Textual Transmissions - Week 36

Date: September 8th, 2026

Last modified: Tuesday, 08-Sep-2026 18:13:51 UTC

Welcome back to Textual Transmissions, a weekly roundup series. I’m proud to say that this week went so much better than the one prior as the depressive episode has dissipiated. This week was not the best productivity wise; I skipped my classes on Tuesday and Wednesday, which was probably not the greatest decision given that those classes only permit 1-2 absences but, oh well.

Although the week itself was relatively chill I was able to see my boyfriend a couple of times. We reached five months of being together :), I went up with three of my friends to the Marshall County Blueberry Festival on Saturday, which I can only describe as being the Platonic ideal of a small town fair, which for some reason has over 400 vendors present. Expensive and extremely unhealthy food Had my first ever deep fried Oreos; really good. paired with kitschy items for sale, although many of them were AI generated.

The festival also made me extremely interested in the strange conservative dichotomy of designs simulatneously needing to be extremely sanitized and family-friendly to showcase their Christian family values and the accepting arms of The Lord(tm), but also need to declare their love for offending people, how much they hate various family members, and their love of guns and the excitement of getting the opportunity to shoot a person. I’m not sure how people are able to reconcile these contradictions in their head.

Regardless, on Sunday we then went further up to South Haven in Michigan, where one of my friends had a distant family member who owned a boat on Lake Michigan. Despite living in Indiana my entire life, that was the second time I’ve ever been to Lake Michigan, with the first time being in Chicago only a couple months ago. It was a beautiful and relaxing day and I wish we could’ve spent more time up there. I mainly wish I brought my point-and-shoot camera, but c’est la vie. I still need to process film from last December…

Website updates

You may have noticed that the blog and link pages have gotten a visual update! I didn’t like how the lists looked, so I turned them into a responsive grid. I think it looks a lot more interesting. I still need to add more links, as well as adding descriptions to each of the links as so far only one has one, but it’s a good start for now. I also made the link underline smaller as I felt like before the squiggles were too… squiggly.

Grad school?

On Friday I met with one of my professors over going to grad school for Buddhist studies. To summarize the conversation was basically “good luck”. Even ignoring the ever-decreasing amount of funding that humanities departments receive, and thus a decreasing amount of grad students that can be admitted, my particular research focus will make it hard for me to get tenureship, since Buddhist studies really enjoys the past and is rarely focused on contemporary issues. Within East Asian studies, religion is not looked upon that much. So… it’ll be a bit of a struggle. That’s why I think I also want to study the history of lay Buddhist movements and pilgrimage routes so I can have a historical background. All else fails I can do policy analysis or something.

She also recommended that I ramp up my studying of Classical Chinese and Sanskrit, as you won’t really be taken seriously if you can’t understand them (especially the latter).

Class

Embodying Nirvana

We continued discussing some of the basics of Buddhist belief. We discussed the three types of duḥkha (suffering). These are duḥkha-duḥkha which is close to what English speakers think of when the word “suffering” is said; just straight up bad times. Duḥkha-pārināma is the suffering of change, which is the suffering that occurs when we lose something. You have a lover, but they leave you? Duḥkha-pārināma! You have an ice cream cone, but then you eat it all, resulting in you not having anymore ice cream? Duḥkha-pārināma! Our yearning for something permanent causes us to suffer in this minute ways, as all things are subject to change and are impermanent.

A more subtle version of duḥkha-pārināma is saṃskāra-duḥkha, which is the suffering of condition states. While duḥkha-pārināma occurs when we are losing the object of happiness, saṃskāra-duḥkha occurs even when we are at the height of pleasure. It’s the reflection on if things are truly great right now, and if we are getting what we actually want (spoiler alert: the answer is no, since what we relaly want is a permanent pleasure that does not change).

Where does duḥkha come from? Tṛṣṇā (craving/thirst)! This originates all from ignorance, which in Buddhism is more of the idea “you don’t know what you don’t know.” You are ignorant of the true way of things, which causes you to thirst for more.

The reading was Donald Lopez’s article “The Buddha” in Critical Terms for the Study of Buddhism. It focused on the reception of the Buddha’s uṣṇīṣa, which is a protrubence on the top of the Buddha’s head, particularly by European audiences and their extreme confusion about the physical trait.

Buddhist Art

The first site case study is Sanchi Stůpa, which is a site built by King Aśoka in the 3rd century BCE, and is one of the oldest stone structures in India. It represents an aniconistic view of the Buddha, with the Buddha never being depicted literally, rather using symbols (his feet, a king’s parasol, a stone slab, etc.). In particular, we looked at the toranas, which showcase various tales from the Buddha’s past and present lives, such as the defeat of Māra and the Mahakapi Jataka. For example, below is the rear bottom archtirave on the Western Gateway.

The scene depicts the defeat of Māra by the Buddha. The Buddha is depicted aniconistically in the middle of the scene, represented by the temple of Bodhgayā; see the bodhi tree and parasol on top, which is frequently used in symbolizing the Buddha. On the right are the armies of Māra fleeing the scene after their defeat, while on the left is an entourage of gods celebrating the Buddha’s accomplishment. It is debated on whether or not this was created by one or two artists, given the much more complex scene of the fleeing demons.

East Asian Buddhism

Began going through the Longer Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtra. Not much to say.

Media Chinese

Decided the news that I’m going to use for my presentation: 年轻人的玄学：热潮背后的现象解析.

Links

Mecca and the mall

An interesting article about the conflict between the modernization of Mecca to fit more pilgrims but also the expectations of the pilgrim. It goes with some of the feelings I had visiting Fo Guang Shan monastery and generally my research interest in pilgrimage. I particularly found the following intriguing:

Some changes are unavoidable. When Muhammad performed his final pilgrimage in 632 CE, an estimated 30,000 followers accompanied him. When I performed my pilgrimage in February 2026, an estimated 1.68 million people from abroad had been granted pilgrimage permits for the month of Ramadan. These pilgrims need space not just to worship, but also to sleep and eat, and to do all that mortal bodies do – and so infrastructure should be built to support those needs.

However, the de-historicisation of Mecca has been a calculated, ideological project, with what would be considered protected monuments in any other part of the world decimated to build vanity projects. Saudi Arabia’s premier religious ideology – Wahhabism – is an 18th-century revivalist movement that espouses a literalist, strict interpretation of the Quran, and it has encouraged the tearing down of historical sites such as the houses of early Islamic figures, and the enshrined gravesites of the Prophet’s family, claiming that they’d invite idolatry otherwise. The refitting of Mecca is also deeply entwined with the rise of the petrodollar in the Kingdom, creating a tense intersection where ritual jostles with capitalism for space. As the writer and public intellectual Ziauddin Sardar puts it in The Sacred City (2014), the Kingdom has made a steel and glass heaven of consumerism in the name of extinguishing idol worship.

On the back of the oil economy, the Kingdom has exported its brand of Wahhabi Islam across the world. Traditional ways of believing have been homogenised, and a dogmatic, cookie-cutter version of the faith has been parcelled off. In return, the Global North has exported the phenomenon of placelessness to Saudi Arabia, whereby an influx of foreign brands has remade both the country’s high streets and consumer choices. The commercial onslaught, compounded by the active destruction of material history, gives the fringes of sacred space a particular tone. Irfan al-Alawi, a theologian and heritage preservation proponent, described this in The Guardian as the ‘Manhattanisation of Mecca’.