I bought a tibetan prayer wheel on auction. It's a common thing. You press it to your forehead, say om mani padme hum, then spin clockwise, every spin counts as saying everything written in the wheel once, if it has 50 000 prayers written out that's 180 * 50000 mantras per minute, 9 000 000 mantras per minute. You can see how a lot of good karma is accrued. It's more like an exponential system than a linear one so yeah. A big number system. Many layers to the world, many reincarnation levels, big time spans. High level beings live for a very long time. But not permanently.
The original idle clicker. With modern materials, vacuum pumps, and magnetic bearings for the mechanics and lithography for the writing, we can pump those numbers up!
All silent in the monastery except for the ultrasonic whine of thousands of prayer turbines.
Prayer ring gyros, encoding the prayers into ultra-fast laser pulses going round millions of turns of optic fibre may be a competing technology.
Reminds me of bitcoin for some reason. There are some logical reasons for these things to exist, but from outside perspective, it's just more advanced ant mill.
technology wont count as the prayers were not written out by someone with reencarnatory mojo at a monestery, and then the prayer wheel sold to help both the new owner with carma and the monk and temple survive with money,also the physical action of spinning the wheel while the one holding is praying would count as intentional, a remote powered machine may likely be a stretch, or most likely with buddists,"bit prayers", ha! would have
value inversly proportional to there speed of execution, lest the ancient megga temple prayer wheels loose there "value"
It's hard to say where rules lawyering ends and hermeneutics begins, but as I am aware it's presumably somewhere before installing an EUV etching machine on a Tibetan mountaintop, I am joking.
That said electric (and wind and water-powered) prayer wheels do actually exist, so there is some prior art.
Even if prayers were real, this sounds like a huge gimmick. Reciting a prayer while holding a book equals reciting the entire book at once? How absolutely convenient. Who thought of that, a door-to-door salesman?
Clearly an operations lead tasked with exponential increases in mantra output.
In all seriousness, I don't think the average person could have actually read the books when the concept was conceived anyway, so automating the trick of the recipient receiving all the blessings in the book without someone having to read them out would have saved a whole lot of monks' time....
All depends on the prayer quota. If one can do "9 000 000 mantras per minute" easily, then maybe what's needed for betterment is a totality of a quintillion prayers in one's life.
This feels like one of the quotes that needs to be quoted and I would quote you if I can understand what you mean by "turns out someone else made both" as maybe its me who didn't get its meaning (so can you please explain what you mean by this? thanks in advance!)
Reminds me of kosher electric appliances to pretend you didn't turn on the light or whatever on fridays. If there is a god he must chuckle at these things.
Yes, that accruing is linear. I mean there are exponential examples in the religious system, such as more karma required for different things, the lifespans of deities in various realms and the length of the kalpas/ timespans of the ages.
And compared to saying it aloud by yourself it's orders of magnitude more. And when they cram the text into like neat folds with dense text, thats a few more. I just googled, yeah I still google because perplexity on comet is not my thing, 100 trillion prayers on a microfilm is an example I saw.
Hmm maybe, anyways what I read was shantidevas way of the bodhisattva and some other texts like dhammapada and some tibetan texts and art
It speaks of merit that is good and that spinning the mani korlo generates merit, and many tibetan monks like shantidevas text
But yeah you got me I've copypasted from many separate things it's the result of a big cultural and literary melting pot
I am not an expert in buddhism but I think the idea of doing good karma is to get out of this cycle of life and death and to get moksh
So I mean, If we really think about it from an atheist's point of view as to what happens after death, its essentially moksh.
Also I genuinely believe that if there is some spiritiuality in this world, then it would reward us for the work that we are doing by the amount of hard work.. ie, reading the 9 million mantras per minute was being that easy, and accruing karma was so easy, then even people who are more sinful than me can go to moksh because they can offset their karma by an insane degree by doing this thing and I feel like if the universe is from where we get our intelligence and we can deduce it that its kinda wrong, then ofc the universe knows that too and it won't be of much value.
Basically if I truly see things from a more religious perspective, even then theoretically one should just live a good life as much as he can and not wonder or worry about the rules set by other religious people since they themselves had crafted their own rules and you should too.
TLDR: Just be a good person as much you can without pushing yourself to limits and then to me personally, I will much rather go into hell by not following god but following good than go into heaven by following god but not good.
I mean no offense to religious people because i mean, I can understand you guys too. Life is truly scary. Even I want the comfort of a god or karma and even I pray sometimes when I truly feel desperate but the scientific part of me can't really let go of all the inconsistencies I feel like.
AFAIK, from my atheist's understanding of Buddhism, you don't get out of the cycle of life and death, samsara, with good karma. Quite the contrary, you're almost guaranteeing your next life will be that of some kind of angel that lives for millions of years, and delaying your eventual enlightenment by that much, since you can only get enlightened on Earth.
Not that it's a bad thing, people are allowed to enjoy reincarnation, and it probably beats being reincarnated in hell.
I was just going down a rabbit hole yesterday about the use of AI techniques (or lack of success) in deciphering still-forgotten languages. Unsupervised models have partially cracked Ugaritic and Linear B [0], and Pythia/Ithaca restore Greek inscriptions at scale [1], but Linear A or Proto-Elamite still stall because the corpora are too small and there is no bilingual ‘Rosetta Stone’. The most promising direction now seems to be hybrid pipelines that combine vision encoders to normalize glyphs with constrained decoders guided by phonotactic priors.
AI is great at pattern recognition, but when the sample size is tiny and there's no known language to anchor it to, it’s like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing and no idea what the final image looks like.
Wonderful and reminiscent of the Vesuvius Prize [0], of course. Broadly, makes me wonder if there are other categories of 'lost' information that will emerge in the years ahead as imaging tools and AI analysis improve.
I am on the Vesuvius Challenge team. We came across this press release back in July and were quite impressed! It's great to see other groups using non destructive means to read ancient documents.
It makes me wonder how much information we lost because we thought that retrieval methods were as good as they were ever going to get, and we destroyed the material trying to read it.
My parents moved from Tibet to India, recetly I learned the ancient art of 'Tummo.' I never realized I had a natural 'high altitude adaptation' until I went on a trip with a group of foreigners and people from India. It was an eye-opening moment when I saw firsthand the difficulty they had with stamina at high altitudes. Stuff like this is super fascinating for me.
Small nitpick and they got it right in the next sentence but "3D X-ray topographical scanner" should be tomographic not topographic. X-ray topography is something else unrelated.
I bought a tibetan prayer wheel on auction. It's a common thing. You press it to your forehead, say om mani padme hum, then spin clockwise, every spin counts as saying everything written in the wheel once, if it has 50 000 prayers written out that's 180 * 50000 mantras per minute, 9 000 000 mantras per minute. You can see how a lot of good karma is accrued. It's more like an exponential system than a linear one so yeah. A big number system. Many layers to the world, many reincarnation levels, big time spans. High level beings live for a very long time. But not permanently.
The original idle clicker. With modern materials, vacuum pumps, and magnetic bearings for the mechanics and lithography for the writing, we can pump those numbers up!
All silent in the monastery except for the ultrasonic whine of thousands of prayer turbines.
Prayer ring gyros, encoding the prayers into ultra-fast laser pulses going round millions of turns of optic fibre may be a competing technology.
Reminds me of bitcoin for some reason. There are some logical reasons for these things to exist, but from outside perspective, it's just more advanced ant mill.
Related, I highly recommend the short story The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke.
https://hex.ooo/library/nine_billion_names_of_god.html
I would joke something akin to that's why china is winning but that would be too much bad karma for me to handle
technology wont count as the prayers were not written out by someone with reencarnatory mojo at a monestery, and then the prayer wheel sold to help both the new owner with carma and the monk and temple survive with money,also the physical action of spinning the wheel while the one holding is praying would count as intentional, a remote powered machine may likely be a stretch, or most likely with buddists,"bit prayers", ha! would have value inversly proportional to there speed of execution, lest the ancient megga temple prayer wheels loose there "value"
It's hard to say where rules lawyering ends and hermeneutics begins, but as I am aware it's presumably somewhere before installing an EUV etching machine on a Tibetan mountaintop, I am joking.
That said electric (and wind and water-powered) prayer wheels do actually exist, so there is some prior art.
Even if prayers were real, this sounds like a huge gimmick. Reciting a prayer while holding a book equals reciting the entire book at once? How absolutely convenient. Who thought of that, a door-to-door salesman?
Clearly an operations lead tasked with exponential increases in mantra output.
In all seriousness, I don't think the average person could have actually read the books when the concept was conceived anyway, so automating the trick of the recipient receiving all the blessings in the book without someone having to read them out would have saved a whole lot of monks' time....
All depends on the prayer quota. If one can do "9 000 000 mantras per minute" easily, then maybe what's needed for betterment is a totality of a quintillion prayers in one's life.
Just a ritual, the design is Very Human!
Man searching for God is like a hacker trying to find super user on some remote system.
Turns out someone else made both :P
This feels like one of the quotes that needs to be quoted and I would quote you if I can understand what you mean by "turns out someone else made both" as maybe its me who didn't get its meaning (so can you please explain what you mean by this? thanks in advance!)
Reminds me of kosher electric appliances to pretend you didn't turn on the light or whatever on fridays. If there is a god he must chuckle at these things.
50000 * 3s, with s in seconds is very much linear.
Yes, that accruing is linear. I mean there are exponential examples in the religious system, such as more karma required for different things, the lifespans of deities in various realms and the length of the kalpas/ timespans of the ages.
And compared to saying it aloud by yourself it's orders of magnitude more. And when they cram the text into like neat folds with dense text, thats a few more. I just googled, yeah I still google because perplexity on comet is not my thing, 100 trillion prayers on a microfilm is an example I saw.
> You can see how a lot of good karma is accrued.
FYI there's no "good karma" in Tibetan buddhism. There is just karma. Karma is not good because it will cause samsara.
Maybe it is supposed to be a fun cheat to remove karma not "accrue good karma" but surely no one uses it seriously lol
Hmm maybe, anyways what I read was shantidevas way of the bodhisattva and some other texts like dhammapada and some tibetan texts and art It speaks of merit that is good and that spinning the mani korlo generates merit, and many tibetan monks like shantidevas text But yeah you got me I've copypasted from many separate things it's the result of a big cultural and literary melting pot
I am not an expert in buddhism but I think the idea of doing good karma is to get out of this cycle of life and death and to get moksh
So I mean, If we really think about it from an atheist's point of view as to what happens after death, its essentially moksh.
Also I genuinely believe that if there is some spiritiuality in this world, then it would reward us for the work that we are doing by the amount of hard work.. ie, reading the 9 million mantras per minute was being that easy, and accruing karma was so easy, then even people who are more sinful than me can go to moksh because they can offset their karma by an insane degree by doing this thing and I feel like if the universe is from where we get our intelligence and we can deduce it that its kinda wrong, then ofc the universe knows that too and it won't be of much value.
Basically if I truly see things from a more religious perspective, even then theoretically one should just live a good life as much as he can and not wonder or worry about the rules set by other religious people since they themselves had crafted their own rules and you should too.
TLDR: Just be a good person as much you can without pushing yourself to limits and then to me personally, I will much rather go into hell by not following god but following good than go into heaven by following god but not good.
I mean no offense to religious people because i mean, I can understand you guys too. Life is truly scary. Even I want the comfort of a god or karma and even I pray sometimes when I truly feel desperate but the scientific part of me can't really let go of all the inconsistencies I feel like.
AFAIK, from my atheist's understanding of Buddhism, you don't get out of the cycle of life and death, samsara, with good karma. Quite the contrary, you're almost guaranteeing your next life will be that of some kind of angel that lives for millions of years, and delaying your eventual enlightenment by that much, since you can only get enlightened on Earth.
Not that it's a bad thing, people are allowed to enjoy reincarnation, and it probably beats being reincarnated in hell.
Very cool!
I was just going down a rabbit hole yesterday about the use of AI techniques (or lack of success) in deciphering still-forgotten languages. Unsupervised models have partially cracked Ugaritic and Linear B [0], and Pythia/Ithaca restore Greek inscriptions at scale [1], but Linear A or Proto-Elamite still stall because the corpora are too small and there is no bilingual ‘Rosetta Stone’. The most promising direction now seems to be hybrid pipelines that combine vision encoders to normalize glyphs with constrained decoders guided by phonotactic priors.
[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.06718
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.06262
AI is great at pattern recognition, but when the sample size is tiny and there's no known language to anchor it to, it’s like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing and no idea what the final image looks like.
How fascinating: in a paragraph entirely _about_ language, written entirely in my first language, I can barely recognize a fair chunk of the terms.
Wonderful and reminiscent of the Vesuvius Prize [0], of course. Broadly, makes me wonder if there are other categories of 'lost' information that will emerge in the years ahead as imaging tools and AI analysis improve.
[0] https://scrollprize.org/
I am on the Vesuvius Challenge team. We came across this press release back in July and were quite impressed! It's great to see other groups using non destructive means to read ancient documents.
It makes me wonder how much information we lost because we thought that retrieval methods were as good as they were ever going to get, and we destroyed the material trying to read it.
Tangential but even stuff like this bothers me in that regard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf1GvrUqeIA
My parents moved from Tibet to India, recetly I learned the ancient art of 'Tummo.' I never realized I had a natural 'high altitude adaptation' until I went on a trip with a group of foreigners and people from India. It was an eye-opening moment when I saw firsthand the difficulty they had with stamina at high altitudes. Stuff like this is super fascinating for me.
At least this time it's not an entire Buddhist monk.
https://web.archive.org/web/20241119222821/http://www.histor...
Small nitpick and they got it right in the next sentence but "3D X-ray topographical scanner" should be tomographic not topographic. X-ray topography is something else unrelated.
Wild that they found Sanskrit grammar in a Tibetan mantra. Just goes to show how fluid and interconnected these traditions really were
Considering Buddhism's origin it isn't that surprising.
hard to gauge significance without carbon dating of the scrolls. Why leave that out ?
If we are the ones who can read the prayers, maybe it’s because we’re the ones meant to answer them.
There's something poetic about modern tech being used to uncover ancient hopes and intentions
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