(Pieter Bruegel the Elder, “Sloth”)
three R’s (reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmetic)
three points in a good landing
Three Signs of Being in Buddhism (impermanence, suffering, absence of soul)
four seasons
four classical elements (Earth, Water, Air, Fire)
four states of matter (solid, liquid, gas, plasma)
four humors of Hippocrates (black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, blood)
four temperaments of Hippocrates (sanguine, choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic)
four points on a compass
four freedoms (of speech, of worship, from want and fear – Franklin Roosevelt, 1941)
five ages of Man
five senses
five Great Lakes (North American)
Five Nations (Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca)
six types of quarks (up, down, top, bottom, strange, charm)
six types of leptons (electron, electron neutrino, muon, muon neutrino, tau, tau neutrino)
Seven Seas (varies locally and is often idiomatic; list most often accepted today is North Atlantic, South Atlantic, North Pacific, South Pacific, Arctic, Southern, Indian)
seven continents
Seven Hills of Rome
Seven Wonders of the World
Seven Deadly Sins (lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, pride)
eight bits in a byte
eight days (and nights) in Hanukkah
eight legs on a spider
eight tentacles on an octopus
eight vertices in a cube
eight paths to the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths
eight planets in our solar system (now that Pluto is a Dwarf)
nine muses in Greek mythology
nine circles of hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy
twelve pence in a shilling
29.531 days in the lunar month
365.25 days in the solar year
100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy
100 billion galaxies in the universe
100 billion neurons in the human brain
Good list, Jerry. Don’t want to get stiflingly pedantic with you about Buddhist teachings…but…the existence of the eight-fold path IS the fourth of the Four Noble Truths, rather than a path to those truths. The Buddha seemed to have a talent and fondness for numbered lists.
And, as long as Pluto brings the term Dwarf to the list, let’s add the Seven Dwarves…
Thanks, Steve! Because I know nothing about Buddhism, I had no right including any paths at all, let alone an eight-fold one. But when I ran across mention of it in my reading I couldn’t resist throwing it in anyway. Thanks for setting me straight… And I’d have happily included the Seven Dwarves but the only ones I could remember were Grumpy and Dopey.
Grumpy, Dopey, Happy, Sneezy, Doc, Sleepy, and Bashful. And, I guess Walt Disney spells it “Dwarfs.”
I feel you “know” more about Buddhism than you realize; not the formal teachings with all the lists, but the essential quality of giving full attention to what is. Several passages in The Windward Shore (the chapter Beachwalking comes to mind) seek to give words to an inner experience of looking into the natural world unfiltered by ideas and concepts. That kind of attention is a cornerstone of Buddhist practice. There’s an inherent paradox in any effort to capture this process in language — the consciousness that sees without concepts is a layer below verbal thought — but something that has frequently struck me about your writing is how well you evoke that wordless presence — through the medium of words. The same facility has the work of Rick Bass appearing in Buddhist publications even though I don’t think he sees himself as being in or from that tradition.
I could be way off in all this, of course. Wouldn’t be the first time I revealed myself to be more Dopey than Doc.
Well said Steve.
10 COMMANDMENTS.
SPEED OF LIGHT, 182,000 miles per second (if my astronomy class memory is correct). It also could be 186,000 mps.