Section three has been added to the Diamond Sutra. A link to the sutra can be found at the top of this page or here.
Kumarajiva’s translation of the Diamond Sutra was divided into thirty-two sections by Prince Zhaoming of the Liang Dynasty (502-587). The sutra has been divided in different ways by others, but the Zhaoming division has remained the most widely used to this day. The titles of the sections are also his.
Section Three is called “The Heart of the Mahayana” because it contains the basic Mahayana vow to help all sentient beings attain enlightenment. In a word, to “save” them. The version and explanation of the vow in this section is the “heart,” or deepest explanation of the vow, because it includes both the helping part and the empty part.
As the Buddha says in this section, “All great bodhisattvas…should realize as they vow to save all sentient beings that in truth there are no sentient beings to be saved.”
This is both an answer to Subhuti’s question and a rephrasing of it. In the last paragraph of this section, the Buddha answers with more detail: “Subhuti, if a bodhisattva has laksana of self, laksana of human beings, laksana of sentient beings, or laksana of a soul, then he is not a bodhisattva.”
Laksana is a Sanskrit word meaning “characteristic,” “mark,” “symptom,” or “mental thing (dharma).” It is often translated as “characteristic,” “mark,” “thought,” or “idea.”
The basic meaning of laksana is “dharma of the mind” or “thing of the mind.” Thus, if a bodhisattva has any “thing at all in their mind about there being selves, human beings, sentient beings, or souls” when they are generous, they are not truly a bodhisattva. This describes the ultimate selflessness of self and other.
In this translation, the word “soul” has been used. A more literal translation would be an entity that “takes rebirth” or lives after this body is gone.
Word choices are fascinating and need to be discussed, but to avoid getting lost in them, it is best to remember that in this section, the Buddha is categorically saying that no matter what kind of sentient being you can conceive of, in truth, there are no sentient beings, there is no saving them, and if a bodhisattva has an iota of a sense that they are doing that or that they have a self, then they are not truly a bodhisattva.
In other posts we have discussed fractals in the humanities. This concept may help in understanding the meaning of this section and in glimpsing the meaning of the sutra itself. Surely all of us at one time or another have acted with a pure heart and a pure mind to give to or help another with no thought of ourselves or even of them. For at least a moment we dwelt within a pure state of mind and feeling that was utterly selfless, sublime.
Rather than say that state is the Diamond Sutra, let’s say that it is a state that points toward the meaning of the sutra. That state is a small fractal of the larger fractal set described by the sutra. Altruistic consciousness freed from the marks self, other, calculation, design.
NOTE: My original intention was to post the entire sutra and do commentaries on each section within six months or one year. I have not been able to do that due to other commitments and interests but may go for it at some point. The Diamond Sutra is a beautiful work of literature and an important text for Buddhist practitioners. It would be good if everyone were exposed to it and at least had some sense of what it means. ABN
The human toll of the ongoing Israeli war in Gaza since 7 October 2023 can be summarized in a few statistics even as the raw numbers cannot do justice to the raw suffering: the Israel Defense Forces have killed and seriously injured more than 10% of the population and, through the destruction of infrastructure — including energy, water, sanitation, agriculture, housing, and healthcare — rendered the conditions of life so difIicult as to cause long term harm for the rest of the population.
As of 3 October 2025, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, 67,075 people have been killed and 169,430 people have been injured out of the approximately 2.2 million people living in the Gaza Strip in July 2023 (not including Israeli military forces). 2 The total number of Gazans has declined to an estimated 2.1 million people since the start of the war due to death and the exodus of about 100,000 people from the territory.
The total number of casualties, 236,505 people who have been killed and injured, constitutes more than 10% of the pre-war population of Gaza. That is, if the statistics, from the Gaza Ministry of Health, are complete. Recent analysis by public health experts suggests that the number of fatalities reported by the Gaza Ministry of Health, which faces many obstacles to making a full account of the deaths, may be a signiIicant undercount of the violent deaths.
In the West Bank, 1,048 people have been killed and 10,320 people injured from 7 October 2023 to 3 October 2025 by direct violence. 4 Altogether, the number of residents of Gaza and the West Bank killed and injured in this period is 68,123 people directly killed and 179,750 people injured.
I have been seeing a lot of stuff about microaggression recently.
The term interests me because FIML is all about micro impressions.
When done with a caring partner, FIML is designed to correct mistaken impressions or interpretations that often derive from micro impressions and/or manifest as micro expressions.
Anyone who has done FIML for more than a few months surely must be aware that we create wrong impressions of even our most trusted partners frequently.
A wrong impression often snowballs, leading to a wrong interpretation that after festering can be much harder to correct than the original micro impression.
So between friends, and especially FIML partners, the perception of micro aggression can and should be noticed and dealt with immediately or as soon as possible. It is basic to FIML practice that even a single uncorrected wrong impression can lead to serious divisions between people.
In this sense, I heartily accept the idea of microaggression being a thing. In fact, I believe it is such a thing that it happens all the time, especially if you mean micro mis-impressions and not just microaggression.
But the term microaggression means something different from the above, though the central concepts are related. Wikipedia has this short definition of microaggression:
…the use of known social norms of behavior and/or expression that, while without conscious choice of the user, has the same effect as conscious, intended discrimination.
The main difference is “without conscious choice of the user.” FIML is all about being conscious. Both parties being conscious.
If I perceive something in your speech, demeanor, or behavior that makes me think that maybe you are disrespecting me or mad at me or or suspicious of me or something like that, then if you are my FIML partner I am basically required to ask you about it if there is time.
In FIML, the asking is done without prejudgement. I simply ask “what was in your mind when you made that expression or said those words or did that thing.” Your answer must be honest. If you don’t trust your partner to be honest, you can’t do FIML (though you can start trying and see if either or both of you changes).
If your partner answers honestly and you do not perceive an iota of what you thought was in their mind, that part of the event is finished. If when the person spoke or acted they had no nothing about doing what you thought they might be doing, you are done with it. You no longer have any right to further impute your thing onto them.
You can if you want, and this is encouraged, continue to discuss the matter. For example, you might say: “From your response, I can tell that you were not disrespecting me and I am delighted to find that out. That’s a huge relief for me because I have spent much of my life reacting to people who do that as if they were disrespecting me. It’s weird to hear that I am wrong in this case and it makes me wonder if I have been wrong in other cases.”
Then the two of you can discuss that. I know one person who frequently reacts to educated northeast American accents as being “imperious” or “arrogant” when they are not. (Don’t get me started on all the many phrases and attitudes in culture that wrongly limit speech and thus culture itself—“condescending,” “know-it-all,” “argumentative,” “imperious,” etc.)
So, if two friends are having problems between themselves with microaggression, they are prime candidates for FIML practice. Of course, any two friends who are having any problems with micro impressions (all friends all the time) are prime candidates for FIML. (You cannot but have these problems.)
But microaggression as the word is being used today is not something FIML can deal with directly because it is
…the use of known social norms of behavior and/or expression that, while without conscious choice of the user, has the same effect as conscious, intended discrimination.
The important words here are “known social norms,” “without conscious choice” leading to “discrimination.”
I don’t know how to unpack that. From a FIML point of view, my guess is behaviors that could potentially be identified as “microaggression” according to that definition would be in the range of dozens per day per every person in the world. Maybe more.
An example many readers will remember is Michelle Obama reacting to a customer in Target asking her to hand them something they could not reach.
I tell this story – I mean, even as the first lady – during that wonderfully publicized trip I took to Target, not highly disguised, the only person who came up to me in the store was a woman who asked me to help her take something off a shelf.
If even the president’s wife can get something so ordinary so wrong, you can see the scope of the problem. In the same interview, the president himself mentioned being “mistaken for a waiter.”
Both later downplayed their comments because they had to. Microaggression is an inherently super-ambiguous term open to a multitude of interpretations every time it is used.
In FIML, we find that micro-mistakes are real and dangerous. They are not ignored but addressed immediately because they can be so serious. Relevantly, in my experience with FIML a great many micro-impressions that I form are simply dead wrong. Most of them are wrong. I can’t enter that as evidence because the world does not have enough FIML practitioners for me to do a study on it. However, I do suspect that a great many micro-impressions of or impressions of microaggression are wrong.
Many of us laughed or thought it was ridiculous for Michelle Obama to bristle at having a short person ask her for help because we all have been on one side or the other of an exchange like that and thought nothing of it. I have been mistaken for a store employee or construction worker more than once and never thought anything of it, except maybe to feel slightly flattered that someone thought I looked like I knew what I was doing.
Another problem with the notion of politicizing microaggression (because that is what the term is about) is whose microaggression against whom?
I have strabismus, lazy eye. Even though the condition has been surgically corrected, I still cannot maintain a direct friendly gaze for long periods of time. This means that many people are led to misinterpreting my micro expressions (I start to look down) as me being bored, tired, or not friendly when all that is happening is my eye is so tired it starts to blur and needs to look away.
I know this from years of experience and because some people tell me what they are thinking. One in twenty or twenty-five people have strabismus. Add in other eye conditions with similar problems and you will get much higher percentages. Add hearing problems, attention-deficit problems, autism problems, and so on and you can include most people in the world having difficulties with micro-expressions and how they are being interpreted by others.
If someone from a different culture or race or neighborhood interprets my strabismus as microaggression (boredom with them or condescension toward them rather than simple fatigue), they will get it all wrong. And there is little or nothing I can do about it.
I even tell people about strabismus sometimes. I explain what it does. They say they understand, but very few of them really do. Only very close friends or people who have similar eye problems understand well enough that it stops being an issue with them.
Moreover, strabismus and other eye problems can lead to problems with facial recognition. So the person in the store that asked Michelle Obama for help may have also had facial recognition problems. I have that problem, too, and I seriously doubt that I would recognize Michelle Obama if I saw her in Target.
So, sorry, I don’t have any really good answer to how to understand microaggression or deal with it. On a personal level with friends or FIML partners, micro-impressions are what we want to work with as much as we can. On a societal level, you can hardly do anything about it. A super-smart person might be able to become aware of a good many of the difficulties faced by people in the world, but even that person will miss many of them or misinterpret what they perceive even if they “know” the right thing to do.
At the abstract heart of the problem there is probably a measurement or resolution problem. Simply stated, no person can ever possibly do perfect microanalyses all the time in all situations with all people. Far from it. Thus, it is a sort of “reverse microaggression” to demand or expect that they can or will or should.
I suppose we can and should become more aware of how complex people are and how difficult it is to know even one other person well, or even to know yourself well. But nothing that I can think of will ever relieve us of the difficulty of dealing with the immense number of micro-impressions we all give and receive every minute of every day.
UPDATE 3/24/21: Since I first posted this, the notion of reacting strongly to “systemic microaggression” has gained in popularity. Guys, that is a downward spiral into Hell. Misunderstanding micro impressions that way is to turn almost everything into “fighting words.”
In order to safeguard national security and interests, in accordance with the relevant provisions of the Export Control Law of the People’s Republic of China, the Regulations of the People’s Republic of China on Export Control of Dual-Use Items and other laws and regulations, and with the approval of the State Council of China, it was decided to adopt the following export control measures
1. Overseas organizations and individuals “hereinafter referred to as ”overseas specific export operators must obtain a dual-use item export license issued by the Ministry of Commerce of China before exporting the following items to other countries and regions other than China:
(1) Containing, integrating or mixing items listed in Part 1 of Annex 1 to this Announcement originating in China and manufactured overseas, and the items listed in Part 1 of Annex 1 to this Announcement account for 0.1% of the value of the items listed in Part 2 of Annex 1 manufactured overseas and above;
(2) Items listed in Annex 1 of this announcement produced overseas using technologies related to rare earth mining, smelting and separation, metal smelting, magnetic material manufacturing, and rare earth secondary resource recycling originating in China;
(3) Items listed in Annex 1 of this announcement originating in China.
I will be surprised if USA has not already established a plan to overcome this by mining our own rare earth minerals in our own country.
I have no doubt USA has caused China many problems covertly and overtly and China sees itself as fighting back (while also sobbing over their ‘Century of Humiliation’ which USA had little to do with).
China’s entire modernization has come mainly from USA and the West. Same for the entire rest of the world.
I do not expect anyone to kiss our asses and our elite parasites did make huge fortunes selling out our technology to China.
But it would be better if China behaved better than this, and same goes for most of the rest of the world.
Western men created the modern world. And everyone is benefitting from it.
Western-style modernization is without doubt the most significant human achievement in world history. ABN
(Also, USA defeated Japan in WW2, not China which did next to nothing but wait for the end to then seize power and bogus credit.)
Logan, 22, was a massive Taylor Swift fan and an aspiring teacher
South Carolina congresswoman Nancy Mace has called for the Justice Department to step in to investigate and prosecute the murder of an aspiring teacher.
Logan Haley Federico, 22, an avid Taylor Swift fan, was killed while sleeping in a fraternity house during a visit to her boyfriend at the University of South Carolina on May 3.
Alexander Dickey, 30, a repeat offender with a long criminal rap sheet, was arrested and charged in her slaying.
Prosecutors say Dickey crept into her bedroom, startled Logan awake and forced her to her knees while she was naked and begging for help.
He is accused of shooting her in the chest with a stolen 12-gauge shotgun. Prosecutors say he then fled in a stolen vehicle. He has not entered a plea in the case.
Logan’s father Stephen Federico has demanded Dickey face the death penalty and accused South Carolina prosecutors of not pushing hard enough for the ultimate punishment.
Republican lawmakers have now joined his cause and are urging the Trump administration to take up the case.
Mace told Daily Mail this week that state law enforcement has shown ‘unforgivable weakness’ in handling the investigation.
The various mug shots of career criminal Alexander Dickey
Sad this needs to be said. It needs to be said more often. 3.5% of world population are White women. If you guys keep fighting White men, neither of us is going to survive :) ABN
U.S. Senator Susan Collins sharply criticized on Monday morning the handling of ballots found improperly delivered to a residence in Newburgh, calling for an independent investigation and raising serious questions about election integrity in Maine.
“It’s alarming that these ballots just showed up,” Collins told the Maine Wire. “How did they get there, who sent them, what in the world are ballots being delivered to a house in Newburgh and are there more out there?”
The senator’s comments preceded Secretary of State Shenna Bellows hastily calling a news conference in Augusta that afternoon.
Highlighting the urgency of the matter, Collins continued: “We need independent law enforcement to take a look into this. I think the FBI should be involved, ballot security is extremely important.”
She further questioned the role of state officials in managing the inquiry. “There should never be absentee ballots floating around out there, what in the world?” she said. “The Secretary of State should step aside. We need an independent investigation. We need to find out how this happened.”
Former FBI Director James Comey is appearing in court on Wednesday for a dramatic arraignment on charges of making false statements and obstructing a congressional investigation.
James Comey is appearing as a defendant in a court where he previously brought cases as FBI Director
According to an indictment brought by Lindsey Halligan, the recently appointed U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Comey faces two counts.
The first is ‘making false statements within the jurisdiction of the legislative branch of the United States Government.’
It is alleged that on September 30, 2020 he ‘willfully and knowingly made a materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statement’ while testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The statement was that he had not ‘authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports regarding an FBI investigation concerning PERSON 1.’
Prosecutors allege that, contrary to that statement, he did authorize someone else to ‘serve as an anonymous source in news reports.’
‘PERSON 1’ in the indictment is believed to be Hillary Clinton, with Comey’s statement relating to an investigation into her private email server.
In the second count, Comey is charged with obstruction of a Congressional proceeding.
It is alleged he ‘did corruptly endeavor to influence, obstruct and impede ‘ a Senate Judiciary Committee investigation by ‘making false and misleading statements.’
If convicted Comey faces up to five years in prison, although actual sentences for similar crimes are typically less than the maximum.
The indictment against him has been brought by Lindsey Halligan, the new U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia
We need the term meta-Q which means “general meta cognitive ability,” or the ability to see the meta levels of several arguments at once including nuance and branch arguments.
IQ generally connotes being good at taking a test of reasoning, language, and some sort of abstract thinking.
People with high IQs probably also have high meta-Q. The advantage of adding this term is it distinguishes how arguments are presented and considered, how they are analyzed.
For example, mainstream medicine has usurped the meta-Q of virtually all covid reasoning. Fauci at the top either determined or became the spokesperson for what “the science” of covid is and no other view has been allowed. Literally hundreds of millions of people have been forced to agree with the irrational dictates of an irrationally narrow covid meta-Q. Big Tech aided and abetted this mockery of reason by censoring and deplatforming anyone who brought complexity and nuance into the prison yard.
The covid example is roughly the same with other issues of the day, such as election fraud, the January 6 “insurrection,” Critical Race Theory, equality of outcome, and so on. The country is divided because the meta-Q of public discourse is so low there can be no mixing of ideas, no synthesis, no rapprochement.
Magnates of meta-Q usurpation are most of the famous public “thinkers” in USA: Michael Shermer, Cass Sunstein, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Bill Maher, Fauci, Lakshmi Singh, famous actors, etc. These people are supported by editorials, talking-heads, politicians, terrible academics (most of them), and so on.
In private conversations, discussions always go badly when there are too many voices with low meta-Q training or ability in the room. Arguments become simplified and nuance is rarely acknowledged. Meta-Q is the ability to “see over” a problem, to see beyond the words, to what an argument is, how it was formed, what it will result in, how it moves through time, and what alternatives there are.
I am pretty sure most people could be trained to increase their meta-Q considerably and surely to at least know when it is called for and who is doing it well. ABN
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