Unicode : its time has come.

Downloads from visiblemantra.org

Times Ext Roman
Self installing Windows font, just double click.

Jayarava's Indic Keyboard Map
zipped archive with map files, and some documentation on installation.

I'm fairly sure that these files are virus free but do your own scan.

They work for me but may not work for you

I've started to use Unicode a lot more in this and other places. In fact you will need to use Unicode to read this post. What is it, and why use it? Unicode is a standard for the encoding of letters and other written characters. In the old days the Americans (bless 'em) created a standard way of encoding English which is known by it's acronym: ASCII. Each letter was a assigned a number and this made encoding text much easier for computers. ASCII used one byte (8 bits) which gave it a limit of 256 characters. This just about does it for English, but of course many other languages are in use in the world, and some of them don't stick to the plain Roman characters familiar to English language speakers. Unicode solves this problem by using two bytes giving 256 x 256 = 65536 possibilities. Even this places limits, but it does mean that encoding non-Roman scripts is a possibility, and it also allows us to use a full range of diacritic marks - which is where it gets interesting for me.

I falteringly read Pāli, and I use a lot of Pāli and Sanskrit terms in my writing. Diacritics do matter in the writing of Indic languages. For instance the retroflex unvoiced stop ( ṭ ) is different from the dental unvoiced stop ( t ). Compare them in Devanāgarī for instance: ट and त are not at all alike, and are clearly distinguished in pronunciation. However in the early days of popular writing about Buddhism, publishers, who did not have readily available fonts to cope with the diacritics, nor proof readers who knew what they meant, just decided to do without them. Unfortunately this became the fashion. Scholars used them of course and this became a bit of a dividing line - serious Buddhist writing uses diacritics, but popular Buddhism does not. There is no good reason to continue this, but it's become a habit.

Until quite recently the internet reinforced this bad habit. HTML simply could not cope with anything other than ASCII (and it's one byte descendants). Several ASCII based encoding systems were invented. Let's say I want to write paṭicca-samuppāda. Two of the common methods of doing it in text look like this:

velthuis: pa.ticca-samuppaada
ITRANS: paTicca-samuppAda

Neither is very easy to read compared to properly printed text. Real problems emerge for nasals ṅ, ñ, and ṇ, and the sibilants ṣ and ś. One way around the problem was to create a special font that had to be installed before pages could be read. This works OK, but these home-made fonts use parts of the ascii scheme that are seldom used in English, and they do it idiosyncratically so that they are not interchangeable. If I use the Vipassana Research Institute font that comes with their CD of the Pāli Canon I get this if I change fonts:

VriRoman Pali: paµicca-samupp±da

Unicode solves this problem, and it is getting easier to use. On my visiblemantra.org website I used to hand code all of the extra characters. So for example ṭ = &#7789 and ā = &#257. This is time consuming, taxes the memory, and makes the source code difficult to read, but it results in a full set of Indic letters. And what's more the will display correctly in any Unicode font.

Unicode has not completely superseded the old style ASCII fonts. Since the sequence that contains the numbers and upper and lower case Roman letters are the same, for most people there is no incentive to change. We have our favourite fonts and we don't want to change. And actually there are still not many Unicode fonts to choose from. Windows and Mac both ship with a couple of Unicode fonts (For Windows Arial Unicode MS and Lucinda Sans Unicode) but not a version of Times Roman. Some fonts only implement a subset of the Unicode character set - so Times New Roman does have some extra characters, but not all the ones we need for Sanskrit.

When I set up visiblemantra.org I made the decision to use diacritics throughout the site. I believe that it is important to accurately represent the mantras. So you can't really read the site without setting a Unicode font in your browser options. I'm an early adopter and this will mean that some of the 200 or so visitors each day cannot read some of the text, but I hope I am making it more sensible for everyone to start using Unicode. Its a bit like DVDs or any of those new technologies. Some people hold out for as long as they can, but there comes a time when it just makes more sense to go with the new. I believe the time has come. I have used the occasion diacritic on this site before, but fudged it at times by leaving them off. From now on I plan to use diacritics all the time - which is to say that I intend to spell Sanskrit and Pāli words as they should be (taking into account my appalling spelling of course).

Two things have made the difference for me. Firstly I managed to get hold of a copy of the Windows Unicode font Times Ext Roman which has all the diacritics I need, and looks good both on screen and printed. Secondly I discovered how easy it is to make a keyboard map so I can type them whatever application I am using. I'm making both the font and the keyboard map available on visiblemantra.org, and I'd encourage everyone who reads this to go ahead and make the jump. I also have both a rough, and a detailed, guide to how to pronounce the letters of Sanskrit on visiblemantra.org.

Here's the Sanskrit alphabet in all its glory:

a ā i ī u ū e ai o au aṃ aḥ ṛ ṝ ḷ ḹ ka kha ga gha ṅa ca cha ja jha ña ṭa ṭha ḍa ḍha ṇa ta tha da dha na pa pha ba bha ma ya ra la va śa ṣa sa ha kṣa

See what you've been missing? (Hint: if not set your browser font to Unicode!)

A selection of fabulous Resources which rely on Unicode can be found at the following locations:

• Visible Mantra
  
• Tipiṭaka (Burmese Ed.)
• Pāli Canon Online Database (Thai Ed.)
• PTS Pāli English Dictionary
• Digital Sanskrit Buddhist Canon
• Göttingen Register of Electronic Texts in Indian Languages

Violence and the Media

Memory Alpha

I've always loved reading science fiction, and enjoy science fiction movies and TV shows. My friends and I club together to buy seasons of Star Trek. Lately I've also seen some of the remade Battlestar Galactica and a new series called Heros. In these more recent shows there has definitely been a change in the way violence is depicted. It is more graphic, the obvious intent is to make it seem more real. It is more frequent. It is also more violent. Season three of Star Trek Next Generation, which I am watching at present, seems quite innocent by comparison.

Since my ordination retreat I have become a lot more sensitised to violence in the media. I find now that I cannot bear to watch much on the screen. The emotional response is too strong. I've also become aware of how violence is hyped in other media. Even the much vaunted BBC news focusses in on the most violent and shocking news. Perhaps their coverage is a little more sophisticated than a tabloid, but the tendency is to highlight stories which are violent - wars, disasters with many dead, mass murder, violent crime. These stories get the lead, and they are lingered over.

It is my firm conviction that the purpose of the media is to entertain. Fullstop. I no longer believe that "the news" is an exception to this. Stories are chosen on their potential for stimulating an emotional response, and written in such a way as to get the maximum emotion response from the target audience. It's all about creatingwhat physiologists call "arousal" . Violent images, whether intended as entertainment, or as "news", do have an affect on us even if the effect is below the threshold of consciousness.

Constant stimulation is not good for us. One only has to consider that in the UK mental health problems have replaced back-pain as the the no.1 cause of time off work sick, and of people on incapacity benefits. The thing about a fast pace of life is that our bodies cannot get back to their optimum resting state. My current understanding of depression is that it results from over-stimulation and an inability to process the physical effects of that stimulation. I recall an experiment we did in the 6th form on earthworms. Poke a worm and it writhes about vigorously in something analogous to our fight or flight response - it is making itself difficult to catch and eat. Wait till it stops and poke it again and it will respond with less vigour. Repeat this and the worm gives less response until after only 3 or 4 times it is unable to response to being poked. The lesson here is that constantly provoking a fight or flight response wears you out. I believe this is why depressed people avoid contact and anything stimulating - at worst they lie in bed in darkened rooms not moving.

Whether you realise it or not seeing violent images produces arousal in the body. This is generally short of the fully fledged fight or flight response. It can be sustained over longer periods and with more repetition. But it's clear that for many people it is happening too much, too often.

The knee jerk Buddhist reaction is to say that violence is a breach of the first precept, and violent images are in the same category. I think there is some truth to this, but it seems to me that it is more helpful to take a different tack. The Buddha liked to point out that the unenlightened are obsessed with, intoxicated by, totally caught up in sensual experiences - including the mind-sense. The Enlightened still have sensory experiences, but they have unhooked themselves emotionally from these. They are no longer caught up in the show, they no longer suspend disbelief. If everyday experience is intoxicating, then the media is like amphetamines, and media violence like crack cocaine.

Like any addict we do get a "hit", some kind of pay off, from the drug. Thanks to Will Buckingham of thinkbuddha.org I recently read Cordelia Fine's little book A Mind of it's Own. In it she makes the point that physiologically speaking it virtually impossible to tell the difference between emotions: her example focuses on fear and anger which are physically indistinguishable. The only difference is in your thoughts apparently. Emotion, she says, is arousal + emotional thoughts. What seems to be happening in the West is that we are seeking out more and more stimulating experiences, at the same time as substituting virtual contact via the internet, email, and virtual reality games, for real human contact. The media reflects this desire for more intense and more frequent stimulation. However this is a characteristic of addictive substances also - the addict needs more frequent, and higher strength doses, in order to get the same effect. Overdose is not uncommon because of this.

The Buddha's advice for those unable to disentangle themselves from sensory experience was to apply appamāda (vigilance*), and guard the gates of the sense; or as my teacher Sangharakshita says: reduce input. I decline to watch violence violent images in the media these days as I can tell that they have a lasting deleterious effect on my mental health.

Live long, and prosper.

~~oOo~~

* appamāda can be translated more literally as not blind drunk on the objects of the senses. I expand on this a bit in my essay on the Buddha's last words.