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By then I was sick of everything. I packed a bag and went to a Buddhist temple deep in the mountains somewhere in southern China. Oh, I didn’t go to become a monk. Too lazy for that. I just wanted to find a truly peaceful place to live for a while. The abbot there was my father’s old friend—very intellectual, but became a monk in his old age. The way my father told it, at his level, this was about the only way out. The abbot asked me to stay. I told him, “I want to find a peaceful, easy way to just muddle through the rest of my life.” The abbot said, “This place isn’t really peaceful. There are lots of tourists, and many pilgrims too. The truly peaceful can find peace in a bustling city. And to attain that state, you need to empty yourself.” I said, “I’m empty enough. Fame and fortune are nothing to me. Many of the monks in this temple are worldlier than me.” The abbot shook his head and said, “No, emptiness is not nothingness. Emptiness is a type of existence. You must use this existential emptiness to fill yourself.”
The Three-Body Problem
Cixin Liu and Ken Liu
How did Pizarro come to be at Cajamarca? Why didn’t Atahuallpa instead try to conquer Spain? Pizarro came to Cajamarca by means of European maritime technology, which built the ships that took him across the Atlantic from Spain to Panama, and then in the Pacific from Panama to Peru. Lacking such technology, Atahuallpa did not expand overseas out of South America. In addition to the ships themselves, Pizarro’s presence depended on the centralized political organization that enabled Spain to finance, build, staff, and equip the ships. The Inca Empire also had a centralized political organization, but that actually worked to its disadvantage, because Pizarro seized the Inca chain of command intact by capturing Atahuallpa. Since the Inca bureaucracy was so strongly identified with its godlike absolute monarch, it disintegrated after Atahuallpa’s death. Maritime technology coupled with political organization was similarly essential for European expansions to other continents, as well as for expansions of many other peoples. A related factor bringing Spaniards to Peru was the existence of writing. Spain possessed it, while the Inca Empire did not. Information could be spread far more widely, more accurately, and in more detail by writing than it could be transmitted by mouth. That information, coming back to Spain from Columbus’s voyages and from Cortés’s conquest of Mexico, sent Spaniards pouring into the New World. Letters and pamphlets supplied both the motivation and the necessary detailed sailing directions. The first published report of Pizarro’s exploits, by his companion Captain Cristóbal de Mena, was printed in Seville in April 1534, a mere nine months after Atahuallpa’s execution. It became a best-seller, was rapidly translated into other European languages, and sent a further stream of Spanish colonists to tighten Pizarro’s grip on Peru.
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Jared Diamond
How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined. You always insist that the order sustaining society is an objective reality created by the great gods or by the laws of nature.
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
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