List of games that Buddha would not play | Hacker News Reader

List of games that Buddha would not play

en.wikipedia.org

24 pointssalsais9 comments

Kinda surprised about the hopscotch and ball games... If nothing else, I would have thought they'd be ok as 'exercise' and co-ordination drills ?

> Akasam astapadam was an ashtapada variant played with no board, literally "astapadam played in the sky". A correspondent in the American Chess Bulletin identifies this as likely the earliest literary mention of a blindfold chess variant.

I found it quite surprising that blindfold/mental variants of board games existed then, but thinking about it further there is no reason to be surprised about that I suppose. Many of the games discussed here seem more "modern" than I would have thought.

It is interesting that Chaturaji and Chaturanga are omitted, though I am inclined to believe that is because they didn't exist yet, rather than them being expressly permitted. That seems consistent with the timelines of each: [0] [1] So it would seem that all of the existing board games in India at the time were race games. [2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaturanga

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaturaji

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_game

There's no specific mention of Go or Backgammon which should both have been (perhaps not well) known at the time. Backgammon is a sort of 'race' game likes ones mentioned so may be thought to be on this 'no play' list.

Go is tricky to classify. It may have been designed or used to develop strategic war skills. Another view is sharing an economic market where trying to take too much will result in loss.

19x19 is greater than 8 or 10 rows :)

Nice loophole

Or originally I believe it was 17x17--still good to go.

The defining characteristic seems to be indulging in the mental projection of meaning onto the objects used for play.

What do you mean? What kind of meaning can you project on dice, for example?

Dice don't exist, until you take an object with dots on it and call it a die. The squares on a chess board don't mean anything until you project the rules of the game onto them. The ball is nothing until you project it's importance as a package to deliver to a particular place in reality that you are also projecting as the ball's destination, and projecting a "score" that this action increments.

These games exist nowhere but in ego consciousness.

It would be nice to know _how_ those games lead to negligence more than other games.

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