X-ray scans reveal Buddhist prayers inside tiny Tibetan scrolls
popsci.com164 points by Hooke 5 days ago
164 points by Hooke 5 days ago
I bought a tibetan prayer wheel on auction. It's a common thing. You press it to your forehead, say om mani padme hum, then spin clockwise, every spin counts as saying everything written in the wheel once, if it has 50 000 prayers written out that's 180 * 50000 mantras per minute, 9 000 000 mantras per minute. You can see how a lot of good karma is accrued. It's more like an exponential system than a linear one so yeah. A big number system. Many layers to the world, many reincarnation levels, big time spans. High level beings live for a very long time. But not permanently.
The original idle clicker. With modern materials, vacuum pumps, and magnetic bearings for the mechanics and lithography for the writing, we can pump those numbers up!
All silent in the monastery except for the ultrasonic whine of thousands of prayer turbines.
Prayer ring gyros, encoding the prayers into ultra-fast laser pulses going round millions of turns of optic fibre may be a competing technology.
Reminds me of the Electric Monk from Douglas' Adams "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" [0]
It's essentially a robot built to believe things on behalf of its owner, offloading the tiresome burden of religion to a machine.
In the book it is explained as a natural evolution of other machines, like a dishwasher washes dishes for you, a VCR watches TV for you, an electric monk believes for you.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirk_Gently%27s_Holistic_Detec...
Reminds me of bitcoin for some reason. There are some logical reasons for these things to exist, but from outside perspective, it's just more advanced ant mill.
Just write a 10 TB hard disk full of plaintext mantras and let that bad boy spin at its usual ~5k rpm for a cost effective 50 PB of mantras per minute. Or go MAAS and write a few them into S3.
The Arthur C Clark story Nine Billion Names of God is cute on this theme :D
I would joke something akin to that's why china is winning but that would be too much bad karma for me to handle
technology wont count as the prayers were not written out by someone with reencarnatory mojo at a monestery, and then the prayer wheel sold to help both the new owner with carma and the monk and temple survive with money,also the physical action of spinning the wheel while the one holding is praying would count as intentional, a remote powered machine may likely be a stretch, or most likely with buddists,"bit prayers", ha! would have value inversly proportional to there speed of execution, lest the ancient megga temple prayer wheels loose there "value"
It's hard to say where rules lawyering ends and hermeneutics begins, but as I am aware it's presumably somewhere before installing an EUV etching machine on a Tibetan mountaintop, I am joking.
That said electric (and wind and water-powered) prayer wheels do actually exist, so there is some prior art.
Related, I highly recommend the short story The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke.
Reminds me of kosher electric appliances to pretend you didn't turn on the light or whatever on fridays. If there is a god he must chuckle at these things.
A Hindu coworker once brought me a housefly he trapped, and asked me to kill it.
"Oh, no! Krisna sees through your little sin-transferral plan, Abu!"
The ultimate purpose of these laws is to cultivate a devotion to God. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with or "unclean" about consuming pork compared to beef, for example. It's a sacrifice that's made to instill a habit of devotion and of being attentive to spiritual matters.
(Indeed, among Christ's criticisms of the Pharisees is that they had lost sight of the spirit of the law and reduced it to an exercise in OCD and appearing pious in public while their hearts remained impure. From the Christian perspective, the Mosaic covenant was fulfilled by Christ and superseded by the New Covenant in which such dietary laws are no longer needed, as they would have already served their purpose. Of course, Catholics do practice dietary restriction on Fridays and during Lent as a matter of canon law as a penitential sacrifice.)
Ritual, in general, is not some kind of superstitious witchcraft or casting of spells, but a matter of spiritual practice and a system of signs communicating unseen realities. Everyday life contains similar practices. We use signs to communicate truths that cannot be perceived through our senses all the time (think of all the gestures we use in everyday life). This is to be expected, as human beings are also corporeal beings, and we communicate through signs that can be perceived through the senses.
Even if prayers were real, this sounds like a huge gimmick. Reciting a prayer while holding a book equals reciting the entire book at once? How absolutely convenient. Who thought of that, a door-to-door salesman?
Clearly an operations lead tasked with exponential increases in mantra output.
In all seriousness, I don't think the average person could have actually read the books when the concept was conceived anyway, so automating the trick of the recipient receiving all the blessings in the book without someone having to read them out would have saved a whole lot of monks' time....
But look at the consequences. They have zero OpSec!
These very manuals are now for sale on the open and dark web and anyone can buy one and start accumulation of karma points! FFS, the chant password has already been distributed and they changed nothing! There is no encryption, it's all plain text at rest. SMH.
There is no auth process. Anyone can walk up, grab a prayer turbine and start spinning it for all they are worth. I would not be surprised if I saw a motorcycle, on it's side, with the drive wheel touching a prayer turbine, and spinning it at 100s of RPMs.
Don't get me started on their callous handling of libraries that these texts reference or the complete lack of standards when new data is added. They just throw it into the pile and keep spinning. :|
They may have a handle on religion, but their data security sucks, frankly.
and does anyone actually audit their scrolls? there could be malprayer slipped in there.
All depends on the prayer quota. If one can do "9 000 000 mantras per minute" easily, then maybe what's needed for betterment is a totality of a quintillion prayers in one's life.
Man searching for God is like a hacker trying to find super user on some remote system.
Turns out someone else made both :P
This feels like one of the quotes that needs to be quoted and I would quote you if I can understand what you mean by "turns out someone else made both" as maybe its me who didn't get its meaning (so can you please explain what you mean by this? thanks in advance!)
I think they mean: turns out someone else made both the computer system and man. They are implying the existence of god.
The hacker and the system share the same maker, so the search was never outside to begin with. Breaking in is ironic, because the hacker is already part of what was created by the superuser they are looking for.
Does that mean a seance is akin to running 'wall' in your local haunted house?
I guess you are the product of a culture formed by a theistic religion?
Buddhism has some very different ideas. Its also quite varied - Theravada is more different from Zen than protestant Christianity is from Catholic or Orthodox.
Most types of Christian prayer are about having in effect on yourself, so it would not make sense. Even intercessionary prayer is a personal request, so this sort of thing sounds wrong, but the prayer wheels arise from completely different beliefs.
I fail to see how your reply is remotely relevant to what I've said. Any way you put it this seems like a convenient "tradition" to allow people to pray less but make them feel as if they prayed more
But what if that's not how prayer works? What if rotating the prayer wheels is just as effective as saying the prayers out loud? And what if that effect really can be multiplied up mechanically, somehow, and what if it doesn't actually matter whether people say them out loud or not? There'd be little reason not to use prayer wheels. And the people using them would be doing the exact opposite of praying less. They'd be praying more!
You're claiming prayers are not real, but then seem not to be following through fully with this, by subsequently assuming that if they were real, it would be inevitable that they'd have to operate in some particular way. But that wouldn't automatically follow. I think this is the reply's point.
My point is that since writing is a human invention (and a recent one at that), having a tradition where you can conveniently multiply your prayers through scripture seems utterly convenient and manufactured
Couldn't have a snide reply on a prayer wheel grift without somehow inflicting a jab at Christianity, now could you?
I think you have misunderstood me. "it does not make sense" is not a jab at Christianity (or Buddhism). The intended meaning is that something like a prayer wheel would not make sense given Christian beliefs but may do given particular Buddhist beliefs.
50000 * 3s, with s in seconds is very much linear.
Yes, that accruing is linear. I mean there are exponential examples in the religious system, such as more karma required for different things, the lifespans of deities in various realms and the length of the kalpas/ timespans of the ages.
And compared to saying it aloud by yourself it's orders of magnitude more. And when they cram the text into like neat folds with dense text, thats a few more. I just googled, yeah I still google because perplexity on comet is not my thing, 100 trillion prayers on a microfilm is an example I saw.
Maybe "exponential" means "big" to non-math people. Years ago in a writing class I took, English majors kept using "hyperbolic" to mean "exaggerated". That was hard to parse for this physicist.
They arrive there from two different base words (which share an origin): Hyperbole vs hyperbola.
https://uselessetymology.com/2017/11/12/the-etymology-of-hyp...
> You can see how a lot of good karma is accrued.
FYI there's no "good karma" in Tibetan buddhism. There is just karma. Karma is not good because it will cause samsara.
Maybe it is supposed to be a fun cheat to remove karma not "accrue good karma" but surely no one uses it seriously lol
Is that an innovation of Mahayana or Vajrayana Buddhism? I've only read Theravada texts, and in those, good and bad Karma are clearly differentiated. Attaining a pleasant rebirth is considered a wholesome pursuit that the teachings of the Buddha are supposed to help you with, though it is considered a lower pursuit than attaining Nirvana (the hierarchy is pleasant current life < pleasant rebirth < Nirvana, and the Dhamma claims to be the supreme authority on all 3).
There are definitely descriptions of virtuous and non-virtuous results of actions (karma) in Mahayana/Vajrayana Buddhism. A teacher of mine, who spent 20+ years as a Gelug monk, gave a nice talk about it from a Vajrayana perspective [1].
The major innovation in Vajrayana would be an addition to the hierarchy you laid out, which is full Buddhahood in this lifetime and the tantric methods to get there. Nirvana/samsara are considered two perspectives of the same reality [2].
[1] starts about 20 min in, after the opening meditation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdYmiLvSzfY
I heard any rebirth is samsara, circle of suffering, karma keeps it going, you should clear karma not accrue even more
I don't know the different buddhisms but checked wikipedia about karma in tibetan buddhism and it seems to say it too
Hmm maybe, anyways what I read was shantidevas way of the bodhisattva and some other texts like dhammapada and some tibetan texts and art It speaks of merit that is good and that spinning the mani korlo generates merit, and many tibetan monks like shantidevas text But yeah you got me I've copypasted from many separate things it's the result of a big cultural and literary melting pot
I am not an expert in buddhism but I think the idea of doing good karma is to get out of this cycle of life and death and to get moksh
So I mean, If we really think about it from an atheist's point of view as to what happens after death, its essentially moksh.
Also I genuinely believe that if there is some spiritiuality in this world, then it would reward us for the work that we are doing by the amount of hard work.. ie, reading the 9 million mantras per minute was being that easy, and accruing karma was so easy, then even people who are more sinful than me can go to moksh because they can offset their karma by an insane degree by doing this thing and I feel like if the universe is from where we get our intelligence and we can deduce it that its kinda wrong, then ofc the universe knows that too and it won't be of much value.
Basically if I truly see things from a more religious perspective, even then theoretically one should just live a good life as much as he can and not wonder or worry about the rules set by other religious people since they themselves had crafted their own rules and you should too.
TLDR: Just be a good person as much you can without pushing yourself to limits and then to me personally, I will much rather go into hell by not following god but following good than go into heaven by following god but not good.
I mean no offense to religious people because i mean, I can understand you guys too. Life is truly scary. Even I want the comfort of a god or karma and even I pray sometimes when I truly feel desperate but the scientific part of me can't really let go of all the inconsistencies I feel like.
TLDR: Just be a good person as much you can...
Armchair philosopher: But you have to define good before you can follow it. Even the Golden Rule falls apart if you're a masochist.
Have thought about this too. I genuinely don't have an answer except doing good is feeling good with a sense of contentment.
And to be honest, for me its also doing good not because you want others to know but in spite of it, you should rather live your life in that sense of secrecy but honestly, that's what I consider "based" and its definitely nothing wrong with telling what good you did, but I really suffer from this sense of oversharing everything so to me its really one of an ideals.
I get what you are saying and its a good point and I am sure that there is some better reasoning than this good than "what my soul feels truly satisfy with"
Honestly, I might sound kind of idk preachy but I want to live my life in such a sense that it can have an impact. A positive impact. That's it. If people say my name in good intention. But also, I don't want to work only for people to say that I have good impact but rather knowing that the good that I am doing even in secret might come some day out. I do doubt how many secrets I can carry to grave in this interconnected world. I'd much rather be an open book with some dark chapters but I'd try to still do some good. I am sorry if I confuse you because I think I am a little confused too. Because I don't know how my definition of good can stand time and ever changing people. I can't convince anybody something, everyone have their own livelihood and they were parented differently and so they value different things and they have different meanings of good. Putting the word's meaning into umbrella means that I am taking the freedom away. There is no objective good in my opinion, only things happening. Chaos and reactions. We are lucky to spawn in into such an complicated world, but we were bound to happen because we are what happens when luck hands correctly. We were bound to exist in the randomness. It doesn't have much native meaning itself, this world. I feel like it just has some scientific rules and I don't know why it has that, but I doubt if there is some moral code embedded into the universe. Its our own intepretation.
I guess I am going all over the places for sure, definitely not a clear thought but a rough sketch. I sometimes feel a little guilt thinking that I might be polluting hackernews with such long comments since they might take up visual space away from some meaningful content than myself. But maybe I overshare.
In my mind that's easy. Doing "good" is just doing things that don't intentionally hurt others, unless it's to defend oneself or save many others from harm.
AFAIK, from my atheist's understanding of Buddhism, you don't get out of the cycle of life and death, samsara, with good karma. Quite the contrary, you're almost guaranteeing your next life will be that of some kind of angel that lives for millions of years, and delaying your eventual enlightenment by that much, since you can only get enlightened on Earth.
Not that it's a bad thing, people are allowed to enjoy reincarnation, and it probably beats being reincarnated in hell.
Wonderful and reminiscent of the Vesuvius Prize [0], of course. Broadly, makes me wonder if there are other categories of 'lost' information that will emerge in the years ahead as imaging tools and AI analysis improve.
I am on the Vesuvius Challenge team. We came across this press release back in July and were quite impressed! It's great to see other groups using non destructive means to read ancient documents.
It makes me wonder how much information we lost because we thought that retrieval methods were as good as they were ever going to get, and we destroyed the material trying to read it.
Tangential but even stuff like this bothers me in that regard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf1GvrUqeIA
Very cool!
I was just going down a rabbit hole yesterday about the use of AI techniques (or lack of success) in deciphering still-forgotten languages. Unsupervised models have partially cracked Ugaritic and Linear B [0], and Pythia/Ithaca restore Greek inscriptions at scale [1], but Linear A or Proto-Elamite still stall because the corpora are too small and there is no bilingual ‘Rosetta Stone’. The most promising direction now seems to be hybrid pipelines that combine vision encoders to normalize glyphs with constrained decoders guided by phonotactic priors.
AI is great at pattern recognition, but when the sample size is tiny and there's no known language to anchor it to, it’s like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing and no idea what the final image looks like.
How fascinating: in a paragraph entirely _about_ language, written entirely in my first language, I can barely recognize a fair chunk of the terms.
Ha, fair point! Let me try again :)
People have tried using modern AI to crack lost languages. In some cases it works a bit. For example, a model learned to match Ugaritic (an ancient Semitic language) to Hebrew with no “dictionary” at all. In another case, a system called Pythia can guess missing letters in damaged Greek inscriptions with higher accuracy than human experts.
But with truly lost scripts like Linear A or Proto-Elamite, we run into two problems: there are only a few hundred very short texts, and we don’t have any bilingual “Rosetta Stone” to anchor them. AI can spot patterns, cluster symbols, and even suggest likely word boundaries, but it cannot yet produce actual translations. The current hope is to combine image recognition (to clean up messy symbols) with language models guided by rules of possible sound systems, then loop in human experts to check or reject the guesses.
My parents moved from Tibet to India, recetly I learned the ancient art of 'Tummo.' I never realized I had a natural 'high altitude adaptation' until I went on a trip with a group of foreigners and people from India. It was an eye-opening moment when I saw firsthand the difficulty they had with stamina at high altitudes. Stuff like this is super fascinating for me.
Small nitpick and they got it right in the next sentence but "3D X-ray topographical scanner" should be tomographic not topographic. X-ray topography is something else unrelated.
Wild that they found Sanskrit grammar in a Tibetan mantra. Just goes to show how fluid and interconnected these traditions really were
At least this time it's not an entire Buddhist monk.
https://web.archive.org/web/20241119222821/http://www.histor...
If we are the ones who can read the prayers, maybe it’s because we’re the ones meant to answer them.
There's something poetic about modern tech being used to uncover ancient hopes and intentions
hard to gauge significance without carbon dating of the scrolls. Why leave that out ?
The title of this article confuses me on many levels and layers.
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