Notes

1) The Diamond of the Perfect Wisdom No. 16 is a modest and unofficial contribution (submitted after the registration deadline) to the reflections of the Jōdo Shinshū community members gathered for the 2025 IABC conference in September in Oxford, which will focus on the theme “Peace and Harmony”

2) An icon-maker working within a regular line of transmission—here, a sculptor of Buddhas—learns that four components underlie the sacred art he practises: a spiritual doctrine, forms, techniques and materials. With time, comprehension of the doctrine (which confers legitimacy, harmony, regularity and sound foundation on the whole) tends to be lost, while the forms, techniques and materials endure. The forms are then corrupted, though the techniques and materials still endure. Next, the techniques degenerate while the materials persist—until the materials, too, become corrupted. This process naturally unfolds at various rhythms and in various combinations. Seen as a dark and turbid reflection prolonging that perspective, the digital communication technologies bound up with the Internet—by their very structure and, above all, their effect—border on the worst counter-icons imaginable, once these “infra-transhumanist” phenomena are examined in the light of the principles that preside over reproducing the Buddha’s image.

3) Reference is made to Daniel’s dream.

4) Yet it is toward just such a morass—comparable to late-antique society at its darkest hour, should nothing arise to counterbalance the decay—that the Federal Council is busy showing Switzerland, scorning the neutrality that is its most precious heritage and betraying (by means of some referendum tainted with a European sauce) a populace that in reality is deeply attached to it. It is worth recalling that, scarcely ten years after the bicentenary commemorations of the Congresses of Vienna and Paris, the Federal Council suddenly “forgot” that the federal state, Switzerland’s borders and her perpetual neutrality are owed to a Russian Tsar, Alexander I, and to his plenipotentiary minister, Count Ioannis-Antonios Kapodistrias, who also secured the independence of the Canton of Vaud from Bern. What a strange idea of gratitude today’s Federal Councillors entertain—stranger still their notion of perpetuity! Always eager to collaborate, they would do well to note that, after this “forgetting,” some of their shrewdest critics have begun comparing them not to sages but to garden gnomes—though deprived even of the virtues those folk-tale figures possess.