TERMS STARTING WITH
encyclopediacal ::: a. --> Encyclopedic.
encyclopedian ::: a. --> Embracing the whole circle of learning, or a wide range of subjects.
encyclopedia ::: n. --> Alt. of Encyclopaedia
Encyclopedia, “Angelology.”]
Encyclopedia, “Angels”; Mackenzie, Myths of
Encyclopedia', Gaynor, Dictionary of Mysticism].
Encyclopedia I, 595.]
Encyclopedia of Religions.]
Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology, The. See
Encyclopedia, p. 521.]
TERMS ANYWHERE
19, 22. [Rf. Forlong, Encyclopedia of Religions .]
22. Encyclopedias and references (vols. 53-54, nos. 2121-2136), e.g.,
28. According to Jewish tradition, all patriarchs, along with those who led exceptionally virtuous lives, attained angelic rank when they got to Heaven. This, however, has been disputed: “the belief that the souls of the righteous after death become angels has never been part of Jewish thought” ( Universal Jewish Encyclopedia I, 314). That it was at one time part of patristic thinking can be deduced from Theodotus ( Excerpts ) to the effect that “those who are changed from men to angels are instructed for a thousand years by the angels, after they are brought to perfection” and that then “those who have been taught are translated to archangelic authority.”
AbhidharmamahAvibhAsA. (T. Chos mngon pa bye brag bshad pa chen po; C. Apidamo dapiposha lun; J. Abidatsuma daibibasharon; K. Abidalma taebibasa non 阿毘達磨大毘婆沙論). In Sanskrit, "Great Exegesis of ABHIDHARMA," also commonly known as MahAvibhAsA; a massive VAIBHAsIKA treatise on SARVASTIVADA abhidharma translated into Chinese by the scholar-pilgrim XUANZANG and his translation bureau between 656 and 659 at XIMINGSI in the Tang capital of Chang'an. Although no Sanskrit version of this text is extant, earlier Chinese translations by Buddhavarman and others survive, albeit only in (equally massive) fragments. The complete Sanskrit text of the recension that Xuanzang used was in 100,000 slokas; his translation was in 200 rolls, making it one of the largest single works in the Buddhist canon. According to the account in Xuanzang's DA TANG XIYU JI, four hundred years after the Buddha's PARINIRVAnA, King KANIsKA gathered five hundred ARHATs to recite the Buddhist canon (TRIPItAKA). The ABHIDHARMAPItAKA of this canon, which is associated with the SarvAstivAda school, is said to have been redacted during this council (see COUNCIL, FOURTH). The central abhidharma treatise of the SarvAstivAda school is KATYAYANĪPUTRA's JNANAPRASTHANA, and the AbhidharmamahAvibhAsA purports to offer a comprehensive overview of varying views on the meaning of that seminal text by the five hundred arhats who were in attendance at the convocation. The comments of four major ABHIDHARMIKAs (Ghosa, DHARMATRATA, VASUMITRA, and Buddhadeva) are interwoven into the MahAvibhAsA's contextual analysis of KAtyAyanīputra's material from the JNAnaprasthAna, making the text a veritable encyclopedia of contemporary Buddhist scholasticism. Since the MahAvibhAsA also purports to be a commentary on the central text of the SarvAstivAda school, it therefore offers a comprehensive picture of the development of SarvAstivAda thought after the compilation of the JNAnaprasthAna. The MahAvibhAsA is divided into eight sections (grantha) and several chapters (varga), which systematically follow the eight sections and forty-three chapters of the JNAnaprasthAna in presenting its explication. Coverage of each topic begins with an overview of varying interpretations found in different Buddhist and non-Buddhist schools, detailed coverage of the positions of the four major SarvAstivAda Abhidharmikas, and finally the definitive judgment of the compilers, the KAsmīri followers of KAtyAyanĪputra, who call themselves the VibhAsAsAstrins. The MahAvibhAsA was the major influence on the systematic scholastic elaboration of SarvAstivAda doctrine that appears (though with occasional intrusions from the positions of the SarvAstivAda's more-progressive SAUTRANTIKA offshoot) in VASUBANDHU's influential ABHIDHARMAKOsABHAsYA, which itself elicited a spirited response from later SarvAstivAda-VaibhAsika scholars, such as SAMGHABHADRA in his *NYAYANUSARA. The MahAvibhAsa was not translated into Tibetan until the twentieth century, when a translation entitled Bye brag bshad mdzod chen mo was made at the Sino-Tibetan Institute by the Chinese monk FAZUN between 1946 and 1949. He presented a copy of the manuscript to the young fourteenth DALAI LAMA on the Dalai Lama's visit to Beijing in 1954, but it is not known whether it is still extant.
abhidharmapitaka. (P. abhidhammapitaka; T. chos mngon pa'i sde snod; C. lunzang; J. ronzo; K. nonjang 論藏). The third of the three "baskets" (PItAKA) of the Buddhist canon (TRIPItAKA). The abhidharmapitaka derives from attempts in the early Buddhist community to elucidate the definitive significance of the teachings of the Buddha, as compiled in the SuTRAs. Since the Buddha was well known to have adapted his message to fit the predilections and needs of his audience (cf. UPAYAKAUsALYA), there inevitably appeared inconsistencies in his teachings that needed to be resolved. The attempts to ferret out the definitive meaning of the BUDDHADHARMA through scholastic interpretation and exegesis eventually led to a new body of texts that ultimately were granted canonical status in their own right. These are the texts of the abhidharmapitaka. The earliest of these texts, such as the PAli VIBHAnGA and PUGGALAPANNATTI and the SARVASTIVADA SAMGĪTIPARYAYA and DHARMASKANDHA, are structured as commentaries to specific sutras or portions of sutras. These materials typically organized the teachings around elaborate doctrinal taxonomies, which were used as mnemonic devices or catechisms. Later texts move beyond individual sutras to systematize a wide range of doctrinal material, offering ever more complex analytical categorizations and discursive elaborations of the DHARMA. Ultimately, abhidharma texts emerge as a new genre of Buddhist literature in their own right, employing sophisticated philosophical speculation and sometimes even involving polemical attacks on the positions of rival factions within the SAMGHA. ¶ At least seven schools of Indian Buddhism transmitted their own recensions of abhidharma texts, but only two of these canons are extant in their entirety. The PAli abhidhammapitaka of the THERAVADA school, the only recension that survives in an Indian language, includes seven texts (the order of which often differs): (1) DHAMMASAnGAnI ("Enumeration of Dharmas") examines factors of mentality and materiality (NAMARuPA), arranged according to ethical quality; (2) VIBHAnGA ("Analysis") analyzes the aggregates (SKANDHA), conditioned origination (PRATĪTYASAMUTPADA), and meditative development, each treatment culminating in a catechistic series of inquiries; (3) DHATUKATHA ("Discourse on Elements") categorizes all dharmas in terms of the skandhas and sense-fields (AYATANA); (4) PUGGALAPANNATTI ("Description of Human Types") analyzes different character types in terms of the three afflictions of greed (LOBHA), hatred (DVEsA), and delusion (MOHA) and various related subcategories; (5) KATHAVATTHU ("Points of Controversy") scrutinizes the views of rival schools of mainstream Buddhism and how they differ from the TheravAda; (6) YAMAKA ("Pairs") provides specific denotations of problematic terms through paired comparisons; (7) PAttHANA ("Conditions") treats extensively the full implications of conditioned origination. ¶ The abhidharmapitaka of the SARVASTIVADA school is extant only in Chinese translation, the definitive versions of which were prepared by XUANZANG's translation team in the seventh century. It also includes seven texts: (1) SAMGĪTIPARYAYA[PADAsASTRA] ("Discourse on Pronouncements") attributed to either MAHAKAUstHILA or sARIPUTRA, a commentary on the SaMgītisutra (see SAnGĪTISUTTA), where sAriputra sets out a series of dharma lists (MATṚKA), ordered from ones to elevens, to organize the Buddha's teachings systematically; (2) DHARMASKANDHA[PADAsASTRA] ("Aggregation of Dharmas"), attributed to sAriputra or MAHAMAUDGALYAYANA, discusses Buddhist soteriological practices, as well as the afflictions that hinder spiritual progress, drawn primarily from the AGAMAs; (3) PRAJNAPTIBHAsYA[PADAsASTRA] ("Treatise on Designations"), attributed to MaudgalyAyana, treats Buddhist cosmology (lokaprajNapti), causes (kArana), and action (KARMAN); (4) DHATUKAYA[PADAsASTRA] ("Collection on the Elements"), attributed to either PuRnA or VASUMITRA, discusses the mental concomitants (the meaning of DHATU in this treatise) and sets out specific sets of mental factors that are present in all moments of consciousness (viz., the ten MAHABHuMIKA) or all defiled states of mind (viz., the ten KLEsAMAHABHuMIKA); (5) VIJNANAKAYA[PADAsASTRA] ("Collection on Consciousness"), attributed to Devasarman, seeks to prove the veracity of the eponymous SarvAstivAda position that dharmas exist in all three time periods (TRIKALA) of past, present, and future, and the falsity of notions of the person (PUDGALA); it also provides the first listing of the four types of conditions (PRATYAYA); (6) PRAKARAnA[PADAsASTRA] ("Exposition"), attributed to VASUMITRA, first introduces the categorization of dharmas according to the more developed SarvAstivAda rubric of RuPA, CITTA, CAITTA, CITTAVIPRAYUKTASAMSKARA, and ASAMSKṚTA dharmas; it also adds a new listing of KUsALAMAHABHuMIKA, or factors always associated with wholesome states of mind; (7) JNANAPRASTHANA ("Foundations of Knowledge"), attributed to KATYAYANĪPUTRA, an exhaustive survey of SarvAstivAda dharma theory and the school's exposition of psychological states, which forms the basis of the massive encyclopedia of SarvAstivAda-VaibhAsika abhidharma, the ABHIDHARMAMAHAVIBHAsA. In the traditional organization of the seven canonical books of the SarvAstivAda abhidharmapitaka, the JNANAPRASTHANA is treated as the "body" (sARĪRA), or central treatise of the canon, with its six "feet" (pAda), or ancillary treatises (pAdasAstra), listed in the following order: (1) PrakaranapAda, (2) VijNAnakAya, (3) Dharmaskandha, (4) PrajNaptibhAsya, (5) DhAtukAya, and (6) SaMgītiparyAya. Abhidharma exegetes later turned their attention to these canonical abhidharma materials and subjected them to the kind of rigorous scholarly analysis previously directed to the sutras. These led to the writing of innovative syntheses and synopses of abhidharma doctrine, in such texts as BUDDHAGHOSA's VISUDDHIMAGGA and ANURUDDHA's ABHIDHAMMATTHASAnGAHA, VASUBANDHU's ABHIDHARMAKOsABHAsYA, and SAMGHABHADRA's *NYAYANUSARA. In East Asia, this third "basket" was eventually expanded to include the burgeoning scholastic literature of the MAHAYANA, transforming it from a strictly abhidharmapitaka into a broader "treatise basket" or *sASTRAPItAKA (C. lunzang).
According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, “Angel,”
according to the Catholic Encyclopedia, “Gnosti¬
According to the Jewish Encyclopedia (p. 595),
Akkadian name being Im (Forlong, Encyclopedia
alphabetic language "human language" A written human language in which symbols reflect the pronunciation of the words. Examples are English, Greek, Russian, Thai, Arabic and Hebrew. Alphabetic languages contrast with {ideographic languages}. {I18N Encyclopedia (http://i18ngurus.com/encyclopedia/alphabetic_language.html)}. (2004-08-29)
Among its members W. Dubislav (1937), K. Grelling, O. Helmer, C. G. Hempel, A. Herzberg, K.. Korsch, H. Reichenbach (q.v.), M. Strauss. Many members of the following groups may be regarded as adherents of Scientific Empiricism: the Berlin Society for Scientific Philosophy, the W arsaw School, the Cambridge School for Analytic Philosophy (q.v.), further, in U. S. A., some of the representatives of contemporary Pragmatism (q.v.), especially C. W. Morris, of Neo-Realism (q.v.), and of Operationalism (q.v.). Among the individual adherents not belonging to the groups mentioned: E. Kaila (Finland), J. Jörgensen (Denmark), A. Ness (Norway); A. J. Ayer, J. H. Woodger (England); M. Boll (France); K. Popper (now New Zealand); E. Brunswik, H. Gomperz, Felix Kaufmann, R. V. Mises, L. Rougier, E. Zilsel (now in U. S. A.); E. Nagel, W. V. Quine, and many others (in U.S.A.). The general attitude and the views of Scientific Empiricism are in esential agreement with those of Logical Empiricism (see above, 1). Here, the unity of science is especially emphasized, in various respects There is a logical unity of the language of science; the concepts of different branches of science are not of fundamentally different kinds but belong to one coherent system. The unity of science in this sense is closely connected with the thesis of Physicahsm (q.v.). There is a practical task in the present stage of development, to come to a better mutual adaptation of terminologies in different branches of science. There is today no unity of the laws of science. It is an aim of the future development of science to come, if possible, to a simple set of connected, fundamental laws from which the special laws in the different branches of science, including the social sciences, can be deduced. Here also, the analysis of language is regarded as one of the chief methods of the science of science. While logical positivism stressed chiefly the logical side of this analysis, it is here carried out from various directions, including an analysis of the biological and sociological sides of the activities of language and knowledge, as they have been emphasized earlier by Pragmatism (q.v.), especially C. S. Peirce and G. H. Mead. Thus the development leads now to a comprehensive general theory of signs or semiotic (q.v.) as a basis for philosophy The following publications and meetings may be regarded as organs of this movement. The periodical "Erkenntnis", since 1930, now continued as "Journal of Unified Science" The "Encyclopedia of Unified Science", its first part ("Foundations of the Unity of Science", 2 vols.) consisting of twenty monographs (eight appeared by 1940). Here, the foundations of various fields of science are discussed, especially from the point of view of the unity of science and scientific procedure, and the relations between the fields. Thus, the work intends to serve as an introduction to the science of science (q.v.). A series of International Congresses for the Unity of Science was started by a preliminary conference in Prague 1934 (see report, Erkenntnis 5, 1935). The congresses took place at Pans in 1935 ("Actes", Pans 1936; Erkenntnis 5, 1936); at Copenhagen in 1936 (Erkenntnis 6, 1937); at Paris in 1937; at Cambridge, England, in 1938 (Erkenntnis 7, 1938); at Cambridge, Mass., in 1939 (J. Unif. Sc. 9, 1941); at Chicago in 1941. Concerning the development and the aims of this movement, see O. Neurath and C. W. Morris (for both, see above, I D), further H. Reichenbach, Ziele and Wege der heutigen Naturphilosophie, 1931; S. S. Stevens, "Psychology and the Science of Science", Psych. Bull. 36, 1939 (with bibliography). Bibliographies in "Erkenntnis": 1, 1931, p. 315, p. 335 (Polish authors); 2, 1931, p. 151, p. 189; 5, 1935, p. 185, p. 195 (American authors), p. 199 (Polish authors), p. 409, larger bibliography: in Encycl. Unif. Science, vol. II, No. 10 (to ippetr in 1942). -- R.C.
“Angelology,” in Jeurish Encyclopedia.]
“Angelology,” in Jewish Encyclopedia.]
As J. G. R. Forlong says in Encyclopedia of
At more than one million words, this is the largest dictionary of Buddhism ever produced in the English language. Yet even at this length, it only begins to represent the full breadth and depth of the Buddhist tradition. Many great dictionaries and glossaries have been produced in Asia over the long history of Buddhism and Buddhist Studies. One thinks immediately of works like the MahAvyutpatti, the ninth-century Tibetan-Sanskrit lexicon said to have been commissioned by the king of Tibet to serve as a guide for translators of the dharma. It contains 9,565 entries in 283 categories. One of the great achievements of twentieth-century Buddhology was the Bukkyo Daijiten ("Encyclopedia of Buddhism"), published in ten massive volumes between 1932 and 1964 by the distinguished Japanese scholar Mochizuki Shinko. Among English-language works, there is William Soothill and Lewis Hodous's A Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms, published in 1937, and, from the same year, G. P. Malalasekera's invaluable Dictionary of PAli Proper Names. In preparing the present dictionary, we have sought to build upon these classic works in substantial ways.
Aufklärung: In general, this German word and its English equivalent Enlightenment denote the self-emancipation of man from mere authority, prejudice, convention and tradition, with an insistence on freer thinking about problems uncritically referred to these other agencies. According to Kant's famous definition "Enlightenment is the liberation of man from his self-caused state of minority, which is the incapacity of using one's understanding without the direction of another. This state of minority is caused when its source lies not in the lack of understanding, but in the lack of determination and courage to use it without the assistance of another" (Was ist Aufklärung? 1784). In its historical perspective, the Aufklärung refers to the cultural atmosphere and contrlbutions of the 18th century, especially in Germany, France and England [which affected also American thought with B. Franklin, T. Paine and the leaders of the Revolution]. It crystallized tendencies emphasized by the Renaissance, and quickened by modern scepticism and empiricism, and by the great scientific discoveries of the 17th century. This movement, which was represented by men of varying tendencies, gave an impetus to general learning, a more popular philosophy, empirical science, scriptural criticism, social and political thought. More especially, the word Aufklärung is applied to the German contributions to 18th century culture. In philosophy, its principal representatives are G. E. Lessing (1729-81) who believed in free speech and in a methodical criticism of religion, without being a free-thinker; H. S. Reimarus (1694-1768) who expounded a naturalistic philosophy and denied the supernatural origin of Christianity; Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86) who endeavoured to mitigate prejudices and developed a popular common-sense philosophy; Chr. Wolff (1679-1754), J. A. Eberhard (1739-1809) who followed the Leibnizian rationalism and criticized unsuccessfully Kant and Fichte; and J. G. Herder (1744-1803) who was best as an interpreter of others, but whose intuitional suggestions have borne fruit in the organic correlation of the sciences, and in questions of language in relation to human nature and to national character. The works of Kant and Goethe mark the culmination of the German Enlightenment. Cf. J. G. Hibben, Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 1910. --T.G. Augustinianism: The thought of St. Augustine of Hippo, and of his followers. Born in 354 at Tagaste in N. Africa, A. studied rhetoric in Carthage, taught that subject there and in Rome and Milan. Attracted successively to Manicheanism, Scepticism, and Neo-Platontsm, A. eventually found intellectual and moral peace with his conversion to Christianity in his thirty-fourth year. Returning to Africa, he established numerous monasteries, became a priest in 391, Bishop of Hippo in 395. Augustine wrote much: On Free Choice, Confessions, Literal Commentary on Genesis, On the Trinity, and City of God, are his most noted works. He died in 430. St. Augustine's characteristic method, an inward empiricism which has little in common with later variants, starts from things without, proceeds within to the self, and moves upwards to God. These three poles of the Augustinian dialectic are polarized by his doctrine of moderate illuminism. An ontological illumination is required to explain the metaphysical structure of things. The truth of judgment demands a noetic illumination. A moral illumination is necessary in the order of willing; and so, too, an lllumination of art in the aesthetic order. Other illuminations which transcend the natural order do not come within the scope of philosophy; they provide the wisdoms of theology and mysticism. Every being is illuminated ontologically by number, form, unity and its derivatives, and order. A thing is what it is, in so far as it is more or less flooded by the light of these ontological constituents. Sensation is necessary in order to know material substances. There is certainly an action of the external object on the body and a corresponding passion of the body, but, as the soul is superior to the body and can suffer nothing from its inferior, sensation must be an action, not a passion, of the soul. Sensation takes place only when the observing soul, dynamically on guard throughout the body, is vitally attentive to the changes suffered by the body. However, an adequate basis for the knowledge of intellectual truth is not found in sensation alone. In order to know, for example, that a body is multiple, the idea of unity must be present already, otherwise its multiplicity could not be recognized. If numbers are not drawn in by the bodily senses which perceive only the contingent and passing, is the mind the source of the unchanging and necessary truth of numbers? The mind of man is also contingent and mutable, and cannot give what it does not possess. As ideas are not innate, nor remembered from a previous existence of the soul, they can be accounted for only by an immutable source higher than the soul. In so far as man is endowed with an intellect, he is a being naturally illuminated by God, Who may be compared to an intelligible sun. The human intellect does not create the laws of thought; it finds them and submits to them. The immediate intuition of these normative rules does not carry any content, thus any trace of ontologism is avoided. Things have forms because they have numbers, and they have being in so far as they possess form. The sufficient explanation of all formable, and hence changeable, things is an immutable and eternal form which is unrestricted in time and space. The forms or ideas of all things actually existing in the world are in the things themselves (as rationes seminales) and in the Divine Mind (as rationes aeternae). Nothing could exist without unity, for to be is no other than to be one. There is a unity proper to each level of being, a unity of the material individual and species, of the soul, and of that union of souls in the love of the same good, which union constitutes the city. Order, also, is ontologically imbibed by all beings. To tend to being is to tend to order; order secures being, disorder leads to non-being. Order is the distribution which allots things equal and unequal each to its own place and integrates an ensemble of parts in accordance with an end. Hence, peace is defined as the tranquillity of order. Just as things have their being from their forms, the order of parts, and their numerical relations, so too their beauty is not something superadded, but the shining out of all their intelligible co-ingredients. S. Aurelii Augustini, Opera Omnia, Migne, PL 32-47; (a critical edition of some works will be found in the Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, Vienna). Gilson, E., Introd. a l'etude de s. Augustin, (Paris, 1931) contains very good bibliography up to 1927, pp. 309-331. Pope, H., St. Augustine of Hippo, (London, 1937). Chapman, E., St. Augustine's Philos. of Beauty, (N. Y., 1939). Figgis, J. N., The Political Aspects of St. Augustine's "City of God", (London, 1921). --E.C. Authenticity: In a general sense, genuineness, truth according to its title. It involves sometimes a direct and personal characteristic (Whitehead speaks of "authentic feelings"). This word also refers to problems of fundamental criticism involving title, tradition, authorship and evidence. These problems are vital in theology, and basic in scholarship with regard to the interpretation of texts and doctrines. --T.G. Authoritarianism: That theory of knowledge which maintains that the truth of any proposition is determined by the fact of its having been asserted by a certain esteemed individual or group of individuals. Cf. H. Newman, Grammar of Assent; C. S. Peirce, "Fixation of Belief," in Chance, Love and Logic, ed. M. R. Cohen. --A.C.B. Autistic thinking: Absorption in fanciful or wishful thinking without proper control by objective or factual material; day dreaming; undisciplined imagination. --A.C.B. Automaton Theory: Theory that a living organism may be considered a mere machine. See Automatism. Automatism: (Gr. automatos, self-moving) (a) In metaphysics: Theory that animal and human organisms are automata, that is to say, are machines governed by the laws of physics and mechanics. Automatism, as propounded by Descartes, considered the lower animals to be pure automata (Letter to Henry More, 1649) and man a machine controlled by a rational soul (Treatise on Man). Pure automatism for man as well as animals is advocated by La Mettrie (Man, a Machine, 1748). During the Nineteenth century, automatism, combined with epiphenomenalism, was advanced by Hodgson, Huxley and Clifford. (Cf. W. James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, ch. V.) Behaviorism, of the extreme sort, is the most recent version of automatism (See Behaviorism). (b) In psychology: Psychological automatism is the performance of apparently purposeful actions, like automatic writing without the superintendence of the conscious mind. L. C. Rosenfield, From Beast Machine to Man Machine, N. Y., 1941. --L.W. Automatism, Conscious: The automatism of Hodgson, Huxley, and Clifford which considers man a machine to which mind or consciousness is superadded; the mind of man is, however, causally ineffectual. See Automatism; Epiphenomenalism. --L.W. Autonomy: (Gr. autonomia, independence) Freedom consisting in self-determination and independence of all external constraint. See Freedom. Kant defines autonomy of the will as subjection of the will to its own law, the categorical imperative, in contrast to heteronomy, its subjection to a law or end outside the rational will. (Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, § 2.) --L.W. Autonomy of ethics: A doctrine, usually propounded by intuitionists, that ethics is not a part of, and cannot be derived from, either metaphysics or any of the natural or social sciences. See Intuitionism, Metaphysical ethics, Naturalistic ethics. --W.K.F. Autonomy of the will: (in Kant's ethics) The freedom of the rational will to legislate to itself, which constitutes the basis for the autonomy of the moral law. --P.A.S. Autonymy: In the terminology introduced by Carnap, a word (phrase, symbol, expression) is autonymous if it is used as a name for itself --for the geometric shape, sound, etc. which it exemplifies, or for the word as a historical and grammatical unit. Autonymy is thus the same as the Scholastic suppositio matertalis (q. v.), although the viewpoint is different. --A.C. Autotelic: (from Gr. autos, self, and telos, end) Said of any absorbing activity engaged in for its own sake (cf. German Selbstzweck), such as higher mathematics, chess, etc. In aesthetics, applied to creative art and play which lack any conscious reference to the accomplishment of something useful. In the view of some, it may constitute something beneficent in itself of which the person following his art impulse (q.v.) or playing is unaware, thus approaching a heterotelic (q.v.) conception. --K.F.L. Avenarius, Richard: (1843-1896) German philosopher who expressed his thought in an elaborate and novel terminology in the hope of constructing a symbolic language for philosophy, like that of mathematics --the consequence of his Spinoza studies. As the most influential apostle of pure experience, the posltivistic motive reaches in him an extreme position. Insisting on the biologic and economic function of thought, he thought the true method of science is to cure speculative excesses by a return to pure experience devoid of all assumptions. Philosophy is the scientific effort to exclude from knowledge all ideas not included in the given. Its task is to expel all extraneous elements in the given. His uncritical use of the category of the given and the nominalistic view that logical relations are created rather than discovered by thought, leads him to banish not only animism but also all of the categories, substance, causality, etc., as inventions of the mind. Explaining the evolution and devolution of the problematization and deproblematization of numerous ideas, and aiming to give the natural history of problems, Avenarius sought to show physiologically, psychologically and historically under what conditions they emerge, are challenged and are solved. He hypothesized a System C, a bodily and central nervous system upon which consciousness depends. R-values are the stimuli received from the world of objects. E-values are the statements of experience. The brain changes that continually oscillate about an ideal point of balance are termed Vitalerhaltungsmaximum. The E-values are differentiated into elements, to which the sense-perceptions or the content of experience belong, and characters, to which belongs everything which psychology describes as feelings and attitudes. Avenarius describes in symbolic form a series of states from balance to balance, termed vital series, all describing a series of changes in System C. Inequalities in the vital balance give rise to vital differences. According to his theory there are two vital series. It assumes a series of brain changes because parallel series of conscious states can be observed. The independent vital series are physical, and the dependent vital series are psychological. The two together are practically covariants. In the case of a process as a dependent vital series three stages can be noted: first, the appearance of the problem, expressed as strain, restlessness, desire, fear, doubt, pain, repentance, delusion; the second, the continued effort and struggle to solve the problem; and finally, the appearance of the solution, characterized by abating anxiety, a feeling of triumph and enjoyment. Corresponding to these three stages of the dependent series are three stages of the independent series: the appearance of the vital difference and a departure from balance in the System C, the continuance with an approximate vital difference, and lastly, the reduction of the vital difference to zero, the return to stability. By making room for dependent and independent experiences, he showed that physics regards experience as independent of the experiencing indlvidual, and psychology views experience as dependent upon the individual. He greatly influenced Mach and James (q.v.). See Avenarius, Empirio-criticism, Experience, pure. Main works: Kritik der reinen Erfahrung; Der menschliche Weltbegriff. --H.H. Averroes: (Mohammed ibn Roshd) Known to the Scholastics as The Commentator, and mentioned as the author of il gran commento by Dante (Inf. IV. 68) he was born 1126 at Cordova (Spain), studied theology, law, medicine, mathematics, and philosophy, became after having been judge in Sevilla and Cordova, physician to the khalifah Jaqub Jusuf, and charged with writing a commentary on the works of Aristotle. Al-mansur, Jusuf's successor, deprived him of his place because of accusations of unorthodoxy. He died 1198 in Morocco. Averroes is not so much an original philosopher as the author of a minute commentary on the whole works of Aristotle. His procedure was imitated later by Aquinas. In his interpretation of Aristotelian metaphysics Averroes teaches the coeternity of a universe created ex nihilo. This doctrine formed together with the notion of a numerical unity of the active intellect became one of the controversial points in the discussions between the followers of Albert-Thomas and the Latin Averroists. Averroes assumed that man possesses only a disposition for receiving the intellect coming from without; he identifies this disposition with the possible intellect which thus is not truly intellectual by nature. The notion of one intellect common to all men does away with the doctrine of personal immortality. Another doctrine which probably was emphasized more by the Latin Averroists (and by the adversaries among Averroes' contemporaries) is the famous statement about "two-fold truth", viz. that a proposition may be theologically true and philosophically false and vice versa. Averroes taught that religion expresses the (higher) philosophical truth by means of religious imagery; the "two-truth notion" came apparently into the Latin text through a misinterpretation on the part of the translators. The works of Averroes were one of the main sources of medieval Aristotelianlsm, before and even after the original texts had been translated. The interpretation the Latin Averroists found in their texts of the "Commentator" spread in spite of opposition and condemnation. See Averroism, Latin. Averroes, Opera, Venetiis, 1553. M. Horten, Die Metaphysik des Averroes, 1912. P. Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant et l'Averroisme Latin, 2d ed., Louvain, 1911. --R.A. Averroism, Latin: The commentaries on Aristotle written by Averroes (Ibn Roshd) in the 12th century became known to the Western scholars in translations by Michael Scottus, Hermannus Alemannus, and others at the beginning of the 13th century. Many works of Aristotle were also known first by such translations from Arabian texts, though there existed translations from the Greek originals at the same time (Grabmann). The Averroistic interpretation of Aristotle was held to be the true one by many; but already Albert the Great pointed out several notions which he felt to be incompatible with the principles of Christian philosophy, although he relied for the rest on the "Commentator" and apparently hardly used any other text. Aquinas, basing his studies mostly on a translation from the Greek texts, procured for him by William of Moerbecke, criticized the Averroistic interpretation in many points. But the teachings of the Commentator became the foundation for a whole school of philosophers, represented first by the Faculty of Arts at Paris. The most prominent of these scholars was Siger of Brabant. The philosophy of these men was condemned on March 7th, 1277 by Stephen Tempier, Bishop of Paris, after a first condemnation of Aristotelianism in 1210 had gradually come to be neglected. The 219 theses condemned in 1277, however, contain also some of Aquinas which later were generally recognized an orthodox. The Averroistic propositions which aroused the criticism of the ecclesiastic authorities and which had been opposed with great energy by Albert and Thomas refer mostly to the following points: The co-eternity of the created word; the numerical identity of the intellect in all men, the so-called two-fold-truth theory stating that a proposition may be philosophically true although theologically false. Regarding the first point Thomas argued that there is no philosophical proof, either for the co-eternity or against it; creation is an article of faith. The unity of intellect was rejected as incompatible with the true notion of person and with personal immortality. It is doubtful whether Averroes himself held the two-truths theory; it was, however, taught by the Latin Averroists who, notwithstanding the opposition of the Church and the Thomistic philosophers, gained a great influence and soon dominated many universities, especially in Italy. Thomas and his followers were convinced that they interpreted Aristotle correctly and that the Averroists were wrong; one has, however, to admit that certain passages in Aristotle allow for the Averroistic interpretation, especially in regard to the theory of intellect. Lit.: P. Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant et l'Averroisme Latin au XIIIe Siecle, 2d. ed. Louvain, 1911; M. Grabmann, Forschungen über die lateinischen Aristotelesübersetzungen des XIII. Jahrhunderts, Münster 1916 (Beitr. z. Gesch. Phil. d. MA. Vol. 17, H. 5-6). --R.A. Avesta: See Zendavesta. Avicehron: (or Avencebrol, Salomon ibn Gabirol) The first Jewish philosopher in Spain, born in Malaga 1020, died about 1070, poet, philosopher, and moralist. His main work, Fons vitae, became influential and was much quoted by the Scholastics. It has been preserved only in the Latin translation by Gundissalinus. His doctrine of a spiritual substance individualizing also the pure spirits or separate forms was opposed by Aquinas already in his first treatise De ente, but found favor with the medieval Augustinians also later in the 13th century. He also teaches the necessity of a mediator between God and the created world; such a mediator he finds in the Divine Will proceeding from God and creating, conserving, and moving the world. His cosmogony shows a definitely Neo-Platonic shade and assumes a series of emanations. Cl. Baeumker, Avencebrolis Fons vitae. Beitr. z. Gesch. d. Philos. d. MA. 1892-1895, Vol. I. Joh. Wittman, Die Stellung des hl. Thomas von Aquino zu Avencebrol, ibid. 1900. Vol. III. --R.A. Avicenna: (Abu Ali al Hosain ibn Abdallah ibn Sina) Born 980 in the country of Bocchara, began to write in young years, left more than 100 works, taught in Ispahan, was physician to several Persian princes, and died at Hamadan in 1037. His fame as physician survived his influence as philosopher in the Occident. His medical works were printed still in the 17th century. His philosophy is contained in 18 vols. of a comprehensive encyclopedia, following the tradition of Al Kindi and Al Farabi. Logic, Physics, Mathematics and Metaphysics form the parts of this work. His philosophy is Aristotelian with noticeable Neo-Platonic influences. His doctrine of the universal existing ante res in God, in rebus as the universal nature of the particulars, and post res in the human mind by way of abstraction became a fundamental thesis of medieval Aristotelianism. He sharply distinguished between the logical and the ontological universal, denying to the latter the true nature of form in the composite. The principle of individuation is matter, eternally existent. Latin translations attributed to Avicenna the notion that existence is an accident to essence (see e.g. Guilelmus Parisiensis, De Universo). The process adopted by Avicenna was one of paraphrasis of the Aristotelian texts with many original thoughts interspersed. His works were translated into Latin by Dominicus Gundissalinus (Gondisalvi) with the assistance of Avendeath ibn Daud. This translation started, when it became more generally known, the "revival of Aristotle" at the end of the 12th and the beginning of the 13th century. Albert the Great and Aquinas professed, notwithstanding their critical attitude, a great admiration for Avicenna whom the Arabs used to call the "third Aristotle". But in the Orient, Avicenna's influence declined soon, overcome by the opposition of the orthodox theologians. Avicenna, Opera, Venetiis, 1495; l508; 1546. M. Horten, Das Buch der Genesung der Seele, eine philosophische Enzyklopaedie Avicenna's; XIII. Teil: Die Metaphysik. Halle a. S. 1907-1909. R. de Vaux, Notes et textes sur l'Avicennisme Latin, Bibl. Thomiste XX, Paris, 1934. --R.A. Avidya: (Skr.) Nescience; ignorance; the state of mind unaware of true reality; an equivalent of maya (q.v.); also a condition of pure awareness prior to the universal process of evolution through gradual differentiation into the elements and factors of knowledge. --K.F.L. Avyakta: (Skr.) "Unmanifest", descriptive of or standing for brahman (q.v.) in one of its or "his" aspects, symbolizing the superabundance of the creative principle, or designating the condition of the universe not yet become phenomenal (aja, unborn). --K.F.L. Awareness: Consciousness considered in its aspect of act; an act of attentive awareness such as the sensing of a color patch or the feeling of pain is distinguished from the content attended to, the sensed color patch, the felt pain. The psychologlcal theory of intentional act was advanced by F. Brentano (Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte) and received its epistemological development by Meinong, Husserl, Moore, Laird and Broad. See Intentionalism. --L.W. Axiological: (Ger. axiologisch) In Husserl: Of or pertaining to value or theory of value (the latter term understood as including disvalue and value-indifference). --D.C. Axiological ethics: Any ethics which makes the theory of obligation entirely dependent on the theory of value, by making the determination of the rightness of an action wholly dependent on a consideration of the value or goodness of something, e.g. the action itself, its motive, or its consequences, actual or probable. Opposed to deontological ethics. See also teleological ethics. --W.K.F. Axiologic Realism: In metaphysics, theory that value as well as logic, qualities as well as relations, have their being and exist external to the mind and independently of it. Applicable to the philosophy of many though not all realists in the history of philosophy, from Plato to G. E. Moore, A. N. Whitehead, and N, Hartmann. --J.K.F. Axiology: (Gr. axios, of like value, worthy, and logos, account, reason, theory). Modern term for theory of value (the desired, preferred, good), investigation of its nature, criteria, and metaphysical status. Had its rise in Plato's theory of Forms or Ideas (Idea of the Good); was developed in Aristotle's Organon, Ethics, Poetics, and Metaphysics (Book Lambda). Stoics and Epicureans investigated the summum bonum. Christian philosophy (St. Thomas) built on Aristotle's identification of highest value with final cause in God as "a living being, eternal, most good." In modern thought, apart from scholasticism and the system of Spinoza (Ethica, 1677), in which values are metaphysically grounded, the various values were investigated in separate sciences, until Kant's Critiques, in which the relations of knowledge to moral, aesthetic, and religious values were examined. In Hegel's idealism, morality, art, religion, and philosophy were made the capstone of his dialectic. R. H. Lotze "sought in that which should be the ground of that which is" (Metaphysik, 1879). Nineteenth century evolutionary theory, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and economics subjected value experience to empirical analysis, and stress was again laid on the diversity and relativity of value phenomena rather than on their unity and metaphysical nature. F. Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra (1883-1885) and Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887) aroused new interest in the nature of value. F. Brentano, Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis (1889), identified value with love. In the twentieth century the term axiology was apparently first applied by Paul Lapie (Logique de la volonte, 1902) and E. von Hartmann (Grundriss der Axiologie, 1908). Stimulated by Ehrenfels (System der Werttheorie, 1897), Meinong (Psychologisch-ethische Untersuchungen zur Werttheorie, 1894-1899), and Simmel (Philosophie des Geldes, 1900). W. M. Urban wrote the first systematic treatment of axiology in English (Valuation, 1909), phenomenological in method under J. M. Baldwin's influence. Meanwhile H. Münsterberg wrote a neo-Fichtean system of values (The Eternal Values, 1909). Among important recent contributions are: B. Bosanquet, The Principle of Individuality and Value (1912), a free reinterpretation of Hegelianism; W. R. Sorley, Moral Values and the Idea of God (1918, 1921), defending a metaphysical theism; S. Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity (1920), realistic and naturalistic; N. Hartmann, Ethik (1926), detailed analysis of types and laws of value; R. B. Perry's magnum opus, General Theory of Value (1926), "its meaning and basic principles construed in terms of interest"; and J. Laird, The Idea of Value (1929), noteworthy for historical exposition. A naturalistic theory has been developed by J. Dewey (Theory of Valuation, 1939), for which "not only is science itself a value . . . but it is the supreme means of the valid determination of all valuations." A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (1936) expounds the view of logical positivism that value is "nonsense." J. Hessen, Wertphilosophie (1937), provides an account of recent German axiology from a neo-scholastic standpoint. The problems of axiology fall into four main groups, namely, those concerning (1) the nature of value, (2) the types of value, (3) the criterion of value, and (4) the metaphysical status of value. (1) The nature of value experience. Is valuation fulfillment of desire (voluntarism: Spinoza, Ehrenfels), pleasure (hedonism: Epicurus, Bentham, Meinong), interest (Perry), preference (Martineau), pure rational will (formalism: Stoics, Kant, Royce), apprehension of tertiary qualities (Santayana), synoptic experience of the unity of personality (personalism: T. H. Green, Bowne), any experience that contributes to enhanced life (evolutionism: Nietzsche), or "the relation of things as means to the end or consequence actually reached" (pragmatism, instrumentalism: Dewey). (2) The types of value. Most axiologists distinguish between intrinsic (consummatory) values (ends), prized for their own sake, and instrumental (contributory) values (means), which are causes (whether as economic goods or as natural events) of intrinsic values. Most intrinsic values are also instrumental to further value experience; some instrumental values are neutral or even disvaluable intrinsically. Commonly recognized as intrinsic values are the (morally) good, the true, the beautiful, and the holy. Values of play, of work, of association, and of bodily well-being are also acknowledged. Some (with Montague) question whether the true is properly to be regarded as a value, since some truth is disvaluable, some neutral; but love of truth, regardless of consequences, seems to establish the value of truth. There is disagreement about whether the holy (religious value) is a unique type (Schleiermacher, Otto), or an attitude toward other values (Kant, Höffding), or a combination of the two (Hocking). There is also disagreement about whether the variety of values is irreducible (pluralism) or whether all values are rationally related in a hierarchy or system (Plato, Hegel, Sorley), in which values interpenetrate or coalesce into a total experience. (3) The criterion of value. The standard for testing values is influenced by both psychological and logical theory. Hedonists find the standard in the quantity of pleasure derived by the individual (Aristippus) or society (Bentham). Intuitionists appeal to an ultimate insight into preference (Martineau, Brentano). Some idealists recognize an objective system of rational norms or ideals as criterion (Plato, Windelband), while others lay more stress on rational wholeness and coherence (Hegel, Bosanquet, Paton) or inclusiveness (T. H. Green). Naturalists find biological survival or adjustment (Dewey) to be the standard. Despite differences, there is much in common in the results of the application of these criteria. (4) The metaphysical status of value. What is the relation of values to the facts investigated by natural science (Koehler), of Sein to Sollen (Lotze, Rickert), of human experience of value to reality independent of man (Hegel, Pringle-Pattlson, Spaulding)? There are three main answers: subjectivism (value is entirely dependent on and relative to human experience of it: so most hedonists, naturalists, positivists); logical objectivism (values are logical essences or subsistences, independent of their being known, yet with no existential status or action in reality); metaphysical objectivism (values --or norms or ideals --are integral, objective, and active constituents of the metaphysically real: so theists, absolutists, and certain realists and naturalists like S. Alexander and Wieman). --E.S.B. Axiom: See Mathematics. Axiomatic method: That method of constructing a deductive system consisting of deducing by specified rules all statements of the system save a given few from those given few, which are regarded as axioms or postulates of the system. See Mathematics. --C.A.B. Ayam atma brahma: (Skr.) "This self is brahman", famous quotation from Brhadaranyaka Upanishad 2.5.19, one of many alluding to the central theme of the Upanishads, i.e., the identity of the human and divine or cosmic. --K.F.L.
encyclopediacal ::: a. --> Encyclopedic.
encyclopedian ::: a. --> Embracing the whole circle of learning, or a wide range of subjects.
encyclopedia ::: n. --> Alt. of Encyclopaedia
Catholic Encyclopedia, “Gnosticism.”]
Catholic Encyclopedia. “Gnosticism.”
Catholic Encyclopedia.]
cism,” Catholic Encyclopedia ; Doresse, The Secret
Cosmology: A branch of philosophy which treats of the origin and structure of the universe. It is to be contrasted with ontology or metaphysics, the study of the most general features of reality, natural and supernatural, and with the philosophy of nature, which investigates the basic laws, processes and divisions of the objects in nature. It is perhaps impossible to draw or maintain a sharp distinction between these different subjects, and treatises which profess to deal with one of them usually contain considerable material on the others. Encyclopedia, section 35), are the contingency, necessity, eternity, limitations and formal laws of the world, the freedom of man and the origin of evil. Most philosophers would add to the foregoing the question of the nature and interrelationship of space and time, and would perhaps exclude the question of the nature of freedom and the origin of evil as outside the province of cosmology. The method of investigation has usually been to accept the principles of science or the results of metaphysics and develop the consequences. The test of a cosmology most often used is perhaps that of exhibiting the degree of accordance it has with respect to both empirical fact and metaphysical truth. The value of a cosmology seems to consist primarily in its capacity to provide an ultimate frame for occurrences in nature, and to offer a demonstration of where the limits of the spatio-temporal world are, and how they might be transcended.
C. W. Morris, Foundations of the Theory of Signs, International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, vol. 1, no 2, Chicago, 1938. R. Carnap. Foundations of Logic and Mathematics, International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, vol 1, no 3, Chicago, 1939.
Dasheng yi zhang. (J. Daijo gisho; K. Taesŭng ŭi chang 大乗義章). In Chinese, "Compendium of the Purport of Mahāyāna"; compiled by JINGYING HUIYUAN; a comprehensive dictionary of Buddhist numerical lists that functions as a virtual encyclopedia of MAHĀYĀNA doctrine. Huiyuan organized 249 matters of doctrine into five sections: teachings, meanings, afflictions, purity, and miscellaneous matters (this last section is no longer extant). Each section is organized numerically, much as are some ABHIDHARMA treatises. The section on afflictions begins, for instance, with the meaning of the two hindrances and ends with the 84,000 hindrances. These various listings are then explained from a Mahāyāna perspective, with corroboration drawn from quotations from scriptures, treatises, and the sayings of other teachers. The Dasheng yi zhang serves as an important source for the study of Chinese Mahāyāna thought as it had developed during the Sui dynasty (589-618).
deity of Hades. [Rf Forlong, Encyclopedia of
Dharmatrāta. (T. Chos skyob; C. Damoduoluo; J. Darumatara; K. Talmadara 達摩多羅). The proper name of two well-known masters of the ABHIDHARMA. ¶ The first Dharmatrāta (fl. c. 100-150 CE), sometimes known to the tradition as the Bhadanta Dharmatrāta and commonly designated Dharmatrāta I in the scholarship, was a Dārstāntika from northwest India. This Dharmatrāta, along with VASUMITRA, Ghosa[ka], and Buddhadeva, was one of the four great ĀBHIDHARMIKAs whom Xuanzang says participated in the Buddhist council (SAMGĪTI) conveyed by the KUSHAN king KANIsKA (r. c. 144-178 CE), which was headed by PĀRsVA (see COUNCIL, FOURTH). The views of these four masters are represented in the ABHIDHARMAMAHĀVIBHĀsĀ, a massive commentary on KĀTYĀYANĪPUTRA's JNĀNAPRASTHĀNA, which functions as a virtual encyclopedia of SARVĀSTIVĀDA abhidharma. ¶ A second Dharmatrāta (fl. c. fourth century CE), known as Dharmatrāta II, is also the putative author of the SAMYUKTĀBHIDHARMAHṚDAYA (C. Za apitan xinlun; "The Heart of Scholasticism with Miscellaneous Additions"), the last of a series of expository treatises that summarized Sarvāstivāda abhidharma philosophy as it was then prevailing in BACTRIA and GANDHĀRA; the text was based on Dharmasresthin's ABHIDHARMAHṚDAYA. Dharmatrāta II also composed the PaNcavastuvibhāsā (C. Wushi piposha lun; "Exposition of the Five-Fold Classification"), a commentary on the first chapter of Vasumitra's PRAKARAnAPĀDA, one of the seven major texts of the Sarvāstivāda ABHIDHARMAPItAKA, which was also translated by Xuanzang in 663; it involves a discussion of the mature Sarvāstivāda fivefold classification system for dharmas: materiality (RuPA), mentality (CITTA), mental constituents (CAITTA), forces dissociated from thought (CITTAVIPRAYUKTASAMSKĀRA), and the unconditioned (ASAMSKṚTA). The DAMODUOLUO CHAN JING, a meditation manual that proved influential in early Chinese Buddhism, is also attributed to him.
Eden and Gehinnom. [Rf. Jewish Encyclopedia I, 593;
Eden and Gehinnom. [R/i Jewish Encyclopedia I,
Encyclopedia, “Angelology.”]
Encyclopedia, “Angels”; Mackenzie, Myths of
Encyclopedia', Gaynor, Dictionary of Mysticism].
Encyclopedia I, 595.]
- Encyclopedia of Mythology, (int.) Robert Graves.
Encyclopedia of Religions.]
Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology, The. See
Encyclopedia, p. 521.]
encyclopedical ::: a. --> Pertaining to, or of the nature of, an encyclopedia; embracing a wide range of subjects.
encyclopedism ::: n. --> The art of writing or compiling encyclopedias; also, possession of the whole range of knowledge; encyclopedic learning.
encyclopedist ::: n. --> The compiler of an encyclopedia, or one who assists in such compilation; also, one whose knowledge embraces the whole range of the sciences.
Evangelist.” [Rf. Robbins, The Encyclopedia of
Fayuan zhulin. (J. Hoon jurin; K. Pobwon churim 法苑珠林). In Chinese, "A Grove of Pearls in the Garden of the Dharma," compiled in 668 by the Tang-dynasty monk Daoshi (d. 683) of XIMINGXI; a comprehensive encyclopedia of Buddhism, in one hundred rolls and one hundred chapters, based on the DA TANG NEIDIAN LU and XU GAOSENG ZHUAN, which were compiled by Daoshi's elder brother, the monk DAOXUAN (596-667). The encyclopedia provides definitions and explanations for hundreds of specific Buddhist concepts, terms, and numerical lists. Each chapter deals with a single category such as the three realms of existence (TRILOKA[DHĀTU]), revering the Buddha, the DHARMA, and the SAMGHA, the monastery, relics (sARĪRA), repentance, receiving the precepts, breaking the precepts, and self-immolation (SHESHEN), covering these topics with numerous individual entries. The Fayuan zhulin is characterized by its use of numerous passages quoted from Buddhist scriptures in support of its explanations and interpretations. Since many of the texts that Daoshi cites in the Fayuan zhulin are now lost, the encyclopedia serves as an invaluable source for the study of medieval Chinese Buddhism.
Forlong, Encyclopedia of Religions, claims that
Forlong, Encyclopedia of Religions .] Duma is a
Forlong, Encyclopedia of Religions.
Forlong, Encyclopedia of Religions.]
Forlong, J. G. R. Encyclopedia of Religions. 3 vols. New
for punishment. [Rf. Jewish Encyclopedia ; Hastings,
Freemasonry: A world-wide philosophical fraternal institution. Its origins are lost in the immemorial past, although it is claimed to have been founded at the time of the building of Solomon’s Temple; its present organization dates from 1717, the establishment of the premier Grand Lodge of England. It teaches morality and basic religion by means of symbols, particularly those derived from the builder’s craft; its basic doctrines include belief in God, the Great Architect of the Universe, and belief in the immortality of the soul. A great deal of ancient and medieval occult lore, particularly of the Kabalah and of alchemy, has been retained by the Order in a more or less modified form. According to H. L. Haywood, in Supplement to Mackey’s Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (copyright, 1946, by the Masonic History Company), Vol. III, p. 1234, “A Masonic Lodge represents a body of workmen in which each member has a station or place corresponding to his task or function.” It is stated in the same volume (p. 1485) that “there is no occultism in Freemasonry, though the word is often used loosely in the Ritual, as a synonym for ‘arcane.’ The correct Masonic word is ‘esoteric.’”
from Laronsse Encyclopedia of Mythology.
Gandhāra. (T. Sa 'dzin; C. Jiantuoluo; J. Kendara; K. Kondara 健馱羅). An ancient center of Indic Buddhism, located in the northwest of the subcontinent in the region of present-day northern Pakistan and southeastern Afghanistan. The Gandhāra region included the entire Peshawar valley up to its border along the Indus River to the east and also extended to include the Swat valley and the region around Gandhāra's central city of TAKsAsILA (Taxila), located near what is today Peshawar, Pakistan. For the five centuries bracketing the beginning of the Common Era, Gandhāra was a cosmopolitan cultural center and a crossroads of the major trade routes between Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, China, and the Indian subcontinent (see SILK ROAD). As traders from these various areas moved through Gandhāra, the region became a place of cultural exchange. Four major empires were centered in Gandhāra: the Indo-Greek, Indo-Scythian, Indo-Parthian, and KUSHAN. Tradition claims that AsOKA supported Buddhism in the Gandhāra region during the third century BCE, although the first physical evidence of Buddhism in the region dates from the second and first centuries CE. Gandhāra was conquered by Demetrius I of Bactria around 185 BCE and, although Greek rule in the region was brief, Greek art and culture had an enduring effect on the Gandhāran community. Some of the oldest known Buddhist art comes from this region, more specifically the "Greco-Buddhist" style of sculpture that was a product of this period. The earliest iconographic representations of the Buddha, in fact, are thought by some art historians to come from second century BCE Gandhāra. During the first and second centuries CE, Gandhāra became the principal gateway through which Buddhism traveled to Persia, China, and the rest of Asia. Between the years 50 and 320 CE, the KUSHANs were pushed south out of Central Asia and occupied Gandhāra. Gandhāra, along with KASHMIR, supported and housed a large SARVĀSTIVĀDA community, and Gandhāra was long recognized as a principal bastion of this important MAINSTREAM BUDDHIST SCHOOL. Around the first or second century CE, when the Sarvāstivāda school was at its peak, the fourth Buddhist council (see COUNCIL, FIRST) is said to have taken place in Gandhāra, sponsored by KANIsKA I, the third king of the Kushan dynasty. According to traditional accounts, there were 499 monks in attendance, although that large number is probably intended to represent the importance of the convention rather than a literal count of the number of people present. VASUMITRA presided over the fourth council, with the noted poet and scholarly exegete AsVAGHOsA assisting him. In addition to recording a new VINAYA, the council also resulted in the compilation of a massive collection of Sarvāstivāda ABHIDHARMA philosophy, known as the ABHIDHARMAMAHĀVIBHĀsĀ, or "Great Exegesis of Abhidharma," which functions as a virtual encyclopedia of different scholastic perspectives on Buddhism of the time. The VAIBHĀsIKA school of Sarvāstivāda abhidharma exegesis, which based itself on this compilation, was centered in the regions of Gandhāra and Kashmir. The KĀsYAPĪYA and BAHUsRUTĪYA schools added to the significant presence of Buddhism in the region.
Gehinnom. [Rf. Jewish Encyclopedia, 593.]
George Boole "person" 1815-11-02 - 2008-05-11 22:58 best known for his contribution to symbolic logic ({Boolean Algebra}) but also active in other fields such as probability theory, {algebra}, analysis, and differential equations. He lived, taught, and is buried in Cork City, Ireland. The Boole library at University College Cork is named after him. For centuries philosophers have studied logic, which is orderly and precise reasoning. George Boole argued in 1847 that logic should be allied with mathematics rather than with philosophy. Demonstrating logical principles with mathematical symbols instead of words, he founded {symbolic logic}, a field of mathematical/philosophical study. In the new discipline he developed, known as {Boolean algebra}, all objects are divided into separate classes, each with a given property; each class may be described in terms of the presence or absence of the same property. An electrical circuit, for example, is either on or off. Boolean algebra has been applied in the design of {binary} computer circuits and telephone switching equipment. These devices make use of Boole's two-valued (presence or absence of a property) system. Born in Lincoln, Lincolnshire, UK, George Boole was the son of a tradesman and was largely self-taught. He began teaching at the age of 16 to help support his family. In his spare time he read mathematical journals and soon began to write articles for them. By the age of 29, Boole had received a gold medal for his work from the British Royal Society. His 'Mathematical Analysis of Logic', a pamphlet published in 1847, contained his first statement of the principles of symbolic logic. Two years later he was appointed professor of mathematics at Queen's College in Ireland, even though he had never studied at a university. He died in Ballintemple, Ireland, on 1864-12-08. {Compton's Encyclopedia Online (http://comptons2.aol.com/encyclopedia/ARTICLES/00619_A.html)}. (1998-11-19)
Gnosticism: A creed representing a mixture of the doctrines of the Babylonian, Egyptian, Indian and Christian religions, occultism, astrology and magic, as well as parts of the Hebrew Kabalistic teachings. Its origin is still a matter of debate. According to the Encyclopedia of Religion by V. Ferm, “Gnosticism is now regarded as pre-Christian Oriental mysticism.” All Gnostic sects had their priests who practiced astrology and the magic arts, and it is claimed that the Gnostics continued to celebrate the ancient Greek mysteries, too. The Church regarded the Gnostics as heretics and sorcerers and persecuted them as such.
“Gnosticism” in Catholic Encyclopedia ; Grant,
“Gnosticism” in Catholic Encyclopedia.
hierarchies in the cabala. [Rf. Jewish Encyclopedia,
Huyghe, Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology, p. 59.]
In Freemasonry, King Solomon is especially honored as the builder of the Temple and as the first of the Three Grand Masters — the other two being Hiram, King of Tyre, and Hiram Abif — all of whom were concerned with the building of the Temple. The evil ending of Solomon’s life, according to the Biblical account, is almost overlooked in Masonic ritual and literature. In the Jewish Encyclopedia (“Solomon”), according to one writer, Solomon is represented as “the wise king par excellence”; and “in Arabic literature, Solomon is spoken of as ‘the messenger of God’ ”; according to another writer in the same work, however, “a critical sifting of the sources leaves the picture of a petty, Asiatic despot, remarkable, perhaps, only for a love of luxury and for polygamous inclinations.” Only by interpreting the Bible esoterically can we arrive at the truth regarding King Solomon; and such interpretation fully corroborates the characterization of “the wise king par excellence”; and fully supports both Masonic ritual and tradition in regarding King Solomon as the first and chief of the Three Grand Masters.
ing to Forlong, Encyclopedia of Religions, Asmo¬
in the celestial hierarchy. [Rf. Jewish Encyclopedia.]
in the underworld. In The Encyclopedia of Witch¬
iranischen Philologie III; Forlong, Encyclopedia of
Jewish Encyclopedia, “ Angelology.”]
Jewish Encyclopedia, “Angelology,” the galearii
Jewish Encyclopedia I, 593.] “To Nairyo Sangha
Jewish Encyclopedia I, 595.]
Jewish Encyclopedia I, 94] claims he was originally
Jewish Encyclopedia, p. 314; The Book of the Angel
Jewish Encyclopedia, p. 520; Trachtenberg, Jewish
Jinglü yixiang. (J. Kyoritsu iso; K. Kyongnyul isang 經律異相). In Chinese, lit., "Peculiarities of the Sutras and Vinayas"; an encyclopedia of exotics found in both SuTRA and VINAYA literature compiled in 516 CE by the monk Baochang, at the request of the martial emperor of the Liang dynasty (Liang Wudi). The encyclopedia is composed of fourteen chapters: heaven, earth, BUDDHAs, BODHISATTVAs, sRĀVAKAs, kings, crown princes, elders, laymen (UPĀSAKA) and laywomen (UPĀSIKĀ), non-Buddhist sages, other laymen and commoners, ghosts, animals, and hells. The Jinglü yixiang serves as an important resource for studying the ways in which Buddhism as a foreign religion was understood and adopted by medieval Chinese Buddhists.
Jingtu qunyi lun. (J. Jodo gungiron; K. Chongt'o kunŭi non 浄土群疑論). In Chinese, "Treatise on Myriad Doubts concerning the PURE LAND," composed by the monk Huaigan (fl. c. seventh century CE). In this treatise, written largely in dialogic format, Huaigan attempts to address systematically various questions concerning the notion of rebirth in AMITĀBHA Buddha's pure land. The seven-roll treatise is divided into twelve sections in a total of 116 chapters, which cover a wide range of subjects concerning pure land doctrine. These include, as but a few representative examples, the location of the pure land within the three realms of existence (TRILOKA[DHĀTU]), the destiny (GATI) to which beings reborn there belong, where pure land rebirth belongs on MĀRGA schemata, and Huaigan's attempts to reconcile inconsistencies in different scriptures' accounts of the pure land. The Jingtu qunyi lun has therefore functioned almost as an encyclopedia for adherents of pure land teachings. The questions raised anticipate the criticisms of Huaigan's contemporaries, who specialized in the exegesis of the MAHĀYĀNASAMGRAHA and the new YOGĀCĀRA translations of XUANZANG; Huaigan's answers also reflect his own training in Yogācāra doctrine and his extensive command of Buddhist scriptural and commentarial literature.
Jingying Huiyuan. (J. Joyo Eon; K. Chongyong Hyewon 浄影慧遠) (523-592). Chinese monk and putative DI LUN exegete during the Sui dynasty. Huiyuan was a native of DUNHUANG. At an early age, he entered the monastery of Guxiangusi in Zezhou (present-day Shanxi province) where he was ordained by the monk Sengsi (d.u.). Huiyuan later studied various scriptures under the VINAYA master Lizhan (d.u.) in Ye, the capital of the Eastern Wei dynasty. In his nineteenth year, Huiyuan received the full monastic precepts from Fashang (495-580), ecclesiastical head of the SAMGHA at the time, and became his disciple. Huiyuan also began his training in the DHARMAGUPTAKA "Four-Part Vinaya" (SIFEN LÜ) under the vinaya master Dayin (d.u.). After he completed his studies, Huiyuan moved back to Zezhou and began his residence at the monastery Qinghuasi. In 577, Emperor Wu (r. 560-578) of Northern Zhou began a systematic persecution of Buddhism, and in response, Huiyuan is said to have engaged the emperor in debate; a transcript of the debate, in which Huiyuan defends Buddhism against criticisms of its foreign origins and its neglect of filial piety, is still extant. As the persecution continued, Huiyuan retreated to Mt. Xi in Jijun (present-day Henan province). Shortly after the rise of the Sui dynasty, Huiyuan was summoned by Emperor Wen (r. 581-604) to serve as overseer of the saMgha (shamendu) in Luozhou (present-day Henan). He subsequently spent his time undoing the damage of the earlier persecution. Huiyuan was later asked by Emperor Wen to reside at the monastery of Daxingshansi in the capital. The emperor also built Huiyuan a new monastery named Jingyingsi, which is often used as his toponym to distinguish him from LUSHAN HUIYUAN. Jingying Huiyuan was a prolific writer who composed numerous commentaries on such texts as the AVATAMSAKASuTRA, MAHĀPARINIRVĀnASuTRA, VIMALAKĪRTINIRDEsA, SUKHĀVATĪVYuHASuTRA, sRĪMĀLĀDEVĪSIMHANĀDASuTRA, SHIDI JING LUN (VASUBANDHU's commentary on the DAsABHuMIKASuTRA), DASHENG QIXIN LUN, and others. Among his works, the DASHENG YI ZHANG ("Compendium of the Purport of Mahāyāna"), a comprehensive encyclopedia of Mahāyāna doctrine, is perhaps the most influential and is extensively cited by traditional exegetes throughout East Asia. Jingying Huiyuan also plays a crucial role in the development of early PURE LAND doctrine in East Asia. His commentary on the GUAN WULIANGSHOU JING, the earliest extant treatise on this major pure land scripture, is critical in raising the profile of the Guan jing in East Asian Buddhism. His commentary to this text profoundly influenced Korean commentaries on the pure land scriptures during the Silla dynasty, which in turn were crucial in the the evolution of Japanese pure land thought during the Nara and Heian periods. Jingying Huiyuan's concept of the "dependent origination of the TATHĀGATAGARBHA" (rulaizang yuanqi)-in which tathāgatagarbha is viewed as the "essence" (TI) of both NIRVĀnA and SAMSĀRA, which are its "functioning" (YONG)-is later adapted and popularized by the third HUAYAN patriarch, FAZANG, and is an important precursor of later Huayan reconceptualizations of dependent origination (PRATĪTYASAMUTPĀDA; see FAJIE YUANQI).
Larousse Encyclopedia of Byzantine & Medieval Art.
lonian theosophy. [Rf. Catholic Encyclopedia,
Louvre. From Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology.
Magic and Superstition; Jewish Encyclopedia, p. 516.]
malevolent spirits in Larousse Encyclopedia of
Missing definition "introduction" First, this is an (English language) __computing__ dictionary. It includes lots of terms from related fields such as mathematics and electronics, but if you're looking for (or want to submit) words from other subjects or general English words or other languages, try {(http://wikipedia.org/)}, {(http://onelook.com/)}, {(http://yourdictionary.com/)}, {(http://www.dictionarist.com/)} or {(http://reference.allrefer.com/)}. If you've already searched the dictionary for a computing term and it's not here then please __don't tell me__. There are, and always will be, a great many missing terms, no dictionary is ever complete. I use my limited time to process the corrections and definitions people have submitted and to add the {most frequently requested missing terms (missing.html)}. Try one of the sources mentioned above or {(http://techweb.com/encyclopedia/)}, {(http://whatis.techtarget.com/)} or {(http://google.com/)}. See {the Help page (help.html)} for more about missing definitions and bad cross-references. (2014-09-20)! {exclamation mark}!!!Batch "language, humour" A daft way of obfuscating text strings by encoding each character as a different number of {exclamation marks} surrounded by {question marks}, e.g. "d" is encoded as "?!!!!?". The language is named after the {MSDOS} {batch file} in which the first converter was written. {esoteric programming languages} {wiki entry (http://esolangs.org/wiki/!!!Batch)}. (2014-10-25)" {double quote}
Mystes (Greek) [from muo to close the mouth] Plural mystai. An initiate to the first degrees of the Mysteries; the next higher rank being that of the epoptes (seer); and the highest function being that of the hierophantes (teacher or communicator). With the Pythagoreans the neophyte or mystes guarded silence as to what he had learned, and was authorized and empowered to speak or teach only when his mouth had been opened because of attaining the rank of epoptes. This custom has been borrowed by Roman Catholic Cardinals along with the term Mystes: “A word or two may be said of the singular practice of closing and subsequently opening the mouth of a newly created cardinal. Like almost everything else connected with the subject, this form had once a real significance, but has become a mere meaningless formality. Some reasonable time was originally allowed to elapse before the pontiff in one consistory formally pronounced the mouth to be opened which he had declared to be closed in a previous consistory. Now the form of opening is pronounced within a few minutes of the form of closing” (Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th ed., “Cardinal”).
Mysticism The doctrine that the nature of reality can be known by direct apprehension, by faculties above the senses, by intuition. “Mysticism demands a faculty above reason, by which the subject shall be placed in immediate and complete union with the object of his desire — a union in which the consciousness of self has disappeared, and in which therefore subject and object are one” (Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th ed. “Mysticism”). It overlaps in meaning such terms as the Neoplatonic ecstasis, and the theosophy of Iamblichus.
New Jewish Encyclopedia, (ed.) David Bridget (with
New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge,
New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia.]
of archangels. [Rf. Enoch II; Slavonic Encyclopedia.]
of Enoch-Metatron.” [Rf. Catholic Encyclopedia I,
of God”). See Jewish Encyclopedia I, 593. Another
of Islatir, Jewish Encyclopedia, “Angelology”;
of the 1st Heaven. [Rf. Jewish Encyclopedia,
of virtues. In Larousse Illustrated Encyclopedia of
optical fibre "communications" (fibre optics, FO, US "fiber", light pipe) A plastic or glass (silicon dioxide) fibre no thicker than a human hair used to transmit information using infra-red or even visible light as the carrier (usually a laser). The light beam is an electromagnetic signal with a frequency in the range of 10^14 to 10^15 Hertz. Optical fibre is less susceptible to external noise than other transmission media, and is cheaper to make than copper wire, but it is much more difficult to connect. Optical fibres are difficult to tamper with (to monitor or inject data in the middle of a connection), making them appropriate for secure communications. The light beams do not escape from the medium because the material used provides total internal reflection. {AT&T} {Bell Laboratories} in the United States managed to send information at a rate of 420 megabits per second, over 161.5 km through an optical fibre cable. In Japan, 445.8 megabits per second was achieved over a shorter distance. At this rate, the entire text of the Encyclopedia Britannica could be transmitted in one second. Currently, AT&T is working on a world network to support high volume data transmission, international computer networking, {electronic mail} and voice communications (a single fibre can transmit 200 million telephone conversations simultaneously). See also {FDDI}, {Optical Carrier n}, {SONET}. (1997-05-26)
ousse Encyclopedia of Mythology, p. 59. Another
over fruit-bearing trees. [Rf. Jewish Encyclopedia,
Pesikta Rabbati. [Rf. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Angel-
Philosophical Library, Inc., New York, N. Y., publishers of Hindu Philosophy by T. Bernard, An Encyclopedia of Astrology by N. de Vore, An Encyclopedia of Religion by V. Ferm (ed.), Forgotten Religions by V. Ferm (ed.), Introduction to Comparative Mysticism by J. de Marquette, The Splendour That Was Egypt by M. A. Murray, Dictionary of Philosophy by D. D. Runes (ed.), and Christian Science and Philosophy by H. W. Steiger.
quoted in Jewish Encyclopedia I, 593.] In the
Reader’s Encyclopedia, “Araf.”
Revelation.” [Rf. Jewish Encyclopedia, p. 85.] The
[Rf Forlong, Encyclopedia of Religions.] Ahriman
[Rf. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Angelology.”]
[Rf. Jewish Encyclopedia I, 588] the story is that
[Rf. The New Schajf-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religi¬
Robbins, Rossell Hope. The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and
Roucek, Joseph S. (ed.). Slavonic Encyclopedia. New
same.” [Rf. Universal fewish Encyclopedia I, 303.]
says Universal Jewish Encyclopedia (I, 314), which
Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia, “Angels.”]
see also the Jewish Encyclopedia 1,593.]
Slavonic Encyclopedia. See Roucek.
Takakusu Junjiro. (高楠順次郎) (1866-1945). One of the leading Japanese scholars of Indian Buddhism of the early twentieth century, who played a leading role in establishing Japan as a major center of scholarship in Buddhist Studies. He was born, surnamed Sawai, in today's Hiroshima prefecture. He was raised in a JoDO SHINSHu family belonging to the NISHI HONGANJIHA, and he remained a devout layman throughout his life. After primary school, he studied at the leading Jodo Shinshu educational institution, today's Ryukoku University, from 1885 to 1889, during which time, through Jodo Shinshu connections, he was adopted into the Takakusu merchant house of Kobe. With the support of his adoptive father, he spent the period from 1890 to 1897 in Europe. Through the introduction of the Jodo Shinshu cleric NANJo BUN'Yu, Takakusu was able to study Indology under FRIEDRICH MAX MÜLLER at Oxford University, receiving a B.A. in 1894 and an M.A. in 1896. While at Oxford, he assisted Müller with the Sacred Books of the East project. The final volume of the series, entitled Buddhist Mahāyāna Texts (1894), included the VAJRACCHEDIKĀPRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀSuTRA, the PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀHṚDAYA, and the three PURE LAND sutras, all Indian works (or at least so regarded at the time) but selected because of their importance for Japanese Buddhism. Müller's choice of these texts was influenced by Takakusu and Nanjo Bun'yu. The works in Buddhist Mahāyāna Texts were translated by Müller, with the exception of the GUAN WULIANGSHOU JING, which was translated by Takakusu. Takakusu also studied in Paris with SYLVAIN LÉVI, with whom he would later collaborate on the Hobogirin Buddhist encyclopedia project. He returned to Japan in 1897 to lecture in Indian philosophy at Tokyo Imperial University, where he served as professor from 1899 to 1927, being appointed to the chair of Sanskrit studies in 1901. He was a devoted supporter of Esperanto and in 1906 was a founding member of the Japanese Esperantists Association. He supervised and contributed substantially to three monumental publishing projects: (1) the Upanishaddo zensho, a Japanese translation of the Upanisads (1922-1924); (2) the TAISHo SHINSHu DAIZoKYo, a modern typeset edition of the East Asian Buddhist canon (see DAZANGJING) (1922-1934); and (3) the Kokuyaku nanden daizokyo, a Japanese translation of the Pāli canon of what he called "Southern Buddhism" (1936-1941). For his work on editing the Taisho canon, he was awarded the Prix Stanislas Julien in Sinology from the Institut de France in 1929. Among his English-language publications, he is known especially for A Record of the Buddhist Religion as Practised in India and the Malay Archipelago (1896), which is his translation of YIJING's pilgrimage record (NANHAI JIGUI NEIFA ZHUAN), and Essentials of Buddhist Philosophy (1947). He died in Shizuoka Prefecture, outside Tokyo.
Tantra: That body of Hindu religious literature which is stated to have been revealed by Shiva as the specific scripture of the Kali Yuga (the present age). The Tantras were the encyclopedias of esoteric knowledge of their time; the topics of a Tantra are: the creation of the universe, worship of the gods, spiritual exercise, rituals, the six magical powers, and meditation.
tem. [Rf. Catholic Encyclopedia, “Gnosticism.”]
Tetrabiblos (Greek for Four Books): An encyclopedia of astrology, said to be the record of the oldest astrological systems. It dates from about 132-160 A.D. In it the author, Claudius Ptolemy, the great Egyptian mathematician, says that it was compiled from “ancient” sources.
The importance of Arab philosophy has to be evaluated both in regard to the Oriental and the Western world. The latter was influenced, naturally, not by the originals but by the translations which do not always render exactly the spirit of the authors. In the East, theology remained victorious, but incorporated in its own teachings much of the philosophies it condemned. M. Horten, in Ueberweg-Heinze, Geschichte der Philosophie, 3d ed., Berlin, 1928, pp. 287-342. Geschichte der Arabischen Litteratur, Vol. I, II, Weimar, 1898-1902, Vol. III-VI, Leiden, 1936-1941. The Encyclopedia of Islam, Leiden, 1913-1918. -- R.A.
This book represents more than twelve years of effort. Donald Lopez initiated the project with the assistance of several of his graduate students at the University of Michigan, many of whom have now gone on to receive their degrees and be appointed to university positions. Around that time, Robert Buswell asked Lopez to serve as one of the editors of his two-volume Encyclopedia of Buddhism (New York: Macmillan Reference, 2004). When that project was completed, Lopez invited Buswell to join him as coauthor of the dictionary project, an offer he enthusiastically accepted, bringing with him his own team of graduate students from UCLA. In dividing up responsibilities for the dictionary, Buswell took principal charge of entries on mainstream Buddhist concepts, Indian abhidharma, and East Asian Buddhism; Lopez took principal charge of entries on MahAyAna Buddhism in India, Buddhist tantra, and Tibetan Buddhism. Once drafts of the respective sections were complete, we exchanged files to review each other's sections. Over the last seven years, we were in touch almost daily on one or another aspect of the project as we expanded upon and edited each other's drafts, making this a collaborative project in the best sense of the term. Graduate students at both the University of Michigan and UCLA assisted in gathering materials for the dictionary, preparing initial drafts, and tracing the multiple cross-references to Asian language terms. This project would have been impossible without their unstinting assistance and extraordinary commitment; we are grateful to each of them. Those graduate students and colleagues who made particularly extensive contributions to the dictionary are listed on the title page.
tradition [Rf. New Jewish Encyclopedia, p. 441]
tradition,” says Forlong in Encyclopedia of Religions,
Universal fewish Encyclopedia.]
UniversalJewish Encyclopedia.
valent for Gabriel. [Rf Forlong, Encyclopedia of
world.” [Rf. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Metatron,”
Zuting shiyuan. (J. Sotei jion; K. Chojong sawon 祖庭事苑). In Chinese, "Garden of Matters from the Patriarchs' Hall," edited in eight rolls by Mu'an Shanxiang (d.u.) in 1108; the oldest encyclopedia of the Chinese CHAN tradition. This collection includes over 2,400 items related to Chan pedagogy, culled from Buddhist and secular stories, proverbs, numerological lists, personal names, local dialects, and so forth. Mu'an is said to have embarked on this project in response to the growing number of monks who were unable to understand the rich content and context of the many GONG'AN exchanges found in Chan literature. Mu'an's material is drawn from over twenty important Chan sources, such as the discourse records (YULU) of YUNMEN WENYAN, XUEDOU CHONGXIAN, and FAYAN WENYI, and YONGJIA XUANJUE's popular ZHENGDAO GE. The encyclopedia functions as a glossary for these works, offering explanations for their difficult technical terms and obscure names (which are not necessarily Chan or Buddhist in origin), and drawing his explanations from Buddhist, Confucian, and Daoist materials, as well as such secular sources. For example, the first roll of the encyclopedia provides a glossary of the Yunmen lu, which discusses the author Yunmen Wenyan, offers definitions of terms and explanations of names appearing in the text, drawing on sources ranging from the Shiji ("Book of History") to the AGAMA SuTRAs, and fills out the myriad numerical lists that appear in the text, such as the three vehicles (C. sansheng; S. TRIYĀNA), the three baskets of the canon (C. sanzang; S. TRIPItAKA), the eight teachings of Tiantai (see WUSHI BAJIAO), etc. Mu'an's exhaustive collection meticulously traces the source of each item and provides a detailed commentary on each. The Zuting shiyuan was republished in 1154, and numerous editions were published during the Tokugawa period in Japan.
KEYS (10k)
1 Robert Anton Wilson
1 Douglas Adams
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
8 Encyclopedia Brittanica (1875)
7 Douglas Adams
4 Robert Anton Wilson
4 Jorge Luis Borges
3 Zadie Smith
3 Umberto Eco
3 Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 Isaac Asimov
3 G K Chesterton
3 Donald J Sobol
3 Anonymous
2 Stephen Leacock
2 Richard Dawkins
2 Phil Knight
2 Paulo Coelho
2 Neal Stephenson
2 N D Wilson
2 Melissa de la Cruz
2 Lisa Renee Jones
2 Kory Stamper
1:[My wife] liked to collect old encyclopedias from second-hand bookstores, and at one point we had eight of them. When I wrote my first historical novel--back in 1980, before I was online--I used them often as a research tool. For instance, I learned that the Bastille was either 90 feet high or 100 feet or 120 feet. This led me to formulate Wilson's 22nd Law: 'Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only look in one encyclopedia.' ~ Robert Anton Wilson, #KEYS
2:It is also the story of a book, a book called The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - not an Earth book, never published on Earth, and until the terrible catastrophe occurred, never seen or heard of by any Earthman.
Nevertheless, a wholly remarkable book.
in fact it was probably the most remarkable book ever to come out of the great publishing houses of Ursa Minor - of which no Earthman had ever heard either.
Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly successful one - more popular than the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than Fifty More Things to do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilogy of philosophical blockbusters Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway?
In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitch Hiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.
First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words Don't Panic inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.
~ Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:Who will ever kiss this encyclopedia of a head? ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove 2:Esoteric Encyclopedia of Eternal Knowledge. Book by V. A. Howard, 1974. ~ vernon-howard, @wisdomtrove 3:I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia. ~ jorge-luis-borges, @wisdomtrove 4:The unknown was my compass. The unknown was my encyclopedia. The unnamed was my science and progress. ~ anais-nin, @wisdomtrove 5:I came to the idea of how fine it would be to think of an encyclopedia of an actual world, and then of an encyclopedia, a very rigorous one of course, of an imaginary world, where everything should be linked. ~ jorge-luis-borges, @wisdomtrove 6:The man who acquires an encyclopedia does not thereby acquire every line, every paragraph, every page, and every illustration; he acquires the possibility of becoming familiar with one and another of those things. ~ jorge-luis-borges, @wisdomtrove 7:Here's what the Encyclopedia Galactica has to say about alcohol. It says that alcohol is a colourless volatile liquid formed by the fermentation of sugars and also notes its intoxicating effect on certain carbon-based life forms. ~ douglas-adams, @wisdomtrove 8:Kids, she says. When they're little, they believe everything you tell them about the world. As a mother, you're the world almanac and the encyclopedia and the dictionary and the Bible, all rolled up together. But after they hit some magic age, it's just the opposite. After that, you're either a liar or a fool or a villain. ~ chuck-palahniuk, @wisdomtrove 9:The Encyclopedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as "Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun to Be With. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing devision of the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes. ~ douglas-adams, @wisdomtrove 10:On those remote pages [of & *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:The Encyclopedia of Teen Killers. ~ Phil Chalmers, #NFDB
2:A man is the whole encyclopedia of facts. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
3:Who will ever kiss this encyclopedia of a head? ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
4:Who knew Lenny was an encyclopedia for useless information? ~ Simone Elkeles, #NFDB
5:The Book of Mormon is an inexhaustible encyclopedia of knowledge. ~ Hugh Nibley, #NFDB
6:God is not an encyclopedia whose task is to satisfy our curiosity. ~ Jacques Ellul, #NFDB
7:The Christian church is an encyclopedia of prehistoric cults. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
8:You couldn't drop knowledge if you threw an Encyclopedia off a cliff. ~ Celph Titled, #NFDB
9:There's no encyclopedia or book about parenthood. You learn on the fly. ~ LeBron James, #NFDB
10:They know that the world might eat them, and no encyclopedia could stop it. ~ N D Wilson, #NFDB
11:Everyone knows the best volume of the encyclopedia is the one with ships-S. ~ Roger Angell, #NFDB
12:Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only own one encyclopedia. ~ Robert Anton Wilson, #NFDB
13:I'm not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like I did. ~ Yogi Berra, #NFDB
14:Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only look in one encyclopedia. ~ Robert Anton Wilson, #NFDB
15:I like to think of The Falls as my own personal encyclopedia Greenaway-ensis. ~ Peter Greenaway, #NFDB
16:If I could, I'd write a huge encyclopedia just about the words luck and coincidence ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
17:I had a terrible vision: I saw an encyclopedia walk up to a polymath and open him up. ~ Karl Kraus, #NFDB
18:I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia. ~ Jorge Luis Borges, #NFDB
19:The world encyclopedia, the universal library, exists, and it is the world itself. ~ Alberto Manguel, #NFDB
20:Because the world is radically new, the ideal encyclopedia should be radical, too. ~ Charles Van Doren, #NFDB
21:The cultivated person's first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia. ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
22:There was an omnivorous intellect that won him the family sobriquet of Walking Encyclopedia. ~ Eric Liu, #NFDB
23:he lets me take the orders, standing at my side like
my own personal Mexican food encyclopedia ~ Suzanne Young,#NFDB
24:He was telling an interesting anecdote full of exciting words like "encyclopedia" and "rhododendron". ~ A A Milne, #NFDB
25:The unknown was my compass. The unknown was my encyclopedia. The unnamed was my science and progress. ~ Anais Nin, #NFDB
26:Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica. ~ Stephen Leacock, #NFDB
27:That girl,” tutted Alsana as her front door slammed. “Swallowed an encyclopedia and a gutter at the same time. ~ Zadie Smith, #NFDB
28:That girl,' tutted Alsana as her front door slammed, 'swallowed an encyclopedia and a gutter at the same time. ~ Zadie Smith, #NFDB
29:Science is not a vast encyclopedia, it is a thin flame of reason burning across ample reservoirs of ignorance. ~ Robert Kirshner, #NFDB
30:I used to be the god of poetry, which does not mean I am a walking encyclopedia of every obscure line ever written. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
31:But that woman is an encyclopedia!
Of all vices, ancient and modern, and terribly interesting to leaf through!
~ Jean Lorrain,#NFDB
32:This is a survey, not an encyclopedia; a study, not a painting; an essay, not a mathematical or historical proof. ~ Joseph P Farrell, #NFDB
33:As a mother, you're the world almanac and the encyclopedia and the dictionary and the Bible, all rolled up together. ~ Chuck Palahniuk, #NFDB
34:The man who knew an encyclopedia by heart would be in grave danger of incurring the title idiot savant—“learned fool. ~ Mortimer J Adler, #NFDB
35:The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, in one of its saner moments, defined music as “a specific variant of the sound made by people. ~ Alex Ross, #NFDB
36:Dullard: Someone who looks up a thing in the encyclopedia, turns directly to the entry, reads it, and then closes the book. ~ Philip Jos Farmer, #NFDB
37:Dullard: Someone who looks up a thing in the encyclopedia, turns directly to the entry, reads it, and then closes the book. ~ Philip Jose Farmer, #NFDB
38:The Encyclopedia Planaria, in forty-four volumes, is not portable, and after all, what is entirely reliable unless it's dead? ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
39:You may be to call up the entire encyclopedia, but a brain with no heart and no reasoning .. well, nothing is more meaningless. ~ Melissa de la Cruz, #NFDB
40:Philosophy is an interpretation of the world in order to change it. ~ Karl Marx cited in: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry by Jonathan Wolff, #NFDB
41:The Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th edition, devotes 20,000 words to the person of Jesus Christ and never once hints that He didn't exist. ~ John Ankerberg, #NFDB
42:What we need is an electronic encyclopedia of life, with one page for each species. On each page is given everything known about that species. ~ E O Wilson, #NFDB
43:You may be able to call up an entire
encyclopedia, but nothing is more meaningless than a brain
with no heart and no reasoning ~ Melissa de la Cruz,#NFDB
44:I always introduce myself as an encyclopedia of defects which I do not deny. Why should I? It took me a whole life to build myself as I am. ~ Oriana Fallaci, #NFDB
45:Oh, please. You have so many rules, your rules have rules. Any woman who dared to date you would need an encyclopedia-sized book to keep up. ~ Lisa Renee Jones, #NFDB
46:If I could, I’d write a huge encyclopedia just about the words luck and coincidence. It’s with those words that the universal language is written. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
47:he had read in an encyclopedia article entitled “Obstetrics.” From boyhood he had had the habit of looking up things in that dependable work; but, ~ Upton Sinclair, #NFDB
48:There is enough information capacity in a single human cell to store the Encyclopedia Britannica, all 30 volumes of it, three or four times over. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
49:You can market your book, but you can’t sell your book. The only book we’ve ever seen being successfully “sold” by selling methods is the Encyclopedia. ~ Bob Mayer, #NFDB
50:Przejrzałem moje notatki i nie spodobały mi się. Spędziłem trzy dni w U.S. Robots, a równie dobrze mogłem zostać w domu i wertować Encyclopedia Tellurica. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
51:51. You might as well act as if objects had the colors, The Encyclopedia says. –Well, it is as you please. But what would it look like to act otherwise? ~ Maggie Nelson, #NFDB
52:Just once, he looks back at Arsay, and I feel like an entire encyclopedia of information and words is exchanged between them. I wish I could speak telepathy too. ~ Poppet, #NFDB
53:Take our politicians: they're a bunch of yo-yos. The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches. ~ Saul Bellow, #NFDB
54:The hardest thing was learning to write. I was 13, and the only writing I had done was for Social Studies. It consisted of copying passages right out of the encyclopedia ~ Tracy Kidder, #NFDB
55:If I were like Lionel, I would write a book: Obvious Lies, Bad Advice, and Wrong Information I’ve Gotten from Men. A book? An encyclopedia! But in this case my friend was right. ~ Francine Prose, #NFDB
56:Loyal Hanneke,” Alma said fondly, “let us be honest with ourselves. Who will ever put a ring on these fishwife’s hands of mine? Who will ever kiss this encyclopedia of a head? ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
57:When some French were assembling an encyclopedia of paranormal experiences, they decided to leave déjà vu out, because it was so common it could not be considered paranormal. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson, #NFDB
58:Young chefs, famous chefs, home cooks, and everyone who loves food and cooking-we all depend on Larousse Gastronomique. It is the only culinary encyclopedia that is always up-to-date. ~ Daniel Boulud, #NFDB
59:A man is the whole encyclopedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
60:Schwartz is an encyclopedia of psychological research on choice problems. If asked to give a quote about him for the back of a book cover, I would say, “This motherfucker knows choice.” As ~ Aziz Ansari, #NFDB
61:There are bars of Pear's soap and a thick book called Pear's Encyclopedia, which keeps me up day and night because it tells you everything about everything and that's all I want to know. ~ Frank McCourt, #NFDB
62:Therefore we value the poet. All the argument and all the wisdom is not in the encyclopedia, or the treatise on metaphysics, or the Body of Divinity, but in the sonnet or the play. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
63:Homer’s Iliad was the cultural encyclopedia of pre-literate Greece, the didactic vehicle that provided men with guidance for the management of their spiritual, ethical, and social lives. ~ Marshall McLuhan, #NFDB
64:When I have my students do erasures, I'm always amazed by the way their voice comes through, whether they're doing an erasure of a romance novel or an encyclopedia. Your sensibility will out. ~ Matthea Harvey, #NFDB
65:An encyclopedia is a book or set of books filled with facts from A to Z. So was Encyclopedia's head. He had read more books than just about anyone in Idaville, and he never forgot what he read. ~ Donald J Sobol, #NFDB
66:submission would be, because I’d really earned it.” "Oh, please. You have so many rules, your rules have rules. Any woman who dared to date you would need an encyclopedia-sized book to keep up. ~ Lisa Renee Jones, #NFDB
67:Language is the biggest barrier to human progress because language is an encyclopedia of ignorance. Old perceptions are frozen into language and force us to look at the world in an old fashioned way. ~ Edward de Bono, #NFDB
68:What usually works: Simple sells. When you have to get out an encyclopedia and an Excel sheet to show somebody how much they make on a stream that comes by way of ad revenue, it gets a little complicated. ~ Monte Lipman, #NFDB
69:Indeed the Encyclopedia Qwghlmiana features a lengthy article about the local system of runes. The author of this article has such a chip on his shoulder that the thing is almost physically painful to read. ~ Neal Stephenson, #NFDB
70:[A]s in the infancy of science its various branches were confused and confounded, so in a like stage of society we often find the same person uniting the parts of philosopher, savant and priest. ~ Encyclopedia Brittanica (1875), #NFDB
71:I came to the idea of how fine it would be to think of an encyclopedia of an actual world, and then of an encyclopedia, a very rigorous one of course, of an imaginary world, where everything should be linked. ~ Jorge Luis Borges, #NFDB
72:I have a chance to chance to trade my bicycle for a sword," said Peter. "I want to make sure the sure the sword is real."
"You don't think the sword is really a sword?" said Encyclopedia. "What do you think it is? ~ Donald J Sobol,#NFDB
73:The man who acquires an encyclopedia does not thereby acquire every line, every paragraph, every page, and every illustration; he acquires the possibility of becoming familiar with one and another of those things. ~ Jorge Luis Borges, #NFDB
74:You’ll fly like a stone kite,” said Encyclopedia. “Nope, it’s going to work,” said Casper. “Buck Barkdull has flown—” “Nobody can fly!” screamed Encyclopedia. “Jump off the roof and you’ll find out what an anchor does. ~ Donald J Sobol, #NFDB
75:Curiosity was first excited by fancy (and the fancy of primitive man... was far more active and vigorous than ours), and when it found itself baffled by a natural reaction, it had recourse to divination. ~ Encyclopedia Brittanica (1875), #NFDB
76:Here’s what the Encyclopedia Galáctica has to say about alcohol. It says that alcohol is a colorless volatile liquid formed by the fermentation of sugars and also notes its intoxicating effect on certain carbon-based life forms. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
77:[There] was a time when a lot of people came to the door. The milkman. The iceman. The Fuller Brush man. Encyclopedia salesmen. There was a sense of interaction with the world that started right at your own front doorstep. ~ Catherine Ryan Hyde, #NFDB
78:Encyclopedia Galáctica has to say about alcohol. It says that alcohol is a colorless volatile liquid formed by the fermentation of sugars and also notes its intoxicating effect on certain carbon-based life forms. The Hitchhiker’s ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
79:Here's what the Encyclopedia Galactica has to say about alcohol. It says that alcohol is a colourless volatile liquid formed by the fermentation of sugars and also notes its intoxicating effect on certain carbon-based life forms. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
80:The most widely raised type of silkworm, the larva of the 'Bombyx mori', no longer exists anywhere in a natural state. As my encyclopedia poignantly puts it: 'The legs of the larvae have degenerated, and the adults no longer fly'. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides, #NFDB
81:Before long I established that I kept arriving at the same address: a proto-Germanic reference work called Vikipedia, an easily recognisable compound of ‘encyclopedia’ and those ancient Germans with exploration in their blood, the Vikings. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
82:She always saw through him, as if he were just another window. She always felt that she knew everything about him that could be known. Not that he was simple, but that he was knowable, like a list of errands, like an encyclopedia. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer, #NFDB
83:From the Vedas we learn a practical art of surgery, medicine, music, house building under which mechanized art is included. They are encyclopedia of every aspect of life, culture, religion, science, ethics, law, cosmology and meteorology. ~ William James, #NFDB
84:The Encyclopedia Qwghlmiana had made much use of the definite article—the Town, the Castle, the Hotel, the Pub, the Pier. Waterhouse stops in at the Shithouse to deal with some aftershocks of the sea voyage, and then walks up the Street ~ Neal Stephenson, #NFDB
85:Unlike so many Dylan-writer-wannabes and phony 'encyclopedia' compilers, Sean Wilentz makes me feel he was in the room when he chronicles events that I participated in. Finally a breath of fresh words founded in hardcore, intelligent research. ~ Al Kooper, #NFDB
86:Lightning goes up. It shoots right up from the ground and into the cloud. This what the encyclopedia says in the section on climate and weather. I reread this passage a couple of times to make sure I hadn't gone batty—but no, lightning goes up. ~ A J Jacobs, #NFDB
87:I barely trust established sources of information. I have a hard time finding [Wikipedia], an encyclopedia that anyone can alter, to be a safe way to learn about anything except how many idiots think their opinions are a suitable substitute for facts. ~ R K Milholland, #NFDB
88:When I was about ten my favourite article in the huge and mouldering Encyclopedia Britannica we owned (the ninth edition) was the one on Lycanthropy. (Yes, I had a favourite 1890s Britannica article when I was ten. I am now aware this is not entirely usual.) ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
89:If we are to use the Bible effectively, then we must use it the way God wrote it – in narrative form. Our team rejects the notion that the Bible is simply an encyclopedia of disconnected Bible verses. God's Word is less like a cookbook and more like a novel. ~ James MacDonald, #NFDB
90:In a partner I'm looking for an encyclopedia and a dictionary. A bit of the Boy Scouts Handbook. A person who is conscientious about the trail he leaves behind him. Love. Unconditional kindness. Basically, I'm looking for the qualities I revere in my friends. ~ Renee Zellweger, #NFDB
91:The first art in caves were really psychedelic experiences, and the reason that they were is because the tribal encyclopedia, the amount of information that people needed to know in order to move to a new way of life, suddenly increased over that period of time. ~ Howard Rheingold, #NFDB
92:I really love rap music. I grew up in the '80s and '90s with Public Enemy, N.W.A., LL Cool J - I'm a hip-hop encyclopedia. But I got kind of frustrated with the chauvinistic side of rap music, the one that makes it hard to write songs about love and relationships. ~ Mayer Hawthorne, #NFDB
93:When I was 8 years old, I made my own encyclopedia of American biography - Johnny Appleseed, Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Charles Lindbergh, my pantheon of favorite heroes. Then I would write my own things and sew them together and try to make my own book. ~ Douglas Brinkley, #NFDB
94:There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders among the ablest men. Imagine a congress of eminent celebrities, such as More, Bacon, Grotius, Pascal, Cromwell, Bossuet, Montesquieu, Jefferson, Napoleon, Pitt, etc. The result would be an Encyclopedia of Error. ~ Lord Acton, #NFDB
95:Astrology and magic were the efforts made in various ways to verify and apply this theory... magical power was at starting purely cosmogenic, i.e., regarded as an attribute of God or nature, before it was counterfeited by the magicians of various countries. ~ Encyclopedia Brittanica (1875), #NFDB
96:I had an encyclopedia with a list of flags in the back, so I would look at all these flags of China and Liberia and England and Denmark and whatever, and I learned all the different flags and I tried to imagine what it would be like to be voyaging on some of these ships. ~ George R R Martin, #NFDB
97:You have a diasporic black world, and the only way to put it back together again is symbolic. It's like Humpty Dumpty. Whoever could edit the 'Encyclopedia Africana' would provide symbolic order to the fragments created over the past 500 years. That is a major contribution. ~ Henry Louis Gates, #NFDB
98:[The Internet] is by far the most important innovation in the media in my lifetime. It's like having a huge encyclopedia permanently available. There's a tremendous amount of rubbish on the world wide web, but retrieval of what you want to so rapid that it doesn't really matter ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
99:It is one thing to speak of embracing the new, the fresh, the strange. It is another to feel that one is an insect, crawling across a page of the Encyclopedia Britannica, knowing only that something vast is passing by beneath, all without your sensing more than a yawning vacancy. ~ Gregory Benford, #NFDB
100:Tautologies are instantaneous, everything is revealed at once. Eternity can actually be experienced. Once you set up a closed circuit, you just keep spinnin' 'round and 'round in there. That's the nature of tautologies. No interruptions like with dreams. It's like the encyclopedia wand. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
101:Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable. ~ Italo Calvino, #NFDB
102:If here and there an honest student of the black art still survives, he is regarded as a mad but harmless enthusiast; and as for the pretended searchers for the philosopher's stone, they are, if possible, less interesting objects than the dupes they still continue to cheat. ~ Encyclopedia Brittanica (1875), #NFDB
103:Hoffmeier furnishes a sophisticated fresh approach to the Biblical Exodus traditions filled with detailed Egyptological background, and utterly indispensable because of its basis in recent, and in many cases as yet unpublished, archaeological data. This is a virtual encyclopedia of the Exodus. ~ Baruch Halpern, #NFDB
104:I feel like I have to be a walking encyclopedia - I constantly have to be explaining myself - especially when I do table work or when I'm talking to a dramaturg about, you know, the culture, but also what I'm trying to do as a writer in this particular play. You know, you have to protect yourself too. ~ Nilo Cruz, #NFDB
105:You know what I need?” I asked. “A chocolate fountain?” Ethan suggested. “A complete paper set of the Encyclopedia Britannica? A lifetime supply of grilled meat?” “I like all those ideas, but I was thinking a magical spray I can use on Mallory to wash the crazy off her.” “Like Lysol for evil?” Paige asked. ~ Chloe Neill, #NFDB
106:books: Nancy Drew, Harriet the Spy, Encyclopedia Brown, and later, anything with even a passing mention of sex in it: Judy Blume’s Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret, and those Clan of the Cave Bear books, the whole Flowers in the Attic series. But mostly we were obsessed with a book called The Chrysalids. We ~ Ivan E Coyote, #NFDB
107:To my surprise, I discovered that anesthesiologists are a bit in the dark themselves. “How anesthesia works has been a mystery since the discovery of anesthesia itself,” writes Michael Alkire, an anesthesiologist at the University of California at Irvine School of Medicine, in the new Encyclopedia of Consciousness. ~ Carl Zimmer, #NFDB
108:I looked up "skin" in the encyclopedia and confirmed that, sure enough, it is the human body's largest organ, a fact that suggests our surfaces are critical to who we are, not just the gateway to physical or spiritual depths but a profoundly important web of cells that, in protecting us, gives us form and function. ~ Lauren Slater, #NFDB
109:In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitchhiker’s Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
110:Kids, she says. When they’re little, they believe everything you tell them about the world. As a mother, you’re the world almanac and the encyclopedia and the dictionary and the Bible, all rolled up together. But after they hit some magic age, it’s just the opposite. After that, you’re either a liar or a fool or a villain. ~ Chuck Palahniuk, #NFDB
111:My fashion is my most prized possession for two reasons: 1) because it is a visualization of all the hard work I've put in to get where I am today; 2) because it is a legend to the encyclopedia of my life. It is exactly what I've aimed to seep into the artistic consciousness of people all over the world - that life is an art form. ~ Lady Gaga, #NFDB
112:Mumbling priests swinging stick cans on their chains and even witch doctors conjuring up curses with a well-buried elephant tooth have a better sense of their places in the world. They know this universe is brimming with magic, with life and riddles and ironies. They know that the world might eat them, and no encyclopedia could stop it. ~ N D Wilson, #NFDB
113:It is upsetting to many parents that their teen-agers introduce them to their friends as encyclopedia salesmen who are just passing through ... if they introduce them at all. I have some acquaintances who hover in dark parking lots, enter church separately and crouch in furnace rooms so their teen-agers will not be accused of having parents. ~ Erma Bombeck, #NFDB
114:Frank Drummer
Out of a cell into this darkened space -The end at twenty-five!
My tongue could not speak what stirred within me,
And the village thought me a fool.
Yet at the start there was a clear vision,
A high and urgent purpose in my soul
Which drove me on trying to memorize
The Encyclopedia Britannica!
~ Edgar Lee Masters,#NFDB
115:William Ferris has long reigned as the unimpeachable source of the entire southern experience. His work on southern folklore and the composition of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture have made him both legendary and necessary. His book, The Storied South , is a love song to the South Bill helped illuminate. It's a crowning achievement of his own storied career. ~ Pat Conroy, #NFDB
116:One of the thousand objections to the sin of pride lies precisely in this, that self-consciousness of necessity destroys sel-revelation. A man who thinks a great deal about himself will try to be many-sided, attempt a theatrical excellence at all points, will try to be an encyclopedia of culture, and his own real personality will be lost in that false universalism. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
117:It was the alchemists who first stated, however confusedly, the problems which science is still engaged in solving; and to them... we owe the enormous service of removing the endless obstructions which a purely rationalistic method, born before its time and degenerating into verbal quibbles and scholastic jargon, had placed in the path of human progress. ~ Encyclopedia Brittanica (1875), #NFDB
118:You’re letting him get to you. You’re like a walking mythological encyclopedia, Kate. You pull random mystical crap out of your head and figure out that a giant monster nobody has seen on the face of the planet for three thousand years is allergic to hedgehogs and then you find a cute hedgehog and stab the monster in the eye with it.”
“Where do you even get this shit? ~ Ilona Andrews,#NFDB
119:The tremendous Jeremy Latcham from Marvel showed up with this one-of-a-kind animated encyclopedia about S.H.I.E.L.D. and The Avengers. Coulson wasn't a part of the comic books, which is a singular thing about him that I thought would get me killed off very quickly, but luckily, it didn't. It just became a thing that I fit into, and they kept finding new and better uses for me. ~ Clark Gregg, #NFDB
120:One of the things I believe most intensely is that every child’s why should be answered with care—and with respect. If you do not know the answer, and you often will not, then take the child with you to a source to find the answer. This may be a dictionary or encyclopedia which he is too young to use himself, but he will have had a sense of participation in finding the answer. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt, #NFDB
121:Nazi Literature in the Americas, a wicked invented encyclopedia of imaginary fascist writers and literary tastemakers, is Bolaño playing with sharp, twisting knives. As if he were Borges's wisecracking, sardonic son, Bolaño has meticulously created a tightly woven network of far-right litterateurs and purveyors of belles lettres for whom Hitler was beauty, truth, and the great lost hope. ~ Stacey D Erasmo, #NFDB
122:Most of the puranas are highly sectarian as is the Shiva Purana, which is one of the longer and larger puranas. It gives an exhaustive account Shiva’s mythic deeds – many of which have become the common mythic currency for many traditional Hindus – as well as instructions for how, where, and when Shiva is to be worshipped. ~ James G. Lochtefeld, in "Illustrated Encyclopedia of Hinduism: N-Z (2002)", p. 637, #NFDB
123:I'm tempted to say, 'Writing treatments is like designing a film by hiring six million monkeys to tear out pages of an encyclopedia, then you put the pages through a paper-shredder, randomly grab whatever intact lines are left, sing them in Italian to a Spanish deaf-mute, and then make story decisions with the guy via conference call.' But no... compared to writing treatments, that makes sense, too. ~ Terry Rossio, #NFDB
124:If I had enough time left, I'd write a complete encyclopedia based on just the words "love" and "hope."
Don't laugh! Its possible. In a world were everything and everybody can change on you overnight, love will always be love and hope will remain as hope. Those two never change. Love and hope remain eternal.
People change, but love and hope will never change. They are as basic as air and water. ~ Jos N Harris,#NFDB
125:It is as the father of the Encyclopedia that Denis Diderot merits eternal recognition. Guilty as he was in almost every relation of life towards the individual, for mankind, in the teeth of danger and of infidelity, at the ill-paid sacrifice of the best years of his exuberant life, he produced that book which first levelled a free path to knowledge and enfranchised the soul of his generation. ~ Evelyn Beatrice Hall, #NFDB
126:Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today — but the core of science fiction, its essence, the concept around which it revolves, has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all. ~ Isaac Asimov, in "My Own View" in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1978) edited by Robert Holdstock; later published in Asimov on Science Fiction (1981), #NFDB
127:In a book published at the time, a lace manufacturer admitted that he expected his workers to turn a few tricks on the side to make up for his not paying them a living wage. Soon lace, including crocheted lace, began to be seen as morally tainted—it’s made by prostitutes! As Donna Kooler suggests in The Encyclopedia of Crochet, this may even explain how the word “hooker” came to have such wayward connotations. ~ Debbie Stoller, #NFDB
128:Run a test. Give a 5-year-old a printed book and an iPad and see what happens. That 5-year-old is going to go right for the iPad. They're not intimidated by it. They know what to do with it. They'll start searching around. And in a children's e-book, you can have links to kid-safe encyclopedia. So if they click on the lion, it takes them to Africa and tells them all about lions. So now, the e-book is educational. ~ Dan Poynter, #NFDB
129:The Encyclopedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as "Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun to Be With. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing devision of the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes, ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
130:The Encyclopedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as "Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun to Be With. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing devision of the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
131:Let's be honest-we're a pretty intense bunch, yeah? Osten laughed, and Kaden's expression brightend. "But whatever we put her through, it was welcome. She'd rather have forced me to learn penmanship than never have had a daughter. She'd rather have been your living encyclopedia than not connect with us. She'd rather have begged you to sit still than have had only three children. None of this is because of us," I promised. ~ Kiera Cass, #NFDB
132:Will there ever be an encyclopedia? Possibly. I would say two things about the encyclopedia: firstly, I’ve always said and I stand by it, whenever I do do a printed encyclopedia I would like all the proceeds to go to charity. Back in 1998 I never dreamt I personally I would be in the position that I could set up a large charitable foundation and personally do things for charity, and I’ve done other charity books already. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
133:The Talmud is not only an encyclopedia of law but a work of folk art, a hymn to the Lord rising out of many generations of men who spent their lives in the quest for him. This quest for God, the confident search for the holy in every busy detail of life, is its grand single theme. The Talmud recaptures a long golden age of intelligence and insight, and it is to this day the circulating heart's blood of the Jewish religion. ~ Herman Wouk, #NFDB
134:discovered a classification Jorge Luis Borges devised, claiming that A certain Chinese encyclopedia divides animals into: a. Belonging to the Emperor b. Embalmed c. Tame d. Sucking pigs e. Sirens f. Fabulous g. Stray dogs h. Included in the present classification i. Frenzied j. Innumerable k. Drawn with a very fine camel-hair brush l. Et cetera m. Having just broken the water pitcher n. That from a long way off look like flies. ~ Sue Hubbell, #NFDB
135:This 'web of discourses' as Robyn called it...is as much a biological product as any of the other constructions to be found in the animal world. (Clothes too, are part of the extended phenotype of Homo Sapiens almost every niche inhabited by that species.An illustrated encyclopedia of zoology should no more picture Homo Sapiens naked than it should picture Ursus arctus-the black bear- wearing a clown suit and riding a bicycle. ~ Daniel C Dennett, #NFDB
136:[My wife] liked to collect old encyclopedias from second-hand bookstores, and at one point we had eight of them. When I wrote my first historical novel--back in 1980, before I was online--I used them often as a research tool. For instance, I learned that the Bastille was either 90 feet high or 100 feet or 120 feet. This led me to formulate Wilson's 22nd Law: 'Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only look in one encyclopedia.' ~ Robert Anton Wilson, #NFDB
137:Rules of Play is an exhaustive, clear, cogent, and complete resource for understanding games and game design. Salen and Zimmerman describe an encyclopedia of game design issues, techniques, and attributes. In particular, they analyze the elements that can make a game experience richer, more interesting, more emotional, more meaningful, and, ultimately, more successful. It should be the first stop you make when learning about game design. ~ Nathan Shedroff, #NFDB
138:[My wife] liked to collect old encyclopedias from second-hand bookstores, and at one point we had eight of them. When I wrote my first historical novel---back in 1980, before I was online---I used them often as a research tool. For instance, I learned that the Bastille was either 90 feet high or 100 feet or 120 feet. This led me to formulate Wilson's 22nd Law: 'Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only look in one encyclopedia.' ~ Robert Anton Wilson, #NFDB
139:Death still exists; what has disappeared is the certainty that everything will eventually end sooner or later. There's time to shave your head, time to let the gray hairs grow, time to get pregnant, to torture, to be the world champion, and to rewrite the encyclopedia. With patience, a single person could build the pyramids; with perseverance, another single person could knock them down. I guess destruction is another form of love. ~ Mart n Felipe Castagnet, #NFDB
140:I like the trail that the Internet created. For example, I was watching one of those Douglas Sirk movies, and I noticed that Rock Hudson towered over everyone, and I typed in "How tall was" and I saw "How tall was Jesus," and I'm like, "Sure," and half an hour later you're somewhere you didn't expect to be. It doesn't work that same way in books, does it? Even if you have an encyclopedia, the trail isn't that crazy. I like that aspect of it. ~ David Sedaris, #NFDB
141:Only a hundred years ago the idea that an order might arise without a personal Author appeared so nonsensical to you that it inspired seemingly absurd jokes, like the one about the pack of monkeys hammering away at typewriters until the Encyclopedia Britannica emerged. I recommend that you devote some of your free time to compiling an anthology of just such jokes, which amused your forebears as pure nonsense but now turn out to be parables of Nature. ~ Stanis aw Lem, #NFDB
142:Wikipedia first appeared to Internet users with a simple self-description: HomePage You can edit this page right now! It’s a free, community project Welcome to Wikipedia! We’re writing a complete encyclopedia from scratch, collaboratively. We started work in January 2001. We’ve got over 3,000 pages already. We want to make over 100,000. So, let’s get to work! Write a little (or a lot) about what you know! Read our welcome message here: Welcome, newcomers! ~ James Gleick, #NFDB
143:I went downstairs to Dad’s encyclopedia and looked up HOMOSEXUALITY, but that didn’t tell me much about any of the things I felt. What struck me most, though, was that, in the whole long article, the word “love” wasn’t used even once. That made me mad; it was as if whoever wrote the article didn’t know that gay people actually love each other. The encyclopedia writers ought to talk to me, I thought as I went back to bed; I could tell them something about love. ~ Nancy Garden, #NFDB
144:Just in same way medicine as a magical or sacred art was prior to alchemy; for... before thinking of forming new substances, men employed already existing herbs, stones, drugs, perfumes, and vapours. The medical art was indissolubly bound up with astrology, but, judging from the natural inventiveness of the ancients, we should have expected... that chemical preparations would have played a more important part among the instruments of priestly thaumaturgy. ~ Encyclopedia Brittanica (1875), #NFDB
145:Host of heaven” was a term that referred to astronomical bodies that were also considered to be gods or members of the divine council.[8] The Encyclopedia Judaica notes that, “in many cultures the sky, the sun, the moon, and the known planets were conceived as personal gods. These gods were responsible for all or some aspects of existence. Prayers were addressed to them, offerings were made to them, and their opinions on important matters were sought through divination.”[9] ~ Brian Godawa, #NFDB
146:My investigations revealed a deep and previously unsuspected relationship between gravity and thermodynamics, the science of heat, and resolved a paradox that had been argued over for thirty years without much progress: how could the radiation left over from a shrinking black hole carry all of the information about what made the black hole? I discovered that information is not lost, but it is not returned in a useful way—like burning an encyclopedia but retaining the smoke and ashes. ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
147:At a certain historical moment, some people found the suspicion that the sun did not revolve around the earth just as crazy and deplorable as the suspicion that the universe does not exist. So we would be wise to keep an open, fresh mind against the moment when the community of scientists decrees that the idea of the universe has been an illusion, just like the flat earth and the Rosicrucians. After all, the cultivated person’s first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia. ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
148:Indeed, the purpose of an encyclopedia is to collect knowledge disseminated around the globe; to set forth its general system to the men with whom we live, and transmit it to those who will come after us, so that the work of preceding centuries will not become useless to the centuries to come; and so that our offspring, becoming better instructed, will at the same time become more virtuous and happy, and that we should not die without having rendered a service to the human race in the future years to come. ~ Denis Diderot, #NFDB
149:The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them. Everything remembered and thought, everything conscious, becomes the pedestal, the frame, the base, the lock of his property. The period, the region, the craftsmanship, the former ownership—for a true collector the whole background of an item adds up to a magic encyclopedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object. ~ Walter Benjamin, #NFDB
150:Tool,” William said,...."As in a device to perform or facilitate mechanical or manual labor?”
“That’s right Encyclopedia Britannica. Or in layman’s terms: screwdriver, hammer—”
“How about a wrench,” William interrupted,“ —
"You’ve got a quick learner on your hands, Bryn,” Paul said .... “Sure, wrench works just fine as well,” ... “Whatever blows your skirt up buddy.” ...
“Well a wrench would come in handy right now,” William mused. “Because you definitely have a couple screws loose. ~ Nicole Williams,#NFDB
151:Before I officially began the journey to dig deeper into my food and family roots and routes, I was racking up an internal encyclopedia about other people and how food affected their lives as proxy for the stories in my own bloodline and body. This made for really uncomfortable armor. It never really fit me right. These were other people’s tales and paths—not my own. I began to wonder if I ever really would be able to locate myself in the human experience. What good is it to learn the flow of human history and to ~ Michael W Twitty, #NFDB
152:Here’s what the Encyclopedia Galáctica has to say about alcohol. It says that alcohol is a colorless volatile liquid formed by the fermentation of sugars and also notes its intoxicating effect on certain carbon-based life forms. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy also mentions alcohol. It says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. It says that the effect of drinking a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
153:Alchemy was... the sickly but imaginative infancy through which modern chemistry had to pass before it attained its majority [i.e.,] became a positive science. The search for gold was only one crisis in this infancy. This crisis is over, and alchemy is now a thing of the past. There is no longer any need to exhort adventurous spirits, who hope to find Golconda at the bottom of their crucibles, to leave such visions and turn to the safer paths of science or industry. The battle has been fought and won... ~ Encyclopedia Brittanica (1875), #NFDB
154:The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write something out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far in between. Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica. ~ Stephen Leacock, #NFDB
155:On those remote pages [of 'a certain Chinese encyclopedia'] it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f ) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance. ~ Jorge Luis Borges, #NFDB
156:A good reference book, the Columbia Encyclopedia. Best one-volume all-round reference in the world and more useful than the Britannica, even if it does waste an entry on Isaac Asimov."
"On whom?" asked Gonzalo.
"Asimov. Friend of mine. Science fiction writer and pathologically conceited. He carries a copy of the Encyclopedia to parties and says, 'Talking of concrete, the Columbia Encyclopedia has an excellent article on it only 249 pages after their article on me. Let me show you.' Then he shows them the article on himself. ~ Isaac Asimov,#NFDB
157:In the first stages of civilisation the magician was the man of science. The mysteries of this magic art being inseparable from those of religion and philosophy, were preserved... hermetically sealed in the adyta of the temple. Its philosophy was the cabala. We must consequently look on the various cabalas or oral traditions, transmitted from age to age as the oracles of various faiths and creeds, as constituting the elements of that theory which the Jewish cabala promulgated some centuries later in a condensed and mutilated form. ~ Encyclopedia Brittanica (1875), #NFDB
158:Invariably, I will be referred to Gleason Archer's massive Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, a heavy volume that seeks to provide the reader with sound explanations for every conceivable puzzle found within the Bible - from whether God approved of Rahab's lie, to where Cain got his wife. (Note to well-meaning apologists: it's not always the best idea to present a skeptic with a five-hundred-page book listing hundreds of apparent contradictions in Scripture when the skeptic didn't even know that half of them existed before you recommended it.) ~ Rachel Held Evans, #NFDB
159:Look. He's handing out little cards," said Brother.
"Maybe he'll give me one," said Sister, scurrying off through the crowd.
"Hey, wait!" said Brother, who was always nervous about Sister's bold ways. Not that there was much anybody could do about it. That's the way it was with the Bear Scouts. Each scout brought something special to the troop. Sister was bold. Brother was a natural leader. Super-smart Fred read the dictionary and encyclopedia just for fun. Lizzy was so in tune with nature that she could pet a skunk without getting skunked. ~ Stan Berenstain,#NFDB
160:Vishnu Purana is one of the eighteen traditional puranas, which were an important genre of smriti text, and the repository of much of traditional Indian mythology... Most of the puranas are highly sectarian as is the Vishnu Purana which is focused on the worship of Vishnu. It gives an exhaustive account of Vishnu’s mystic deeds – many of which have become the common mythic currency for many traditional Hindus – as well as instructions for how, where, and when Vishnu is to be worshipped. ~ James G. Lochtefeld, in Illustrated Encyclopedia of Hinduism: N-Z (2002), p. 760, #NFDB
161:He discovered then that he could understand written English and that between parchments he had gone from the first page to the last of the six volumes of the encyclopedia as if it were a novel. At first he attributed to that the fact that Aureliano could speak
about Rome as if he had lived there many years, but he soon became aware that he knew things that
were not in the encyclopedia, such as the price of items. “Everything is known,” was the only reply
he received from Aureliano when he asked him where he had got that information from. ~ Gabriel Garc a M rquez,#NFDB
162:The Encyclopedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as “Your Plastic Pal Who’s Fun to Be With.” The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as “a bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes,” with a footnote to the effect that the editors would welcome applications from anyone interested in taking over the post of robotics correspondent. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
163:A tremor of apprehension encircled the room. None of the ladies required any preparation to pronounce on a question of morals; but when they were called ethics it was different. The club, when fresh from the "Encyclopedia Brittanica," the "Reader's Handbook" or Smith's "Classical Dictionary," could deal confidently with any subject; but when taken unawares it had been known to define agnosticism as a heresy of the Early Church and Professor Froude as a distinguished histologist; and such minor members as Mrs. Leveret still secretly regarded ethics as something vaguely pagan. ~ Edith Wharton, #NFDB
164:But as St. Simon has well observed, chemical phenomena are much more complicated than astronomical—the latter requiring only observation, the former experiment—and hence astrology preceded alchemy. But there was then no hard and fast line between the several branches of science, and hence the most opposite were united, not, as now, by a common philosophical or philanthropical object, but by reason of their common theological origin. Thus alchemy was the daughter of astrology, and it was not till the end of the 16th century A.D. that she passed from a state of tutelage. ~ Encyclopedia Brittanica (1875), #NFDB
165:It is possible I never learned the names of birds in order to discover the bird of peace, the bird of paradise, the bird of the soul, the bird of desire. It is possible I avoided learning the names of composers and their music the better to close my eyes and listen to the mystery of all music as an ocean. It may be I have not learned dates in history in order to reach the essence of timelessness. It may be I never learned geography the better to map my own routes and discover my own lands. The unknown was my compass. The unknown was my encyclopedia. The unnamed was my science and progress. ~ Anais Nin, #NFDB
166:It is possible I never learned the names of birds in order to discover the bird of peace, the bird of paradise, the bird of the soul, the bird of desire. It is possible I avoided learning the names of composers and their music the better to close my eyes and listen to the mystery of all music as an ocean. It may be I have not learned dates in history in order to reach the essence of timelessness. It may be I never learned geography the better to map my own routes and discover my own lands. The unknown was my compass. The unknown was my encyclopedia. The unnamed was my science and progress. ~ Ana s Nin, #NFDB
167:[T]he full time is come for applying to the occult sciences the same searching analysis to which the other myths of prehistoric times have been so rigorously subjected. To trace its earliest beginnings, to investigate its development by the aid of modern criticism, is the province of physical science, no less than of the sister science of morals. ...[B]oth had a common origin. Those ancient cosmogenies, those poetical systems... struck out to solve the problem of the universe and of the destiny of mankind, were the germs of science no less than of literature... philosophy... religion. ~ Encyclopedia Brittanica (1875), #NFDB
168:I see all this and I feel no amazement because making the shell implied also making the honey in the wax comb and the coal and the telescopes and the reign of Cleopatra and the films about Cleopatra and the Pyramids and the design of the zodiac of the Chaldean astrologers and the wars and empires Herodotus speaks of and the words written by Herodotus and the works written in all languages, including those of Spinoza in Dutch, and the fourteen-line summary of Spinoza’s life and works in the instalment of the encyclopedia in the truck passed by the ice-cream van, and so I feel as if, in making the shell, I had also made the rest. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
169:Give me priests. Give me men with feathers in their hair, or tall domed hats, female oracles in caves, servants of the python, smoking weed and reading palms. A gypsy fortuneteller with a foot-peddle ouija board and a gold fish bowl for a crystal ball knows more about the world than many of the great thinkers of the West. Mumbling priests swinging stink cans on their chains and even witch doctors conjuring up curses with a well-buried elephant tooth have a better sense of their places in the world. They know this universe is brimming with magic, with life and riddles and ironies. They know that the world might eat them, and no encyclopedia could stop it ~ N D Wilson, #NFDB
170:The Book of Man
(in Twenty-Three Volumes)
It has 3,088,286,401 letters of DNA (give or take a few).
Published as a book with a standard-size font, it would contain just four letters...AGCTTGCAGGGG...and so on, stretching, inscrutably, page upon page, for over 1.5 million pages-sixty-six times the size of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
It encodes about 20,687 genes in total-only 1,796 more than worms, 12,000 fewer than corn, and 25,000 fewer genes than rice or wheat. The difference between "human" and "breakfast cereal" is not a matter of gene numbers, but of the sophistication of gene networks. It is not what we have; it is how we use it. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee,#NFDB
171:/Farsi I had supposed that, having passed away From self in concentration, I should blaze A path to Thee, but ah! No creature may Draw near thee, save Thy appointed ways. I cannot longer live, Lord, without Thee; Thy Hand is everywhere: I may not flee. Some have desired through hope to come to Thee, And thou hast wrought in them their high design: Lo! I have severed every thought from me, And died to selfhood, that I might be Thine. How long, my heart's Beloved? I am spent: I can no more endure this banishment. [2135.jpg] -- from A Treasury of Traditional Wisdom: An Encyclopedia of Humankind's Spiritual Truth, by Whitall N. Perry
~ Abu l-Husayn al-Nuri, I had supposed that, having passed away
,#NFDB
172:We need to free ourselves from the habit of seeing culture as encyclopedia knowledge, and men as mere receptacles to be stuffed full of empirical data and a mass of unconnected raw facts, which have to be filed in the brain as in the columns of a dictionary, enabling their owner to respond to the various stimuli from the outside world. This form of culture really is harmful, particularly for the proletariat. It serves only to create maladjusted people, people who believe they are superior to the rest of humanity because they have memorized a certain number of facts and dates and who rattle them off at every opportunity, so turning them almost into a barrier between themselves and others. ~ Antonio Gramsci, #NFDB
173:In the Encyclopedia of social sciences, Harold lasswell, one of the founders of modern political science, warned that the intelligent few must recognize "the ignorance and stupidity of the masses." And not succumb to "democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests." They are not the best judges; we are. The masses must be controlled for their own good, and in more democratic societies where force is unavailable, social managers must turn to a whole new technique of control, largely through propaganda. Note that this is a good Leninist doctrine. The similarity between progressive democratic theory and Marxism-Leninism is rather striking, something that Bakunin predicted long before. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
174:She arrives in Rome prepared, as ever. She brings five guidebooks, all of which she has read already, and she has the city pre-mapped in her head. She was completely oriented before she even left Philadelphia. And this is a classic example of the differences between us. I am the one who spent my first weeks in Rome wandering about, 90 percent lost and 100 percent happy, seeing everything around me as an unexplainable beautiful mystery. But this is how the world kind of always looks to me. To my sister's eyes, there is nothing which cannot be explained if one has access to a proper reference library. This is a woman who keeps The Columbia Encyclopedia in her kitchen next to the cookbooks—and reads it, for pleasure. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
175:Modern science dates from three discoveries—that of Copernicus, the effect of which... was to expel the astrologers from the society of astronomers; that of Torricelli and Pascal, of the weight of the atmosphere... which was the foundation of physics; lastly... Lavoisier... by discovering oxygen, destroyed the theory of Stahl, the last alchemist who can be excused for not being a chemist.
Before these three grand stages in the progress of science, the reign of astrology, magic, and alchemy was universal and almost uncontested. Even a genius like Kepler, who by his three great laws laid the foundations for the Copernican system, was guided in his investigations by astrological and cabalistic considerations. ~ Encyclopedia Brittanica (1875),#NFDB
176:The semanticists maintained that everything depends on how you interpret the words “potato,” “is” and “moving.” Since the key here is the operational copula “is,” one must examine “is” rigorously. Whereupon they set to work on an Encyclopedia of Cosmic Semasiology, devoting the first four volumes to a discussion of the operational referents of “is.” The neopositivists maintained that it is not clusters of potatoes one directly perceives, but clusters of sensory impressions. Then, employing symbolic logic, they created terms for “cluster of impressions” and “cluster of potatoes,” devised a special calculus of propositions all in algebraic signs and after using up several seas of ink reached the mathematically precise and absolutely undeniable conclusion that 0=0. ~ Stanis aw Lem, #NFDB
177:Before I officially began the journey to dig deeper into my food and family roots, I was racking up an internal encyclopedia about other people and how food affected their lives as proxy for the stories in my own bloodline and body. This made for really uncomfortable armor. It never really fit me right. These were other people's tales and paths - not my own. I began to wonder if I ever really would be able to locate myself in the human experience. What good is it to learn the flow of human history and to speak of the dead if their stories don't speak to you? What of food history and facts and figures and flashpoints? What good is your own position as a culinary historian if you can't find yourself in the narrative of your food's story, if you don't know who you are? ~ Michael W Twitty, #NFDB
178:You say a name, but its not known to anyone.
Either because that man died or because
He was a celebrity on the banks of another river.
Chiaromonte
Miomandre
Petőfi
Mickiewicz
Young generations are not interested in what happened
Somewhere else, long ago.
And what about the teachers who repeated:
Ars longa, vita brevis?
Their laurel crowned deceptions will soon be over.
Do you still say to yourself: non omnis moriar?
O yes, not all of me shall die, there will remain
An item in the fourteenth volume of an encyclopedia
Next to a hundred Millers and Mickey Mouse.
A traveler. Far away. And a low sun.
You sit in a ditch and to your bearded mouth
You raise a slice of bread cut off with a penknife. ~ Czes aw Mi osz,#NFDB
179:Our parents had drilled us under the importance of using proper diction, of saying “going” instead of “goin” and “isn’t” instead of “ain’t “. We were taught to finish off words. They bought us a dictionary and a full Encyclopedia Britannica set, which lived on a shelf in the stairwell to our apartment, its titles etched in gold. Any time we had a question about a word, or a concept, or some piece of history, they directed us toward those books. Dandy, too, was an influence, meticulously correcting our grammar and admonishing us to enunciate our words when we went over for dinner. The idea was we were to transcend, to get ourselves further. They’d planned for it. They encouraged it. We were expected not just to be smart but to own our smartness – to inhabit it with pride – and this filtered down to how we spoke. ~ Michelle Obama, #NFDB
180:Just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book. In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. ... The great minds of the period—Milton, Bacon, Locke—were zealous believers in the memory-enhancing powers of the commonplace book. There is a distinct self-help quality to the early descriptions of commonplacing’s virtues: in the words of one advocate, maintaining the books enabled one to “lay up a fund of knowledge, from which we may at all times select what is useful in the several pursuits of life.” ~ Steven Berlin Johnson, "The Glass Box and the Commonplace Book," Hearst New Media lecture (April 22, 2010)., #NFDB
181:Just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book. In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. ... The great minds of the period—Milton, Francis_Bacon, Locke—were zealous believers in the memory-enhancing powers of the commonplace book. There is a distinct self-help quality to the early descriptions of commonplacing’s virtues: in the words of one advocate, maintaining the books enabled one to “lay up a fund of knowledge, from which we may at all times select what is useful in the several pursuits of life.” ~ Steven Berlin Johnson, "The Glass Box and the Commonplace Book," Hearst New Media lecture, April 22, 2010., #NFDB
182:We will never fight again, our lovely, quick, template-ready arguments. Our delicate cross-stitch of bickers.
The house becomes a physical encyclopedia of no-longer hers, which shocks and shocks and is the principal difference between our house and a house where illness has worked away. Ill people, in their last day on Earth, do not leave notes stuck to bottles of red wine saying ‘OH NO YOU DON’T COCK-CHEEK’. She was not busy dying, and there is no detritus of care, she was simply busy living, and then she was gone.
She won’t ever use (make-up, turmeric, hairbrush, thesaurus).
She will never finish (Patricia Highsmith novel, peanut butter, lip balm).
And I will never shop for green Virago Classics for her birthday.
I will stop finding her hairs.
I will stop hearing her breathing. ~ Max Porter,#NFDB
183:our land: The Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening and Double Yoga. Northland Wildflowers and Quilts to Wear. Songs for the Dulcimer and Bread Baking Basics. Using Plants for Healing and I Always Look Up the Word Egregious. I took the books she’d read to me, chapter by chapter, before I could read to myself: the unabridged Bambi and Black Beauty and Little House in the Big Woods. I took the books that she’d acquired as a college student in the years right before she died: Paula Gunn Allen’s The Sacred Hoop and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s This Bridge Called My Back. Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. But I did not take the books by James Michener, the ones my mother loved the most. “Thank you,” I said now to Jeff, holding The Novel. “I’ll trade this for ~ Cheryl Strayed, #NFDB
184:The Encyclopedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as “Your Plastic Pal Who’s Fun to Be With.” The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as “a bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes,” with a footnote to the effect that the editors would welcome applications from anyone interested in taking over the post of robotics correspondent. Curiously enough, an edition of the Encyclopedia Galactica that had the good fortune to fall through a time warp from a thousand years in the future defined the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as “a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
185:The war is not over, however. Even organisations like Wikipedia succumbed to the authoritarian twitch, appointing editors with special privileges who could impose their own prejudices upon certain topics. The motive was understandable – to stop entries being taken over by obsessive nutters with weird views. But of course what happened, just as in the French and Russian revolutions, was that the nutters got on the committee. The way to become an editor was simply to edit lots of pages, and thereby gain brownie points. Some of the editors turned into ruthlessly partisan dogmatists, and the value of a crowd-sourced encyclopedia was gradually damaged. As one commentator puts it, Wikipedia is ‘run by cliquish, censorious editors and open to pranks and vandalism’. It is still a great first port of call on any uncontroversial topic, but I find Wikipedia cannot be trusted on many subjects. ~ Matt Ridley, #NFDB
186:Amory Blaine inherited from his mother every trait, except the stray inexpressible few, that made him worth while. His father, an ineffectual, inarticulate man with a taste for Byron and a habit of drowsing over the Encyclopedia Britannica, grew wealthy at thirty through the death of two elder brothers, successful Chicago brokers, and in the first flush of feeling that the world was his, went to Bar Harbor and met Beatrice O'Hara. In consequence, Stephen Blaine handed down to posterity his height of just under six feet and his tendency to waver at crucial moments, these two abstractions appearing in his son Amory. For many years he hovered in the background of his family's life, an unassertive figure with a face half-obliterated by lifeless, silky hair, continually occupied in "taking care" of his wife, continually harassed by the idea that he didn't and couldn't understand her. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
187:You’re not safe to go back there,” he said.
“I’m going,” I returned.
“We’ll see.”
Jeez, there was just no shaking this guy.
“You do know that there’s this little thing called the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote?” I asked.
“I heard of that,” he said and there was a smile in his voice.
“And there’s this whole movement called fem… in… is…im.” I said it slowly, like he was a dim child. “Where women started working, demanding equal pay for equal work, raising their voices on issues of the day, taking back the night, stuff like that.”
He rolled into me, which made me roll onto my back.
“Sounds familiar.”
“Do you have an encyclopedia? Maybe we can look it up. If the words are too big for you to read, I’l read it out loud and explain as I go along.”
He got up on his elbow. “Only if you do it naked.” I slapped his shoulder. ~ Kristen Ashley,#NFDB
188:The information capacity recorded in DNA is of a size which
astonishes scientists. There is enough information in a single human
DNA molecule to fill a million encyclopedia pages or 1,000 volumes.
To put it another way, the nucleus of a cell contains information, equivalent
to that in a 1 million-page encyclopedia. It serves to control all
the functions of the human body. To make a comparison, the 23-volume
Encyclopedia Britannica, one of the largest encyclopedias in the world,
contains a total of 25,000 pages. Yet a single molecule in the nucleus of
a cell, and which is so much smaller than that cell, contains a store of
information 40 times larger than the world's largest encyclopedias.
That means that what we have here is a 1,000-volume encyclopedia,
the like of which exists nowhere else on Earth. This is a miracle of
design and creation within our very own bodies, for which evolutionists
and materialists have no answer. ~ Harun Yahya,#NFDB
189:Did God really say you can't eat from any tree in the garden?" "Oh, no! We can eat from any tree but the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil." Woman explained. "But if we eat from that tree or even touch it, God will kill us!" That bastard! thought the snake and he spat, "Bullshit! This fruit will not kill you! God knows that if you eat from that tree you will open your eyes and become like gods and know the difference between good and evil!" Become like gods! Well, isn't that interesting... "Fuck God, eat all you want, learn all you can, write a goddamn encyclopedia, for Chrissake!" "Well," Woman thought, "It's a beautiful tree and the fruit looks delicious and who better to trust than a talking snake?" Abandoning all caution, she picked some forbidden fruit and shared it with Man. They each took a bite... Flash! Man, suddenly felt the cool breeze on his balls and looked frantically at Woman... She looked frantically at him... Holy Shit! We're buck fucking naked! ~ Steve Ebling, #NFDB
190:The Guide even tells you how you can mix one yourself. Take the juice from one bottle of the Ol’ Janx Spirit, it says. Pour into it one measure of water from the seas of Santraginus V—Oh, that Santraginean seawater, it says. Oh, those Santraginean fish! Allow three cubes of Arcturan Mega-gin to melt into the mixture (it must be properly iced or the benzine is lost). Allow four liters of Fallian marsh gas to bubble through it, in memory of all those happy hikers who have died of pleasure in the Marshes of Fallia. Over the back of a silver spoon float a measure of Qualactin Hyper-mintextract, redolent of all the heady odors of the dark Qualactin Zones, subtle, sweet and mystic. Drop in the tooth of an Algolian Suntiger. Watch it dissolve, spreading the fires of the Algolian Suns deep into the heart of the drink. Sprinkle Zamphuor. Add an olive. Drink . . . but . . . very carefully . . . The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy sells rather better than the Encyclopedia Galactica. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
191:Practical discoveries must have been made many times without science acquiring thereby any new fact. For to prevent a discovery from being lost there must be such a combination favourable circumstances... There must be publicity... the application of the discovery must be... obvious, as satisfying some want. ...Nor is this all; for a practical discovery to become a scientific fact, it must serve to demonstrate the error of one hypothesis, and to suggest a new one, better fitted for the synthesis of existing facts. But old beliefs are proverbially obstinate and virulent in their opposition to newer and truer theories which are destined to eject and replace them. To sum up, even in our own day chemistry rests on a less sound basis than either physics, which had the advantage of originating as late as the 17th century, or astronomy, which dates from the time when the Chaldean shepherd had sufficiently provided for his daily wants to find leisure for gazing into the starry heavens. ~ Encyclopedia Brittanica (1875), #NFDB
192:As in the middle ages... [t]here was then no desire to communicate discoveries; science was a sort of freemasonry, and silence was effectually secured by priestly anathemas; men of science were as jealous of one another as they were of all other classes of society. ...[T]o form a clear picture of this earliest stage of civilisation, an age which represents at once the naïveté of childhood and the suspicious reticence of senility, we must turn our eyes to the priest, on the one hand, claiming as his own all art and science, and commanding respect by his contemptuous silence; and, on the other hand, to the mechanic plying the loom, extracting the Tyrian dye, practising chemistry, though ignorant of its very name, and despised and oppressed, and only tolerated when he furnished Religion with her trappings or War with arms. Thus the growth of chemistry was slow, and by reason of its backwardness it was longer than any other art in ridding itself of the leading-strings of magic and astrology. ~ Encyclopedia Brittanica (1875), #NFDB
193:The incredible specified complexity of life becomes obvious when one considers the message found in the DNA of a one-celled amoeba (a creature so small, several hundred could be lined up in an inch). Staunch Darwinist Richard Dawkins, professor of zoology at Oxford University, admits that the message found in just the cell nucleus of a tiny amoeba is more than all thirty volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica combined, and the entire amoeba has as much information in its DNA as 1,000 complete sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica!2 In other words, if you were to spell out all of the A, T, C, and G in the unjustly called primitive amoeba (as Dawkins describes it), the letters would fill 1,000 complete sets of an encyclopedia! Now, we must emphasize that these 1,000 encyclopedias do not consist of random letters but of letters in a very specific orderjust like real encyclopedias. So heres the key question for Darwinists like Dawkins: if simple messages such as Take out the garbageMom, Mary loves Scott, and Drink Coke require an intelligent being, then why doesnt a message 1,000 encyclopedias long require one? ~ Norman L Geisler, #NFDB
194:Shakespeare was not even able to perform a function that we consider today as perfectly normal and ordinary a function as reading itself. He could not, as the saying goes, “look something up.” Indeed the very phrase—when it is used in the sense of “searching for something in a dictionary or encyclopedia or other book of reference”—simply did not exist. It does not appear in the English language, in fact, until as late as 1692, when an Oxford historian named Anthony Wood used it. Since there was no such phrase until the late seventeenth century, it follows that there was essentially no such concept either, certainly not at the time when Shakespeare was writing—a time when writers were writing furiously, and thinkers thinking as they rarely had before. Despite all the intellectual activity of the time there was in print no guide to the tongue, no linguistic vade mecum, no single book that Shakespeare or Martin Frobisher, Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nash, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Izaak Walton, or any of their other learned contemporaries could consult. ~ Simon Winchester, #NFDB
195:The encyclopedia wand’s a theoretical puzzle, like Zeno’s paradox. The idea is t’engrave the entire encyclopedia onto a single toothpick. Know how you do it?” “You tell me.” “You take your information, your encyclopedia text, and you transpose it into numerics. You assign everything a two-digit number, periods and commas included. 00 is a blank, A is 01, B is 02, and so on. Then after you’ve lined them all up, you put a decimal point before the whole lot. So now you’ve got a very long sub-decimal fraction. 0.173000631 … Next, you engrave a mark at exactly that point along the toothpick. If 0.50000’s your exact middle on the toothpick, then 0.3333’s got t’be a third of the way from the tip. You follow?” “Sure.” “That’s how you can fit data of any length in a single point on a toothpick. Only theoretically, of course. No existin’ technology can actually engrave so fine a point. But this should give you a perspective on what tautologies are like. Say time’s the length of your toothpick. The amount of information you can pack into it doesn’t have anything t’do with the length. Make the fraction as long as you want. It’ll be finite, but pretty near eternal. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
196:She always felt that she knew everything about him that could be known - not that he was simple, but that he was knowable, like a list of errands, like an encyclopedia. He had a birthmark on the third toe of his left foot. He wasn't able to urinate if someone could hear him. He thought cucumbers were good enough, but pickles were delicious - so absolutely delicious, in fact, that he questioned whether they were, indeed, made from cucumbers, which were only good enough. He hadn't heard of Shakespeare, but Hamlet sounded familiar. He liked making love from behind. That, he thought, was about as nice as it gets. He had never kissed anyone besides his mother and her. He had dived for the golden sack only because he wanted to impress her. He sometimes looked in the mirror for hours at a time, making faces, tensing muscles, winking, smiling, puckering. He had never seen another man naked, and so had no idea if his body was normal. The word "butterfly" made him blush, although he didn't know why. He had never been out of the Ukraine. He once thought that the earth was the centre of the universe, but learned better. He admired magicians more after learning the secrets of their tricks. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer, #NFDB
197:It is also the story of a book, a book called The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - not an Earth book, never published on Earth, and until the terrible catastrophe occurred, never seen or heard of by any Earthman.
Nevertheless, a wholly remarkable book.
in fact it was probably the most remarkable book ever to come out of the great publishing houses of Ursa Minor - of which no Earthman had ever heard either.
Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly successful one - more popular than the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than Fifty More Things to do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilogy of philosophical blockbusters Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway?
In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitch Hiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.
First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words Don't Panic inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.
~ Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,#NFDB
198:Not only the portraits on the walls, but also the shelves in the library were thinned out. The disappearance of certain books and brochures happened discretely, usually the day after the arrival of a new message from above. Rubashov made his sarcastic commentaries on it while dictating to Arlova, who received them in silence. Most of the works on foreign trade and currency disappeared from the shelves – their author, the People’s Commissar for Finance, had just been arrested; also nearly all old Party Congress reports treating the same subject; most books and reference-books on the history and antecedents of the Revolution; most works by living authors on problems of birth control; the manuals on the structure of the People’s Army; treatises on trade unionism and the right to strike in the People’s State; practically every study of the problems of political constitution more than two years old, and, finally, even the volumes of the Encyclopedia published by the Academy – a new revised edition being promised shortly.
New books arrived, too: the classics of social science appeared with new footnotes and commentaries, the old histories were replaced by new histories, the old memoirs of dead revolutionary leaders were replaced by new memoirs of the same defunct. Rubashov remarked jokingly to Arlova that the only thing left to be done was to publish a new and revised edition of the back numbers of all newspapers. ~ Arthur Koestler,#NFDB
199:he had to stand by while there proliferated in his own house such concepts as “the art of living thought” “the graph of spiritual growth” and “action on the wing”. he discovered that a biweekly ”hour of purification” was held regularly under his roof. he demanded an explanation. it turned out that what they meant by this was reading the poems of Stefan George together. Leo Fischel searched his old encyclopedia in vain for the poet’s name. but what irritated him most of all, old-style liberal that he was, was that these green pups referred to all the high government officials, bank presidents, and leading university figures in the Parallel Campaign as “puffed-up little men”. then there were the world-weary airs they gave themselves, complaining that the times had become devoid of great ideas, if there was anyone left who was ready for great ideas. that even “humanity” had become a mere buzzword, as far as they were concerned, and that only “the nation” or, as they called it, “folk and folkways” still really had any meaning.
wiser than their years, they disdained “lust” and “the inflated lie about the crude enjoyment of animal existence” as they called it, but talked so much about supersensuality and mystical desire that the startled listener reacted willy-nilly by feeling a certain tenderness for sensuality and physical desires, and even Leo Fischel had to admit that the unbridled ardor of their language sometimes made the listener feel the roots of their ideas shooting down his legs, though he disapproved, because in his opinion great ideas were meant to be uplifting. ~ Robert Musil,#NFDB
200:His fists balled spasmodically. “It amounts to a diseased attitude—a conditioned reflex that shunts aside the independence of your minds whenever it is a question of opposing authority. There seems no doubt ever in your minds that the Emperor is more powerful than you are, or Hari Seldon wiser. And that’s wrong, don’t you see?” For some reason, no one cared to answer him. Hardin continued: “It isn’t just you. It’s the whole Galaxy. Pirenne heard Lord Dorwin’s idea of scientific research. Lord Dorwin thought the way to be a good archaeologist was to read all the books on the subject—written by men who were dead for centuries. He thought that the way to solve archaeological puzzles was to weigh the opposing authorities. And Pirenne listened and made no objections. Don’t you see that there’s something wrong with that?” Again the note of near-pleading in his voice. Again no answer. He went on: “And you men and half of Terminus as well are just as bad. We sit here, considering the Encyclopedia the all-in-all. We consider the greatest end of science is the classification of past data. It is important, but is there no further work to be done? We’re receding and forgetting, don’t you see? Here in the Periphery they’ve lost nuclear power. In Gamma Andromeda, a power plant has undergone meltdown because of poor repairs, and the Chancellor of the Empire complains that nuclear technicians are scarce. And the solution? To train new ones? Never! Instead they’re to restrict nuclear power.” And for the third time: “Don’t you see? It’s Galaxy-wide. It’s a worship of the past. It’s a deterioration—a stagnation! ~ Isaac Asimov, #NFDB
201:He asked me innocently, what then had brought me to his home, and without a minutes hesitation I told him an astounding lie. A lie which was later to prove a great truth. I told him I was only pretending to sell the encyclopedia in order to meet people and write about them. That interested him enormously, even more than the encyclopedia. He wanted to know what I would write about him, if I could say.
It's taken me twenty years to answer that question, but here it is. If you would still like to know, John Doe of the city of Bayonne, this is it. I owe you a great deal, because after that lie I told you, I left your house and I tore up the prospectus furnished me by The Encyclopedia Britannica and I threw it in the gutter. I said to myself I will never again go to people under false pretenses, even if is to give them the Holy Bible. I will never again sell anything, even if I have to starve.
I am going home now and I will sit down and really write about people and if anybody knocks at my door to sell me something, I will invite him in and say "Why are you doing this?" and if he says it is because he needs to make a living I will offer him what money I have and beg him once again to think what he is doing. I want to prevent as many men as possible from pretending that they have to do this or that because they must earn a living. It is not true. One can starve to death, it is much better. Every man who voluntarily starves to death jams another cog in the automatic process. I would rather see a man take a gun and kill his neighbor in order to get the food he needs than keep up the automatic process by pretending that he has to earn a living. That's what I want to say, Mr John Doe. ~ Henry Miller,#NFDB
202:But you haven't tried. You haven't tried once. First you refused to admit that there was a menace at all! Then you reposed an absolutely blind faith in the Emperor! Now you've shifted it to Hari Seldon. Throughout you have invariably relied on authority or on the past—never on yourselves."
His fists balled spasmodically. "It amounts to a diseased attitude—a conditioned reflex that shunts aside the independence of your minds whenever it is a question of opposing authority. There seems no doubt ever in your minds that the Emperor is more powerful than you are, or Hari Seldon Wiser. And that's wrong don't you see?"
For some reason, no one cared to answer him.
Hardin continued: "It isn't just you. It's the whole Galaxy. Pirenne heard Lord Dorwin's idea of scientific research. Lord Dorwin thought the way to be a good archaeologist was to read all the books on the subject—written by men who were dead for centuries. He thought that the way to solve archaeological puzzles was to weight the opposing authorities. And Pirenne listened and made no objections. Don't you see that there's something wrong with that?"
Again the note of near-pleading in his voice.
Again no answer. He went on: "And you men and half of Terminus as well are just as bad.. We sit here, considering the Encyclopedia the all-in-all. We consider the greatest end of science is the classification of past data. It is important, but is there no further work to be done? We're receding and forgetting, don't you see? Here in the Periphery they've lost nuclear power. In Gamma Andromeda, a power plant has undergone meltdown because of poor repairs, and the Chancellor of the Empire complains that nuclear technicians are scarce. And the solution? To train new ones? Never! Instead they're to restrict nuclear power."
And for the third time: "Don't you see? It's galaxy-wide. It's a worship of the past. It's a deterioration—a stagnation! ~ Isaac Asimov,#NFDB
203:We live in a modern society. Husbands and wives don't
grow on trees, like in the old days. So where
does one find love? When you're sixteen it's easy,
like being unleashed with a credit card
in a department store of kisses. There's the first kiss.
The sloppy kiss. The peck.
The sympathy kiss. The backseat smooch. The we
shouldn't be doing this kiss. The but your lips
taste so good kiss. The bury me in an avalanche of tingles kiss.
The I wish you'd quit smoking kiss.
The I accept your apology, but you make me really mad
sometimes kiss. The I know
your tongue like the back of my hand kiss. As you get
older, kisses become scarce. You'll be driving
home and see a damaged kiss on the side of the road,
with its purple thumb out. If you
were younger, you'd pull over, slide open the mouth's
red door just to see how it fits. Oh where
does one find love? If you rub two glances, you get a smile.
Rub two smiles, you get a warm feeling.
Rub two warm feelings and presto-you have a kiss.
Now what? Don't invite the kiss over
and answer the door in your underwear. It'll get suspicious
and stare at your toes. Don't water the kiss with whiskey.
It'll turn bright pink and explode into a thousand luscious splinters,
but in the morning it'll be ashamed and sneak out of
your body without saying good-bye,
and you'll remember that kiss forever by all the little cuts it left
on the inside of your mouth. You must
nurture the kiss. Turn out the lights. Notice how it
illuminates the room. Hold it to your chest
and wonder if the sand inside hourglasses comes from a
special beach. Place it on the tongue's pillow,
then look up the first recorded kiss in an encyclopedia: beneath
a Babylonian olive tree in 1200 B.C.
But one kiss levitates above all the others. The
intersection of function and desire. The I do kiss.
The I'll love you through a brick wall kiss.
Even when I'm dead, I'll swim through the Earth,
like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones. ~ Jeffrey McDaniel,#NFDB
204:This was a golden age, in which we solved most of the major problems in black hole theory even before there was any observational evidence for black holes. In fact, we were so successful with the classical general theory of relativity that I was at a bit of a loose end in 1973 after the publication with George Ellis of our book The Large Scale Structure of Space–Time. My work with Penrose had shown that general relativity broke down at singularities, so the obvious next step would be to combine general relativity—the theory of the very large—with quantum theory—the theory of the very small. In particular, I wondered, can one have atoms in which the nucleus is a tiny primordial black hole, formed in the early universe? My investigations revealed a deep and previously unsuspected relationship between gravity and thermodynamics, the science of heat, and resolved a paradox that had been argued over for thirty years without much progress: how could the radiation left over from a shrinking black hole carry all of the information about what made the black hole? I discovered that information is not lost, but it is not returned in a useful way—like burning an encyclopedia but retaining the smoke and ashes.
To answer this, I studied how quantum fields or particles would scatter off a black hole. I was expecting that part of an incident wave would be absorbed, and the remainder scattered. But to my great surprise I found there seemed to be emission from the black hole itself. At first, I thought this must be a mistake in my calculation. But what persuaded me that it was real was that the emission was exactly what was required to identify the area of the horizon with the entropy of a black hole. This entropy, a measure of the disorder of a system, is summed up in this simple formula which expresses the entropy in terms of the area of the horizon, and the three fundamental constants of nature, c, the speed of light, G, Newton’s constant of gravitation, and ħ, Planck’s constant. The emission of this thermal radiation from the black hole is now called Hawking radiation and I’m proud to have discovered it. ~ Stephen Hawking,#NFDB
205:Had I fallen prey, in middle age, to a kind of andropause? It wouldn’t have surprised me. To find out for sure I decided to spend my evenings on YouPorn, which over the years had grown into a sort of porn encyclopedia. The results were immediate and extremely reassuring. YouPorn catered to the fantasies of normal men all over the world, and within minutes it became clear that I was an utterly normal man. This was not something I took for granted. After all, I’d devoted years of my life to the study of a man who was often considered a kind of Decadent, whose sexuality was therefore not entirely clear. At any rate, the experiment put my mind at rest. Some of the videos were superb (shot by a crew from Los Angeles, complete with a lighting designer, cameramen and cinematographer), some were wretched but ‘vintage’ (German amateurs), and all were based on the same few crowd-pleasing scenarios. In one of the most common, some man (young? old? both versions existed) had been foolish enough to let his penis curl up for a nap in his pants or boxers. Two young women, of varying race, would alert him to the oversight and, this accomplished, would stop at nothing until they liberated his organ from its temporary abode. They’d coax it out with the sluttiest kind of badinage, all in a spirit of friendship and feminine complicity. The penis would pass from one mouth to the other, tongues crossing paths like restless flocks of swallows in the sombre skies above the Seine-et-Marne when they prepare to leave Europe for their winter migration. The man, destroyed at the moment of his assumption, would utter a few weak words: appallingly weak in the French films (‘Oh putain!’ ‘Oh putain je jouis!’: more or less what you’d expect from a nation of regicides), more beautiful and intense from those true believers the Americans (‘Oh my God!’ ‘Oh Jesus Christ!’), like an injunction not to neglect God’s gifts (blow jobs, roast chicken). At any rate I got a hard-on, too, sitting in front of my twenty-seven-inch iMac, and all was well. Once I was made a professor, my reduced course load meant I could get all my teaching done on Wednesdays. ~ Michel Houellebecq, #NFDB
206:Ecclesiastes
This is a book of the Old Testament. I don't believe I've ever read this section of the Bible - I know my Genesis pretty well and my Ten Commandments (I like lists), but I'm hazy on a lot of the other parts. Here, the Britannica provides a handy Cliff Notes version of Ecclesiastes:
[the author's] observations on life convinced him that 'the race is not swift, nor the battle strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all' (9:11). Man's fate, the author maintains, does not depend on righteous or wicked conduct but is an inscrutable mystery that remains hidden in God (9:1). All attempts to penetrate this mystery and thereby gain the wisdom necessary to secure one's fate are 'vanity' or futile. In the face of such uncertainty, the author's counsel is to enjoy the good things that God provides while one has them to enjoy.
This is great. I've accumulated hundreds of facts in the last seven thousand pages, but i've been craving profundity and perspective. Yes, there was that Dyer poem, but that was just cynical. This is the real thing: the deepest paragraph I've read so far in the encyclopedia. Instant wisdom. It couldn't be more true: the race does not go to the swift. How else to explain the mouth-breathing cretins I knew in high school who now have multimillion-dollar salaries? How else to explain my brilliant friends who are stuck selling wheatgrass juice at health food stores? How else to explain Vin Diesel's show business career? Yes, life is desperately, insanely, absurdly unfair. But Ecclesiastes offers exactly the correct reaction to that fact. There's nothing to be done about it, so enjoy what you can. Take pleasure in the small things - like, for me, Julie's laugh, some nice onion dip, the insanely comfortable beat-up leather chair in our living room.
I keep thinking about Ecclesiastes in the days that follow. What if this is the best the encyclopedia has to offer? What if I found the meaning of life on page 347 of the E volume? The Britannica is not a traditional book, so there's no reason why the big revelation should be at the end. ~ A J Jacobs,#NFDB
207:SURE? The Case of the Knockout Artist Bugs Meany’s heart burned with a great desire. It was to get even with Encyclopedia. Bugs hated being outsmarted by the boy detective. He longed to punch Encyclopedia so hard on the jaw that the lump would come out the top of his head. Bugs never raised a fist, though. Whenever he felt like it, he remembered Sally Kimball. Sally was the prettiest girl in the fifth grade—and the best fighter. She had done what no boy under twelve had dreamed was possible. She had flattened Bugs Meany! When Sally became the boy detective’s junior partner, Bugs quit trying to use muscle on Encyclopedia. But he never stopped planning his day of revenge. “Bugs hates you more than he does me,” warned Encyclopedia. “He’ll never forgive you for whipping him.” Just then Ike Cassidy walked into the detective agency. Ike was one of Bugs’s pals. “I’m quitting the Tigers,” he announced. “I want to hire you. But you’ll have to take the quarter from my pocket. I can’t move my fingers.” “What’s this all about?” asked Encyclopedia. “Bugs’s cousin, Bearcat Meany, is spending the weekend with him,” said Ike. “Bearcat is only ten, but he’s built like a caveman. Bugs said he’d give me two dollars to box a few rounds with Bearcat. “Bearcat tripped you and stepped on your fingers?” guessed Encyclopedia. “No, he used his head,” said Ike. “I gave him my famous one-two: a left to the nose followed by a right to the chin. I must have broken both my hands hitting him.” “You should have worn boxing gloves,” said Sally. “We wore gloves,” said Ike. “Man, that Bearcat is something else!” “Did he knock you out?” asked Encyclopedia. “He did and he didn’t,” said Ike. “His first punch didn’t knock me out and it didn’t knock me down. But it hurt so much I just had to go down anyway.” “Good grief!” gasped Encyclopedia. “H-he licked you with one punch?” “With two,” corrected Ike. “When I got up, he hit me again. I was paralyzed. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t move enough to fall down.” “Bearcat sounds like a coming champ,” observed Sally. “He’s training for the next Olympics,” said Ike. “Isn’t he a little young?” said Sally. “You tell him that,” said Ike. “He hurt me when he breathed on me.” The more Encyclopedia heard about Bearcat, the unhappier he became. ~ Donald J Sobol, #NFDB
208:In theory, toppings can include almost anything, but 95 percent of the ramen you consume in Japan will be topped with chashu, Chinese-style roasted pork. In a perfect world, that means luscious slices of marinated belly or shoulder, carefully basted over a low temperature until the fat has rendered and the meat collapses with a hard stare. Beyond the pork, the only other sure bet in a bowl of ramen is negi, thinly sliced green onion, little islands of allium sting in a sea of richness. Pickled bamboo shoots (menma), sheets of nori, bean sprouts, fish cake, raw garlic, and soy-soaked eggs are common constituents, but of course there is a whole world of outlier ingredients that make it into more esoteric bowls, which we'll get into later.
While shape and size will vary depending on region and style, ramen noodles all share one thing in common: alkaline salts. Called kansui in Japanese, alkaline salts are what give the noodles a yellow tint and allow them to stand up to the blistering heat of the soup without degrading into a gummy mass. In fact, in the sprawling ecosystem of noodle soups, it may be the alkaline noodle alone that unites the ramen universe: "If it doesn't have kansui, it's not ramen," Kamimura says.
Noodles and toppings are paramount in the ramen formula, but the broth is undoubtedly the soul of the bowl, there to unite the disparate tastes and textures at work in the dish. This is where a ramen chef makes his name. Broth can be made from an encyclopedia of flora and fauna: chicken, pork, fish, mushrooms, root vegetables, herbs, spices. Ramen broth isn't about nuance; it's about impact, which is why making most soup involves high heat, long cooking times, and giant heaps of chicken bones, pork bones, or both.
Tare is the flavor base that anchors each bowl, that special potion- usually just an ounce or two of concentrated liquid- that bends ramen into one camp or another. In Sapporo, tare is made with miso. In Tokyo, soy sauce takes the lead. At enterprising ramen joints, you'll find tare made with up to two dozen ingredients, an apothecary's stash of dried fish and fungus and esoteric add-ons. The objective of tare is essentially the core objective of Japanese food itself: to pack as much umami as possible into every bite. ~ Matt Goulding,#NFDB
209:du bois in ghana
at 93, you determined to pick up and go—
and stay gone. the job nkrumah called you to,
to create, at last, your encyclopedia africana
(encompassing a continent chipped
like wood beneath an axe, a large enough
diaspora to girdle the globe, and a mere four
thousand years) was either well-deserved
sinecure or well-earned trust
that your health was as indestructible as
your will. my mind wrestles with possible pictures:
the victorian sensibility, the charcoal wool
formality of your coats and vests, the trim
of your beard as sharp as the crease of your
collar—how would these du boisian essentials
hold up to sub-saharan heat? would
your critical faculties wilt in accra's
urban tropics as i've read that westerners'
are wont to do? dr. du bois, i presume
you took the climate in stride, took to it,
looked out your library's louvered windows
onto a land you needed
neither to condemn nor conquer,
and let the sun tell you what you already knew:
this was not a port to pass on.
your 95th birthday photo found you bathed
in white cloth, cane still in hand, sharing a smile
with a head of state who knew your worth—joy
that this nation's birth occurred in time
for you to step out of a cold, cold storm
into outstretched arms. would your panafrican dream have survived a dictatorial
nkrumah, an nkrumah in exile? you took
10
the prerogative of age and died without telling,
without knowing. a half-century later, here
in the country where you were born, i look
into a screen and watch as, near and far, a pandemic of violence and abuse staggers the planet.
we seed the world with blood, grow
bleeding, harvest death and the promise
of more. when i turn bitter, seeing no potential
for escape, i think of the outrages you saw—wars,
lynchings, genocide, mccarthy, communism's
failure to rise above corrupting power
any better than capitalism had, the civil rights
movement's endless struggle—and how
you kept writing and walking, looking
for what you knew was out there. your memory,
your tireless radiant energy, calls me
to my work, to my feet, insisting
that somewhere on the earth, freedom is
learning to walk, trying not to fall,
and, somewhere, laboring to be born.
~ Evie Shockley,#NFDB
210:Failures as people: millions of Americans felt that this description fit them to a T. Seeking a solution, any solution, they eagerly forked over their cash to any huckster who promised release, the quicker and more effortlessly the better: therapies like “bioenergetics” (“The Revolutionary Therapy That Uses the Language of the Body to Heal the Problems of the Mind”); Primal Scream (which held that when patients shrieked in a therapist’s office, childhood trauma could be reexperienced, then released; John Lennon and James Earl Jones were fans); or Transcendental Meditation, which promised that deliverance could come if you merely closed your eyes and chanted a mantra (the “TM” organization sold personal mantras, each supposedly “unique,” to hundreds of thousands of devotees). Or “religions” like the Church Universal and Triumphant, or the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, or “Scientology”—this last one invented by a science fiction writer, reportedly on a bet. Devotees paid cash to be “audited” by practitioners who claimed the power—if, naturally, you paid for enough sessions—to remove “trauma patterns” accreted over the 75 million years that had passed since Xenu, tyrant of the Galactic Confederacy, deposited billions of people on earth next to volcanoes and detonated hydrogen bombs inside those volcanos, thus scattering harming “body thetans” to attach to the souls of the living, which once unlatched allowed practitioners to cross the “bridge to total freedom” and “unlimited creativity.” Another religion, the story had it, promised “perfect knowledge”—though its adherents’ public meeting was held up several hours because none of them knew how to run the movie projector. Gallup reported that six million Americans had tried TM, five million had twisted themselves into yoga poses, and two million had sampled some sort of Oriental religion. And hundreds of thousands of Americans in eleven cities had plunked down $250 for the privilege being screamed at as “assholes.” “est”—Erhard Seminars Training, named after the only-in-America hustler who invented it, Werner Erhard, originally Jack Rosenberg, a former used-car and encyclopedia salesman who had tried and failed to join the Marines (this was not incidental) at the age of seventeen, and experienced a spiritual rebirth one morning while driving across the Golden Gate Bridge (“I realized that I knew nothing. . . . In the next instant—after I realized that I knew nothing—I realized that I knew everything”)—promised “to transform one’s ability to experience living so that the situations one had been trying to change or had been putting up with, clear up just in the process of life itself,” all that in just sixty hours, courtesy of a for-profit corporation whose president had been general manager of the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of California and a former member of the Harvard Business School faculty. A ~ Rick Perlstein, #NFDB
211:I could not understand why these romancers never took the trouble to find out a few elementary facts about the thing they denounced. The facts might easily have helped the denunciation, where the fictions discredited it. There were any number of real Catholic doctrines I should then have thought disgraceful to the Church. There are any number which I can still easily imagine being made to look disgraceful to the Church. But the enemies of the Church never found these real rocks of offence. They never looked for them. They never looked for anything. They seemed to have simply made up out of their own heads a number of phrases, such as a Scarlet Woman of deficient intellect might be supposed to launch on the world; and left it at that.
Boundless freedom reigned; it was not treated as if it were a question of fact at all. A priest might say anything about the Faith; because a Protestant might say anything about the priest.
These novels were padded with pronouncements like this one, for instance, which I happen to remember: "Disobeying a priest is the one sin for which there is no absolution. We term it a reserved case." Now obviously a man writing like that is simply imagining
what might exist; it has never occurred to him to go and ask if it does exist. He has heard the phrase "a reserved case" and considers, in a poetic reverie, what he shall make it mean. He does not go and ask the nearest priest what it does mean. He does not look it up in an encyclopedia or any ordinary work of reference. There is no doubt about the fact that it simply means a case reserved for ecclesiastical superiors and not to be settled finally by the priest. That may be a fact to be denounced; but anyhow it is a fact. But the man much prefers to denounce his own fancy. Any manual would tell him that there is no sin "for which there is no absolution"; not disobeying the priest; not assassinating the Pope. It would be easy to find out these facts and quite easy to base a Protestant invective upon them. It puzzled me very much, even at that early stage, to imagine why people bringing controversial charges against a powerful and prominent institution should thus neglect to test their own case, and should draw in this random way on their own imagination. It did not make me any more inclined to be a Catholic; in those days the very idea of such a thing would have seemed crazy. But it did save me from swallowing all the solid and solemn assertion about what Jesuits said and did. I did not accept quite so completely as others the well-ascertained and widely accepted fact that "Roman Catholics may do anything for the good of the Church"; because I had already learned to smile at equally accepted truths like "Disobeying a priest is the one sin for which there is no absolution." I never dreamed that the Roman religion was true; but I knew that its accusers, for some reason or other,
were curiously inaccurate. ~ G K Chesterton,#NFDB
3 Poetry
3 Philosophy
2 Integral Yoga
1 Psychology
1 Occultism
1 Education
1 Christianity
1 Baha i Faith
1 Alchemy
4 Jorge Luis Borges
2 The Mother
2 Jorge Luis Borges
3 Labyrinths
2 Selected Fictions
2 Borges - Poems
0 1967-06-03, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yes, but its still a kind of encyclopedia.
Yes.
--
On the contrary, theyre taught to rely on books, precisely on encyclopedias. I had to come here to understand what it meant, why I used to pull from above. That is to say, it wasnt at all encouraged when I was a child.
But Z has done experiments like that. He told me the story of a girl at the School who had no imagination: when she was asked a question she could only answer what she had learned, and when she was given a problem she could never solve it. She was like that, blocked above. And he taught her to try and make contact precisely with that intuitive zone, by keeping quiet, falling silent and listening. And it seems that after some time, she had extraordinary results in that way, by falling silent and listeninganswers which were really remarkable and certainly came from the region of intuition. And thats a practical fact, he did it at the School.
1.00a - Introduction, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
No, I will NOT recommend a book. It should not hurt you too much to browse on condensed hay (or thistles) such as articles in encyclopedias. Take Roget's Thesaurus or Smith's Smaller Classical Dictionary (and the like) to read yourself to sleep on. But don't stultify yourself by taking up such study too seriously. You only make yourself ridiculous by trying to do at 50 what you ought to have done at 15. As you didn't tant pis! You can't possibly get the spirit; if you could, it would mean merely mental indigestion. We have all read how Cato started to learn Greek at 90: but the story stops there. We have never been told what good it did to himself or anyone else.
5. God-forms. See Magick pp. 378-9. Quite clear: quite adequate: no use at all without continual practice. No one can join with you --- off you go again! No, no, a thousand times no: this is the practice par excellence where you have to do it all yourself. The Vibration of God-names: that perhaps, I can at least test you in. But don't you dare come up for a test until you've been at it and hard for at least 100 exercises.
1.05 - THE HOSTILE BROTHERS - ARCHETYPES OF RESPONSE TO THE UNKNOWN, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
our country. Only at some point in their old age, in the course of compiling encyclopedias, would they
notice with astonishment that they could not find any worthy Russian names for our letters for all the
--
Vol. 7. Plato (pp. 200-212). Chicago: encyclopedia Brittanica.
Polan, H.J. & Ward, M.J. (1994). Role of the mothers touch in failure to thrive: A preliminary
--
(pp. 69-104). Chicago: encyclopedia Brittanica.
374
--
(pp. 105-148). Chicago: encyclopedia Brittanica.
Shakespeare (1952c). Titus Andronicus. In R.M. Hutchins (Ed.), Great books of the western world: Vol. 26.
I. (pp. 170-198). Chicago: encyclopedia Brittanica.
Shallice, T. (1982). Specific impairments in planning. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of
1.07 - Bridge across the Afterlife, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
The Britannica Concise encyclopedia defines near-death
experience as follows: Mystical or transcendent experi-
1.ala - I had supposed that, having passed away, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Whitall N. Perry Original Language Persian/Farsi I had supposed that, having passed away From self in concentration, I should blaze A path to Thee, but ah! No creature may Draw near thee, save Thy appointed ways. I cannot longer live, Lord, without Thee; Thy Hand is everywhere: I may not flee. Some have desired through hope to come to Thee, And thou hast wrought in them their high design: Lo! I have severed every thought from me, And died to selfhood, that I might be Thine. How long, my heart's Beloved? I am spent: I can no more endure this banishment. [2135.jpg] -- from A Treasury of Traditional Wisdom: An encyclopedia of Humankind's Spiritual Truth, by Whitall N. Perry
1.jlb - Elegy, #Borges - Poems, #Jorge Luis Borges, #Poetry
to have questioned lithographs, encyclopedias,
atlases,
1.jlb - That One, #Borges - Poems, #Jorge Luis Borges, #Poetry
and an old love of encyclopedias
and fine handmade maps and smooth ivory,
2.1.4.2 - Teaching, #On Education, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The criticisms made in the report apply to the teachers as much as to the students. For students of high capacity, one teacher well versed in his subject is enougheven a good text-book, together with encyclopedias and dictionaries would be enough. But as one goes down the scale and the capacity of the student becomes lower, the teacher must have higher and higher capacities: discipline, self-control, consecration, psychological understanding, infectious enthusiasm, to awaken in the student the part which is asleep the will to know, the need for progress, self-control.
Just as we organise the school in such a way as to be able to discover and help outstanding students, in the same way, the responsibility for classes should be given to outstanding teachers.
Book of Imaginary Beings (text), #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
his toy tiger and the pictures of tigers in the encyclopedia
have somehow taught him to look at the flesh-and-bone tiger
--
Brunetto Latinis Tesoro - the encyclopedia which Latini
recommended to his old disciple in the seventh circle of Hell
--
ill omen and therefore changed. Nicholas de Vore, in his encyclopedia of Astrology, sustains the same hypothesis and
remarks that the four figures come together in the sphinx,
ENNEAD 06.05 - The One and Identical Being is Everywhere Present In Its Entirety.345, #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04, #Plotinus, #Christianity
507 See McClintock and Strong, B. T. & E. encyclopedia, s. v.
508 Enn. vi, 5.7.
MoM References, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Vol. 7. Plato (pp. 200-212). Chicago: encyclopedia Brittanica.
Polan, H.J. & Ward, M.J. (1994). Role of the mothers touch in failure to thrive: A preliminary investigation. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 33, 1098-1105.
--
(pp. 69-104). Chicago: encyclopedia Brittanica.
374
--
(pp. 105-148). Chicago: encyclopedia Brittanica.
Shakespeare (1952c). Titus Andronicus. In R.M. Hutchins (Ed.), Great books of the western world: Vol. 26.
I. (pp. 170-198). Chicago: encyclopedia Brittanica.
Shallice, T. (1982). Specific impairments in planning. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of
Tablets of Baha u llah text, #Tablets of Baha u llah, #Baha u llah, #Baha i
Gracious God! A thing hath recently happened which caused great astonishment. It is reported that a certain person 1 went to the seat of the imperial throne in Persia and succeeded in winning the good graces of some of the nobility by his ingratiating behavior. How pitiful indeed, how deplorable! One wondereth why those who have been the symbols of highest glory should now stoop to boundless shame. What is become of their high resolve? Whither is gone the sense of dignity and honor? The sun of glory and wisdom hath unceasingly been shining above the horizon of Persia, but nowadays it hath sunk to such a low level that certain dignitaries have allowed themselves to be treated as playthings in the hands of the foolish. The aforesaid person hath written such things concerning this people in the Egyptian press and in the Beirut encyclopedia that the well-informed and the learned were astonished. He proceeded then to Paris where he published a newspaper entitled 'Urvatu'l-Vuthqá [The Sure Handle] and sent copies thereof to all parts of the world. He also sent a copy to the Prison of 'Akká, and by so doing he meant to show affection and to make amends for his past actions. In short, this Wronged One hath observed silence in regard to him. We entreat God, the True One, to protect him and to shed upon him the light of justice and fairness. It behooveth him to say: 1. Jamálu'd-Dín-i-Afghání. (See God Passes By pp.296, 317.) [CLUI: Urvatu'l-Vuthqá]
O God my God! Thou seest me standing before the door of Thy forgiveness and benevolence, turning my gaze toward the horizon of Thy bountiful favors and manifold blessings. I beg of Thee by Thy sweet accents and by the shrill voice of Thy Pen, O Lord of all mankind, to graciously aid Thy servants as it befitteth Thy days and beseemeth the glory of Thy manifestation and Thy majesty. Verily potent art Thou to do whatsoever Thou willest. All they that dwell in the heavens and on the earth bear witness to Thy power and Thy might, to Thy glory and Thy bounteousness. Praise be to Thee, O Lord of the worlds and the Well-Beloved of the heart of every man of understanding!
The Act of Creation text, #The Act of Creation, #Arthur Koestler, #Psychology
early nineteenth centuries. This is how the encyclopedia Britannica sums
up its evaluation of Macpherson (rny italics):
The Dwellings of the Philosophers, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
children, we believe along with the encyclopedia that "such a metaphor serves to characterize
a period, an institution, etc., whose circumstances or results become fatal to the very people
--
in 204", says the encyclopedia, "and died in Rome in 222; he came from a Syrian family (17)
dedicated to the cult of the Sun at Emesa (18) . He himself, when very young, was a high priest
The Fearful Sphere of Pascal, #Labyrinths, #Jorge Luis Borges, #Poetry
where it is given as a citation from Plato, and in the encyclopedia Speculum
Triplex; in the sixteenth century, the last chapter of the last book of
The Garden of Forking Paths 1, #Selected Fictions, #unset, #Zen
The damp path zigzagged like those of my childhood. When we reached the house, we went into a library filled with books from both East and West. I recognized some large volumes bound in yellow silk-manuscripts of the Lost encyclopedia which was edited by the Third Emperor of the Luminous Dynasty. They had never been printed. A phonograph record was spinning near a bronze phoenix. I remember also a rose-glazed jar and yet another, older by many centuries, of that blue color which our potters copied from the Persians . . .
Stephen Albert was watching me with a smile on his face. He was, as I have said, remarkably tall. His face was deeply lined and he had gray eyes and a gray beard.
The Garden of Forking Paths 2, #Selected Fictions, #unset, #Zen
The damp path zigzagged like those of my childhood. We came to a library of Eastern and Western books. I recognized bound in yellow silk several volumes of the Lost encyclopedia, edited by the Third Emperor of the Luminous Dynasty but never printed. The record on the phonograph revolved next to a bronze phoenix. I also recall a famille rose vase and another, many centuries older, of that shade of blue which our craftsmen copied from the potters of Persia. . .
Stephen Albert observed me with a smile. He was, as I have said, very tall, sharp-featured, with gray eyes and a gray beard. He told me that he had been a missionary in Tientsin "before aspiring to become a Sinologist."
--- Overview of noun encyclopedia
The noun encyclopedia has 1 sense (first 1 from tagged texts)
1. (1) encyclopedia, cyclopedia, encyclopaedia, cyclopaedia ::: (a reference work (often in several volumes) containing articles on various topics (often arranged in alphabetical order) dealing with the entire range of human knowledge or with some particular specialty)
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun encyclopedia
1 sense of encyclopedia
Sense 1
encyclopedia, cyclopedia, encyclopaedia, cyclopaedia
=> reference book, reference, reference work, book of facts
=> book
=> publication
=> work, piece of work
=> product, production
=> creation
=> artifact, artefact
=> whole, unit
=> object, physical object
=> physical entity
=> entity
--- Hyponyms of noun encyclopedia
1 sense of encyclopedia
Sense 1
encyclopedia, cyclopedia, encyclopaedia, cyclopaedia
=> book of knowledge
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun encyclopedia
1 sense of encyclopedia
Sense 1
encyclopedia, cyclopedia, encyclopaedia, cyclopaedia
=> reference book, reference, reference work, book of facts
--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun encyclopedia
1 sense of encyclopedia
Sense 1
encyclopedia, cyclopedia, encyclopaedia, cyclopaedia
-> reference book, reference, reference work, book of facts
=> cookbook, cookery book
=> instruction book
=> source book
=> wordbook
=> handbook, enchiridion, vade mecum
=> directory
=> annual, yearly, yearbook
=> atlas, book of maps, map collection
=> encyclopedia, cyclopedia, encyclopaedia, cyclopaedia
--- Grep of noun encyclopedia
encyclopedia
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