Now, it's my great pleasure to introduce tonight's speaker, Professor Stephen Tizer of Princeton University. Professor Tizer hardly needs an introduction, and the size of this room tells us that. But I will nonetheless say something about this wonderful work. Professor Tizer is DT Suzuki, Professor in Buddhist Studies and Professor of Religion in the Department of Religion at Princeton University. He's very well known for his approach to Buddhism, which has paid attention to interactions and intersections, interactions between Buddhism in India, China, Korea, and Japan, interactions of Buddhism with other religious traditions of China, first of all, Taoist, interaction between expressions of Buddhism in the elite context and in the popular context. His methodology makes use of a wide-ranging of sources, doctrinal sources, historical documents, as well as artistic and material sources. And his insights theoretically draw on history, anthropology, literary theory, and religious studies. The wealth of this scholarship is very well illustrated by his three monographs to date. All awarded major prizes. The first one, the Ghost Festival in Medieval China, was awarded a Prize in History of Religion by the American Council of Learned Society and looked at the meaning of this very important festival in Medieval China and the influences that Buddhist patterns had on Taoist practice. His second book, The Scripture on the Ten Kings and the Making of Purgatory in Medieval Chinese Buddhism, also awarded the Joseph Levinson Book Prize in Chinese Studies. And the third monographs, Reinventing the Wheel, Paintings of Rebirth in Medieval Buddhist Temples, that won the Stanislaus Julien Prize of the Académie des Inscricions et Beltêtre of the Institut de France. Both look at, again, a very important representation in documents and in artistic productions of the hell and the purgatory and the question of rebirth. Prostheticism is also co-edited to very important books for students, books that we always use in classes. So I think we should also mention those readings on the Lotus Sutras and readings on the Platform Sutra that introduce these fundamental scriptures for the station context to a broader audience. His current research project, Curing with Karma, that's a title, is what is going to talk to us tonight. Examine healing liturgies, particularly in documents from the one that express the interaction between Buddhism and indigenous Chinese tradition and the wealth of sutric and non-canonical texts unhurted on the silk route. So without further ado, please join me to welcome Professor Taisenstrasse. Thank you very much, Lucia. I express my thanks to Professor Dolce, Chair of the Center of Buddhist Studies and to the other members of the Buddhist Studies Committee, Professor Palumbo, Professor Lukes Anitz, and Professor Pago. I also want to take this opportunity because a representative COO of the Foundation is herself here to thank the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation for sponsoring this series, as well as for their work in sponsoring Buddhist studies broadly, in sponsoring projects on art, and on sponsoring projects on the Hong Kong. So thanks to all of you for very much. For about 2,000 years, people from all walks of life in China took recourse to different therapies when they fell sick. Depending on individual fortune and the possibility of local care facilities, they might seek help from a doctor practicing acupuncture, monk Sebastian, or prescribing herbal cures. They might go to an exorcist, a Taoist priest, or a Buddhist monk. Sometimes they went to all four such practitioners in succession. My lecture today is an attempt to survey the range of healing methods offered by Buddhist monks, in particular, between roughly the fourth and 10th centuries. Hence my subject today draws more narrowly from my current research on liturgies for healing contained in the Dunhuang manuscripts. But I'd like to place that evidence, especially in today's lecture, in a broader context. So I want to arrange more broadly than simply materials from Dunhuang. I'd like to draw on evidence from paintings, sutras, talismans, manuscripts, including liturgies, and other archaeological remains, and explore the technologies that are employed in Buddhist forms of healing. The techniques ranged from relatively humble acts of donation to more extensive projects involving copying of scriptures, chanting spells, and confessing one's faults to more complicated ones, such as commissioning the magicking of images, sponsoring a lamp lighting ceremony, making seals, or ingesting talismans, or engaging the services of an exorcist. My lecture highlights the logics of these various practices, and in the end, in the conclusion, reflects on the process of healing in Chinese Buddhism. As you can see, my lecture is divided into four parts. I want to address firstly how we think about sickness and curing. Secondly, I want to look at what I categorize as relatively simple acts of healing, giving, copying, chanting, and confessing. Then look at forms of healing that are slightly more involved. They involve more people. They involve greater resources. They involve more specialized technologies, such as lighting of lamps, sealing, and ingesting talismans, and exorcism. Finally, I'll reflect on what this says about the broader process of healing as reflected in Chinese Buddhism. So I think it's good at the beginning of a talk about healing to think about how we conceive of healing and how the different realms of what we might consider to be sickness, good health, salvation, medical science, herbal practice, religious healing, and so forth, how they all fit together. My very basic point I hope most of you will agree with from the very start is that sickness and wellness and the different techniques of healing have been conceived and organized as spheres or as overlapping areas of practice rather differently in different times and places. I'm taking basically a historical approach to healing. So if I were in England, I would first try and make sense of how the system for providing health services works here. And I would be confronted, first of all, with a number of acronyms which are completely new to me. And if I looked at the history of them, I find that they change every couple years as well. I would have to understand what the clinical commissioning group is, what a GP is. I'd have to understand where to go or what is actually considered a secondary care service, such as planned hospitalization, rehabilitation, et cetera. And I can assure you that the system in the country where I come from is far more complicated, less well organized, and more poorly funded. If we were going to jump from the modern Western world to a traditional Buddhist viewpoint, how would we could think about sickness in that context? We might use the analysis of the four truths, and in particular, the first of the four noble truths, to come up with a potentially Buddhist way of thinking about wellness and healing. As you all know, the four noble truths, I don't need to run through them at length here. Suffering, the arising, its cessation, and the path to the cessation are all well known. So also well known are an analysis of different forms of suffering. Many in both Indian, in both Indic and East Asian sources talk about either four or eight forms of suffering. The first four well known throughout the Buddhist world, Shangla, being the suffering of birth, suffering of old age, suffering of sickness, and the suffering of death. All of these things are unpleasant and involve suffering. There are essentially added to that emotional and mental forms of distress caused by separation from that which we love, association with that which we hate, the inability to fulfill even our simplest of desires, and all forms of suffering that are due to our endowment with the five skandhas, the continuum of mental and bodily elements. If that's a relatively widespread Buddhist conception, let's look at some conceptions from specifically medieval China. And I'd like to use an example here from a early 6th century statesman, Guozhu Shun, because it encapsulates what I think is a longtime attitude in China and in many cultures towards multiple therapeutic techniques. Guo himself was not a medical practitioner, nor was he a very religious person. He was a fairly straight Confucian official. And in the piece of writing I'm quoting here, he's actually his main subject is not healing at all. His main subject is the traditional Confucian subject of giving advice to a ruler and encouraging the ruler, his emperor, to select wise officials and wise counselors. So to make his point that it's not a point about medicine, but rather a point about governing, he uses contemporary medical practice in order to instruct the emperor. What does he say? He says, when people are sick, they do four different things. They go to Taoist priests who specialize in the sending of a written memorial and petition to the gods, or they go to Buddhist monks and nuns who call for feasts and sutra lectures, sutra chanting, or they go to profane masters, exorcists who insist on release from demonic catastrophe, or people go to doctors and acupuncturists who administer soup and prescribed medicine, all of them claiming to be the most capable. Of course, many of these are tried in succession without any firm distinction between them, except for the people doing the practice, the technology involved, and most important, the results obtained. Some of the implications then to draw this discussion of the broader conceptualization of sickness to a close. Sickness and wellness are relative to each other. That is, even if one can escape sickness at one point, one is still subject to suffering. Sickness and wellness follow each other over many lifetimes. In addition, even when we do achieve good health in this lifetime, that state of good health is not final. Sickness then becomes the point of departure for talking about something that is more final, and that is some kind of final liberation. So sickness is a point of departure for initiating or talking about a more continuing process that will eventually in something ultimate. I'll show you examples of that in my talk. Buddhist healing, furthermore, is not an exclusive practice. Neither Buddhists nor other practitioners ever excluded their, if you want to use a market model, they never excluded their competitors. There was always room for another specialist, either in the village or in the city. And finally, how do we conceive of all of the various supernatural agents engaged in the process of healing? From the Buddhist side, Buddhists and Bodhisattvas in effect function like specialists, or in the US when my primary care physician needs to send me to someone's specialist. He sends me to a specialist. I need special permission, both from my doctor and from my insurance company. And then I can go to see the specialist.  I can go to see avalokiteshvara if I need particular help with childbirth and so on. So let me start near the beginning with relatively simple acts of healing. The photo you see is courtesy of the British Library, is a text I've worked on, and will play a significant role in the book I'm working on right now. As you can see, it's entitled, I haven't translated a Chinese title, but it's a healing liturgies for monks, or a monk. And in fact, this text contains healing liturgies for a monk, a nun, an adult male, and an acarya, a monk with a special title. We'll be reading parts of this in the seminar tomorrow. So liturgical manuals are quite interesting. They're the current subject of my research. They survive at Dunhuang. We have things like them from other parts of the Buddhist world, especially in Japan. We have ganmon and prayer texts from Japan. But the ones from Dunhuang survive in great numbers. This is an anthology. It was used by a monk who served in a priestly capacity, performing many different kinds of rituals. So this is the textual and world and the world of religious practice from which this material comes. It survives, especially at Dunhuang, but because its material was so practical and so much involved with the life of folks at the lower levels of society, these materials have not survived in great number in the canon nor in printed editions. So this makes the material from Dunhuang particularly valuable. So the standard healing ritual in these texts, a standard huan wan, or healing liturgy, includes seven steps. I'll run through them very briefly right now. First, the speaker, the priest, praises the Buddha's virtue, then talks about the purpose of the ritual to heal such and such a person using the transfer of merit. The patient or sufferer is described in generic terms and first lauded and then essentially told, you're sick. It's probably because of a deed you committed either in your previous lifetime or more recently. The acts that are performed in the ritual are discussed next under step four, offering of flowers, offering of incense, hanging of banners. Next comes what I consider to be the crux of the ritual, which is the transfer of merit. The text itself uses a fancier word. It uses the word ornamentation for that. But what's basically involved is a transfer of merit known throughout the Buddhist world. One, a good deed has been performed. A donation has been made by the donor or sponsor of the ritual. That good deed creates goodness, creates merit. That merit in this step of the right is taken and then transferred to the beneficiary. That's the crucial part. That's the crucial step in the ritual. Then a prayer is uttered describing how the beneficiary should benefit from the donation and some closing words are said. We'll run through these seven steps in more detail. As I said in our text reading seminar tomorrow, the language used in these seven sections differs. And it's quite interesting from a linguistic and literary and performative. So some actual examples. Dunhuang also preserves written on the backs of other sheets of paper, very simple, very humble records of donations given for acts of healing, for the commissioning of rituals of healing. Pelio 2583 in particular is now put together as a long scroll consisting of 14 sheets of paper. But each of those 14 sheets of paper started off as a simple record taking up only part of the piece of paper, recording in detail, I'll show you one, recording in detail first what the donation is, the goods that are given, second liturgical words, words that are close to those being spoken because they refer to things that are done in the ritual, third, a date, and fourth, an authentication by the receiving official. So the first part, as you can see, describes the relatively humble offerings made by a nun. We know her name. We know the date on which the donation was made. Secondly, the liturgical portion of this record says the aforementioned are for the nun, Ming Chen's illness. Her illness is described in generic terms. She has long been in bed on her pillow waiting slowly without a cure. Now comes the ritual part. We undertake to donate these possessions in a ritual, and then there are directions to perform the chanting. Please chant on our behalf. The date is given, apparently written by the nun herself. I have my doubts about that, as most nuns at Dunhuang were not very literate. And finally, the authentication by a named monk. And as you can see, it's at least in a different brush. I think it's by a different hand as well. His authentication is given probably at a different place and date, different time from the writing up of the record of donation itself. So all of this is under relatively simple acts of healing, in this case, undertaking a donation. Other relatively simple acts of healing, ritual forms of healing, involve the copying of manuscripts. This is a benefit promised not only in texts that are focused on healing, but throughout Mahayana Buddhist literature, we find exhortations to copy Buddhist texts and enjoy the karmic benefits thereof. This can take place in relation to healing. This can take place in relation to an individual practice. This can take place in relation to propagating a particular text. This can take place in relation to ensuring the well-being of one's ancestors. So there are a variety of uses to which this can be put. But the mechanism and the technology is the same. Either one copies oneself part of a text or a text or one pays to have one copied. The results are the same, largely the same, in terms of karmic benefits, they're largely the same. So we have such an example from a Maitreya text illustrated in a mid-tongue cave at Yulin, near Dunhuang. The man copying at bottom right is depicted and presumably in his next life, he will follow the path to be reborn in Tush Dehevan. Something similar, harder to see, but also quite interesting from the perspective of medieval technologies of copying and the actual process of textual reproduction we see here. This is an illustration of a different text, the Baoyu Ting, and we see one person reading aloud, holding the scroll in front of him and the person doing the actual copying, doing the performance of the writing beside him, writing it down after the first recitation. So giving or donation, copying, and next we want to consider chanting. This illustration, I'll show you the larger painting it's taken from in a moment. This is but one scene, one small panel in a longer, much larger painting. This painting shows how chanting was thought to be done or how chanting was supposed to be done. In this case, let's first talk about the painting and then we can run through the accompanying cartouche which you see here. The painting shows an old man supported by a family member with two children, two young boys, reading along and facing the viewer, letting us see who the real players are in this performance. The main performers are the two monks who are facing us directly and whose sutra scrolls are really pretty big. I think it's a little bigger than most sutra scrolls were, really most sutra scrolls, most tong paper was about, a sheet of paper was about one foot tall by about two feet wide. These are even bigger in order to accentuate the importance of them having a text that they can recite on behalf of a lay person. As the text says, as the cartouche says and the cartouche is itself a paraphrase of a canonical text on the healing Buddha, Medicine Master by Shajit Guru. If there are any sentient beings who get sick and have trouble getting better, those who lack medicine are doctors or those who have no success in here we get a list of the other practices that the text expects you to have already performed, petitioning the gods, asking a profane master to do so, calling on shadowy phantoms with Wang Liang, seeking fortunate blessings, desiring their years to be extended. If the sick wish to cast off the suffering of illnesses, what should they do? They should call the monks to perform rituals of chanting or they should themselves engage in confession rituals dedicated to the Medicine Master by Shajit Guru Tatagata. This is the broader, this is the full painting from which this scene is taken, the scene is at top right. As Professor Whitfield has shown in his study of this entire piece and the associated symbolism and design, Medicine Master by Shajit Guru is in the center, Sun and Moon Bodhisattvas on each side. On the left, a panel narrating the by Shajit Guru's 12 vows, enunciated in a couple versions of the text and the nine forms of unfortunate death, all the different ways that people could and did die and from which you can be rescued if you invoke, if you invite monks to chant sutras in the proper way. So one more important point about chanting, we usually think of it as hiring other people to chant for oneself. That's what impression you would get if you think about the transfer of merit. But in fact, there are many sources that explain chanting can not only be done on behalf of somebody else but I can do it on behalf of myself and I can not simply create merit. I can transform myself through chanting into an agent of healing. This crops up in stories about healing contained in different forms of literature. We find it in miracle tales about the diamond sutra. We find it in biographies of monks and in plenty of other literature from the medieval period. This is important because it confirms what we, it confirms and fills out what we know from Dunhuang and shows that the phenomenon involved are not simply coming from Northwest China but rather Northwest China connected as it was strongly to central China but equally strongly and significantly different periods to kingdoms further west and south. It shows us that there's a much broader continuum in which these practices were pursued. So in this case, there's a fabulous story. I think it's the most illuminating one from the Ming Balji, the record of unseen retribution. This is a collection of miracle tales from the middle of the seventh century. Let me summarize the story. It's too long to read. I've just included the, not the punchline, but the conclusion, the salvific or the healing, the efficient conclusion of this text. There's a monk named Sangcha who lived in the sixth, seventh century. Sangcha lived in the mountains. He eschewed city life and had a very small temple built in a secluded area in the mountains. He loved the mountains. One day he was out walking. He ran across a pitiable man suffering from leprosy who had made a home for himself by digging a hole and making a kind of a whole, a hovel for himself in the forest. Obviously the man had been abandoned by family and friend and was quite moving. The monk persuaded the man, after some back and forth, to come with him back to the temple where he, the monk, said, I will take care of you. So his first act back at the temple was to make the man suffering from leprosy feel at home. So he dug another pit for him on the grounds of the temple where he would feel secure and safe and in the same kind of therapeutic environment that he had built for himself in isolation. And then the monk said about trying to heal him and his method was to teach him to chant. In this case it's chanting the lotus sutra. But there's a wrinkle, of course. The man is portrayed as being very, first of all, it's pretty clear he can't read so he's taught how to chant the lotus sutra verbally from memory as many folks did learn the lotus sutra. But it's really slow going and so the monk grows very frustrated. But finally a deity appears to the patient in a dream and the deity takes over teaching the man how to recite the lotus sutra. So he gets him to the very end of the lotus sutra. It's usually it's eight scrolls, literally eight tran and 28 chapters in medieval China. And that works. It works so well that the man as he's nearing the end he begins to recover. His skin begins to return, he puts on weight and then we go to the next stage. So he not only cures himself through the intoning of the text but then he himself becomes a curative agent. He is sent by the monk, his teacher and curer to go heal other people. So the conclusion here as you can see reached by the time that the man reached the fifth and sixth scrolls out of eight he gradually felt his sewers getting better and when he could complete the chanting the whole text his hair and eyebrows had grown back and he was corpulent again like normal. Moreover, he could cure illness on behalf of others. Like many miracle tales this one ends with the authors or collectors guarantee that he himself has seen with his own eyes the results of this and not only that in this case it wasn't some authors curing. Once when I, Tang Lien suffered from a tumor the monk assigned this man and his exorcistic spells resulted in a cure so I myself can say that this is true. One further largely oral form of simple form of religious healing from the medieval period I wanna talk about is confessing. Confessing is the ritualized confession as an action of course is central to Buddhism has always been in most places. Think back to the Pratimoksha and the fortnightly recitation of the hundreds of infractions by monks and nuns. That basic setup very early made its way into lay practice as well in many different Buddhist cultures. The Dunhuang materials also contain not only liturgies for donation and turning that donation through the transfer of merit towards healing. They also contain liturgies that lay out a confession ritual. So curing with confession rather than curing with karma. The seven steps in those healing rituals are similar to the ones we just looked at but two of them are different and I wanna just remark on them. The first part is the invocation of deities. So after praising the Buddha, deities are invoked that is they are invited to come down to the ritual space not to perform the healing per se but to serve as witnesses, as divine witnesses to the acts of confession that are about to be undertaken. The purpose of the ritual is a similar format. The patient is described in similar ways and then enters the confession. And I've given the beginning of, I've excerpted just the beginning of one particular text which goes now in front of the pure assembly. That's the pure assembly is either the monks if they're monks assembled or it's the deities who have been invoked to attend. I confess and ask forgiveness for my past mistakes. There follows a generic listing of misdeeds and it's generic in the sense that monks have a standard list they're supposed to go through. Nones have a standard list they're supposed to go through. Lay men, lay women and so forth. To each social and religious station there is a corresponding set of very generic standardized misdeeds. So those are the words you speak not what you in fact did yesterday or last year but rather the deeds that cover all such acts that a person such as me might commit. And then that closes with may all the valuables that I offer be accepted for making merit. So there's also a donation and a transfer of merit combined with this confession. Those are relatively simple forms of healing in my estimation. More complex forms I'd like to talk about now. These are more complex in the sense that the technology is more involved, the actions often take longer and there are specialists and often esoteric forms of knowledge. That is knowledge that is not publicly accessible but is contained in secret manuals or in secret words. So complex healing, the lighting of lamps. There were lamp lighting ceremonies all across China both before Buddhism and after Buddhism. This is, what you see here is a depiction of perhaps one of the most fantastic imaginations of how that lamp lighting ceremony was performed. This is Mogo Cave 220, redone by the Jai family in the year 642. This is the eastern wall. This is the eastern wall and this is the opposite wall. This is the connecting wall. This is another connecting wall. So we're standing with our backs to the west looking east and this is what we see from floor to ceiling. It's a scene of the seven Buddhas outlined in the Baishajaguru Sutras. They each have canopies over them. They're accompanied by Yaksha's and various followers. So this is the eastern Pure Land on the western side behind us is a mirror Pure Land and that's the western Pure Land of Amitayas. I wanna draw your attention to what's going on down here with what these Bodhisattvas are doing. There is a tree here, a tree here. These are trees, lamp trees, trees that hold candles, probably oil lamps in them. And this thing in the middle, I'll show you a close up in a second is a multi-tiered lamp tower. So let's take these two Bodhisattvas working so carefully on this lamp tree. Many individual pots of oil, probably with wicks that are burning and to keep this many lamps going at one time, it's not easy. It takes two people, right? You have one Bodhisattva pouring oil into cups to be handed up and we have the other Bodhisattva attending to each individual flame as it needs to be sustained. So it's a complex process. The Bhashogiguru Sutra as well as many earlier sutras such as the Consecration Sutra, Indigenous Chinese Buddhist creation, all associate practices of healing with lighting lamps in seven tiers and keeping them lit for seven times seven days for 49 days. Other relatively complex forms of healing involve sealing or the wearing of talismans. So the basic idea here in both of these practices, both sealing and writing of talismans is that one takes the power that originally derives from a Buddha or Bodhisattva and transfers that power first into some kind of meaning bearing form like writing or sound and then uses that to attach to the person, to affect the person through the senses in some way. So for, let's take the example here. This is a long manual containing many talismans from Dunhuang, Stein 2498. It contains the original talisman. It contains a more standardized interpretation of these talismans in a form that looks like a Chinese character. This character pre-exists Buddhism. If you look at Han Dynasty talismans that have been unearthed in archeological remains outside of Buddhism, we find this exact character and there are reasons having to do with the semantic pieces of the character for why it's used for childbirth. But it's consistent. Daoist manuals for talismanic making used for childbirth have this same talisman. But this is put to Buddhist use. It's contained in a Buddhist text. It's contained in a text that has daoanese and that has other kinds of rituals in it. But here it's for talismans. I've translated just the first two columns, first two sections of texts here and here. I'm not gonna read it in detail. It's there. Let me simply summarize them. In the first case, one writes out the talisman and this is not everybody who can write it out. These are handbooks kept by ritual specialists. So the specialist writes out the talisman and then probably burns it. That was the common practice. And then gives it to the patient to swallow. Probably sometimes this is done in a simple tea, in a simple broth. Sometimes it's done in a more complex substance involving vinegar and peach seeds, which also have healing properties. So we find a mix of both talismanic practice and herbal practice in the same practice. Second example, similarly one swallows it, but then one can also chant over water to enchant the water and then administer the water to the person. That's yet another way to transfer the power that originally derives from a Buddha to a patient. It has to cross media and it has to do so through some kind of meaningful representation, whether it's a dot on E in the form of sound or a written dot on E or even these squiggles, which are fairly comprehensible and there are ones that are much less comprehensible, but which are supposed to have their own semantic, their own semiotic meaning. Another way to transfer the power once taken, translated accurately from the healing power, Buddha to a written representation, is to roll up that written representation and place it next to the body. And that is a way to transfer through contact or through proximity the patient. And in this case, there's a beautiful example I saw it, I studied it in 2011, the last time I was in the British Library. This is a piece of paper, it's about three feet long and it's about one inch tall. And what's the content? The content is a healing liturgy. Right now it's folded up, but I suspect it was done in this format so that it could be rolled up and either put in a satchel and kept close to the body. And we know from archeological remains, this one uncovered pretty recently from a tomb in the early Tang dynasty, that corpses were buried, people were buried with a coppered boxes that held Dharani or similar talismans. So that's another way to transfer the power. Finally, perhaps the most complicated, let's just say another complicated technique is exorcism. This gets back to an idea well known across the Buddhist world, extending back into Indian religion of all types and known across the world, ultimately. But let's look at the particular Buddhist examples. The basic idea is that there are good gods and bad gods and they can all be brought to the service of the Buddha and they can all be brought into the service for the protection and apotropeic protection of followers of the Buddha. In particular, there is a class of demons that afflict children. These, given that childbirth and death of children, childbirth of the mother and death of young children were probably the most frequent forms of death, the mortality, it's not surprising that this kind of practice would be so widespread. The originals I have not seen in person yet in the British Museum, but they're really, really interesting set. Originally there were a set of 16, I think three slips survive with one deity on each side, so a total of six survive. The basic idea is that there are demons who can afflict children. They do so by stealing their soul or possessing them and then that manifests in various forms of sickness. The way to figure this out is to perform a divination with the mother, in this case it's a dream divination. You run through the dreams that the mother has had until you get to one of the animals mentioned in the 16, and if so then we know the name of the demon, knowing the name of the demon, we can then control the demon and offer sacrifice to the demon. All of this requires first divination. Second, talking to the specialist who knows the system that associates the dream symbol with the appropriate demon and then can administer the proper form for sacrifice and ultimately that is a way of exorcising, of drawing the spirit, the evil spirit out of the child and making the child well. This occurs also for deer. The other six that survive in the British Museum or the six are an ox, a stag, a cat, a bird, a rooster, an owl. So let's look at the whole process now. How is the process of healing conducted? How is it thought to work? Well, first of all, unlike modern biomedicine, there was always admitted that there could be a variety of causes of illness. So you see here in a painting of the 10 Kings from the 10th century, painting of the 10 Kings and Shtigarbha, Bodhisattva, Ditzong and the 10 Kings. We see a scene in the painting which shows this wonderful contraption on the right, which is the mirror of karma. We see a deceased person who is passing through the 10 courts of purgatory being judged in each one en route to rebirth for the next lifetime, held in medieval Chinese handcuffs. The kang deriving that word, I think comes from the Portuguese. There are different words for it in Chinese. So a poor sufferer not in a very powerful position being dragged before the judges of purgatory en route to his next rebirth.  And here he's shown, in fact, doing the bad deed, slaying an ox in his previous lifetime. So there's no way to escape the rigors of the underworld bureaucracy. So that may be one reason why I'm sick today. Deeds from a previous lifetime, but the liturgical materials and a wide range of Chinese Buddhist materials on healing also allow for other causalities. They allow for the disequilibrium of yin and yang on the one side from China, on the other side, they allow for the imbalance of the four elements, a traditional idea of Indian physiology. They allow for my sickness now is caused by my enemy who may have put a curse on me or who may have used magic to make me sick. Or I'm being possessed by demons either from my own my own difficulties right now make me susceptible to demons or because they have been sent by someone else. So all of these causes of illness are possible and they all are open to multiple forms of cure. How about calling on divine assistance? I was really intrigued when I started this project because many of the deities, most of the deities invoked in Buddhist healing liturgies are not the major, the primary care bodhisattva by Shajiguru Bodhisattva or the healing Buddha whose name is Master of Medicine. He is involved in some, but he's more often not involved. So who is involved? A whole range of deities and they range from high Buddhas to medium bodhisattvas and lower gods to including gods who have only a tenuous commitment to Buddhist Dharma, gods, Nagas and deities. And they also include the recurring form, the returned form and as a reincarnation of the Buddha's own physician whom the Buddha was sent to the Buddha by one of the kings whom the Buddha preached to, that's Divaka, also shows up as a deity invoked in medieval Chinese Buddhist healing liturgies. So the process relies on divine assistance from a really wide range of figures. How does the process work? Well, I've been looking at the language of liturgical materials and this language, the words spoken are filled with very highly condensed allusions and metaphors, some of which are great potent in the sense of powerful, compressed notions of healing and well-being. So just to read, let's read just the first example from a liturgy. This is in the prayer part, so once the merit has been transferred to the beneficiary, what's the wish, the year-end one, for this particular person who was sick? May the crown of his head be anointed with ghee and the reign of the Dharma enriches body. May 10,000 fortunes gather like clouds and the 1,000 calamities roll away like fog. So the process is conveyed, not simply by saying, he'll get better and won't get sick again. It's conveyed through processes that are carried out, perhaps by deities, perhaps in an imaginary space, perhaps with substances that we can't all see right now, but they're really luscious kinds of figures, anoint shampooing with clarified butter, enriching the body with a fertile, warm rain. These are pretty potent images and there are plenty of other metaphors. I started to compile this here and stopped. These are strong, just from this section of the liturgy, the various liturgies for healing. Remember our sixth century informant, Galzushan, who said, first go to a doctor, people first go to a doctor, or they go to a Taoist, or they go to an exorcist, or they go to a Buddhist priest. We find throughout the literature that many therapies are considered. Few are ruled out in theory. The question is, are they effective? So here we see these are illustrations of the Baishaja Guru Sutra from Dunhuang and their examples of people pursuing other forms of healing that are not specifically Buddhist and some of them seem to be okay. Here's a poor man lying on his back and being fed with a long spoon, but this guy, this is the one of the nine forms of unfortunate death is you take medicine and it kills you. But of course, the other forms that can be practiced, this, my anthropologist friends disagree with me, but I found something like this illustration in four or five places, illustrations of what is secular exorcistic healing supposed to be like? What does it look like in the murals illustrating the Baishaja Guru Sutra? And it shows this group, perhaps a female, perhaps a woman, shamaness, and accompanied by a singer to heal this person. But the best methods, of course, are Buddhist and those are the ones displayed with most sumptuousness. So the ideal form for therapy is sponsor a Buddhist ritual, a Buddhist feast and the ideal form of that, of course, is for the Buddha and his monks. So we'll do the second best and we'll make it for the local monks, but you see the monks, you see people preparing a meal, you see banners, which are always supposed to be involved in healing rituals, and you see a seven tiered lamp here as well. So let's come back to London. Kersen Street, 1920s was when this church only the facade remains, was first, was built. Healing is but one part of a broader process. And if we were looking in detail at the inscription, heal the sick, cleanse the leper, raise the dead. They edited, of course, they're choosing here from the book of Matthew, they left out cast out the devils. But nevertheless, the same understanding of sickness, death, disease, and some kind of either resuscitation or ultimate rebirth, ultimate salvation is also part of the Buddhist world. And I think one really nice example with which I'll end in the Chinese Buddhist world for making that point is the depiction of what happens in the Pure Land. So if curing is simply the first step in the process, we would next think perhaps rebirth in the Pure Land is the final step, but it's not. It's the penultimate step. Curing and the liturgies, some of the liturgies will be reading, bear this out. They narrate a journey and it begins with curing of illness, it can extend to all beings. And then the next step is rebirth in the Pure Land here with Amitabha in the center, Bodhisattva's, Mahasattama, Praptava, Kiteshvara on each side, musicians, dancers, more Bodhisattvas, ornate, lovely three, four tiered architecture, and a pool here. And it's this pool I wanna look at. I wanna look at some of the lotus buds in that pool because they picture a being who is being born into the Pure Land. So you might think of this as a baby, but if we're lucky enough to be reborn in the Pure Land, this is exactly how we are reborn. This is a person being reborn into the Pure Land and this person enjoys several benefits that we don't. So we, in the Buddhist view, in the Buddhist view, birth is impure. So the Buddha had a pure birth. He was born from his mother's side magically. This human being, this being, I don't know, he's mostly human, not fully human, but mostly human. When he's reborn in the Pure Land, he also is born not through the usual impure method, but he is reborn in a flower where he has gestated for a number of years. But that's not the end of the story and the liturgies may clear. First, cure the illness to achieve longevity that those benefits can be shared with others, family, ruler, all sentient beings. Purify body, mind, and speech to prepare for death. That allows one to achieve this condition being reborn in the Pure Land. And once there, our liturgies continue, one is supposed to hear the Buddha preach and with one's own ears hearing directly from the mouth of the Buddha, one will achieve final enlightenment. That is the ultimate cure. I'm gonna stop here and I'm happy to take questions. Thank you very much. Interesting, very rich and insightful lecture. I think, especially the visual material is very telling of many stories actually. I think maybe I should forego my usual privilege of the chair and open up to the public. I'm sure there are lots of questions. So, or should I take my privilege? Maybe I should ask one question. The coast of healing, you're talking about donations and it makes me think that that is a very important part of the process as well. There is no healing without paying for it, or is there? Payment is always required, but payment can take different forms and often our sources revert to the importance in Buddhism of intention. So, if the intention is pure, even the smallest act of giving makes a difference, but it has to be a pure intention. The least costly act of healing I've seen thus far involving a donation to the Sangha is the nun's example that I showed and out of those 14 different liturgies, 12 of them were donations by nuns and it was clearly, it was their old clothing, a couple pieces of their old clothing. I am compiling a list based on Dunhuang materials because we have about 100 different records of donation for specific acts of healing and especially funerals. And of course, which of course funerals are the biggest business and the biggest concern, funerals and memorial rights, but healing comes second after that if we look at the numbers of liturgies that survive. And so, there are some records and they range from the quite humble to the quite ornate either from the local ruler or from non-Dunhuang sources we know, emperors often for their wives or empresses, constructed a new monastery and endowed it and made sure that monks were there around the clock to chant and perform rituals on behalf of their wives or their mothers. So it's a big range, it was a very adaptable. Yes, I do, they all follow that seven. So the ones, the liturgical handbooks I'm looking at use a fairly common in the sense that it's shared across and they use seven steps in the ritual, but for the funeral ritual, in place of praising the beneficiary, you would praise the deceased person according to their station in life. And other than that, they're very similar and the reason is they're both oriented towards that ultimate or towards that last step. And so you can include healing now in that step. That's just the step prior to when healing fails then we add the memorial part. So they are very similar. Now, this is not to say that a funeral is the same thing as a curing event. These are rituals performed by Buddhist monks. They're not at graveside. So they're different. The monks tended not to get involved with anything directly involved with the corpse, for instance, that was somebody else. That was another religious specialist. And we have evidence of that already from the medieval period. It's very common in China and other parts of Asia now that those duties are divided. They're corpse specialists who are considered to be polluted and have other kinds of specialist knowledge or human answers. And then there are people who take care of the memorial part. It could be except for, I mean, so the number seven has a lot to do with transition in general. And this claim is not original to me. So the Buddha's meditations are often thought to have proceeded through seven times seven. The world over transition is often bound up with a number seven. The Bhasharaja Guru text in particular says for healing rituals, use seven times seven. But it's clearly, it's involved with both with death and with healing. And they both involve very big transitions. Are there questions there, Professor Whitfield? I think I was very taken when you identified the scene of exorcism in cave 148 to relate the figure dancing with a peepa, providing music and dance, which of course are also acceptable offerings. If we turn to the silk painting in the British Museum with the 12 vows on one side on the Buddha's right and the nine forms of violent death on the other, there is, we wait until it comes on the screen. It's quite a way back. There we are. Yes, so you showed us the scene that's circled in the upper right there. But immediately above that is a female figure dancing with a peepa.  And beneath that canopy on the ground are two slabs, one smaller than the other like paving stones, placed to form a kind of mandala or altar. So I think this would be relevant to your study. Thank you, that's extremely helpful. I've already built, I came into this material through your thorough study of it. What do you think she's doing? What kind of figure do you think she is among these specialists? Well, I've never had a satisfactory answer to that because the other scenes that are below this all show the various unfortunate circumstances in which one might come to grief being pushed off a cliff or falling into a lake or into a fire or hunting is one where accidents can easily happen, I suppose. But anyway, there's a hunter there. So these are the circumstances. So above that, obviously this female figure dancing and playing music is not, well, I suppose you could interpret it as being excessive indulgence in these. But I think that it is a ritual that's some kind of a ritual. So that's, by the way, I think you can cross off 10th century, it's definitely 9th century or possibly even earlier in date. Thank you, thank you very much. Well, thank you very much for the wonderful lecture, Professor Tizer. You listed, first, as a simple healing method copying sutra. I can give you one of the quite interesting and excellent example from Korea. In the 15th century, Joseon king Sonjo had a terrible disease with his eye, eye disease. So it was very difficult to cure but he was a devout Buddhist, Buddhist monk and he asked his courtiers to bring the most expensive material for writing sutra. That is the sutra of, no, that is the dharani of complete overcome of eye disease. So it is now in Fukuoka and I think it is one of a very good actual examples. Some copying sutra is one of the methods of healing. Thank you. Wonderful, thank you. I look forward to finding the piece itself. I'll ask you later, thank you. Hi, thank you very much. I'm just wondering whether you see any evidence of the tension between monks, freedom to treat other monks in the Sangha and between treating the laity in any of the evidence that you've looked at. That's an important question and behind it, for those of you who don't know, Dr. Law is asking, is referring to the frequent prohibition by almost all official sources for monks to practice healing among the laity. And this is all across the Buddhist world, the vineas, all surviving vineas maintain this prohibition and prohibition on fortune telling, on healing, on exercising, on child, on assisting with, on serving as, nuns cannot serve as midwives, but the state agrees as well. And so in secular law in China, there's the same prohibition. And the answer is not really, that is do I see evidence among the Dunhuang materials? And the answer is not really. So why do I hedge a little bit? I hedge because there are many cases of monks performing these kinds of simple healing rituals for other monks. But there are also many examples of monks writing liturgies that they performed to heal lay people. But there are a lot more, there are more lay roles than there are monk roles in the surviving corpus. But there are a lot of surviving liturgies specifically for monks and nuns as well. But other than that, I don't see any difficulty, no reflection of those intradictions and no indication of that conflict. I wonder how did monks take over the role of healers in the first place and how did they come up quite high in the hierarchy of healers? Thank you. Thank you. This is an important question that the Dunhuang materials actually take us some distance toward answering because most monks did not perform rituals like this. Those monks who performed rituals in general for the laity at Dunhuang were a relative minority and were probably senior. And I say this based not on the research that I've done but drawing on the conclusions. Some of it statistically backed up and by my colleague Hal Chun-Wen, Professor Hao of Shoshida of Capitol Normal University and his first book on the social life of Buddhist monks and nuns at Dunhuang. He has a very nice description of and calculation of how much was paid for certain kinds of rituals. Who were the monks who performed them in relation to other monks and so on? Professor Stevan, thank you very much. I come from China. I am visiting Swana, just come here. Because my English is very poor, my speak in Chinese. You try it. Oh. You try it. Sometimes I can't understand. Oh. Thank you very much. Because my English is really very high. So I try to use Chinese to ask you a question. I have two questions. Actually, your speech today is very good. You have found a lot of ancient Chinese materials, such as wood-pulled materials and a lot of paintings. Some classic and so on are very good. I think compared to the study of the local scholars in China, they are still good. This is a very deep impression on me. When I heard your report just now, I think I have two questions. The first question is, when you talk about Chinese people performing extreme treatment, they will look for various methods. In these methods, you talk about a Buddhist treatment and a Taoist treatment. So in the traditional Chinese people, the treatment of Taoism and Buddhist treatment are more similar to the treatment of the people. This is the first question. The second question is, in the treatment of Buddhism, there is the talisman, the talisman. As far as I know, the talisman in the talisman is more about the treatment of the Taoism. The talisman is not the treatment of Buddhism. So I don't know where you got this information from. We need to talk about this question. I will ask you a question. Thank you, I am sorry. So the visiting professor asked, what was the mix of Buddhist Taoist and folk elements, or popular elements in this material? He was under the impression that practices of nourishing life, if I understood them correctly, were particularly pronounced in Taoism. I'll give one short answer. I will answer it in a short time. Because time is coming. That is that there is a lot of evidence from Dunhuang that shows that the lines between folk practice or local exorcistic practice and local healers and local doctors on the one hand, and monks on the other hand, that they were doing very similar things and providing versions of rituals without much conflict between them, and that they were working on behalf of a populace that did not draw very strict lines. There's much less evidence at Dunhuang about Taoism, but that largely had to do with the particularities of the history of Taoism at Dunhuang in far west China, because Dunhuang was once the An Lushan Rebellion happened in the middle of the 8th century, and the central state was weakened. The Taoist presence at Dunhuang declined rapidly, abetted by the fact that a very powerful Tibetan military regime ruled Dunhuang for the next 80 years, and so that really rang a death knell for the Taoist establishments. So it's just very hard to make a comparison. And then after that, Taoist institutional life was very slow to regrow on the period of independent rule from the 830s onward. The simple saying in Chinese is that Buddhism and the so-called religious customs are really not far away. They often come. I have to put an end to the discussion. I'm sorry for this, but we have to leave the room. However, we have a reception just outside here, so I invite you all to stay. And ask more questions in a more informal way. I'm sure there will be another good time to talk more, to get more of Professor Tizer's knowledge. But for now, let us thank him for a wonderful contribution. Thank you.


Hi folks. Greetings. Happy new year. We'll wait until five after to get started. You can start adding your names and any agenda items to the meeting notes which I've posted a link for in the zoom chat. I didn't see if anyone else joined. We'll get started at five after. So just a couple of minutes. Happy new year and you can add your. Name and any agenda items to the meeting notes. Hopefully folks can hear me. Yeah. All right. This call is being recording if recorded. If you didn't hear the notice when it started and we. Publish these to the. C and C F YouTube. Channel and the CNF working group. Q. If you want to go look at any of the old ones you can, and this will be published there. I welcome. Let's see. We are at five after. Why don't we get started? Meeting notes are posted into the zoom chat. And then we'll get started. For folks that are new to this call. This is the cloud native network function. Working group. It's one of several. Focus initiatives within the CNCF. And this call has been recorded and will be posted on YouTube. At some point after it's done. I'm going to bring up. The screen share. We'll see my call there. I'm in my screen share on the call. Add your. Name would be appreciated here. This meeting. Group meets Mondays. 1600 UTC. We shift. With the time changes, but it's. I guess it's. I guess it doesn't shift. I'm sorry. It says 1600. But we should be this way for a few more months. And. For those that don't know. The main purpose in this group is. Around. Documenting and publicizing on. Cloud native best practices for talk on applications running on. Environments. Kubernetes based environments. That's what we're doing our main focus right now. We have a lot of documentation that we've been working on around. Use cases, user stories. We're going to be publishing best practices. Also publishing or writing up things around. Problem areas. So if you're trying to. Utilize the Kubernetes environment and. Having. Problem. Adopting any type of technology or. Methodologies or whatever, then we want to note those and try to see. What are the problems and what tips and. Things that we can have to work with those. Usually that's. General generic. Vanilla Kubernetes, but if it's specific environments hosted environments, then we want to know those too. Some environments. Or I should say one of the best practices that we had. It's done a lot of talk about was. In the area of security and specifically least privilege. So we had one. Practice that we wrote up called non route. So not running your. Processes and containers as the root user. There's a lot of different things you can do regarding security. If. If someone say discover an exploit or there is a bug. Maybe just something goes wrong with your application. So not having a route. And will limits the damage within the container. So. There's a lot of other places that. You can have problems, but this is just one area. So it's recommended to not run route. And we've written up some stuff around that. So that would be one of the areas. I'm going to jump right in. If someone has any agenda items, actually, I'll just ask, does anyone have anything that's not written? We have. I'll go over the upcoming events as well. But anything else to add. I don't know. Taylor, you remember that I sent you okay. The. You know, the very, very early draft of my next best practices. Around. If we have a few minutes, okay. Somewhere along just a small feedback would be helpful for me. If it's if this is the. The best way to go and start to creating from this. Items. In the repository. Yeah, for sure. Would you like to. Drop a link in here and we just get some feedback right now on the call. I mean, even if it's minor. Sure. Kind of give an overview of it. And then if it's. Do you have a comment access available on the. Yeah, I will open it. It just opened comment access. Since if we're going to drop a link in here, don't want to random people on the internet modifying it. But if they can do comments, then you can approve or. Or reject. Sure. All right. So just add that. Below the meeting host review open floor quest. Okay. Okay. Does anyone else have anything they'd like to add. Or have any questions just about. The CNF working group. Okay. So. MWC Barcelona. Is anyone going to be there? Do you know of any specific interesting events? I don't know of anything that's made it from people that I know that submitted. For MWC. How about. One summit. Okay. So. Cube con EU. See if these are closed. So if you didn't get a man that's too late for that, but if you have something interesting. Feel free to add. Add an entry here just so that we know about it. And everyone in the group can see it. I can, I can share. I can share that I'm on the program committee for the networking track and there are lots of interesting things going on there. So. And it's a pity that only only a handful of them will make it to the conference, but yeah. On one summit or cube con. Keep calm. Sorry. All right. Cool. And I'm well. I guess when, when they make it through it can add them. I guess would be the next thing. Yeah. People that don't make it through Nikolai if it's the same super interesting, maybe you could tell them to come. Tell them to come, tell them to come talk to the working group after they've been rejected. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So there is a, there's going to be a co-located event that since CF is putting on cloud native telco day. So for anyone that doesn't make it. Through the CFPs, maybe for cube con itself, maybe try to get them over, but. Probably ask them anyways. So if, if you're. Available. At those times and you'd like to. Be presented the cloud co-located event, cloud native telco day, then. Let me know. I don't think we have details yet for submitting on that, but we'll get that soon added as soon as we have it. I should hear more this week about that. Okay. I'm safe. He's not open for the N.A. I'm going to go ahead and pull up the pull request. Oh, we have several here. What do we have? 25 days ago. So is there anything else on. Jeffery's. Air gap. What happened? Unicorn. There's another unicorn. It loaded this time. That hasn't been resolved. This hasn't been resolved. Probably need. Someone else to step in. That would be interested in air gap to help. Jeffrey. Is no longer at charter and. Getting things going at his new. Job and we'll see how much availability has gone forward. I don't really see anything else, but this is still something. Folks could look at and give some feedback on. Especially if you do. Like we have some of these that got there were able to be resolved. So if there's anything where you want to change. And you click on the plus. And then suggest and edit is the most helpful way to move it through. But you can take a look at this one. These user stories. So these user stories will be helpful in many areas. To help us. Supplemental documentation. I'm going to move on. What do we have? Best practice compliance. Oh yeah. All right. This one. Folks can look at it. It's not ready yet. Got to get back. Continue on it. This is one of those that are. When you. When you're looking at a set of best practices, or you're, you're working on the test. Maybe you're working with the CNF test suite and trying to. Pass as much as possible, whatever you're, you're trying to improve your software and going along, but you're found an area where it just doesn't work. This is an area where you don't feel like you can follow. A recommended best practice for whatever reason. Very valid reason. Maybe it's in conflict. You're following like HIPAA compliance or something. And you can't do it. You can't follow something because it would conflict. Well, this. Is about, and we need to update the title there, but this one is about. Documenting. Any type of exceptions. You know, and communicating where you can. Where you're not able to be compliant. And the reasons and stuff and making that easily accessible for. The people that care about this, you know, so this could be the ops team at a. Service provider or wherever else. Documenting the reasons around that. And then. Some suggestions there. If anyone has comments or wants to add to this. That would be good. But this one is definitely a draft right now. Any comments or questions? Otherwise I'll move on. Oliver, are you here? You are here. Yep. Here you go. This is all you. I'm going to let you. You want me to screen share or you want to take over. Yeah, no, it's fine. You can just, you can. Yeah, just keep it up there. I mean. Yeah, I think this is what we. Open this poll request just before the holidays. I think we, we've done this in the past. We have already today, we have a use case, which really looks at stateful CNF. I think we're trying to go a bit lower level sort of to tackle some of the user, not, you know, not some only use case, but some of the user stories. I opened this up with Taylor here on, you know, just before the holidays. And these are mainly derived out of, you know, what I would say 4G and 5G, you know, online charging system perspective or a convergent charging system company I work for is, is offering a product in this area. So these are some of the challenges that we face in terms of, you know, cloud native for places where we are dealing with state, need to manage state as part of a 3GPP compliant 5G core. So that's where these use cases are, are deriving from or use user stories are coming from. I have tried to genericize them a little bit more. And the reason for that was just simply to try to create some appeal for others who might recognize. You know, some areas where they are also facing some of the similar challenges. And I see that we've had some comments on here that, you know, maybe these are more IT related. And, you know, I don't totally disagree, but they are in fact network related. So we are talking about CNFs, talking about network functions. And I certainly see the CHF as defined at least in 3GPP. That is a network function. And therefore, you know, there are some, there's some interesting challenges that I think we need to work around with. So by all means, if you have thoughts, comments, please do have a look. This would be interesting to see if we can get this to push it a little bit further along. Do you want to give a, just a quick run through of the stories and use cases? Yeah, let's, why don't you come down then to the first one? Okay. So, yeah, I mean, basically the way I would look, sorry, go up just a little bit, I'll apologize right there. Yeah. So I will try to run through it fairly quickly. If you look at the, you know, the way that it works is we start off kind of at the highest level and sort of what I'm doing by doing the way I've done this is to say, look at this use case, talk about a CSP, a service provider, you know, just recognizing that there's, you know, almost at the highest level, there's a need to maintain, you know, persistent data, things like subscriber information, account balances, quota balances, you know, different things that are used along the life, the journey of a subscriber. And also recognizing that that data may be fairly static in nature or it may be very dynamic and changing, you know, all the time. This is just kind of a starting point to this. And then I go through and give just a few examples with the user stories. So, you know, from a user perspective, I have a, I have an address on file. I may need to change that, you know, I expect my provider to be able to allow me to do that kind of thing. So it's just making the case that the CSP needs to be able to handle that. At the same time, then if you move into sort of the point number two here, it starts to move into cases which are more, you know, dynamic in nature. So things like I have a balance and I expect just like my bank, I expect my bank to be able to maintain my balance. And it should be accurate. Or, you know, things that I have purchased, if it's a, if I've purchased a number of, you know, gigabyte, for example, I expect my service provider to maintain that an accurate balance of that. Because that will also be used to trigger different decisions, whether or not I can use a service or continue to use a service or perhaps my quality of service has changed because, you know, some threshold has been met. So that's kind of the very first user story or use case user story. Then you go to the next one, which is basically the way I see this is kind of nested saying, okay, well, that's great. I'm in that situation, but you may find yourself depending on what you're doing. You may also have a need for things like real time and low latency. And this is certainly, again, an area from an online charging system. The need for real time is quite key. So I've described this in a use case, you know, that basically just describing it as being able to do perform real time crud actions. So, you know, when we create things, we want to be able to update them and to delete them. And there's a number of different reasons why this would be necessary. And one of the main ones from an online charging perspective is that you're trying to limit the financial exposure to primarily the service provider, right?   So this is where sort of the real time low latency comes in. And if you look down to, if you scroll down just a little bit, Taylor, to the user stories here, I just outlined a couple of examples. No, not that far, not that far. Just go up a little bit to those three green. Yeah. So the user stories here is just kind of, again, playing from subscriber doing different things. The first one saying I want to access a service.  But before I can, you know, CSP needs to be able to determine if I'm allowed to do that. Likewise, if you look at number two, this is really, you know, I'm using a service. And the quota that I have, you know, from originally been allocated is, is going to be consumed. And therefore, you know, under the period of me using a service, there needs to be frequent checks to make sure that I'm not going over and beyond what I'm allowed to do. And again, it may serve to make different decisions, which is the third point. So looking at an example here, you might have in 5G and IOT device in a factory, a smart factory, and you're, it's attempting to access higher quality of service, network slice to accommodate a spike in production. So there's a need to, you know, get a better quality of service. Well, before we can enable that, we may want to first ensure that the device has, you know, the possibility to do so or if it has, you know, if it's already utilized, for example, a threshold that was, you know, allocated for the week, for the day, for the month, whatever that might be. So this is just an example of how it might be used, you know, and if you're not, if you don't have that threshold or if you don't have that balance, then you'd be denied or that particular device would be denied if you're stepping up to a higher quality of service. So again, it's just examples of how that really in the end, it's the persistent, you know, this persistent and dynamic data is being used and carried forward to make different business decisions. If you scroll down just a little bit, then, Taylor, we'll get to the next point here being the high transaction, just a little bit there, high transaction processing. So, you know, in addition to that, you know, I'm drilling deeper and deeper to sort of some of the use cases that we face. And one of the things is that we're dealing with, you know, quite a large amount of transactions that are taking place per second. And I think most of us are probably familiar with, you know, if you're looking at it from a 5G perspective, you know, the expectations, this is just going to continue to grow. And we have, you know, some, we have some examples ourselves. I think I've mentioned it in here. And I don't remember, give me a second here. So, you know, we have thousands, for example, per second of transactions per second.  You know, these, but these are business decisions, right?  And I'm saying that it's important to be able to do, you know, to handle a very high, high volume. So it's not just, you know, one or two transactions per second, but we're a high number and we're, you know, needing to do things on a very low latency basis. So that's kind of, you know, that's that complicates and challenges things technically for us a little bit further. If you go one more, a little bit down acid compliant. So I think from our perspective, this is not an option. So again, this is something because we're dealing with financial transactions, the expectations that these can be relied on always, that they're accurate always. So when you're making decisions, you know, financial nature, it can't be, it's not okay to make decisions on things that are not yet accurate or, you know, maybe accurate later, but at the given time, you know, it may be incorrect data. That's not okay. So we are required to be acid compliant. So this is again, one of those things that, you know, you say, okay, well, how do we ensure that when you're dealing with perhaps distributed data and, you know, high volumes and low latency responses, you know, things become, you know, more and more challenging. So that's, you know, again, another one I think would be interesting for us to explore some of the best practices around how, you know, others, you know, again, as you fall down this tree, it's sort of how do we handle that? And then if you have to do that as well, how would you do that? You know, where's some of the technologies that, you know, might be possible to use or best practices that might be, you know, useful. I don't want to take all the time here, Taylor. So if you just want to slide down, I think we've got one, maybe two more. The availability and continuity, you know, I'll kind of try to go through these a little bit quickly. Yeah, I mean, as users, I guess, if we think about it, you know, we're expecting our services to work, right? I mean, we don't, we want to make sure that they're, you know, I say, at least from a customer perspective, the expectations is that services that I want to use are available 24 seven, 365. So, you know, CSPs need to have that high availability. And I don't want to pigeon us into sort of the five nines or something like that. And I was thinking mainly from the perspective of, you know, how you accomplish that, whether it's you have the resilience and you can, you know, you can spin up, you know, if you've got a number of instances running of a particular service, one goes down, well, it's not the end of the world. You have multiple and you're able to handle that. So that's kind of where this one was coming from.  You know, back to the point, it is making, there's financial implications. There are business decisions which are being made from that data. And again, it's not something we look at at the end of the month. So I want to, you know, erase any notion that this is sort of billing data and, you know, we've got, we still have time, but this is sort of, this is in line service being used. This data is constantly being, you know, in order to make decisions for that subscriber, for that particular device, you know, what it can and cannot do or consume. So this is, this is sort of the last place where I wrap up. And then, you know, I'm sure there are other challenges, other, you know, things that need to be addressed, but these were the key ones that I think from a, from a matrix perspective, what we, what we see and what we face within our area that we work within, you know, convergent charging systems for 5G. Hopefully that helps. So hopefully it provides some clarity. Thank you, Oliver. Comments and questions from everyone. Yeah, and this was to, I don't know if Pankaj is on the, is on the call here, but yeah, I threw a comment in there. I don't, I just think it's, you know, I think there's certainly more examples of where we have some of these same kind of challenges. And I don't think that they, you know, some of them are going to be complimentary. Some of them may be, you know, completely new. I, you know, I don't want to, you know, see, I don't particularly see these particular, these use cases or user stories as being accounting related. I think these are very much, you know, these are, they're online charging, they're, you know, convergent charging, they're, they're in line to service, you know, experience and very much, you know, impact the customer experience in real time in the sense that, you know, if you have inaccurate data, you know, you may be denying a customer service when they should have service or providing them a certain experience. And again, I'm talking people, it's easier for us, but could be a device, could be a, you know, piece of equipment that is, you know, then stop from doing what it should be doing, because it's, you know, not accurate data. And that's why I think this is extremely important to the, to the work that we're doing. Yeah. One thing to always keep in mind is IT related things are used all throughout telecom, just like everywhere else. If you're using technology, then it's likely that both IT, generic IT and problems and generic IT solutions are likely to be, are more than likely to be applicable. They may need some modification, but they're very likely. And of course, these particular set of problems, use cases, user stories in the context, these are being used by telecom applications that Matrix and other 5G application providers are creating. We can always add more user stories. So I don't want this to be a block if anyone wants to write up any of this, these particular ones. So this is referencing a good, a good paper. It's, it's always great, by the way, to reference existing papers and content so we can pull more and more material and show relevance and why it's helpful, important. If anyone wants to take these and do a write-up on any of them, especially if it's relevant to you because you're working on these problems, then please feel free to. And this can be adding to existing documentation because you feel it's related. Go in or create new documents to add into this section. These are, this pull request is going to the docs folder covering any user stories, user cases, use cases, but you can add new ones there or add to existing. I don't want to block this though based on that. So if, if folks can look at it and as long as you don't see any problems, I mean, go update this one. Let's get it merged. I'll do it. I'm going to do a review all over this week to go through and make sure there's no, you know, spelling or grammar or anything that we don't want to adjust slightly. And otherwise you'll have a thumbs up for me in the next couple of days to merge. And we want to get some reviews here. If anyone doesn't have, if you're not listed and you'd like to be added as a reviewer, then just let me know. But feel free and add comments and you can put a thumbs up in the comments. Once we have a set of thumbs up and we've addressed any concerns that we feel should be addressed before merging, then we'll merge it. Similarly for the, this one that Ian's working on, if you add comments, we'll try to address those and then ideally by next Monday we can get both of these merged, but for sure the stateful. The air gap may take a little bit longer because Jeffrey's not available. But I think again, this is, these are just areas we're trying to give context. And then we can add to that context. Does anyone have any questions or comments? Otherwise I'm going to hand it over to Ben. Okay. Ben, are you, I'm sorry. Yeah. Are you ready, Ben? Yeah, yeah, sure. Okay, I'm going to stop my share and I'm going to let you share. Go ahead. Just a minute. Okay, while I'm getting back to this window. So again, as part of, wait a second, do you see my window? I do. So, again, I just, you know, our last meeting was way back. So I just getting back to the original story, okay, of, of, of adding security related, the best practices, okay, around the CNF recommendations. And I just simply, you know, started to get together. You know, the best practices from, you know, from getting from the top to bottom, I mean, getting from the most relevant and simplest things with some, you know, very specific with some specific recommendations of best practices.  Okay, but that's the recommendation and it's usually it's not enough, obviously. So what I'm trying to do here is I'm with my proposal was to start from the next network security part of, of, of the Kubernetes installation. Now to set up a cluster. Okay, in the, in the telco industry, which is, you know, somewhat more, I would say more native users, more natively than, you know, users who are, who are using Kubernetes in, in by for through a cloud vendor. So, so I started to collect all the recommendations around that and started with the Kubernetes API, because in the previous meeting, we discussed the two main parts, which was in one hand, protecting the Kubernetes API server and the access to the API server. And the second part was in the general, the, the protection of the Kubernetes control plane and control plane components. So not just the API server, but also the kubel ads, the scheduler, the CD and stuff like that. So, so I just simply started to, I opened this document. Okay. And going through, you know, one by one of the, of the configuration of the API server. And simply, you know, taking the configurations, which are, which I think are relevant to secure installation of the API server. And, and listing here, okay, what, what is the best practice and how to do it. So, for example, okay. Disabling anonymous requests, okay. In API server, so API server wants, won't do anything for unauthenticated users, which is an option, you know, in, in API server that you can enable for many reasons. An anonymous request the API server. Audit logging, okay. How to setting up audit logging and audit log. So you have a trace of any kind of security. Events in case of any concern of security event, you can have a log back of what was done against the API server. The authorization configuration and authentication configuration. So, so one hand, okay. Obviously today we are, we are promoting those also in the security, we're promoting the role based access control in any kind of, of setup. Obviously, okay, no, the authorization is needs to be allowed. But, but, but you bypassing a back. Authentication is, is important. Okay. And something up to how we think that, that the modern deployment of Kubernetes should look like. And today I'm going to, to go through, okay, now of the API, clients, authentic API server client authentication and progressing from here to, to the access to, to at CD and setting up secure access to at CD. And, you know, putting inside, you know, not just, you know, not just the state and but also okay. So what is going to need to be set in the actual deployment. Okay. What is the, the actual recommendation of configuration. And if, at least, okay, someone decides that, that, that for his deployment, it is for some reason it's not good at least we have to make sure that they understand what is, what chances they are taking and what is, what is going to happen if they not use the best practices. And, you know, I think that this might, this might be okay. The resolution here is, you know, is very detailed here. Okay. And, you know, really going into kind of different configuration settings, but on their end, I think that, that this is for someone whose hands on to create the deployment. It is going to be a great way of going through these things because in general, okay, these are not very new things. Okay, these are things which were many myself and the other people from, from a security discussed in different places. Okay. But, but I think that this is going to be in a one stop shop of, of, of how to set up these things. And I would be glad to, to, to get some input. If not, then I'm just will progress. Okay. And, and wait for you guys to go to edit to the actual repository. Thank you so much, Ben. It sounds great to me. I'd like to hear some feedback if folks are have any. Nikolai, you're quiet. Yeah. Have any thoughts. So guys, I really okay, so you can, you know, slack also. And, you know, you can also come I try to enable comments here. Okay. Documents so I will try to finish by the end of this week. Okay. All the. All the APIs are a communication part. Then okay, I would be glad next week to just discuss how to, how to edit in what format we can edit to, to the, to our repository. I assume that we are still recovering from. I tried to, and I tried to access it from an account that you didn't share with, and it's not accessible. Okay. Can you set the settings so that anyone in the world with the link, anyone with the link so that, yeah, sure. Yeah, click on share with Armo bottom left. And then change it to let on the left hand side. Anyone with link, but make it common only. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Now I'm going to refresh. I should be able to access it. Okay, great. Can access it now. And I should be able to say. Make a comment. I'm going to make a comment. Yeah. There we go. I also should be able to, the good thing about this is I should be able to. Yeah. See that that's like a suggest edit. Okay. See that at the exclamation point. Yeah. Yeah. So everybody that has the link, if you have. You know, want to add that you have thoughts or comments or you just want to update like a grammar. Spelling, whatever. Add some clarification. Either add a comment or directly suggest an edit. I'm going to delete my suggestion, but you can suggest an edit. And then we'll look over it. And if it's, you know, it's aligned, then we can just add that right in. And that'll help Ben move this along. Feel free to look at it and review at your, you know, whenever it works for you, your time. Thank you, Ben. I appreciate this. I think this can be a very good one to get in. Awesome. All right. If there's nothing else, then we'll end there. And we'll be back next week. Same time. Same. Hi, everyone. I have a question, actually. Go ahead. Hi. So I'm new here. My name is Charles. And. I wanted to ask how would I, how would I contribute? Because I'm pretty new to this technology though. But I was hoping maybe resources I can probably read all, you know, or anything. Because I find it very interesting. So yeah. Well, if you're wanting to contribute or you're looking, I don't know what you're looking for. If you're, if you're developing an application, trying to look for improvements or want to contribute some more. Yeah, maybe contribute. Probably contribute here, right. Same, I guess. Because technically I'm not that good right now. You know, these aspects. Yeah. All right. So this is a new area maybe. So the, the working group has. Documentation. You can look under the two main areas. I'm going to try to bring this up. I can screen share as well. Let's see. All right. So there's these user stories and use case folders. We'll probably move those under this documentation folder. I'm going to bring this up. But this would be some areas to kind of look and understand. The context around. Problems that are trying to be solved. Specific to communication service provider environments. But a lot of these are generally. Useful for any type of. Networking environment and problems you're running into. And some of them are. Even applicable to. General IT issues. But you have under this user stories. This is a security related set of. User stories. Supply chain attacks. So these are laying down a bunch of areas where there could be problems and then we could talk about. What are different ways that we can try to address these. If, if a. Attack occurs, then what are you going to do? How do you try to prevent them as one thing? And then whenever you can't prevent it and it happens. Then what can you do? And that's what a lot of this is leading up to. Under the use cases, we have different things like onboarding. So this onboarding, that's about. A new application, let's say you have a firewall or. A charging application like. What Oliver was. Presenting user stories related. You're bringing that into an environment. And what are the different things that you may want to think about. And this was actually put forward by a service provider. And talking about some of those. Different life cycle issues. More on the stateful things you should think about. This one's a more specific. To a. Application and set of, I guess, related applications. So BGP. And what you need to think about. There's, if we go into some of these, they have. Diagrams related. What are we looking at here? So these are all areas for context. Under. Let's see. This document. Areas probably not it. Here we go. So the best practice area right now, we don't have any that are published other than the, the non-root. I think in this quarter, we'll probably see a few more. And then more and more come along as we've gotten all the rest of the documentation. The context, but we should start seeing more in here. These are going to be specific. So if you're interested in. Some of the practices that exist in other areas. So non-root is not something specific to seeing us. It's a good practice everywhere. It's utilized in many areas. If you're in a hosting environment. That uses SC Linux like. Red hats. Environments or other. Hosted solutions, or maybe you're, you're seeing an environment that someone's. Building their own. In a non-root based environment, they may have root disabled. Capabilities. So if you're already doing this, but it's a good practice. I mean, even if you're directly running on the host, it's a good practice for a long time to do non-root. We want more like this. And it talks about. Why a very specific practice is useful. And while we're recommending as a general guideline that you can do non-root, it's also useful. And this ties into a lot of those user stories that I pointed out before, those supply chain attacks. And where non-root could help. And then trade offs that you're going to have if you go with root. And then a lot of references. So I think it was Pankai on. One of the other pull requests. I think you could, I'll read them. So these are all areas I think you could go check out if you're interested in. On the documentation side, reading, writing up new ones. The CNF test suite. This effort is around. Implementing. Tests that are checking various practices. most environments where you're already building software and you want to test and validate that things are running as you expect. The I guess implementation site moves at a different speed from the documentation side as we in the working group we're figuring out how things make sense to a large group of people and trying to improve how it's communicated on the test suite we have at this point I think it's close to 50 tests implemented across many different categories so we didn't really talk about the categories but if you think there's stuff that we're talking about compatibility the statefulness that Oliver and talked about earlier security there's a lot around security so there's a lot of different areas so the test suite itself has close to 50 tests if it didn't hit it already over the holidays and this would be another area if you want to come check out and and take a look Thursday if you want to run it so if you actually have an application that you're wanting to test there's a quick start on the main read me where you can actually run and try the test suite out if you already have a Kubernetes environment and utilize an example seeing off if you don't want to try to configure your own yet five steps you can test with it and then you can go check out the install guide and configuration guide for more info and the individual test you can go look at the usage guide if you want to read about those I'm going to bring up security ones here for example like privilege S escalation so this will be on just non-root as their capabilities to do escalation of your container or pod this is actually one that's utilizing the and CubeScape from Armo and you can go read more about this specific test we try to put reasons why it would be problems to allow privilege escalation not that you may not need it that's fine if you have an exception it should be written up but in general we're saying you shouldn't allow it for most components and most applications so we have tests around that there's a lot of other areas and we're trying to write up include documentation for each of the areas as well as remediation if you're trying to improve then we try to link out to different documentation to read up and do those improvements so if you're wanting more on the implementation side then getting involved in the test suite would be a good place this meets there's a contributor meeting that meets on Thursdays at 1415 UTC you can join there there's slacks for both the working group and the test suite channel so you can chat in those but either way it's you know you can get involved read up learn more about the area and happy to have more contributors than any of it including stuff is as simple or straightforward as grammar and spelling mistakes all contributions would be appreciated amazing thank you so much thank you you're welcome any other questions or comments before we end the call thanks everybody we'll see you again next week same zoom same time


Hello, welcome to this short video demonstrating or explaining to you how the academic principles can be used or applied within a virtual learning environment, so our learning environment is loop. We have a suite of 12 principles that were designed as a result of extensive literature review and external and internal consultation with academics. The 12 principles can be broadly classified into three categories and the first category looks at ways in which academics promote high academic standards. The second category encourages academics to design assessment strategies that promote good academic practice in a sense as opposed to designing a plagiarism. And the third category looks at how we can design assessment strategies whereby students are empowered or involved in the assessment strategy. And so what follows now is a selection of screen tasks that demonstrate various loop activities and tools that will help you use loops in an effective way to promote these academic and academic outcomes. Thank you.


Going on everyone Sam here with late in sports cards We're in one box of 23 at bowman draft baseball each da choice for Jonathan L So good luck here at Jonathan see what we've got all right We're gonna start off with a first base auto of Zach Levinson for the Cardinals. It was me and Jacob Gonzalez good chance Nice one there Louis we've got that's pretty nasty to 71 Tommy Troy. That is dope man Congrats on that one Jonathan Sparkle Tommy Troy of the Arizona Diamondbacks first of Tommy Troy Play play just fine right there Oh, yeah, and then a choice exclusive of Trey Morgan not bad either for the raise Trey the ray Very nice for the Tampa Bay Rays That'll do it for your break there Jonathan thanks is always for the sport buddy. Do appreciate it get him right out to my man


The Delphi methodology was used to develop a comprehensive assessment tool for children and adolescents in the child welfare system. The tool consisted of 66 items divided into six dimensions, general information, schools slash work situation, child welfare system history, family visitation history, biological family information, and experiences of sexual abuse. Experts reviewed the tool's format and content throughout its development and validation process. Most of the items performed well, and professionals found them easy to use and relevant. The tool proved to be a valuable and effective tool for collecting sociodemographic information on children and adolescents in the child welfare system, potentially improving their conditions. This article was authored by Olga Fernandez-Garcia, Maria Dolores-Guilario, and Rafael Ballester-Arnold.