About
Fri 15 Apr 2005
My name is Mark. I live in Edinburgh with my wife Sarah (our cat Mao is on leave in the States). I am a postgraduate student in quantitative genetics. I write about evolution, photography, application development, Orthodox theology and, occasionally, life in Japan.
This website is currently sleeping. Elsewhere I am editing my photographs, collecting and quoting, and keeping it under 140 characters.
Perhaps you would like to…
- view photographs, one at a time, in the Photo chronicle
- or read previous entries by topic.
The name of this website, 無の研究 (mu-no-kenkyuu), means “Nothingness Research” and is inspired by the title of Nishida Kitaro’s 『善の研究』(Zen-no-kenkyuu, An Inquiry into the Good). The first character, 無 (mu), means ‘nothingness’ and, as an important concept in Buddhism and Japanese philosophy, is the famous answer to the perennial question: “Does a dog have a buddha nature or not?” The answer—mu—suggests the non-duality of the situation: a dog doesn’t have a buddha nature and it doesn’t not have a buddha nature. The third and fourth characters together simply mean ‘research.’
I make this website for my friends from whom I am separated by distance, who aren’t part of my everyday routine, who can’t easily see what I’m up to, with whom there is little chance to share stray thoughts and childhood memories. Undoubtedly (thanks to search engines), some people who don’t know me will stumble upon what I share here; they are welcome all the same.
You can contact me by email: mu at raysend dot com