Arghhh!

As chronicled in your researcher's journal as I researched my history of early lifestyles in South Asia, during one of the extremely rare times when I was checking out secondary sources...

People! Writers! If you say your book is about a certain date, please please please do not make it about dates 300 years later. That is rather misleading! And please if you're halfway scholarly PUT IN YOUR REFERENCES!

Yes, I just spent an afternoon tracking down references, only to find that some of them were not for my current period.

That's interesting though. I always complain about the few misleading archaeologists, but this was some guy specializing in Buddhist religion.

Current time travel apparatus location: The Round Library, Bangalore, India

Bad fairies

From my notes as I researched my volumes on the history of lifestyles in ancient South Asia...


Today I discovered to my amusement that there were HERETICAL fairies. (Jataka Tale No. 40)

(More seriously, I also learned that that Pali term kinnara is of course more complicated than just possibly meaning fairies. E.g., sometimes it's translated as elves. The Pali-English dictionaries I consulted just said it was a little being with a body like a bird and head like a man, though...so it's not exactly like any European fantastic creature I know of, though I've not read much more than Grimm's and Andersen's.)

German fun

Notes after an emergency trip in 2010 when my very dear dad was in the hospital -- in 2017 he's doing fabulously!

At least one happy work-related thing happened on the trip: The only seat available from India was through Germany, and I found a couple great books there to help me with my studies. That and French were all I did work-wise on my emergency trip.

One book I got was the first German dictionary I can actually read -- I bought my other dictionaries (a huge and a portable) about 20 years ago and my eyes have aged! This is one made for Germans to learn English, so it has some interesting features for me. I read somewhere that it can help to have such a dictionary, as explanations themselves give you reading practice.

I also found with these books that I could start dipping into real magazines! I tried the German wellness magazine Vital whose June (Juni) 2010 issue came with all sorts of free stuff like a booklet on relaxation -- something I found useful in that stressful time!

Reds and greens

Another instance of a breathtaking lifestyle from the 1903 Homes and Their Decoration by Lillie Hamilton French:

One country house, used in winter, has been treated with reds and greens....All the floors are covered with a rich red velvet carpet, a sweep of splendid color, lying across the drawing-room floor, the much-divided hall, up the stairs to the bedrooms above, down the flight of a dozen steps or more to the library door, and on across that floor to the fireplace at its end, some forty feet away. The walls of the drawing-room are covered with a large red figure on a white ground. The hall is green, a better background for the pictures; the library, red. No sense of confusion is conveyed by the breaking up of the wall-colors. That splendid sweep of red in the carpet, when the doors are thrown open, brings everything together. An unbroken stretch of wall-space could never have done this.

 

Very "modern" thoughts on religions

Buddha in a legend c300s CE had some very modern-sounding things to say about a certain religion of his time: "These greedy liars propogate deceit, / And fools believe the fictions they repeat; / He who has eyes can see the sickening sight; / Why does not [the head god] set his creatures right? / If his wide power no limits can restrain, / Why is his hand so rarely spread to bless? / Why are his creatures all condemned to pain? / Why does he not to all give happiness? / Why do fraud, lies, and ignorance prevail? / Why triumphs falsehood, truth and justice fail? / I count your [head god] one th' injust among, / Who made a world in which to shelter wrong. / Those men are counted pure who only kill [animals] – / These are your savage customs which I hate, / Such as [a northwestern Indian tribe's] hordes might emulate.… / Let [the adherents of this religion] [adherents of the same religion] kill – so all were well! / And those who listen to the words they tell. / We see no cattle asking to be slain… / Rather they go unwilling to their death / And in vain struggles yield their latest breath. / To veil the [sacrificial] post, the victim, and the blow / The [religious leaders] let their choicest rhetoric flow… / But if the wood thus round the victim spread / Had been as full of treasure as they said, / As full of silver, gold, and gems for us, /…They would have offered for themselves alone / And kept the rich reversion as their own. / These cruel cheats, as ignorant as vile, / Weave their long frauds the simple to beguile.… / The offerer, simple to their hearts' content, / Comes with his purse, they gather round him fast, / Like crows around an owl, on mischief bent, / And leave him bankrupt and stripped bare at last, / The solid coin which he erewhile possessed, / Exchanged for promises which none can test.… / No law condemns them, yet they ought to die." What he didn't seem to notice was that he had begun his own religion, which according to these Jataka tales often had completely respected people who took all sorts of riches from others, though unlike a certain major religion of the time it did not make animal sacrifices. It however also made promises no one could test (as does any religion of which I am aware), including detailed various hells and heavens. (Though I still need to learn the history of the development of the Jataka Tales; e.g., if it's possible the writer of this particular piece believed differently from other tales' writers.)
(quote from Jataka Tale No. 543, part VIII)

What a life!

From the 1903 Homes and Their Decoration by Lillie Hamilton French:

I saw mahogany in a pink and white morning room the other day, among satin couches, and I felt it added a note of distinction....This particular morning-room had a wainscoting of white wood running from the floor to a four-inch border of white rose-wreathed paper enclosing a paper imitating pink watered silk. The windows were hung with satin similar to that covering the couches. It was a room strictly adapted to the needs of its beautiful owner, who used it only for the writing of letters and the reading of light literature after breakfast.

Tips on flirting, c300s CE

From Jataka Tale No. 536: "ways a woman flirts with a man. She...scratches the ground with a stick, she exposes her...armpit,...makes her tongue loll out." Hmmm.

Probably not your #1 choice for entertainment

A king said on a festival day, while he was dressed up and standing with his 3 ministers on a terrace, watching the moon rise, "Pleasant indeed is this clear night. With what amusement shall we divert ourselves?" He was answered variously,

Let's have a war (a real one!);

Let's eat and drink and enjoy "dance and song and music";

Let's listen to sermons.

– Guess what he decided on? Sermons, of course! This is a religious story, after all. (Jataka Tale No. 544)