerned with it, let alone "mostly a religion that tells you not to have" it. Western religions are very concerned with telling you what to do and not do, but Buddhism is concerned with liberation.
> > Japanese people think Buddhism is a thing you do at funerals.
> Buddhism, and Zen especially, permeate Japanese culture very deeply. Japanese aesthetics, architecture, landscape design, visual art, calligraphy, the tea ceremony, and the martial arts, have all been strongly influenced by Zen. And it's all over pop culture, too—just think of how pervasive Daruma dolls are—that's Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen. Sure, Buddhism is at funerals, but it's everywhere, else, too.
Your statement may be true but so is the grandparent's. (Although I agree that there isn't much about not having sex; mainly you hear about monks don't eat meat, or at least not while people are looking)
Have they invented anything at all? You've already been able to do this with basically any mobile linux distro, as far as I can tell. At least, on the best-supported devices. You don't need a custom OS for it.
What's absurdly ironic about these smartphone addiction apps is that * they're smartphone apps*. They require you to use your smartphone in order to use them. Far more effective, I imagine, would be anything else at all: ditching your smartphone, replacing it with a dumbphone, doing an unplugging retreat, doing a "dopamine fast," or simply taking up a new hobby that's more healthy, like writing or reading on paper.
I keep punctuating like it's the 18th Century, myself;—compound points are my favorites:—like the colon-dash compound, AKA the "dog's bollocks."