The price of leadership

(This post might be depressing for you. Open your mind's windows if you must read it.)

"in the eight years that the Han Dynasty was being replaced by the Qin Dynasty 221-207B.C., the population of China decreased from 20 million to 10 million.
. . . .
In the Dong (Eastern) Han Dynasty 206B.C.-220A.D., the population of China was 50 million. After the transition of power to the Three Kingdom period 222-589, the population decreased to 7 million.
. . . .
In the Sui Dynasty 581-618, the population of China was 50 million. After the transfer of power to the Tang Dynasty 618-907, only one third was left.
. . . .
At the peak of the Song Dynasty 960-1279 the population was about 100 million. But in the beginning of the Qing Dynasty in 1655, the population was 14,033,900. During the 20 year period from 1626 to 1655, the population decreased from 51,655,459 to 14,033,900."

- Source

And then we have:

61,911,000 Murdered: The Soviet Gulag State

35,236,000 Murdered: The Communist Chinese Ant Hill

20,946,000 Murdered: The Nazi Genocide State

10,214,000 Murdered: The Depraved Nationalist Regime


- Source

We've got Alexander the Great, Charles the Great, Kangxi the Great Emperor, and many other greats.

You'll understand I am not impressed by men whose "greatness" is defined by the number of heads they mount on their wall, whatever their reason.

If this behavior was justified because others waged war on them and they were only defending their turf, then we also admit to the rightness of saying, "Better I kill you before you kill me."

And that is how nearly a billion men, women and children were put to death against their will. Having grown up with martial arts, even I have to say I find nothing superior, clever or brilliant about settling differences by death.

The Buddha had this to say:

In this world
Hate never yet dispelled hate.
Only love dispels hate.
This is the law,
Ancient and inexhaustible.

- Dhammapada

Was the Buddha a Negative Thinker?

Remember the story about about the turning point of Siddhartha Gautama's life? He saw four things that troubled him - an old, sick man, a corpse, a beggar and an ascetic. Deeply depressed by these sights, he sought to overcome old age, sickness and death by living the life of an ascetic. And so he abandoned his former life, forgot about his wife and his parents and went forth to seek the truth with nothing but the clothes on his back.

If there was a positive thinker walking with him, I think this is what he would have said to Gautama.

The old man
He would say to Gautama, "Be happy, at least you are better off than the one about to be cremated today."

The sick man
He would say, "Be happy, at least you have a chance to show compassion to him and make merit."

The corpse
He would say, "Be happy, at least you are alive to enjoy this fine day."

The beggar
He would say, "Be happy, at least you come from a well-to-do family and have no shortage of food at home."

The ascetic
He would say, "Be happy, at least you are spared of having to think too much."

And if he was positive-minded, he would say, "Yeah, I am grateful for what I have. I will not let these things sadden me."

So I've been wondering about this for a while.

If Gautama was a positive thinker who found contentment in every shortcoming in his life, would he have any reason to walk down the path to enlightenment?

As I understand it, enlightenment is about escaping life's bondage rather than embracing its positiveness or negativeness.

Do you think positive thinking, while being a necessary sugar to make the coffee drinkable, can also inhibit the desire to search for truth?

When temple meets beer bottle

Monks at Thailand's Sisaket province have taken "no discrimination" to a new level.

They took a million empty beer bottles and built the Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew temple.

Awesome. ^_^

Comment box problems

For some odd reason the comment link on my latest post turned off by itself. I didn't realize it until a few hours after I had posted the entry and had to manually set it back on.

And feisty spammers have been keeping me busy on my other blog.

Do bear with me as I iron these kinks out. ^_^

How much of your life is driven by fear?

Lots of people tell me they are driven by dreams. Desires. Hopes. Or just the love of something.

Its interesting to pay attention to their answers because sometimes (not all the time) you will find something entirely different underneath. Like this conversation I had with my friend Tom who graduated from UC Berkeley.

Me: "So, what's next for you?"

Tom: "I'm looking to do my postgraduate at Caltech, then probably a PhD in robotics."

M: "You like it that much huh?"

T: "Well DT, you know me. I'm not gonna survive a "real" job and I don't think there's anything out here for me. But I'd be interested in that internship program at JPL though."

M: "Oh. NASA in 5 years?"

T: "Yup. NASA in 5 years."

Tom hopes a stint at the Jet Propulsion Labs in Pasadena will eventually help him get to NASA as an engineer. He's well on his way there now.

I've known Tom for 8 years now. He doesn't want to end up in a staid corporate job like his brother Jim. Tom's a nice guy but he's a loner and a geek. With braces. The sort that attracts bullies. He's received his fair share of wedgies right up to sophomore year in college so he figures a research organization like NASA is his only chance at a semblance of a respectable future. It became his dream.

But flip the dream over and I saw fear. The corporate jungle isn't always kind to people like Tom. He may not get a job he can perform. He's not being pulled to JPL. He's pushed there by fear. The dream of going to geek heaven is a by-product of that fear.

I think we're no different. We study because we fear that without qualifications we won't get a job. We stick to a job we hate because we fear the consequence of joblessness. We go to the movies on weekends because we fear boredom. And we dislike going out alone because we fear loneliness.

I don't know about you but it feels scary to think we live in constant fear of one thing or another. It sounds far-fetched and we deny it. If only our Freudian slips didn't give us away every time. Example:

You: "Oops, I need to run and put money in the parking meter"

Judy: "Why worry? I see no traffic officers."

You: "No lah. Scared I'll get a ticket."

Notice how entrenched this pattern of words is in our daily conversation? "Scared I will get [consequence]." The word "scared" is the Freudian slip. A mistake in speech that reveals one's true subconscious desires. Seriously, despite all the love for positive thinking, have you ever heard anyone do the positive and say, "I'm putting money in the meter so that City Hall can continue to pay its workers and the city will be kept neat and tidy"?

I am guilty of this too but thankfully not everything I do is rooted in fear (I think.) For example, my curiosity about space exploration. I just happen to think its a blast to explore the universe. Its like going to the zoo. Okay maybe there is a bit of averseness, that I see a dying planet as a reason to begin space exploration. But that's not gonna happen in my lifetime so as of now, I'm driven more by the thrill of discovery than anything.

My point is this. There's a practical side to being aware how much of what we do is rooted in fear and how much of it isn't. If we are to lead fearless lives, it is worthwhile to recognize each subtle fear, render it harmless by learning not to be afraid of that fear and in time, remove the word "scared" from our vocabulary.

I am assuming that to live positively is to live fearlessly because to be scared of this and that, even subconsciously, is anything but positive.

How does your mind look like?

A person is fascinated by the things he sees. Seeing how pleasant they are to the eyes and touch, he yearns to possess them.

"That's so nice! I like! I want!"

A friend reminds him, "Do you really need that?"

"Aw c'mon, you're thinking too much," he says. "We must learn to enjoy life. Live it to the fullest!"

And so he packs it up and brings it home. And in this way he goes through life, picking up every joy he sees and bringing it home to his loft.


Another person is fascinated by the things he sees. Seeing how pleasant they are to the eyes and touch, he ponders,

"This is so nice! But will I still like it next year?"

Knowing the answer, he cherishes the object for that minute, lets it go and moves on.

And he comes home to his loft empty handed.


We all agree that happiness is a simple life. We may differ in what simplicity means.

We might believe that simplicity is to live free of thought. To be free of thought is to allow our senses to lead us wherever they fancy (because to resist is to think too much.) If we like it, just take it home and put it next to the thing we brought home yesterday. We worry about complications later.

Or we might believe that simplicity is having no baggage. To be free of baggage in the sea of sensual temptations requires the effort of letting go of "I want." Letting go requires reflection and understanding. As we go along, awareness builds and it gets easier. And the effort results in an uncluttered room.













A simple garden is not always the result of an unthinking mind. On the contrary it is often the result of profound awareness and understanding.

How does your mind look like?

How do you like your coffee?

As I look back at my old posts, it just occured to me that many of them would appear to be... almost bleak or negative in my interpretation of the world. I seem to be presenting the side that is ambivalent towards positiveness.

My posts on hope, for example, might have given the impression that I view hope as a bad thing. Although thats not what I meant, that what I was trying to say was that even hope has consequence which can either be happy or not happy, I can understand how it can be interpreted as throwing cold water on a hot idea.

I guess it reveals the two things that dominate my mind at this stage of my growth. First, I am trying to discover for myself why things are the way they are. While people accept things without question (because everyone says thinking too much is a bad thing) and build their hopes on motherhoods and traditions, I go subterranean to try and learn what makes these wisdoms tick. As others rush to invest in a particular stock because everyone says its good, I take it apart piece by piece to see if something's really there.

I have to accept that because life is hard enough as it is, illusions sell and that I will never represent a popular point of view.

Two, I am trying to understand what happiness is. I've stopped equating it with possessions some time ago. I suppose that'll run against every cell in your body if you happen to devote your entire life to the pursuit of money. I don't deny the reality that you need money to pay rent and buy groceries but the fact that I don't see happiness in million-dollar homes and fat bank accounts scares a lot of people, even my family.

So this is the phase in my life when I'm trying to use my own faculties to separate the wheat from the chaff, the substance from the marketing. Along the way, I learnt a valuable lesson. That people do need masks. Life without masks is like coffee without sugar - its unbearable. I can appreciate that. And I'm happy to make coffee for my friends - with cream, sugar, chocolate sprinkles and a dash of vanilla if they want - as I take mine neat.

This blog is my coffee minus cream and sugar. Its a place where I can pick apart wisdoms without feeling I must conform to one set of values or another. Its my zero gravity chamber. Typing out the words helps me think. Its part of my trying to be more self aware.

The Psychology of Hope and Fear

"When you feel hopeful, your body's relaxed. You feel generous and open, not only with others, but with yourself too. Your world expands with ideas for how the hope could gather even more momentum. You feel motivated forward.

If fear takes too much hold of a personality, rigidity of thought and paranoia enter. When this happens on a national level the same trend is seen. You end up with things like racism, sexism and hate."

- Joyce McFadden (Read the full article here)

McFadden is a certified psychoanalyst from Columbia University, an Obama supporter as I am. What she didn't mention in her excellent article is one funny thing about hope. How one man's hope is another man's nightmare.

In the 2008 US Presidential, 53% of American voters defined hope as Obama and 46% defined it as McCain. Yes, hope ran deep on each side. One side hopes that the world is compassionate, inclusive and progressive. The other hopes that the world is conservative, one that must be divided to maintain order.

You might be tempted to say there is "good" hope and "bad" hope, and bad hope = delusion. That would confirm my suspicion of hope as an ideological creature, where good and bad depends on which side of the ideological fence one sits on.

In McFadden's view, each hope-filled side would "feel hopeful, their bodies relaxed. They feel generous and open, not only with others (who share the same views), but with themselves too. Their world expands with ideas for how the hope could gather even more momentum. They feel motivated forward."

So what does the pacifist who hopes to unite the world and the terrorist who hopes to blow up a thousand people have in common? They are both driven by the audacity of hope. Its just that one man's hope is another man's nightmare. Which is which depends entirely on what ideology you subscribe to.

Judgementalism aside, what is clear to me is that humans cannot survive without hope, no matter how misguided we think it is. Hope is why we put our life savings on the casino table even though the chances of winning are a million to one. Hope is the reason why we seek "happy ever after" when reality says "this, too, shall pass." Hope is why we are inherently discontent, always looking for change, always pioneering new areas. Hope gives us that adrenalin. Whether it drives us to our salvation or our downfall is a different matter altogether.

"I am fearful of your hopes."

- Anon

The Will of Heaven

The cruelty of ancient emperors knows no bounds.

Qin Shih Huang is said to have sent countless innocent people to their deaths building his monuments and the great wall. He castrated people, buried hundreds of scholars alive, ordered intellectual works burnt, killed anyone he thinks stood in his way. In a last "heavenly" act he buried hundreds (thousands?) alive in his tomb at Xi'An.

Said to be suffering from megalomania (i.e. he's a psycho), Qin Shih Huang wanted to live and rule forever. He is hailed as a great man who unified China, one who standardized its writing, currency, and measurement systems that lasted to this day.

Not to belittle history but all this got me laughing because it tells me more about the historians than the emperor. So the recipe for "greatness," according to these esteemed scholars, is simple. Kill millions of innocents to enforce your version of order and you are a "great" man.

Come to think of it, it is actually very easy to unify the world. All you need is enough firepower to kill off any resistance - including your friends and family - and you too can unify anything. I think imperial Japan and Hitler had the same ambition. They too would have been "great" uniters of the world if they hadn't run out of guns and bombs. Think about it. We would be having yen or deutchmarks in our wallets today. And writing our blogs in katakana or the great Aryan language, depending.

Thank goodness I am not a great uniter.

May Qin Shih Huang's karma allow him to rest in peace.