Welcome to the Myriad Things

Well, here it is—after a hiatus of about a year or so, I’ve started blogging again in earnest.

And so welcome to The Myriad Things. As some visitors here may know, for a long time—five years in all—I ran a blog over at thinkBuddha.org. It was a huge amount of fun; but back in late 2011, I decided to retire thinkBuddha. I felt that I had come to the end of that particular road, I needed a break from blogging; and, besides, I had plenty of other things on at the time, with a number of writing projects that I was working on and that were taking up my attention.

So I had a break from running a blog for a year or so. But then, a couple of months ago, Steve Himmer invited me to be a guest blogger (it was a bit more fancy than that: Steve called it a ‘writer in residence’) over on his wonderful website, Necessary Fiction for the month of April 2012; and getting back into the swing of blogging was just so much fun that I thought perhaps it was time to return to the fray. I thought for a while about reviving thinkBuddha; but eventually decided that it might be better to set up an entirely new blog.

There were several reasons for my decision to start up something new. Firstly, I wanted somewhere that I could explore matters both philosophical and literary; and thinkBuddha was always a decidedly philosophical kind of a project. It simply wasn’t the kind of place that I felt I could just post a short story if I felt like doing so. Secondly, there was the question of Buddhism. thinkBuddha existed, in part, as a way of grappling with the various traditions of Buddhism. These days, I grapple rather less with Buddhism. Although it remains an abiding interest and influence, it is just not a thing for grappling in the way that it was. Over the past year, I’ve occasionally come up with some things that I thought I might like to blog about, but that didn’t really seem to fit with the kind of approach I had taken on thinkBuddha. The overtly Buddhist nature of the previous blog was becoming a bit confining. And my own website willbuckingham.com is more a kind of general newsy kind of site, and not so much the kind of place suited to extended reflection.

As a result of all of this, I’ve decided to set up a new blog. It may be a bit more freewheeling and eclectic than thinkBuddha was. I’ve chosen the name The Myriad Things  in part because it a name that almost invites this kind of eclecticism, and in part because my philosophical interests have become increasingly entangled with my study of Chinese thought, from whence the notion of ‘myriad things’ comes. thinkBuddha will remain online, although I’ll not be posting new articles over there (other than the occasional post in the news section), and after a while I’ll be closing down the comments, so I can focus on this blog.

I do not know what form or shape The Myriad Things will eventually have. I’m aiming to keep things very loose and broad at first, so that I feel free to post on whatever I like: literature, philosophy both Eastern (in particular, at the moment, Chinese) and Western, other on-going projects in the field of philosophy, writing, current affairs, science, ethics—and yes, from time to time, Buddhism as well. We’ll see how it goes.

A single post does not make a blog: and what a blog actually is generally only becomes apparent only once it has been running for a while. But I am looking forward to getting back into the swing of blogging; and I’m looking forward to renewing some old blog connections, as well as forging many new ones.

Image: 長江萬頃 Ten Thousand Ripples on the Yangtze by Ma Yuan. Source: Wikimedia Commons