Advice

I don't listen much to music. It's not that I don't like it, just that it doesn't interest me.

Instead, I listen quite a lot to podcasts. Mainly from ABC radio national, which, by the way, I recommend to you all most highly. I enjoy "Counterpoint", "The Law Report" and "The Religion Report". I also listen occasionally to the Slate Magazine podcast, but that does get on my nerves after a fairly short period. Recently I also discovered some Stephen Fry podcasts that have been the source of some amusement.

Anyway, all this is by way of a preamble, for today chikenz-watchers, I have some advice. The advice was gleaned from a podcast called "The Ark". It's a short programme (about 15 minutes long) about historical religious matters. I haven't listened to it for some time, but for reasons now lost to me, I noted down something from one of their programmes and I rediscovered it only recently. The particular programme that I am referring to was on the subject of some ancient Buddhist texts that had been found.

These texts surfaced in the 1990s and are over 1500 years old. The programme discussed their discovery and some of the research that is presently being undertaken. My advice to you today, is taken directly from one of these texts. It goes like this;

"If one should not find a wise companion, a well-behaved strong fellow, then like the king who has abandoned the realm that he had conquered, one should wander alone like the rhinoceros."

So then, my advice is that to be like the Buddha, one should strap a half a cricket stump to ones nose and paint oneself grey.