I came to the questions this site explores the long way round. Physics first: a BSc in Applied Physics in 1976, then a PhD in 1984 in surface chemistry, working with secondary ion mass spectrometry. The career that followed ran along the applied edges of the subject — VLSI development, high-temperature superconductors and the manufacture of thin-film Josephson junctions, fibre-optic interferometry, optical chemical sensors for water quality, Bragg grating sensors. Decades spent persuading matter and light to disclose what they know.

The other training ran alongside it the whole time. I became a mitra of the Triratna Buddhist Community in 1988 and was ordained into the Triratna Buddhist Order in 2012, receiving the name Kusaladana. Twenty-four years lie between those commitments — the questions were allowed to ripen slowly, through study and practice concerned above all with the nature of mind. And the working life itself was quietly bending the same way: from measuring the physical world to consultancy work on actuarial modelling of the value of a life year — part of what became the J-value research — and eventually to help looking after IT for Karuna, the Buddhist charity working with some of India’s poorest communities. Instruments first, then people.

This site is where the two trainings finally talk to each other openly — with a third voice recently joined. Working in dialogue with AI has turned out to be a genuine method, not a novelty: a way of testing whether what physics says about the vacuum, what the contemplative traditions say about mind, and what these new systems do when they model the arising and passing of mental formations are pointing at the same territory. Born in 1954, I’ve been asking versions of one question for most of seventy years, Whats beyond the name and form .