A Life of Dogen by John M Evans. Part of the Zen Masters Series.

The sixth and final part of the life of Zen Master Bankei is now up on our Spiritual Nirvana site. To catch up with the serial go here.

We are continuing this series with a master whose name looms large in Zen history. It is the aristocratic priest, Dogen (1200-1253), renowned for introducing the Soto Zen school into Japan. His philosophic writings on Being-Time are said to foreshadow the work of Einstein and quantum physics.

He was a master of words as well as Zen and one of the greatest writers in all Buddhism. Although little known now outside a small circle of Zen scholars, his legacy has lived on, especially in the West through Shunryu Suzuki, a recent Abbot at the San Francisco Zen Center.

Start reading here

I’ve been reading on average around two books a week since childhood. I started at age 3 with Enid Blyton novels, rose to Dostoievsky at 13, and have continued ever since. If I live out the average lifetime, though, I will have read only 7,500 books when I enter the pearly gates.

But will St Peter be impressed? If I were the old gatekeeper I’d point out that more that 100,000 new titles are published each year in Britain alone. Add on the rest of the world, and each year’s totals to date, plus the sum of all ancient manuscripts and codices, and you’ll probably arrive at an eight or nine-figure number.

A mere 7,500 is so piffling as to be almost worthless. Strip out the Enid Blyton’s and the Richmal Crompton’s of childhood reading, plus all the other useless tomes and trashy novels read since, and really, old boy, you have virtually no education at all!

I was set to musing on these depressing thoughts after a visit to Waterstones, the biggest bookshop in town yesterday. I was determined to buy a really great book to read over the weekend. After a quick survey of the latest pulp fiction, the newest sensational stuff from the Dan Brown brigade, the huge pile of “Jesus was a Married Martian” nonsense, I passed on with some relief to the non-fiction shelves.

First, history … well, what could possibly be new or fresh in that? Even Andrew Roberts has been reduced to rewriting Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Philosophy, the same — I’d read the latest Roger Scruton, so not much there. Science? Nah … same ole, same ole. Black ole, to be precise.

But technology, surely, must have something new to say? You are joking? All the computer books are way out of date. There was even a large, floppy volume on Microsoft Office 1997 — a bestseller still, apparently.

In the entire bookshop there wasn’t a single title that I hadn’t already flipped through or actually wanted passionately to read. I was bookless in Waterstones.

So despite the woe-begone state of my lifetime’s reading score and my determination to improve it, the world of print publishing couldn’t provide a single instance of something I wanted to read. How crazy is that?

The truth is, there are only so many subject areas you can write a saleable book about. In my years of avid consumption I had apparently exhausted all of them. So, my pifflingly small reading total compared to the billions of titles available is actually much better than old Peter might think. Some shrewd background selectivity has been driving it for years.

I’d obviously extracted the core of human knowledge and speculation and I’m now destined to go round in circles over the same ground for the rest of my days. There must be some Greek god who matches that description.

Where does that leave the content business? It reveals that content, both online and offline, is constantly repeating itself with massive overduplication of material and ideas. Sure, things get shifted round a lot, as in a kaleidoscope, but the central core of all types of content is just a dance of elements trying to present old material as new and original.

Of course, old principles need to be interpreted anew for succeeding generations, but the tidal waves of content we’re now faced with on a daily basis is largely fraudulent.

How often do you get that sinking feeling when viewing your feed reader? Deja vu always overwhelms me when I look at techmeme. Despite being the best snapshot of tech news on the internet, anything but short-term memory reveals the cyclical nature of so-called news.

The fact is, it doesn’t matter if you don’t read everything. It doesn’t matter if you don’t read 0.01% of everything. Education is choosing what to retain and making sense of it. The other 99.99% recurring is largely superfluous.

From an author’s point of view, the situation is not encouraging. Given the enormous duplication of effort, how much more can content expand, especially on the internet, while retaining value that can be collected by the creator?

We’re already seeing content come close to zero price in many areas. And with copyright laws getting ever looser, newer ways of digging gold from them tha’ mountains of content are urgently needed.

As I write, Valleywag is reporting that “AOL is closing down a slew of smaller blogs it bought from … Jason Calacanis”. Only three WeblogsInc titles are really profitable : Engadget, Autoblog and Joystiq. The rest are not profitable enough. Nick Denton, the writer of the piece remarks : “I also have an aesthetic aversion to those blog networks which measure success in the quantity of titles rather than the quality of the writing.”

I think we can all agree on that.

This is Syntagma’s 500th post since this site was established in October 2006.

It’s hard to believe but we’ve been going for almost 15 months. The posting rate works out at 1.11 recurring posts per day — not that I ever wrote 1.11 recurring posts in a day.

Followers of English cricket and Naval battles will recognize 111 as “Nelson’s number”, which is an excellent omen here in the West Country. It means our constant quest for pieces of eight and Spanish doubloons should bear ample fruit.

I also want to remember Syntagma’s first incarnation as synastry.blogspot.com. It ran for a year on Google bandwidth, for which I thank them, and made a little bit of a stir in the blogosphere, which emboldened me to get our own domain, followed by a 50-strong network.

So here’s to another 500 posts and an even bigger splash when we reach 1000.

There’s an interesting (sort of) meme starting up on Robert Scoble’s blog. Following his dip into U.S. Presidential politics with John Edwards, Scoble gets back on-topic with a thankfully short post, “I Hate Eggplant”.

A treat for Scoble: Eggplant Sandwiches.

Eggplant is an old British name for what we Brits now call aubergines — at least among the ratatouille set. I can tell Robert that naming them aubergines — for which I blame the French — does nothing to improve their flavour.

As for my pet culinary hate, it’s got to be pickled onions.

I suppose my real complaint is with the vinegar, a quite appalling liquid concoction, composed of an alcoholic beverage gone rankly sour. Onions I like, but soak them in vinegar and the result is a product worthy of the dark arts.

The weird thing, though, is that the only time I found aubergines / eggplant palatable was when they were fried and served with ever-so-thin slices of … pickled onions!

Is this a case of the mathematical law that two negatives make a positive?

So what foodstuff do you think should never have been invented by the Almighty, let alone the hand of Man?

We are about to unveil our long-awaited new design for the Syntagma network, following on from the launch of our three network magazine portals late last year.

Thord Hedengren, who designed the portals, is also producing our new network look. The idea is to carry a similarity of design features from portal to site, creating a distinctive Syntagma style. As a network that started out on the Wal-Mart principle of “pile ‘em in ‘n’ stack ‘em high”, this will be a major departure for us.

But then, Petticoat Lane to Bond Street was always our secret trajectory.

We’re getting a draft of the designwork this week, so it shouldn’t be too long before Syntagma joins the fashionistas at the top of the style league.

Watch this spice [sic].