Buddhism – Page 54 – Ramblings of a Monk

So awhile ago, I had lunch with a good friend, Yong Hee. He asked me my thoughts about “ends justifying the means”, ie if the end is strong enough, can it necessarily justify the means to achieve it.

I thought for awhile, and later asked him in return: If someone declares that to have peace,
we need to kill everyone else (so that there is no conflict, hence peace) … is that still right?

Many of our daily decisions do not result in life and death, but on very grey areas where it’s hard to delineate right from wrong. I personally find it important to see the means as part of the end as well, i.e. the actions themselves are part of the result, and not separate from the derivative result that we are pursuing.

The other thing to also consider … as I mentioned to him is the very fact that we are even having second thoughts about certain course of actions … often these are tell tale signs that perhaps the balance is not there.

Chinese translation: http://buddhavacana.net/2013/05/29/和平的代价/

So I’m starting a blog to write down the questions that people pose to me my encounters with people who come to me with questions. I’ll also post occassional ramblings about IT stuffs that I used to dabble with or am dambling with.
To start off, here’s a side note about blogs, I wrote a software called BNG back in the late 90s. It’s an acronym for Buddhist News Generator. You see, this web site used to be on a space hosted by my ISP Pacific Internet back then, and it barely supported any server side scripting … I could of course use FrontPage, which I did initially, but got sick of the thick chunk of FrontPage Extension code that becomes embedded into my web pages.

I was also working on some Multimedia Web Browser called Inspire in a little company’s R&D, and that got me into writing apps that talked HTTPConnect and stuffs. Eventually I wrote BNG as a Windows app that talks directly to your web site’s FTP servers and allows you to enter News snips which would get packaged and uploaded to the configured page.

In short, it does what blogs do (more or less) without server side scripts, database and the like. But it does not have WYSIWYG editing, support for searching, comments, indexing, and all the cool fancy stuffs we take for granted in blogs today. But that was the late 90s.
So did I invent the blog? Naye. Posting style kind of web site became pretty popular with many web sites before blogs came about. I guess the inventive thing about blogs was not so much of a technological progress, but a paradigm shift (don’t you just love these jargon that makes you think that you are intelligent! 😉 ). Blogs are really web sites that are diaries-on-steroids. And perhaps this blog is one such site.

In any case, I’ll just post occasionally and if enough of it appears, I’ll provide a link to the main page for public access.

Till then.

Category: Buddhism

What Price Peace?

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