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Craft is changing, along with ritual and tradition, all rapidly losing value in a globalized world. In India, the essential metaphor and symbolism within ancient creative practices are being lost, while remnants of crafts continue almost solely as commodity. Decolonizing the field of art therapy includes acknowledging the complexity and benefit of nature-based traditional and indigenous arts, based in themes of impermanence, humility, gratitude, a holistic sense of well-being while fostering reconnection to meaning, storytelling and authentic self-expression. Rooted in Indian psychology, an integral evaluation of kolam (rice flour drawings) and mehndi (natural temporary tattoos) through the body, mind, heart and spirit, informs adaptation of these traditional art forms for art therapy sessions in south India. The implications of cultural appropriation, appreciation and adaptation are part of a range of ethical considerations in this type of cross-cultural work, which requires research and thoughtful communication of the history and origin of each art form. By studying the integral impact and essence of each practice through the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual levels, traditional crafts can be sensitively adapted within art therapy practice to help restore relationships to our common, indigenous and healing roots.

This article revisits the preoccupation with impermanence central to John Donne's Songs and Sonnets by considering how Donne's speakers describe themselves as embedded in unstable metaphors of their own making. The speakers in “The Relic” and “A Valediction of my Name in the Window” use metaphor to navigate questions of romantic and erotic agency, deliberately metaphorizing themselves as a strategy for self-preservation that nonetheless renders them profoundly vulnerable. Their fears that their readers may misapprehend their metaphors – whether by accident or by design – are also legible, I argue, as concerns about the power that comes with understanding them correctly as metaphors.

This paper presents analysis from 'a study of staff and patient experiences of the restrictive environments of a forensic psychiatric unit. The paper conceptualises the forensic unit as an impermanent assemblage, enacted in and through practices that hold a future life outside the unit simultaneously near, yet far. We show how the near-far relations between life inside and outside the unit operate in three ways; 1) in relation to the 'care pathway', 2) practices of dwelling, and 3) creating and maintaining connections to life 'beyond' the unit. The paper concludes with a discussion about possible ways to overcome the limitations to recovery that can arise through practices of impermanence.

Forced resettlements were the lot of the generation that had survived the Second World War. Experiences associated with displacement are strongly rooted in the sphere of emotions, thus impacting the formation of the narrative about a lost city and a newly settled city. The interpretive scope of the analysis is delineated by the key category of memory and its derivatives: the community of memory, private memory, the emotional community of memory, as well as trauma and nostalgia. A broad spectrum of terms allows us to refer it to the „lived world“ and the practices of everyday that belonged to the former residents of Lvov who arrived in Cracow after the Second World War, as well as their descendants who identified themselves with the family memory. The emotional community of memory of the „Lvov Cracovians” is described by common indicators: an identical place of origin (not necessarily of birth, however), the war trauma and displacement trauma, later, at varying dates – the process of settling in Cracow. These are the contexts in which their experiences are situated: the burden of losing their homes and their city, the sense of rootlessness, the sense of impermanence and alienation, the nostalgia for abandoned places and bygone times. The half-real, half-metaphysical immersion in the space of Lvov – first mundane and familiar, later brutally appropriated by ideology and politics – caused many former residents of Lvov to feel that their new place of residence – Cracow, with all its historical splendour of the cradle of Polishness – did not become a home, even though the values of national culture were very close to their hearts. That the city of origin is transformed into a myth is not surprising, it is an obvious cultural standard; but the relatively limited presence of Lvov in Cracow is worth investigating. In contrast to Wroclaw, whose empty post-war space was filled by immigrants, the well-settled community of Cracow treated the otherness of the newcomers from the East with reserve. In Cracow, the memory of lost Lvov was an alienated one. This cannot be explained solely by the fact that in the official discourse of the People’s Republic of Poland the topic of the former Eastern Borderlands of Poland was strictly censored (it is commonly known that, paradoxically, this is precisely what caused the powerful mythicisation of the Borderlands and Borderland cities in the everyday memory of the Polish people). In Wroclaw, which was empty of Polish content, the myth of Lvov took a firm root and the city became the heir of the Lvov tradition. Cracow, in contrast, was struggling throughout the post-war period with the ongoing devaluation of its symbolic significance which, although rooted in the Polish national universe, was undergoing ideological manipulation. The Lvov diaspora was constructing its image of Cracow by means of contrasting it to Lvov. In the family tales, “that” Lvov, surrounded with the glow of nostalgia, was – and still is – a mental refuge, strongly rooted in the memory of the first-generation migrants and the memory passed on to children and grandchildren brought up in the new place. It became a symbolic place and, like with Hemingway’s Paris, there is never any ending to it.

With the present paper I study and translate a discourse in the Ekottarika-?gama preserved in Chinese of which no parallel in other discourse collections is known. This situation relates to the wider issue of what significance to accord to the absence of parallels from the viewpoint of the early Buddhist oral transmission. The main topic of the discourse itself is perception of impermanence, which is of central importance in the early Buddhist scheme of the path for cultivating liberating insight. A description of the results of such practice in this Ekottarika-?gama discourse has a somewhat ambivalent formulation that suggests a possible relation to the notion of rebirth in the Pure Abodes, suddh?v?sa. This notion, attested in a P?li discourse, in turn might have provided a precedent for the aspiration, prominent in later Buddhist traditions, to be reborn in the Pure Land.

This essay analyzes the children’s imaginative play in Kazuo Ishiguro’s various novels, with a special focus on Never Let Me Go. Children often engage in various types of repetitive imaginative play, acting out stories about things that do not actually exist in order to avoid the pain of confronting their problems. An exploration of children’s play and the roles performed by the guardians and Madam helps us read the novel from a new perspective – the Mujo view of Buddhism. Mujo is the Buddhist philosophy which describes “the impermanence of all phenomena.” In Never Let Me Go, shadows of death weigh heavily on the reader as an unavoidable reminder of the nature of life. This brings Mujo to the Japanese readers’ minds. The Mujo view of Buddhism has imbued Japanese literature since the Kamakura Era (1185), and a reading of Never Let Me Go from the Mujo perspective sheds light on the condition of its protagonists. My analysis aims to introduce the Mujo doctrine to anglophone literary studies by foregrounding the poignancy and resilience found in Never Let Me Go.

In De Arquitectura, Vitruvius lists three interrelated Latin terms – firmitas (strength or structural stability), utilitas (functionality or appropriate spatial accommodation), and venustas (beauty or attractive appearance), as being the basis of good architecture. Regarding firmitas, he implies that a good architect needs to choose the best and most solid materials, regardless of their cost. Yet, perhaps dismissing Vitruvius's advice, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, most Postmodern architects went on to erect buildings that often looked more like stage sets than anything strong and durable.Postmodern designers applied colour, pattern, and ornament to buildings, transferring ordinary and everyday popular imagery, forms, and material into high culture. By rejecting modern design and aesthetics, they also dismissed the building techniques and materials used by their predecessors. As explained by experts from the Portland-based architecture firm Peter Meijer Architect, PC (PMA), ‘there is an inherent impermanence of the original materials based on a default decision making process that limited a building's longevity to a twenty-five year life-cycle’ for Postmodern architecture. In other words, Postmodern buildings were often built as ephemeral constructions, for which longevity was not an absolute value.

This review essay looks at three recent books on farms, farm labour, and rural livelihoods in southern Africa. The books—Farm labor struggles in Zimbabwe: The ground of politics, by Blair Rutherford; Ordered estates: Welfare, power and maternalism on Zimbabwe's (once white) Highveld, by Andrew M. C. Hartnack; and Zimbabwe's migrants and South Africa's border farms: The roots of impermanence, by Maxim Bolt—offer a range of insights into labour politics and management, new forms of livelihoods on farms and former farms, and how those living on farms interact with informal economies. Usefully, the books cover events over the past two decades, as well as providing regional insights into important contemporary issues. While the books converge in a number of ways, this essay will focus on two key themes: (i) how they address issues of farm management and labour control; and (ii) they ways in which they explore farmworker agency in times of change and in areas of informality and precarity.

Loss, impermanence, and death are facts of life difficult to face squarely. Our own mortality and that of loved ones feels painful and threatening, the mortality of the biosphere unthinkable. Consequently, we do our best to dodge these thoughts, and the current globalizing culture supports and colludes in our evasiveness. Even environmental educators tend to foreground 'sustainability' whilst sidelining the reality of decline, decay, and loss. And yet, human life and ecological health require experiencing 'unsustainability' too, and a pedagogy for life requires a pedagogy of death. In this paper we explore experiences of loss and dying in both human relationships and the natural world through four different types of death affording situations, the cemetery, caring-unto-death, sudden death, and personal mortality. We trace the confluence of death in nature and human life, and consider some pedagogical affordance within and between these experiences as an invitation to foster an honest relationship with the mortality of self, others, and nature. We end by suggesting art as an ally in this reconnaissance, which can scaffold teaching and learning and support us to courageously accept both the beauty and the ugliness that death delivers to life.

Recognizing cognitive imperialism in the emerging postqualitative regime, we propose a hesitation, a perturbation to think the other-than-ness of the west. Asserting the postqualitative regime as west reinforces hegemonic epistemological violence; we look to the East and Africa – progenitors of the west-termed postqualitative regime and seek to privilege the onto–epistemologies from which these concepts were culturally (mis)appropriated. More specifically, we explore the southern African philosophy of Ubuntu and Taoism from the East to transgress west. These oft-western denigrated indigenous philosophical concepts embody the postqualitative conceptual (mis)appropriations of entanglement, the inseparability of ontology and epistemology (onto–epistemology), and an ontological positionality of immanence – interpenetration – impermanence. Re-conceptualizing the postqualitative regime, we offer a turn to non-western indigenous ontologies illuminating African and Eastern philosophies pregnant with multi...

Vipassana meditation in the tradition of S.N. Goenka is based upon neutral, non-judgemental, non-reactive awareness of the arising and passing of body sensations. This focus for meditation has two advantages. First, it is a practical focus that most people find they can work with, and that derives from a historical connection to the Buddha’s words. Second, this meditative focus puts the practitioner in line with the modern scientific world view as well as with the Buddha. The rising and passing of body sensations can be understood in a seamless, scientific narrative that connects cell biology, biochemistry, bioenergetics, the history of the evolution of life on Earth, solar nucleosynthesis and the evolution of the universe. This article traces this elegant and elevating scientific narrative in greater detail.

Aek's fiancee, Fern, was already married to a European man. But each month, she sent remittances back to Aek so that he could build them a home and rubber orchard in their hometown in northeastern Thailand. In the meantime, Aek waited for Fern to return. But in the time spent waiting, plans, aspirations, and even bodies changed. As Aek and Fern charted a life together, this deferred life grew more and more spectral. This article is an ethnographic study of the Thai male romantic partners of Thai women working abroad as sex workers or marriage migrants, and their engagement with the problems of impermanence and deferral. Via the "work of waiting" (Kwon 2015) of those left behind, I argue here that waiting is in tension with the impermanence of hopes, selves, and bodies. I ask: what does it mean to "wait," when what is promised, who promises, and the future date when promises are to be realized are each in flux?

This article approaches Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide from the perspective of Buddhist philosophy. It argues that the Buddhist notions of impermanence (anicca), non-self (anattā) and conditionality (iddappaccayatā) are evident in the novel’s portrayal of the physical reality of the Sundarbans. These principles are also at work in the novel’s representation of the social realm of ideologies, identities and human interactions. As Western environmentalism, to which the female protagonist is attached, is subject to the law of conditionality, the novel critiques the blind attempt to impose the Western ideology of wilderness preservation upon marginalized locals in India and highlights other forms of environmental ideologies. The novel also depicts the interaction between those from the metropolitan center with locals which transcends the postcolonial framework of power struggles and which is instead based on a shared sense of humanity, emphasizing specific conditions that give rise to the interactions. Moreover, the article discusses how the Sundarbans and various factors in the protagonists’ lives and interactions with the locals play a crucial role in prompting them to realize the slipperiness of what they perceive as their identities. Finally, the narrative in the novel itself orchestrates the workings of the law of conditionality and impermanence, trying to inculcate an attitude of non-attachment. As an embodiment of the afore-mentioned Buddhist concepts, The Hungry Tide serves as an expedient means to disrupt one’s tendency to cling to certain views or perceptions of reality and to offer an alternative approach to human interactions which entails open-minded tolerance of difference.

This article is about using BCs to manage brand equity in the service market. Theoretical considerations include the specificity of market services and the essence of BC formation. Various definitions of service are given. The service itself, however, is characterized by: immateriality, impermanence, inseparability of service and quality instability. The most popular model of service management by managers was shown. BC was presented from the modernism era through postmodernism up to the present. A set of variables influencing the emergence of the consumer group was shown. As a conclusion, the areas were shown in which a consumer group adhering to a given brand can be used to spread the brand image, increase loyalty, strengthen brand awareness, or better perceive its quality. BC is treated as a tool to manage the brand equity in the service market. The article recapitulation points to certain limitations. Its main imperfection is to present the problem only in theoretical terms, although the author sees the possibility of developing the problem based on research in the market of service goods.

Visible-Induced Luminescence (VIL) has become a widely accessible investigation tool to identify and image the presence of Egyptian blue on in situ wall paintings. Portable microscopy has similarly entered mainstream usage to examine painted surfaces in archaeological settings. A project to investigate the extremely scant remains of decoration of the 7th c. BC Kushite chapel of Osiris Neb-ankh/Pa-wesheb-iad on the north side of Karnak temple demonstrated the effective use of these low-tech, non-invasive procedures. In order to better understand the nature of the highly deteriorated painting, an interdisciplinary approach was adopted that combined these intensely practical in-situ investigations with a process of comparative evaluation and deduction, drawing on expertise from the fields of painting technology and Egyptology. Beyond expected confirmation of the widespread use of Egyptian blue as a pure color, the skilful and selective admixture of this pigment with yellow and white pigments was detected. This appears to have been used to enhance painted subject matter of particular symbolic importance. The study was the basis for recognising a conspicuous absence of green in the decoration, determining where green was once present, and – by evaluating factors of pigment impermanence versus durability – helping to define the likely nature of the missing pigment. Definitive pigment identification was not always possible, nor was it a primary aim, although the evaluative process employed is also the most efficient way of identifying analytical procedures that might still be required. Even without identification, the findings made in relation to the missing green were highly significant, providing important evidence of a technological shift in the use of greens in Late Period wall paintings, which parallels similar developments found on other Egyptian artefacts. A low-tech, iterative approach to painting investigation therefore has great validity.

As an ongoing phenomenon, the impermanence of the world has been observed by many people, both in ancient and modern times, in the East and in the West. Two of these authors are Gautama Buddha (an ancient, eastern philosopher from the 6th-5th centuries B.C.) and Percy Bysshe Shelley (a modern Western poet: 1792-1822). The aim of this paper is to examine in the light of Buddhist philosophy what impermanence means or looks in a selection of Shelley’s poems, after considering that this philosophy was not alien to the Europeans of the 18th and 19th centuries. Buddhism, seeing impermanence (anicca) as the foundation of the world, both acquiesces to it and urges the individuals to sway with its ebb and flow. Shelley mainly falters in the incorporation of the phenomenon into his mindset and his poems. However, he often shows a casual acceptance of it; and even, in a few cases, he presents it with a positive assessment. La transitoriedad del mundo ha sido considerada un concepto relevante por muchos autores antiguos y modernos, tanto en el este como en el oeste. Dos de estos autores son Gautama Buda (ss. VI-V a.C.) y Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), el primero perteneciente a la cultura oriental antigua y el segundo a la cultura occidental moderna. El propósito de este estudio es examinar, a la luz de la filosofía budista, qué significa y cómo se manifiesta el motivo de la transitoriedad en la poesía de Shelley, partiendo del hecho de que la filosofía del budismo se difundió en la Europa de los siglos XVIII y XIX. El budismo, considerando que la “impermanencia” o transitoriedad (anicca) es una de las tres marcas de la existencia, invita al individuo a aceptar y convivir con esa inestabilidad. Por su parte, Shelley adopta normalmente una actitud dudosa respecto a la incorporación de este fenómeno en su ideario y en su poesía. Se detecta, sin embargo, que a menudo muestra una aceptación casual del concepto. En unos pocos casos, incluso presenta una visión positiva del mismo.

Phaya, or a philosophical verse of local people in northeastern Thailand or locally called Isan whose culture is intimate to that of Lao People’s Democratic Republic, is believed to be influenced by Buddhist Dhamma. It is, therefore, interesting to analyze how the local Isan philosophers borrowed ideas from the source and composed this valuable cultural heritage, with a specific focus on the theme of common characteristics of existence, consisting of anicca (impermanence), dukkha (suffering) and anatta (non-self). 252 existing verses were explored with a focus on common characteristics of existence. The findings revealed that the essence of the verses was literally borrowed from the source, Tripitaka, and figuratively adjusted for literary purposes. Implications of this analysis reassure that phayas are a truly cultural and religious heritage for the two countries. Keywords: Tripitaka, Isan phaya, common characteristics of existence _________________________________________ DOI > https://doi.org/10.24071/joll.2017.170206

The folklore of Nak (Naak) or ‘Mae Nak Phrakhanong’ (Mother Nak of Phrakhanong District) permeates Thailand as the most popular story of a ghostly haunting. The story, originating in the nineteenth century, has been made into a plethora of versions including more than 20 film adaptations. My research focuses on the 2003 opera Mae Naak composed by Somtow Sucharitkul. The opera contains idiosyncratic traits different from other versions, which reflect Thais’ multiple feelings of horror, veneration and affection to Nak. Somtow creates a new Asian heroine in opera, who bears powerful emotions of love and desire to live, unlike the stereotype such as Madama Butterfly. The conclusion, however, does not define the emotional aspect of the story as merely the ignorance of impermanence and attachment. Instead, the narrative helps each individual to concretise and personalise the more abstract concepts of Buddhism. The opera depicts true love that continues through rebirths with her beloved in a karmic journey.