Dr Who William Hartnell

Doctor Who and the ‘Betrayal” of Its Futurist Ethos! (25.5.2025)

Decades later, Peter Capaldi starred in an episode that featured a large wall containing an impressive picture of VI Lenin! This is the Doctor Who that flirts with the far-left – when at no time did this series similarly flirt with the far-right (partly because such a dalliance would have been “illegal” at the time). Today, British society has visibly shifted to the right – where what was not tolerated in the past – is common-place today. At no time during the 1960s episodes was the hippy movement mentioned. Punk was not mentioned in the 1970s. Thatcherism was not mentioned in the 1980s. Doctor Who was cancelled during the 1990s and so had no chance to mention the collapse of the USSR. The Vietnam War was not mentioned, and neither was the Falklands War. The Golden Rule was that contemporary human society should not impinge upon the imaginary processes that fuelled Doctor Who’s scientific speculation.

Buddhism: Pali Bhavana and Chinese Ch’an

Chinese transliterations and translations are useful as the early Chinese scholars had to understand the Indian Pali and Sanskrit terms before they could be rendered effectively into the Chinese language. Obviously, some of the early transliteration of Indian Buddhist terms are purely ‘phonetic’ in nature and in themselves do not convey much meaning as ideograms. This represents an initial process of a slow, careful and gradual building-up of knowledge in China about a thoroughly ‘foreign’ Indian philosophy that had to develop an ‘interface’ with existing Chinese culture.