At The Guardian's website, Mark Vernon has a thought-provoking post on the nature of mystery and religion, in which he writes,

Zen Buddhism tends not to talk of God, but it does talk of the mystery of existence in its koans and meditation on questions like "What is it?" Enlightenment comes when the monk sees that there is no answer, or rather that the answer is only the question: "what?"

Although I don't presume to know everything about what happens when "enlightenment comes," I would have expressed this somewhat differently. Insights usually don't show me that the question has no answer, exactly, but that I've been asking the wrong question. Read more...

Spotted in the Gaylord (Michigan) Herald Times -- some ethnic Japanese celebrating Christmas in Los Angeles substitute Hotei -- sometimes called the "Laughing Buddha" -- for Santa Claus. This doesn't surprise me. There's a remarkable resemblance between Hotei and Santa -- both fat and jolly, both carry bags of good things for children, both somewhat magical.

Both characters represent happiness, generosity and abundance and are especially associated with children, so they could be interchangeable -- albeit in different costumes, and one has a full beard and hair and the other doesn't.

Saint Nicholas -- from whose life the original "Santa Claus" legend slowly emerged -- was a 4th century Christian bishop, and Ch'i-t'zu -- the Ch'an monk of Zhejiang, China, who was the original "laughing buddha" -- probably lived in the 10th century. But Hotei (or Pu-Tai in China) has been fat, jolly, and sack-carrying for centuries, whereas Santa Claus didn't take on these attributes until the 19th century. How did that happen?

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At the New York Times, Natalie Angier writes that vegetables are not as vegetative as we might thing. Plants respond to their environments in complex ways. They practice self-defense -- veggie kung fu? -- and even talk to each other.

Yes, I said talk to each other. When some plants are attacked by insects, they can send out chemical signals to other plants of the same species to be ready with the self-defense. Self-defense is usually some kind of chemical generated to irritate the attacking insects.

And sometimes these chemical signals are a cry for help that attracts insects that eat other insects, which will come and rescue the plant from being eaten. "Just because we humans can't hear them doesn't mean plants don't howl,"  Angier writes. I imagine silent alarms spreading through grass at the approach of a lawnmower.

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A blanket of snow covers a large part of North America today.  This made for an unusually quiet morning where I am. I thought of a haiku by Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) --

A thin layer of snow
coats the wings of mandarin ducks --
such stillness!

Now that the snow has stopped, however, the neighborhood is filled with the sounds of scraping. I hear snow shovels scrape the roads, and people are digging their cars out of snowdrifts and scraping the windows.

The deep morning snow
yields to shovels and scrapers --
on to the mall!

I'm staying home, out of the cold, damp, and noise.