from "Zenki: Complete Activity"
by Dogen zenji
translated by
Yasuda Joshu Dainen and Anzan Hoshin

By George Herbert

I made a posie while the day ran by:
Here will I smell my remnant out and tie
My life within this band.
But time did becon to the flowers, and they
By noon most cunningly did steal away,
And wither'd in my hand.

My hand was next to them, and then my heart:
I took, without more thinking, in good part
Time's gentle admonition:
Who did so sweetly deaths sad taste convey,
Making my mind to smell my fatal day;
Yet surging the suspicion.

Farewell dear flowers, sweetly your time ye spent,
Fit while ye liv'd, for smell or ornament,
And after death for cures.
I follow straight without complaints or grief,
Since if my sent be good, I care not if
It be as short as yours.

KANJI: SEI SHOU i (life, birth, grow)

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Character Etymology:

From a pictograph of a growing plant, symbolizing vitality.

A Listing of All On-Yomi and Kun-Yomi Readings:

on-yomi: SEI SHOU
kun-yomi: i(kiru) i(kasu) i(keru) u(mareru) u(mare) umare u(mu) o(u) ha(eru) ha(yasu) ki nama nama- na(ru) na(su) mu(su) -u

Nanori Readings:

Nanori: asa iki iku ike ubu umai e oi gyuu kurumi gose sa jou sugi so sou chiru naba niu nyuu fu mi mou yoi ryuu

English Definitions:

1. SHOU, SEI: birth, life, existance, living; subsistence; student.
2. ha(eru): grow; spring up; cut (teeth).
3. ha(yasu): grow, cultivate, wear (a beard).
4. i(kasu): revive, resuscitate; restore to life; let live; spare a life; make the most of; give life to.
5. i(keru): keep alive; arrange flowers (in a vase); living.
6. i(kiru): live, subsist, exist; be safe (on first, as in baseball).
7. na(rasu): cause to bear (fruit).
8. na(ru): grow (on a plant), bear (fruit).
9. na(su): bear (a child).
10. o(u): grow.
11. shou(jiru), shou(zuru): produce, yield, create, give rise to, bear, breed; happen, result from.
12. u(mareru): be born.
13. u(mu): bear, give birth to, spawn, breed; produce, yield.
14. nama: raw, uncooked, fresh; unripe; rare; hard cash; conceited; inexperienced; (beer) on tap; crude (rubber), unprocessed.
15. i(ki): living; freshness; setting.
16. u(mare): birth, origin, lineage; birthplace.
17. u(mi): childbirth.
18. -fu: grassy place; woods.
19. ki-: pure, undiluted, genuine; raw, crude.

Character Index Numbers:

New Nelson: 3715
Henshall: 42

Unicode Encoded Version:

生

Unicode Encoded Compound Examples:

先生 (sensei): teacher, doctor; master; elder; honorific suffix.
学生 (gakusei): student.
生き方 (i(ki)kata): way of life, how to live.
生生 (seisei): lively, vivdly.
生化学 (seikagaku): biochemistry.

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life n.

1. A cellular-automata game invented by John Horton Conway and first introduced publicly by Martin Gardner ("Scientific American", October 1970); the game's popularity had to wait a few years for computers on which it could reasonably be played, as it's no fun to simulate the cells by hand. Many hackers pass through a stage of fascination with it, and hackers at various places contributed heavily to the mathematical analysis of this game (most notably Bill Gosper at MIT, who even implemented life in TECO!; see Gosperism). When a hacker mentions `life', he is much more likely to mean this game than the magazine, the breakfast cereal, or the human state of existence. 2. The opposite of Usenet. As in "Get a life!"

--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.

A CRUST of bread and a corner to sleep in,
A minute to smile and an hour to weep in,
A pint of joy to a peck of trouble,
And never a laugh but the moans come double;
And that is life!

A crust and a corner that love makes precious,
With the smile to warm and the tears to refresh us;
And joy seems sweeter when cares come after,
And a moan is the finest of foils for laughter;
And that is life!

-from Lyrics of Lowly Life, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1896)

The added sugar is the chief draw of the cereal for kids; the taste is nothing to write home about otherwise.

Like most cereals, Life is an excellent source of Iron. (However, if you're eating cereal for the Iron content, drink some orange juice with it. Grains have non-heme iron, which isn't as easily absorbed as heme iron, but which is better absorbed when taken with vitamin C.) Life is also a good source (ie, more than 10% of daily recommended intake per serving) of Calcium, which is an unusual claim for a cereal to make. (And maybe worth ignoring the 21% sugar by weight for..)

There is also a sister cereal called "Cinnamon Life", identical but for the addition of cinnamon.

Cletus the Foetus ♥'s puddles

Today, on my way to school, I was stopped at a corner, waiting for my light to change. The night had been cold, and yesterday's rain had frozen, but now that the sun was out everything was melting.

At my feet, a puddle was growing, fed by runoff coming from the Esso parking lot which lies only a couple of meters away, slightly up a hill.

I thought to myself, "If that puddle gets big enough, surface tension and the irregularity of the pavement are going to split it into two baby puddles. That's like asexual reproduction. And it's feeding from that runoff. So is the puddle alive?"

This, of course, led to hours of fascinating debate in the catbox, but there were too many issues that we were unable to resolve. So I went off in search of a textbook definition of life (as a biological process) by which I could determine whether a puddle is alive. After some searching around on the internet, I discovered that there isn't a whole lot of consistency in the definition of "life." So I've culled what I could.

–1:–
A Life Form is an organic whole.

The first thing to keep in mind is that a living being is organic. This philosophical term means that the entity in question is, as a whole, more than simply the sum of its parts. Modern computer science and artificial intelligence research use a similar concept: emergent phenomena. Life is a Gestalt, a holistic or synergistic or transcendental phenomenon. Organicism is a category of life.

–2:–
A Life Form can reproduce.

A living being can generate another, like being (another organic whole). Known life forms have various ways of doing this, including budding or other forms of asexual reproduction, as well as sexual reproduction (which includes endogamy as well as exogamy). In effect, if an organic whole can so much as split into two new wholes which have the same definitive nature as the parent, the entity has reproduced.

–3:–
A Life Form has metabolism.

Some scientists emphasize the conversion of energy from one form to another. Considered loosely, however, metabolism means the incorporation of outside matter into the form's mass. This may be a prelude to reproduction, adaptation, movement, or simply maintenance.

–4:–
A Life Form responds.

A living being can respond to its environment in certain ways. This can include locomotion, growth against force, homeostasis, whatever. The point is that the body undergoes some sort of motion as a result of something that happens in the environment but which is more than simply the application of brute force on the thing.

In addition to these fundamental or essential characteristics, most life (as we commonly recognize) exhibit