iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

My first ever lattice top pie (apple) made with coaching from D, age 16.

An apple pie with a lattice woven top, on a cooling rack.

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Once again Shabbat Shuvah and Talk like a Pirate Day converge. Shanah Tovarrrrr, everyone 😁

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I'm late to this discussion, but: My favorite footnote in a recently published article, generated in irritated response to a reviewer who seemed insistent that everything we need to know about ritual is found in the Dunhuang documents:

Screenshot of a section of an article, reading: "There is no shortage of received texts on ritual, or of liturgies which were demonstrably used in medieval Buddhist practice, but anyone who has been involved in planning a religious ritual will recognize that the liturgy provides a structural framework for the ritual, which is then adapted in practice (and within limits) to the needs of the moment and the community."

Screenshot of the footnote to that sentence, which reads: "My perspective on this question is undoubtedly shaped by having recently planned a double bar mitzvah for my twin sons in a liturgically conservative community where correct practice is a strong value. A broad range of questions not addressed by the liturgy needed to be resolved in order for this to take place, and as a result, a reading of the liturgy itself, which we followed quite faithfully, would nevertheless fail to provide an account that resembled the ritual as it actually occurred."

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Reposted by Kate Lingley 龍梅若

huck mason @tylerhuckabee.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

rip annie dillard

One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

You don’t get to score a win every day; but today I got to introduce a bunch of my undergrads to Ea-Nasir and his stash (STASH!) of complaint letters for the first time. A few of them clearly knew about him already BUT STILL. (It’s Mesopotamia week in the big survey class)

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Toronto in November (at the Ho Center for Buddhist Studies, U of Toronto, and McMaster University). Finally a use for my knitwear, which otherwise doesn't get out much 🙂

An announcement flyer for the Yehan Numata Program in Buddhist Studies at the University of Toronto and McMaster University. It lists four visiting speakers including the OP, for Fall 2026:

Ingo Strauch, University of Lausanne - September 10, 2026 - September 11, 2026.
Xin Wen, Princeton University - October 15, 2026 - October 16, 2026.
Natalie Avalos, University of Colorado, Boulder - October 22, 2026 - October 23, 2026.
Kate A. Lingley, University of Hawai'i at Manoa - November 12, 2026 - November 13, 2026.

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Sunset city. Went to a bat mitzvah reception and apparently being a 13 year old girl is a much better deal than it was 42 years ago. Boy did they know how to party.

First of four views of Honolulu harbor at sunset. A calm sea with several outrigger canoes at anchor, with sunset colors in the background.

View across the harbor at sunset with the highrises of the city in view.

View of the Waianae mountain range at sunset.

The sun dipping toward the sea, with several boats silhouetted against the light.

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Ha, found this post at random - my father was one of the two perpetrators of the Old Howard Ball, in memory of Scollay Square's burlesque house. The Boston Globe society pages did a feature on it which I have seen - I don't know if my dad still has it but it would be great to dig it up somehow.

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

The designers of my building sacrificed a planned painting classroom in order to leave room for this magnificent baobab tree. That was fifty years ago and it continues to grow through the spaces of the building (my office is right behind it)

View of the corner of a modernist concrete building on a tropical college campus. The building is about forty feet high and a gigantic tree, growing partly inside it, towers over it by another twenty or thirty feet.

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Buddhism in the wild (photo by Jerry Feldman, Target Honolulu)

View of an end-cap display at Target, with a sign above it saying “Must have!” The shelves are empty.

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Here to recommend THE DRAGON HAS SOME COMPLAINTS by @wiswell.bsky.social which I can best describe with the term “leaping scale.” This describes a Chinese landscape painting whose scale changes from foreground to middle to background, leaping orders of magnitude rather than in a steady gradient:

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Reposted by Kate Lingley 龍梅若

Massimo (mirror) @rainmaker1973-m.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

30,000 hours of footage, equivalent to 3 years and 7 months, were filmed to capture the blooming of 77 types of flowers, and the result is spectacular. Original post

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

I don’t really understand why this post got 200+ likes but since it has, I feel I should acknowledge the designer of the pattern, Louise Zass-Bangham, who is not on Bsky afaict. Anyway it is an extremely elegant design and was very zen to knit up.

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

I finished this a week or two ago, but had to wait to give it to its recipient before posting it. The pattern is called Siren Song and the yarn colorway is called Whale’s Road 😊

View of a section of a scarf knitted in purple-blue variegated yarn, in a pattern of overlapping waves that grow smaller from right to left.

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

That’s somewhat later than I would have guessed.

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

My brother is a master electrician. I think I could probably avoid actually electrocuting myself, but no actual work would get done.

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

Calligraphy I commissioned for our 20th anniversary: from an inscription I once wrote about. In it, a woman explains why she sponsored a monument in her husband’s honor: “Being sensible of the honor between husband and wife, and the weight of our mutual regard…” The inscription is from the year 573.

A hanging scroll with Chinese calligraphy. In full, it reads: “Commemoration of the twentieth wedding anniversary of [OP] and [OP’S husband]. Being sensible of the honor between husband and wife, and the weight of our mutual regard… Inscription by Zhang Yuanfei for Lu Jingsong, from Shuiyusi. [date] in Xi’an.”

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Trying to capture the startling brightness of the moon shining in through the bedroom window. I think the extreme contrast of the picture is mostly camera effects but no joke, from where I’m lying (in bed) it’s bright enough to read by 😯

View through a partly curtained window from inside a darkened room. Outside there is a full moon so bright that it appears to be daylight.

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

Vale Victor Mair. I didn't know him as well as some of you did, but I was always glad to encounter his maverick spirit and tremendous enjoyment of his subject. I think that's what gave me permission to approach my own work with joy.

en.wikipedia.org

Victor H. Mair - Wikipedia

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

In my professional life: I have a Shang dynasty grayware rim sherd from Zhengzhou that dates to about 1200 BCE. Everyday life: my cast iron frying pan, in which I bake my cornbread, was made around 1854.

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

Reading through 冥祥記 ("Signs from the Unseen Realm," a collection of Buddhist miracle tales from the last decade or so of the fifth century) in search of miraculous images, I notice there are a lot of "trip to the underworld" narratives, which reiterate the fundamental bureaucracy of the afterlife:

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Reposted by Kate Lingley 龍梅若

Spicy Big Dad @spicybigdad.bsky.social · 21/06/2026

SJÄMSÅRA

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Haha @coreopsismajor.bsky.social I have gotten to the episode in the Nanyang Mystery where we encounter the European archaeologist, and his name is Warner 😆 Can I tell you how many times I have heard this guy reviled to me while I was working with Dunhuang and related materials?

en.wikipedia.org

Langdon Warner - Wikipedia

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Not sure this is a MBOTD because the donors are unknown, but let's give them credit nonetheless for sponsoring one of the most beautiful sculptures of (I'm guessing) the 530s. I'm writing about it because the Buddha, carved nearly in the round, is accompanied by two bodhisattvas in intaglio:

Figure of a standing Buddha in flared robes, carved from pale gray stone in China in the first third of the 6th century. The figure is backed with a mandorla shaped like a pointed leaf, on which are carved his attendant bodhisattvas, a host of apsaras playing musical instruments, decorative patterns, an apotropaic monster mask, and a seated Buddha.

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

It's been a while, but today's Medieval Buddhists of the Day are the 90(-ish) lay and monastic patrons of an Eastern Wei stele in the collection of the Henan provincial museum, dated 543, for their forthrightness in talking about how material objects can help us understand the ineffable:

View of a stone stele from sixth-century China, centered on an arched niche in which sits a Buddha figure, flanked by attendants and guardians, with two lions and an incense burner below. Above him are additional figures, and the uppermost arch of the top of the stele is formed by two intertwined dragons.

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

The big shade trees on campus are mostly either leguminous trees like the monkeypod, which drop big sticky beans, or some kind of ficus like this one, which periodically sheds tens of thousands of small round berrylike fruits, so the groundskeepers have to break out the Fruit Zamboni.

View of a large spreading shade tree in the middle of a paved roundabout on a college campus. The asphalt is clear of fruits and fallen leaves and there are telltale markings around the tree, left by a mechanical sweeper not unlike a Zamboni machine.

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

Waiting in an ordinary, lovely spot to pick up two muddy post-hike teenagers.

Three grey-legged feral chickens on a low stone wall in Hawai’i: a rooster, multicolored like a jungle fowl, dragging a thong on his leg suggesting that he is a cockfighting veteran; plus a black hen and a buff hen.

View through tree branches to a mist-shrouded green mountain ridge.

Distant view of a green-clad mountain with dual peaks.

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

True heroism (adapting Hucker for the Pleco interface, hooray)

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

Thinking about the extraterritoriality of Buddhist (and other) images. This is Dunhuang cave 275, dated to the Northern Liang c. 421-439 CE. A (mildly) colossal Maitreya Bodhisattva sits on his lion throne in Tusita heaven, accompanied by bodhisattvas and so on. It's like an embassy or consulate:

View of the interior of cave 275 at Dunhuang, a long rectangular space with murals and relief sculptures on the side walls. The ceiling is modeled in imitation of wooden rafters. At the far end is a larger than life size figure of the bodhisattva Maitreya, seated with crossed ankles and flanked by two lions.

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

I don't have much truck with the eight-legged essay 八股文, the bane of Ming and Qing scholars, because it arrived on the scene much later than the stuff I work on. But today I had reason to look up the basics, and it was kind of interesting for a person who teaches argumentative writing:

en.wikipedia.org

Eight-legged essay - Wikipedia

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

The weather’s warming up so I got out my favorite beach wear: Huaisu’s “Autobiography” … in the form of a rayon pareo … from Costco. No, I can’t explain it either 🤷🏻‍♀️

Image of a pareo or sarong laid out on a bed. The pattern is a reproduction of a famous piece of Chinese calligraphy from the year 777 CE, in the Tang dynasty.

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

Dressed in our official plumage and getting ready to march in. The whole business is awkward and sweaty but extremely life-affirming.

View from behind of a large group of faculty members in academic regalia of different kinds.

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Reposted by Kate Lingley 龍梅若

Natalia Cecire @ncecire.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

Academic departments deserve to be saved, supported, resourced, allowed to grow even if they're not "best in the country," "first in the REF," "top-ranked," "at a Russell Group uni," or whatever other austerity-brained nonsense senior managers have been using to flimflam you out of solidarity

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

OK, so here's the poem by Gaoping local poet, Miao Lingcong (苗令琮). Miao was from Fengtai in Shanxi 山西鳳台 and was named juren 舉人 (not jinshi 進士, oops) in 1771, so this is probably a late c18 poem, but is found in the 1880 gazetteer 續高平縣志 (and not in earlier Gaoping gazetteers, fwiw).

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

I know that every year has 365 days and every day has 24 hours and so on, but even so, how is it possible that my children are SIXTEEN today? (Happy birthday guys!)

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

I designed a winter hat that I meant as a reference to medieval Iranian textile patterns with their pearl borders and birds wearing fluttering scarves. But the recipient pointed out that the birds also look a bit like Hawaiian nēnē, so that’s also appropriate.

A red knitted winter hat with a border of white dots and a pattern of white and gray geese with blue scarves.

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

As a Mother’s Day gift my kid shared a picture of me that he took at a protest a couple of weeks ago, in which he made me look kind of cool and not like the screaming nerd I actually am. Cover of my next solo album? It’s a gift to see yourself through your child’s eyes.

Photo of the OP, a middle-aged white woman with short gray hair, wearing sunglasses and a Death Star T-shirt. It is shot from below and looks kind of artsy.

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

LOCAL POET: In 2002, doing research for a dissertation chapter about the small cave temple site of Gaomiaoshan near Gaoping, I spent some time poking through the county gazetteers (縣誌) for Gaoping county. Gazetteers are local histories usually compiled by local officials in the Ming and Qing...

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

I have lived in Hawai'i long enough to know that you never judge someone's ethnicity by the origin of their name, because that's never the whole story. That said, there's an interesting case in the form of a current candidate for a state house district in Honolulu, Nathan Kenichi Char:

Detail of a political poster with the name of the candidate, Nathan Kenichi Char, and his name in kanji.

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

Just discovered Xu Zhen's "Eternity" series and feel like I need to invite him to take my intro art history course in the fall. There's a whole lotta WTF here, with some occasional witty moments.

xuzhenart.com

Eternity – 徐震 Xuzhen ART

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

Remarkable installation by Tuan Andrew Nguyen on the High Line in NYC: a reproduction of one of the standing Buddhas of Bamiyan (as it looked at the time of its destruction in 2001), furnished with shiny steel hands cast from melted-down artillery shells found in Afghanistan.

View of a sandstone standing Buddha, carved to represent one of the Great Buddhas of Bamiyan. Parts of its face and legs are missing, as are its hands, to replicate the state of the original in 2001 when it was destroyed. Where its hands once were, shiny gold-colored metal hands are mounted as if floating in mid-air. The background is a cityscape of New York highrises.

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

Genuine question: are there writers out there who consider Xu Beihong's ink paintings of running horses to be evidence for the influence of his European training? To my eye these are the least European-influenced of all his work. Xu spent years in Paris and Berlin between the wars...

A Chinese ink painting by the early 20th century painter Xu Beihong, depicting a horse running obliquely toward the viewer. The style is very calligraphic and loose, with visible brushstrokes and ink allowed to bleed to give the impression of a piebald horse with a white blaze. There is a signature by the artist and two red seal impressions toward the bottom.

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

It probably says something about my family dynamics that the question they put to me over the dinner table tonight was how I would translate “You are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge” (Ice Cube). This was in preparation for a hypothetical piece of calligraphy…

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Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

An interesting thing I'm noticing in the current batch of student papers, which are about questions of influence in 20th-c Chinese painting: Students writing about ink paintings that include inscriptions (such as this Xu Beihong portrait of Li Yinquan, dated 1943) tend to think of the inscription...

Ink portrait of a standing man in a long white Chinese scholar's robe, with his face and hands rendered in much more detail than his body and accessories, which are done in a calligraphic, abbreviated style. As in many Chinese ink paintings, there is an inscription at the upper right of the painting, and several red seal impressions along the right edge.

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