[Buddha-l] The state of buddha-l: a brief report

[Richard Hayes]

On August 14, 2009, at 11:19 PM, Joanna Kirkpatrick commented on the  
sūtra of W.F. Wong "I think bad karma probably also causes stupidity"  
with the following bhāṣya:

> Sounds like a comment on the ongoing diatribe, er, scholarly
> debate.

If you want scholarly debates, fans, enroll on H-BUDDHISM. This is  
buddha-l. It is modeled on a reality TV series. The basic idea is that  
you throw a bunch of earnest but lonely people in desperate need of  
affirmation into a locked room with Dan Lusthaus to see how much  
verbal abuse and dismissive reflections on their intelligence they can  
take before they beg to be let out of the room. The person who can  
write the most messages wins. It just so happens the results for the  
three-month period comprising May, June and July have just be computed.

And the winners are....
jkirk (a grand total of 123 messages in May, June and July)
Richard Hayes (74)
Jayarava (55)
Curt Steinmetz (41)

These four contestants withstood the rigors of carefully reading all  
42 messages from Dan Lusthaus during the three-month period.  
Congratulations!

Well, so much for rowdy low-brow entertainment. Let me report on  
what's going on in the rarefied atmosphere of the scholarly lists,  
where real minds are at work on issues of monumental importance to us  
all.

This is just in from INDOLOGY, where Dipak Bhattacharya writes:  
"Personally, I am certain that Papaver somniferum L. is not known  
before the second millennium AD in India.  One can see how confused  
medical authors are about it, even as late as the commentators on  
Sarngadhara's Sarngadharasamhita (ca 1400).  The Sanskrit name is a  
transparent borrowing from Greek."

WHEW! That's a little heady even for a hard-core intellectual. Maybe  
one would want to work up to that level of scholarly sophistication by  
tuning into H-BUDDHISM, where there has been a spirited discussion  
going on for the past week on whether Sanskrit words that have come to  
be recognized as English words can still be written with diacritical  
marks. Now that "nirvāṇa" has been accepted as an English word and  
can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary, it is my duty to inform  
you, it is just plain WRONG to spell it any way but "nirvana" (note  
the elegantly streamlined absence of diacritical marks). Or is it?  
Perhaps it's grammatically acceptable to use diacritic marks but  
simply unfashionably pedantic and potentially confusing to auto  
mechanics in Kansas City who read scholarly works on Indology during  
their lunch breaks. Or it could be that diacritical marks are  
misconstrued by American undergraduates who see them merely as  
decorations of the sort that one finds on such products as Häagen-Dazs  
and Blue Öyster Cult. Or perhaps diacritical marks are a patronizing  
vestige of colonialism, meant to shame natives for the inferiority of  
their languages that cannot be written in the Latin alphabet without  
alien markings. You'll have to tune in to H-BUDDHISM to find out what  
the indisputable facts of the matter are. But wait, that list is  
closed to everyone but scholars who can prove their bona fides. So  
some of you will have to make do with this plebeian reality show  
called buddha-l.

Buena suerte, amigos!
The Moderators