 Well, I wanted to thank Ayesha and Immanuela Salah for arranging this and the Kinsei Foundation for funding this important event. Its relevance becomes increasingly clear, I think, every day and I thank you who have the wisdom to see that and to show up today. If you know something about practices, let's see, let me just plug this in to get the... So if you know something about cremation ground meditation practices, you may have seen images like this. This is from Sri Lanka, it is a Theravada Buddhist monk sitting before a pile of human remains. This would be a typical practice for meditators who specialize in cremation ground meditation in South Asian circles. We're not just talking about Theravada Buddhism, but this is also a pan-Buddhist practice. I'll be drawing today on literature that is composed mostly in the Pali language and mostly by Theravada practitioners, but also I'll be drawing on some Sanskrit texts that would be familiar to Mahayana practitioners in South Asia. So the practice is not mandatory, but it's highly recommended for those who have an inordinate attraction to the body. Those who are sexually aroused and have difficulty practicing celibacy are especially recommended to go to a cremation ground and contemplate bodies, or those who are very attached to the beauty of the body. So it's not necessarily just for horny people, but for people who are very attached to the beauty of the body. The practice is known in Sanskrit as Asubha Bhavna, Bhavna is a word for meditation or contemplation. Asubha in Sanskrit, that which is foul or disgusting in Pali is Asubha Bhavna. It's written about extensively by Buddha Gosha who is comparable to the Thomas Aquinas of Theravada Buddhism. He's a great theologian and commentator. For the compendium of the path called the Visuddhimaga, which translates in English as something like the path of purity, he has a very long section on meditation, all kinds of meditation including meditation on the body, various modes of thinking about the body. You can think about the body in terms of the material elements that make up the body, the radiance or fire, the liquidity or water, the cardinal elements for example, or you can think about the body as a foul and disgusting thing. Think about all the earwax, knots, saliva, excrement, urine, the essence of what you are is that stuff your body produces and the food that you eat as it rots in your belly, all of this is ripe for investigation, very ripe. So Buddha Gosha would exhort you, if you're a monk or a nun, when you wake up in the morning and you go on your alms round, notice what you see as you walk into the courtyard. There's someone, another monk or nun has expected and spit some flim into the courtyard. That's the first thing that you'll see as soon as you come out of your cell, you see something disgusting. Notice those disgusting things as you're on your way to the alms, to the place where you're going for alms. Notice as you cross over all the disgusting things. So there are all kinds of ways to contemplate that which is a suba, that which is foul or disgusting. As I said, it's a practice that is not mandatory, but highly recommended. And if you have a problem maintaining celibacy as a monk or nun, celibacy is required in the Theravada traditions and Sanskritic traditions in the time period that I'm looking at. It is required and if you have difficulty, go to a cremation ground. Buddha Gosha suggests that you select a corpse appropriate for your type of attraction. So do you enjoy a buff body? Do you like to see some biceps? Well, find a bloated corpse then, one that's filled with the gases of future faction, maybe some maggots. Find one that's really distorted. The body is distended and not buff and taut. Do you find that skin tone is what really works for you? That causes you to be sexually aroused. Well, I'm sure a purple corpse could be found. If you go to the cemetery, you'll find a body that has been left behind. But as Dr. Rita Lunger, who will follow me, has described in her book on funeral practices in Sri Lanka, cremation is an expensive thing. Wood is hard to come by and in the pre-modern period it was only the elites who could afford to cremate their dead kings in Sri Lanka. And so in the story literature that I'll be talking about today, bodies are easily come by because most people would simply take their bodies, the bodies of their dead to the cemetery and leave them there for the elements to leave them to putrify or for buzzards and jackals and other predatory animals to take care of. So Bodegosa gives something of a pull down menu, 10 different types of corpses for 10 different types of sexual attraction. Bodegosa also says something interesting, which is that if you're a monk, if you're a male, you should look at male bodies in the cemetery, not female bodies. If you're a nun, you should look at female bodies, not at male bodies. So he presumes heterosexual desires the norm and suggests that you avoid the possibility of a necrophiliac sort of experience. But what I found is that the literature, the narrative literature, story literature found in commentaries composed between the third and the seventh centuries of the common era. The authors of that literature completely ignore what Bodegosa has to say about this danger. Instead they assume that there will be some benefit to necrophiliac sort of movement of arousal because that corpse will inevitably be disgusting if presented in the right way. So the metaphor that I like to think of is aversion therapy, shock therapy. So in these stories that is often the scenario that a meditator goes to a cremation ground, becomes sexually aroused, looking at a male meditator, looks at a female corpse, becomes sexually aroused, and then the corpse is so filled with preterfaction. And the maggots start coming out the nose and mouth generally, sexual arousal, is then you could say there's a kind of shock, an aversion therapy there. So in many cases, in the literature that I explored in a book called Charming Cadabras, it's the Buddha himself who is representing as arranging this experience for monks. And in the end, they achieve insight and they become leaders in the tradition. They become senior monks whose stories are preserved. So through the insight that they achieve, they achieve awakening, the alleviation of suffering. So looking at the body is a really great way to achieve insight into these five things that we're attached to, the five aggregates of clinging or attachment. In the kind of old-fashioned, wordy Victorian English that we sometimes use to translate Sanskrit and Pali terms, we tend to use words like aggregates. When I would just like to say things, the five things we cling to, the five forms of attachment. So body is obviously one thing, but there are intangible things. There are things like sensations and perceptions, thoughts, and then the consciousness that allows us to have those thoughts and perceptions and sensations. And achieving insight into the insubstantial and impermanent nature of those five things is the pathway to nirvana, to the alleviation of suffering. It's our being mesmerized and clinging to and being attached to these five things that cause us to be born again and die again in the cycle of samsara, the wheel of birth and death. And it's our ability to contemplate these things and to see the impermanence and insubstantial nature of these five things that gives us the opportunity to achieve insight and see that there is no essence that we can cling to. So the Buddha is said to have declared that the person who clings to those five things is like a person who's fallen into a river and he's grasping after branches and trees and trying to hold on to something, get some stability while shuttling down a river. Imagine a river and flood stage and you're just tearing down that river and everything is changing and you're moving very rapidly, but you're trying to hold on to something. That's the metaphor for what we try to do in life. These five things constitute us, but there's no permanence there. So taking just the body is one way to see through the whole game, to see the insubstantial and impermanent nature of all these things. Now the body seems to last a lot longer than perceptions and sensations. You might say, well, the body seems more permanent. So if you want to understand impermanence, why don't you look at the mind? Well, you have probably tried it in meditation settings, you know, very volatile and evanescent and hard to grasp, but bodies are all around us and they've got earwax and snot and pus and all kinds of good things. So even though the body will live for 80 or 90 years and it seems kind of permanent, inevitably you'll see signs of its decay. And so it's a good one to focus on. So a typical narrative. This one is drawn from a collection of legends about accomplished monks. I'm drawing, we'll say, on commentarial literature composed, as I said, between the third and the seventh century of the common era. This is a body of narratives about, this is drawn from a body of narratives about accomplished monks, terras in the Theravada tradition. And this is a verse that the Buddha addresses to this monk named Kula. So the story goes that he, Kula, is a man deeply afflicted by lust. He's a monk. He's taken the Saffron robes, but he's unable to banish sexual thoughts. The Buddha knows this. The Buddha knows that this is Kula's problem and he says, practice asubhavna unseasingly. So Kula goes to the cremation ground and he practices. And while he's in the cremation ground, he is able to see the sign of foulness. Asubhavna is quite evident for him as soon as he steps away, horny again. Over and over. He does this over and over. So finally the Buddha goes with him to the cremation ground and he conjures up a beautiful young corpse, a corpse of a beautiful young woman. He sees that Kula is paying attention to this and that he's a bit horny. He causes this spectral female to putrify very rapidly. So something like, you know, in five to ten minutes, her corpse is filled with maggots and they're coming up all of the orifices at once. So this does get Kula's attention and Kula becomes, he achieves insight. He becomes an arhat, that is to say a saint in the Theravada tradition that very day. So in the literature that I explored in a book called Charming Cadavers, this is a kind of typical narrative. And these are stories of people who do not start off as saints. And I was having a chat with Imanuela about necrophilia, lots of lots of necrophilia in these stories. So no one's a saint. There's a journey. There's a spiritual journey that one can take. And we'll see that in many cases of these stories. So in this case, I talked about shock therapy, aversion therapy. The Buddha takes the calculated risk of turning up the dial, of engaging the monk's interest and intensifying an inappropriate kind of desire, only to pair that desire with a stimuli that's noxious, just like what goes on in aversion therapy. And indeed the term Sanbega is used in Sanskrit literary theory to describe a kind of shock. It can be a good kind of shock if you see a beautiful sunset. You have this sense of the beauty of nature that can be quite shocking or it can be something disgusting. They'd be butsarasa for those of you who know Sanskrit literary theory, something disgusting. In any case, it is a shock to the system and it causes a kind of aesthetic shock. And that's what these stories are meant to do. They're meant to bring about this feeling in the reader or listener who identifies with the protagonist. So a little bit about the sources that I'm drawing on. I'm drawing on mainly Budugasa and Damapala, who is another commentator right around the same time, 56 centuries of the common era. I use the term post-ashokin to refer to this body of literature because for those of you who know something about the history of South Asia, you know the famous king Ashoka who converted, who had inherited the Mauryan empire and he expanded it. Great warfare, machine of warfare, a lot of people died. And he had remorse and became known as a nonviolent ruler. And he increased the prestige of Buddhism considerably. So you might say that the age of commentaries, there's something in the role of Ashoka and a literary production after the time of Ashoka that led to this great production of commentary literature. When I say commentaries, you might think as I did in grad school, boring, so dull. But no, not these commentaries. Not dull at all because what you're getting is the back story. People who become saints don't start off pretty and nice and beautiful. They're not scrubbed clean. They're homicidal. They're horny. It's like a telenovela. These are really, these are very racy stories. So you get the biographies behind what Charlie Halisey and his translation of the Terigata, the collection of stories, poems, utterances attributed to senior nuns, Charlie Halisey translated these as epiphany verses. You know, we call them songs. We call them poems. But when you achieve insight in this South Asian context, you present it in metric form. And those are preserved. So we have the Terigata, the collection of verses attributed to the Teris, the senior nuns. We have the Teragata, collection of verses attributed to senior monks. And the biographies are what you get in these commentaries. You get the back story. How did they come to be awakened? They came a long way. You get the back stories behind what the Buddha said. So Budagosa wrote a commentary on the Dhammapada. Some of you may have heard of the Dhammapada, aphorisms attributed to the Buddha. So that's kind of literature I'm drawing on. And I have a theory about why celibacy was so important in this time period that it is kind of a, there's a drumbeat of interest in celibacy. And these stories are really pushing celibacy. And it has to do with the fact that because of Ashoka and the popularity of Buddhism, a lot of people used the monastery as a route for social mobility, upward mobility. So there are a lot of people becoming monks, especially monks, perhaps nuns as well, but especially monks. You could, if you were a smart young man and you really, you went to a monastic university like Nalanda, one of these transnational universities with teachers from all over Asia, you could end up as a court philosopher. And you could bathe in a golden bath filled with warm oil every night. Whatever you wanted, you could command. So social disengagement is kind of hard to maintain when you're sleeping in a comfortable room, you're bathing in a golden bathtub. So celibacy is a way, is one way to promote social disengagement. That's my theory about why this time period has such an interest. The literature from this time period is so strongly oriented towards celibacy. We can talk about whether it's a useful theory or not. To tell one of my, one of my favorite stories in the vast amount of story literature that presents this theme of female objects of contemplation. This story is a little bit different because the object of meditation, courtesan by the name of Siddha Mah, I didn't put the diacriticals on here, but this is a long A. Siddha Mah is a high class sex worker, a very famous courtesan who became a supporter of the Buddha, a lay woman dedicated to the cause of Buddhism. She has a name in this story. Most of the stories that I looked at in my book don't give the female object of meditation a name. The monk who views the body or who looks at the woman who might be sick or dying has a name and has a story, but we don't know the name of the woman. Well, in this case, it's an exception to the room. She has a name and the monk who observes her, her convenient death, does not have a name. He's just a lovesick monk. So, Sirema, if we have time during the Q and A, I can tell you her story. It's quite interesting, her story of conversion, how she became a supporter of Buddhism. But we'll pick up the story as it's told in Bodhikosa's commentary on the Dhammapada, where the the story goes like this. How did this lovesick monk become an arha, become an awakened being? Well, he was staying at a monastery and he heard from some other monks. This is during a time when monks are parapetetic, monks and nuns are moving around, they are not in fixed monastic places, but they're moving around from place to place. And he hears about this beautiful courtesan, Sirema, and her food. She offers food for monks and nuns and clothing and her food, six or eight kinds of curries she offers at every meal. She's got a delicious brunch that she offers. Even better is her beauty. She's quite something to look at. He hears from his fellow monks. So even though he's a whole day's journey away from the town where Sirema lives, he starts walking as soon as he hears the news, he starts walking. He's already fallen in love with her just from her reputation. He walks through the night, he arrives at her place in the morning and he takes alms along with the other monastics there. What he doesn't know but the Buddha knows is that Sirema is going to die that day. Already Sirema is feverish and after the brunch is served, she comes out to greet those who have taken lunch, the monks and nuns there. And she's accompanied by servants who are holding her elbows and keeping her upright. She's really, really very, very ill. She dies that day. Meanwhile, the lovesick monk has gone back to his place for the night, the cell where he's staying, and fallen into a swoon. He's so in love with Sirema. She's so beautiful. He doesn't even notice that she has a fever or if he notices, he thinks, oh how romantic, she's very pale, light-skinned beauty. So he goes back to his cell. The Buddha, in the meantime, knows what's happening. He goes to the king, to the local ruler, and he says, when Sirema dies, make sure that her body is protected. Don't let any jackals or vultures rip up her body. Keep her in the cremation grounds safe for three days. On the fourth day, send a drum through the streets saying, everyone must come see Sirema. No one will be accepted. Everyone must come see Sirema. Send a drummer. So lovesick monk lays in a swoon for three days. Finally, on the fourth day, he hears everyone saying, we're going to see Sirema, we're going to see Sirema. Everyone, let's go, and he hears the drums. So he jumps up, he throws on his outer robe, and he's off. And he follows the crowd. And he arrives in the cremation ground. And once there, the Buddha conducts an auction. You never know with some of these gentlemen. You never know. They might not get the point. They might get the wrong point. So the cremation ground becomes an auction site. Sirema is used to commanding 1,000 copper coins for a day with her. So the Buddha starts the auction at 1,000 copper coins. And he looks around. Any takers, 1,000 copper coins for a day with Sirema. She's been, her body has been in the cremation ground for three days. This is the fourth day. She's quite distended with future faction. So there are no takers. And the Buddha makes it explicitly clear to the lovesick monk that there's no value here by dropping the price in gradual increments. So this young man becomes in our hut. And his story is preserved for us. And this is a kind of typical narrative, except for the fact that she has a name and he does not. So what I think is interesting about these narratives is let's look at the structure. Let's look at the protagonist and the object of meditation and how these things work out. So if you've read some feminist literature, some feminist film theory, some feminist art history, you're familiar with the idea of the objectification of the female body. This slide shows what it feels like phenomenologically to be an object. Person is saying, I am after all merely a thing. And the little bird is saying, I must have profiled all of that. So to be an object is not to be the center of the story, but to be peripheral to the story. It's someone else's story. So even Sinema, given a name, is not the central figure in this story. It's his story, the story of the young monk. So in Charming Gdavres, I took contemporary theory from feminist film theory. People like Laura Mulvey, Teresa de Laurentiis. I took art historians like John Berger. And I use this contemporary theory to try to understand what's going on in these narratives. Now we can talk about whether that's appropriate. Maybe it's too much presentism, taking 21st century, late 20th century and 21st century theory and applying it to pre-modern ideas, perhaps not appropriate. But I find it useful to think about the kinds of seeing that these stories promote. And to imagine a pre-modern Buddhist girl or woman trying to situate herself in the drama of salvation that is rendered by these stories as what seems to me like a male drama or at least a heterosexual male drama. Maybe different for gender queer people or for people with different sexual orientations. But these stories seem to suggest that if you want to put yourself in the protagonist in the subject position in this drama of salvation, it's good to be male and to contemplate female bodies. And not to say that females are excluded here. There are lots of stories about females who attain awakening, who attain insight. They look at female bodies, either their own or that of spectral females created by the Buddha. And I'll tell you a story or two about that in just a moment. But let me spell out a little bit more what this theory looks like. So here's an example that John Berger gives. The art historian John Berger takes this example of a master, what does he call that? The master, I can't remember the genre, but European master, I guess. Also, the allegory of time and love by Bronzino. This is something that was painted for, let's see. It was commissioned by, I have the notes here. He's commissioned by the Grand Duke of Florence as a gift to the king of France. Venus is in the center. Her body is displayed in a kind of way that looks a little uncomfortable to me. Like she's kissing the boy on her left, that's Cupid. Looks a little awkward. Why is she like this? Why is she kissing him like this? Body facing out, body's facing out because this is a gift to the king of France. And he is the surveyor of the scene. He's the implied spectator. It's a gift commissioned for him. This is for his enjoyment. So this John Berger gives us as an example of how the way that the figures are arranged in this painting is for the male surveyor of the scene. So this is an example of the male gaze taking European masters and showing you how things are arranged. If we wanna look at a contemporary example, here's one from the 1960s from America, a bathing suit ad. Again, you see the female and the male gaze. Everyone facing that way. So art historical theory, feminist art historical theory looks at the male gaze. Film theory, likewise. I like Teresa De Laurentiis in particular because she says, you know, not every woman who goes to the cinema adopts the male gaze. There's what she would call double identification. So you identify both with the male subject, the way the camera is orienting you to male subject position, but you also identify with the female object. So it's a double identity. And I think that's what I see in a number of the narratives that I looked at in my book is a kind of double identity. Here's an example of female protagonists. So as I say, there are a number of stories about awakened women who turn their gaze either upon themselves, looking at their own aging bodies, or they look at spectral women, female phantasms created by the Buddha. So one of my favorite stories is about a woman who, you know, like the monk Kula has the intervention of the Buddha to help her with what she's not yet able to manage on her own. So Rupa Nanda is her name and she's the step-sister of the Buddha. And she became a nun really out of loneliness because everyone in her whole extended family joined the monastery as monks and nuns. And she was lonely. So she didn't go to hear the Buddha's teachings because she was lonely. And she became a nun to be with people not to hear sermons about the impermanence and insubstantiality of the body. Oh for God's sake, how boring. That's just not what she signed up for. So she didn't go. And the Buddha, after a while, was like, hmm, step-sister, where are you not coming? Do you want to make some talks? And I want you to know what I've learned, my wisdom. You need to know it. So he arranges something for Rupa Nanda. So he creates a female phantasm about her age, like 16 years old, a beautiful spectral female. And just the same age, and they become instant friends. So this female phantasm is, let's see, Rupa Nanda lays her head on the female phantasm's lap, no, no, no, all the way around, right? Instant friendship, the female phantasm seems tired. So Rupa Nanda says, here, lay your head on my lap. Rest here for a bit. And as soon as she lays her head down, she is bitten by a spider and immediately goes into convulsions, this spectral immediately goes into convulsions. And she dies a horrifying death within five minutes or so. And the usual kind of, you know, there's, it's a splatter screen of hideousness right there in Rupa Nanda's face. You know, though the woman has died, the spectral woman has died in her lap. So this definitely was an effective intervention for Rupa Nanda. She became, she achieved insight right then and there and became an arhat. And this is a kind of typical narrative of a female who becomes a woman of great achievement. So she becomes the head of the contemplative order within the women's monastic order. She's the chief teacher of contemplation, which to me is interesting because she, her moment of insight comes through something unreal, something created, and being a master of meditation or contemplation means you understand what is really real. So through the unreal learning what is really real and she becomes the head teacher of meditation. So a pretty important position to hold. Other examples of females who turn their gaze on themselves there are a lot of narratives of this sort that Kedagatha has many verses along those lines, but one is a nun called Ambapali who at the moment of her awakening, she utters a number of verses that are a point by point contrast between her youthful beauty and her aging body. She says at one point in English, once my breasts were round and full, quite lovely, now they hang like water skins without water. So she's got 20 or 30 verses along those lines. So I think this is what Teresa De Laurentiis will call double identification, seeing themselves as objects while surveying, you know, like taking the position of a surveyor. The association of women with self, with a self-reflexive gaze is certainly not unique to Buddhist literature, not unknown in the West. This painting by Charles Gilbert draws on older strands of Memento Mori traditions in the West, traditions about female vanity. So here you see he's created an optical illusion. A woman is sitting at her makeup table and she's looking at herself in the mirror but what she's seeing is a skull, a large skull. So Memento Mori, remember that is the idea here. Now I'd like to take some time to do something that'll be sort of fun for me to see how we have these gendered conventions in the pre-modern literature that I presented and how I'm asking the question and I hope you'll participate with me. How do the gendered conventions of a text like the Dhammapada get translated into the visual medium of an illustrated version of the Dhammapada? So this is something that was created as a merit-making book in 1993 in Taiwan. Each page illustrates one verse from the Dhammapada, such as the verse that tells the story of Sirma and the Love Learned Monk. Each one is sponsored by a different individual or family or institution and it's for creating merit. So each one has a visual that goes along with it. So let's look and see if the way that the artists have rendered these stories matches up with the Androcentric conventions of the language of the commentary that they draw on in the original text. So this is the original verse from the Dhammapada that the Buddha is said to have uttered to the lovesick monk. So see this decked out body in English. See this decked out body, much thought of, but truly soar within, it is never steady. This is the Pali in the verse that the Buddha is said to have uttered to the Love Learned Monk, the Pali here, and then in English translation here, kind of a literal translation and here we have it translated into the visual medium. So the question is, is this an Androcentric picture? Is this a picture that gives you the male spectator and female bodies as objects, mere objects? And does this objectify the female body in a way that precludes female subjectivity? So I'm looking at this and I'm saying, well, yeah. So Serima is surrounded by the gazing townspeople. This is the auction, the beautiful woman and then the cadaverous woman, sort of conjoined at the hip. But Serima and her cadaverous double, her insides, if you will, the mortal female, the dead female within, they're looking out at us. They're meeting our gaze. So this is hard, I would not say, I think if John Burger were here, he would not say that this is the sort of, you know, painting like the one that we saw earlier where Venus is arrayed simply as a sight to be seen. She's meeting our gaze. So there's something of a vitality, a subjectivity there that Serima has. This next one is interesting though, a little more complicated. So this is from, this is verse 347, the story of K. Ma. Again, I should have put it, diacritical Mark along a K. Ma. So this is a story of the religious awakening of a queen. K. Ma was the wife of King Bimbisara. You may have heard of King Bimbisara, very famous in the history of Buddhism. He was a major supporter of the Buddhist cause, Buddhist cause at the time of the historical Buddha. He was a supporter and so K. Ma should have been going along with him to hear the Buddha teach. She was kind of like Rupananda, like this is so boring and it's just gonna drone on and on about how the body is so hideous and ugly and not worthy of our time and it's mesmerizing, but it's shallow. So I'm not going. And indeed, it makes sense. Her job description as a queen is to be involved in cultivating beauty and through beauty, sensuality and through sensuality, procreation and to give the kingdom an heir, an heir to the throne. That's her job description. So it's quite normal that she would say, I'm not really interested in all this other stuff. I don't blame her. But the Buddha, as usual, because she's an important person, because she's the wife of King Bimbisara and he's a major supporter, he creates a spectacle for her. So he creates a beautiful, again, 16 year old, living 16 year old who dies in a matter of minutes. As soon as she, as soon as he goes, as soon as K. Ma is, you know, seeing the spectral female, this ostensibly 16 year old young woman and it mires her beauty, the Buddha sort of turns up the dial. She dies and she's filled with maggots and putrefaction within moments. So, you know, a very quick lesson, a kind of aha moment that K. Ma achieves very quickly and K. Ma becomes, again, an awakened being and arhat. So the verse that is found in the Dhammapada is one that's a generalization by the Buddha. This is the message, this is the takeaway. Wise people cast away Dukka suffering, severing their, so here we have grammatically, we have plural, masculine plural, severing their lustful ties like a spider caught in its own web. So the lustful ties are like a spider, it's like a self-made web, right? You're horny, you make a web, you capture yourself in it. So here we have a monk who's emerging from this web who's no longer caught in the web and he's seated here in meditation and now he's revering the lotus which represents the teaching of the Buddha. So, this one is a little trickier. So the artists have rendered the story of K. Ma who's a female, an accomplished female meditator by putting a male figure on the meditation seat, a male figure revering the teachings, a male figure emerging from the spider web. But can you really blame the artists because the grammatic, the grammatical form here is masculine. So you can't really blame them if they're looking at the Dhammapada, if they're looking at the Pali, if they know grammatically they're dealing with masculine plural, you have to give them a pass. On the other hand, they didn't really do their homework because if they dug even a little bit, they would see that K. Ma is not a male. This is a story of K. Ma and they would know because the commentary is quite accessible to them. They could know that this is a story of a woman so it's kind of lazy. I guess as a teacher, I wouldn't give them a D because well, they did have, you know, the pronouns in the nouns are gendered male but I wouldn't give them an A because they were a bit lazy. So I'm gonna give them a C, average work, not quite what I'd wanna see. So the illustrator, they're not taking any special liberties here but they haven't, if they wanted to explore other traditions, you know, get beyond the androcentrism of the grammar here. They could have done so but I think they were a bit lazy. So I'm going to end here with an image that may help to warm us up for Dr. Longer's presentation. This is from Sri Lanka. This is a skeleton at the end of a meditation pathway when people do walking meditation. They would come to the end of this kind of platform, see the skeleton, turn around and walk the other way, come back, that would be the, you know, sort of the object that they could contemplate while walking. But I'll end it there because I'd love to have some chance for questions and then to have you help me figure out what's going on with these images. So please pipe up.