Dec 3– Buddhist Writings, translated by Henry Clarke Warren

 Remember the time Bobby Hill was Buddhist?

Dec 3– Buddhist Writings, translated by Henry Clarke Warren

Summary: The Buddha will be born when people live to be 100 (but not 100,000), in the middle-middle of the continent of India, to a high caste (convenient, can't have your religious figure be a peasant), to a perfectly virtuous mother (holy Madonna-whore complex, Batman!) who will die a week after childbirth.

Commentary: Two things jump to mind here:

1. If you put these conditions on the destined king in a fantasy novel, no one would buy it. "People have to live to be older than they do now. But not too old!" He will be born in the middle of the middle of the middle of India (a whole paragraph of middles). To warrior caste parents (that one tracks) and a mom who is absolutely virtuous and perfect (kind of cliché, there, although this might be one of the earliest appearances), who will die a week later (Because barren women are useless, apparently. She gets to keep her couch at least!). Also, the Buddha turns into an elephant and gets unbirthed. Maybe. It's a dream sequence.

2. I had to do math and look up how to do the circle inscribed in a square stuff. The circumference of a circle inscribed in a square is pi times the length of a side (technically it's an oval in a rectangle, but the math for that is just taking the average, which I did). Classical education musing of the evening: How many literature scholars knew that math back then? Could I have figured it out? (It's sort of a right triangle problem, but I doubt I would've figured out to use pi.) Did they all just have formula books sitting around? I want to get one of those engineering references and keep it on my desk. With the formula, it was fairly easy to do the math.