Via Greg Zwahlen at Beliefnet, check out "First Person Plural" by Paul Bloom, published in the November 2008 Atlantic. Bloom is a professor of psychology at Yale, and he is writing about happiness. But he is also writing about the nature of selves. He says,

We used to think that the hard part of the question "How can I be happy?" had to do with nailing down the definition of happy. But it may have more to do with the definition of I.

He also writes that scientists are struggling with the concept of self, since self is not something that can be pinned down physiologically. Some scientists say that a person is a collection of systems and subsystems that interact with each other, but there is no one spot in in our heads that is always "me." Others think something within us must be the chief executive in charge; they just haven't figured out what it is yet.

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Today is the day of the annual pre-Thanksgiving presidential photo op, in which the President of the United States gets his picture taken with a turkey or two.  Contrary to what you might read in news stories, the first president to issue an official pardon that spared the turkey's life was President George H.W. Bush, in 1989. Before that, the turkey was just as likely to be the main course at the White House Thanksgiving dinner.

Since 2005 the pardoned turkeys have been sent to either Disneyland or Disney World to be grand marshals in a Thanksgiving parade. This year's official White House turkey, Courage, and the emergency backup turkey, Carolina, will be sent to the California park and will live out their days in Frontierland.

Some animal welfare activists argue that the fragile birds ought to be sent to a farm sanctuary instead. Domestic turkeys are bred to die young. They are overweight creatures with weakened immune systems, and even the pampered presidential turkeys usually die within six months of their "reprieve."

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Recently Ichiro Ozawa, secretary general of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan, made a speech that, translated into English, seemed to insult Christians by calling them "self-righteous," contrasted with the more "magnanimous" nature of Buddhism. The speech was delivered on Mount Koya, birthplace of the Japanese Buddhist school of Shingon.

At Japan Times, Roger Pulvers explains that many nuances of Japanese were lost in translation into English that made the speech seem harsher than it really was (although the speech was still mostly a pile of "shallow generalities," Pulvers says).  From there, Pulvers discusses the roles that religions have played in Japan since the 1930s. In the case of Buddhism, that role was not always beneficial. Some of you might find Pulvers's commentary as interesting as I did.

Another news tidbit from Japan -- the Ryohoji temple of Tokyo has launched a promotion featuring manga to draw more visitors to the temple. This weekend the temple set up tents and opened a temporary cafe, staffed by young women in popular manga role-playing costumes. The temple is also selling 500 yen ($5) cards with cartoon characters that allow one to download a video to a mobile phone of the Ryohoji chief monk chanting prayers.

I finally worked up the nerve to write an introduction to the Heart Sutra -- a very brief, beginner-level introduction. I recall that I had committed the sutra to memory before anyone explained any part of it to me. I hate to think how long it took for me to figure out who that guy "Shariputra" was.

The Heart Sutra is part of the much larger Prajnaparamita (perfection of wisdom) Sutra, which is a collection of about 40 sutras. Various legends claim these sutras were spoken by the historical Buddha and lost to mankind for centuries. According to one story I've heard, the sutras were guarded by nagas in an undersea cave and then entrusted to the sage Nagarjuna.

However, historians say the prajna sutras were composed by several authors between 100 BCE and 500 CE, as were most of the Mahayana sutras. Reference books don't all agree, but generally historians seem to think the Lotus and  Vimalakirti sutras were composed around 200 CE, and the Diamond Sutra about 400 CE. The vast Flower Garland (Avatamsaka) probably took at least a couple of centuries to write, beginning no earlier than the 1st century CE. And so on.

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