Prologue

Dear Wimal –

I have been thinking of you a great deal recently as I am working on a project that has a lot to do with Sri Lanka. I am living in Tampa, Florida now. Several years ago I had a dream. In the dream, I was wandering through the hills of Tampa (!) and came across a group of bhikkhuni. I approached and asked who they were and they responded “We are of Mahasena.” After waking, further research revealed that Mahasena was a 3rd-century Sri Lankan king who was responsible for bringing Mahayana to early Sri Lankan Buddhism. I had not heard of him before the dream, so I am constructing a fictional narrative that could be an explanation for how such a dream is possible. It involves time-traveling bhikkhunis and the relationship of some current concepts in physics (the amplituhedron) to some ideas associated with Pure Land buddhism. After this initial dream, I got lost in research on early Buddhism in Sri Lanka for a while and in Faxian’s chronicle of Buddhist nuns traveling to China and the associated modern impacts on bhikkhuni ordination.

In the past few years I have been learning to make noise with synthesizers - some of it approaches musicality, I hope. Some of this is intended to be sort of a soundtrack to the bhikkhuni narrative. For example Gandhara Disc One

More later - the music seems to having an effect both on my perception and my relationship with my characters.