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there's really not much to say about the past 3 chapters other than
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Sep 30, 2019 06:27
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 01:02 |
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I love that Dia is just Phos with a hobby. They're full of self-loathing and murderous anger but are totally willing to put it on hold for an aspiring idol career The anime adaptation of this part of the story is going to be absolutely insane. edit: it's fun looking at the picture in this thread's OP after reading the latest chapter lol Cephas fucked around with this message at 23:47 on Nov 24, 2019 |
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Nov 24, 2019 23:43
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Idk if I've mentioned it before or not, but if you like Houseki no Kuni you should do yourself a favor and read the novel Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders. It's about a bunch of ghosts (Abraham Lincoln's son included) who are stuck in Tibetan purgatory and the trials and tribulations that comes with that state of existence. For a novel that has Abraham Lincoln as a character it has really unexpectedly a lot in common with Houseki no Kuni (the author is a practicing Buddhist), and the prose style is nothing short of awe-inspiring.
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Nov 25, 2019 05:46
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 this page is awesome
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May 25, 2020 01:20
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Is Phos Mara, or is Phos Buddha?  Chapter 2. The Sutra of Bodhisattva Ksitigarbha's Fundamental Vows posted:At that time, the World Honored One reached out his golden-hued arms to touch the heads of all the separate transformational Ksitigarbha Bodhisattvas
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Jun 22, 2020 14:46
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Yet again Phos and Cinnabar have been left behind 
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Dec 25, 2020 05:36
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I don't know if I'd say that. The manga starts on a scale akin to a personal mystery (what's the deal with my weird gem family and our monk patriarch? why are moon people attacking? what is my purpose?) and evolves to become a systems/philosophical mystery.what is the purpose of Phos's suffering? can scapegoating all of the world's suffering onto Phos really lead to a happy ending? What does that imply about the nature of the world we're reading about? Is it cruel, benevolent, hopeful...? If the story ends here, it seems like an extremely cruel and bleak story. my instinct is that the story needs to return to the personal scale of Phos's subjective experience so they can get some kind of inner peace, or at least resolution, before the story ends.
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Oct 9, 2021 12:55
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The lunarians from times long past were able to line up and a few of them would be relieved of existence each day by Adamant, but to determine who got to be in line, they imposed a caste system. Aechmea decided to give up his high position in lunarian society to become a leader of the "trash" lunarians, who lived in a state of madness, tearing each other apart and regenerating each day (according to chapter 89). I think the Lunarians end up being a bit like both devas and hell beings (the lowest ones are "trash" and are ruled by Aechmea, whose secret name is Enma). So Aechmea ends up being very much aligned with Adamant, because Adamant is a manifestation of Ksitigarbha bodhisattva, who vowed to forgo his own enlightenment until the hells were all emptied of sinners, and Aechmea is Enma, serving as the administrator of hell. Cairngorm is like... I think Ghost Quartz was a pretty serious person? So Cairngorm was this deep, strong desire that lived inside of them that wanted to come out. Cairngorm is the first gem to become human-like, because they fully renounce the Ghost Quartz part of themself and decide they want their own identity. Cairn seems like the first gem to develop a sense of gender identity, and sexuality, and desire for physical comforts. Their renunciation of the person they used to be in favor of reinventing themselves for the sake of physical pleasures puts them at odds with Phos, who is forced to grow and transform over the course of the story. Cairn wants to be rid of the Ghost Quartz part of themself, and live life as a pampered bad bitch princess. Phos can't let go of Antarcticite, and their desires are existential, not physical: Phos sees themself, and the world around them, as lacking. Phos wants a role, and wants to restore Antarcticite and save Cinnabar, and eventually wants to bring the curtain down on the world. So Phos is very much an idealist who finds both themself and the world lacking in anything worthwhile. Basically, the opposite of Cairngorm, who seems to have no philosophical worries whatsoever, and just wants to live a sensuous life and embrace the self that has finally emerged out of Ghost Quartz's shell. The internal logic of the metaphysics in the story is pretty complicated. But I think maybe, like... Adamant is a machine bodhisattva, created by humans, to bring about their salvation as humanity began to decline. Humans are capable of enlightenment and of purifying the dead, but the meteors that struck the planet destroyed humans, and their aggregate parts reconstituted in the disparate forms of bone, flesh, and spirit. The separate beings are not capable of enlightenment or purification on their own. Adamant was the exception. He could release lunarians from their eternal forms. But because he was damaged by the meteor strikes (Caused by his brother?) that struck the planet, he became incapable of releasing the rest of the lunarian society. It seems implied that Adamant's "flaw" is that he gained a small amount of desire for the companionship of the gems. Because they reminded him of his human companions, and he nurtured and cared for them, Adamant became incapable of wishing for the dissipation all forms of life. On the moon, Aechmea was an exemplary individual who decided to take matters into his own hands to bring about the release of lunarians from stagnant eternal life. He surmised that the best way to do it would be to destroy the gems, thus depriving Adamant of the source of his desire for companionship. But once Phos entered the picture, and it became clear that Adamant was broken beyond repair, Aechmea realized that it might instead be possible to replace Adamant with Phos. Basically, both Adamant and Aechmea realized that Lunarians were relying on Adamant for salvation. He had gone from being their savior to being an obstacle to their salvation. So both of them surmised that it would be better for bone/flesh/spirit to reunite, and become human, and become able to reach enlightenment on its own. They both realize the solution: "If you meet the Buddha, kill him." Adamant recognizes Phos as a human, and thus as his heir in having the power to pray. He instructs Phos to wholeheartedly pray for happiness. The cliffhanger we're waiting on is that Phos has become human, but they're in a really lovely place right now, and it's evidently going to take them 10,000 years before they reach a point where they can wholeheartedly pray for happiness.
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Oct 9, 2021 21:01
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Wow, Ichikawa's art has really entered some awesome new territory The ultimate goal is (supposedly) still for Phos to reach a point where they can wish the Lunarians out of existence, right?
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Jun 25, 2022 16:09
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goblin week posted:Sounds like a sweet deal for the Omelans imo Time to discover gender, put on a party dress, and date an eternal ageless autocrat 
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Jun 30, 2022 13:17
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boredsatellite posted:Oh wow phos actually did it i haven't read the latest chapter yet but this post terrifies me
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Aug 24, 2022 14:19
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it's still good, but the story really was getting funneled into a narrower space when so many plot twists are religious roman a clef stuff like "my name is kongo-sensei but my REAL name is Bodhisattva Kshitigharba Clearer of Hells" "my name is Enma but my REAL name is Dharma Guardian Yama-Ousama Lord of the Underworld" Like I'm not saying that Houseki no Kuni is the nonbinary anime Buddhist equivalent of Left Behind. But, you know.
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Nov 25, 2022 18:17
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symbolic posted:but it's not overt unless you're told about it I think to an audience familiar with Buddhist ideas, it would be extremely on-the-nose. The use of extremely long passages of time (measured in kalpas, a Buddhist term). The imagery of Adamant, who is clearly based on depictions of the Bodhisattva Jizo, combating a host of celestial Devas. Phos's procession of becoming various forms of precious stones (gold, lapis, etc.) is a bit of a deeper cut, but once the pattern is established, it becomes easy for folks to suss out that it's a religious reference. By the time they are hanging out on the moon, it really is about as explicitly a Buddhist story as you can get--Adamant and Enma literally reveal their secret identities as Buddhist figures Kshitigarbha and Yama. That's not a knock on its quality at all. I think Houseki no Kuni absolutely rocks (heh). But like, it's even more Buddhist than Everything Everywhere All At Once, which is saying something.
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Nov 28, 2022 18:49
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Houseki no Kuni Manga Thread - Hitoribocchi the Rock
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Feb 26, 2023 18:05
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Androgynous gemstone schoolkids were OK, but I'm loving these abstract beings hanging out in the twilight between kalpas.
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Aug 25, 2023 04:10
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houseki no kuni ch 1: if you see the buddha on the road, KILL HIM houseki no kuni ch 107: uwu let us pway the narrative definitely reached a tipping point where it went from being a scifi story about buddhist ideas to being an openly religious story. For me that was probably around the period where Aechmea and Kongo were revealed to literally be manifestations Yama and Jizo. From that point on, things seemed to stop being allusions or references and started being almost 1:1 religious correspondences. Not a bad thing necessarily. But definitely a major shift, and for as protracted as the series's conclusion has been, once Phos turned into the godlike being, the overall trajectory of the story seemed pretty set in stone. Like, I don't think this final chapter is going to do some sort of big heel-turn and come out with a shocking antibuddhist critique. My favorite parts of the manga were probably all the moon fuckery, especially everything involving Phos's identity shift upon getting Lapis's head. The imagery around those sections was very haunting and effective. But I really, really dig the latest chapters. Genuinely love to read a comic where a depressed deity, a cartoon fuzzy eyeball, and an assortment of inanimate objects conjecture about existentialism.
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Mar 26, 2024 03:34
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In buddhist terms, the realm of the Devas is a realm without material want, where beings live like gods. However, even gods are still trapped in the wheel of samsara. The moon in HnK is simultaneously a deva realm and a hell realm. Before Kongo malfunctioned, he was able to absolve most of the normie residents of the moon. All that were left were the degenerates that Aechmea was supervising, who lived in a state of madness in a zone called the "wastebin" and constantly murdered and devoured each other ad nauseum, until Aechmea devoted himself to rehabilitating them. Kongo is revealed to be a manifestation of Kshitigarbha, the bodhisattva who vowed to postpone his enlightenment until every being in hell was purified. So even though by the time the gems reach the moon, it's a paradise-like place, it's still coded as being a kind of hell-like existence in the grand scheme of things. the reason kongo malfunctioned is because the fragments of human consciousness floating around in the oceans would occasionally manifest as gems and take on sentient life, and Kongo developed a tiny amount of attachment toward them, a desire for human life to stick around. The problem is that, on a cosmic level, the humans in HnK are entirely hosed, having had their physical forms sundered into three, and their spirits (the moon ghosts) are so old and so weary that they just want to peace out and reach nirvana. so the warfare in the first part of the story turns out to be a mostly pointless war for the gems; the gems and moon ghosts are fighting on a scale of eons, and even types of death that seem permanent (having your body scattered across the solar system) are ultimately solvable because the HnK cosmos is a closed loop, and there is nowhere "outside" of the system without Kongo's intervention. The gems built their identities around a military lifestyle, but once they reach the moon they learn about all sorts of other ways of living, like being a skater or a pop idol or a wife. But the ghosts are way ahead of them on that beat, and know that all of those identities are basically empty on the grand scale of things. Those identities are not suitable stopping points on a cosmic level. So all of that is going on to directly contrast with Phos's existence, as they are basically constantly on fire searching for some kind of meaning to all the suffering they've endured. Or you could say that Phos seeks meaning in suffering. Which is why, when Antarcticite and Cinnabar's problems are solved, Phos doesn't find peace. The peace that comes from the relief of suffering means nothing to Phos; they are only chasing the suffering itself, because Phos, who was always considered weak and useless, has lived their entire existence with a low key background hum of suffering. Phos eventually identifies that constant state of suffering as being the aggregate bits of humanity in them, which they describe as a mixture of desires and qualities like beauty, kindness, and cruelty. The gems, snails, and moon ghosts were all also fragments of humanity, but they were disparately severed. Phos is the first being who becomes truly human, and by being fully human they are able to transcend humanity. This transcendence happens both for Phos as well as for all the others. I think, looking back on the story, rather than Dia or Cinnabar or anyone else, the two central characters are Phos and Kongo. Kongo loved the gems too much to extinguish humankind, and Phos spent their entire existence wanting the gems to acknowledge and love them. So even when Phos achieves a form of enlightenment, there is still a lonely and gloomy tenor to their existence, because their entire existence has been marked by a separation from others. The little rocks are so pleasant and tranquil, see everything that occurs in the cosmos as good, and are so kind to Phos. When in chapter 107 the rocks take Phos to be their littlest sibling, it is a huge mercy for Phos on a character-arc perspective. But I think it's also a philosophical statement, because these are literally rocks; they have no trace of humanity in them. Phos has reached a point where they are able to feel kinship and connection and a sense of family belonging with the earth itself, with the very matter of the universe. the interesting thing is that it's Kongo's brother who saves that last bit of Phos to take on the ship to live with the rocks. In a way he is saving the savior. I think that's one of the interesting things about HnK. It seems to have this emotional investment in being kind and generous toward its savior figures, and imagines people being kinder and more charitable to them than they are to themselves. Cephas fucked around with this message at 16:29 on Mar 26, 2024 |
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Mar 26, 2024 15:24
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Brutal Garcon posted:Partially talking out my rear end here, but(t): the emphasis on "humanity", and what does or doesn't have varying amounts of it, seems at odd with the Buddhist themes. Not precisely the default state of things. "All conditioned phenomena are dissatisfactory" (sabbe sankhara dukkha) is probably the most precise rendering I have heard in English. As I understand it, the world is full of conditioned phenomena in the form of physical states of matter, and sentient beings generate conditioned phenomena in the form of mental states. The rising and dissolution of that phenomena causes sentient beings suffering. But Buddhism teaches that sentient beings can awaken to the truth of impermanence and dependent origination and become liberated from their dissatisfaction. So you know, it's maybe like being born with a pesky mote in your eye. In a sense that's the "default state of things," but also if that mote wasn't there, you'd realize that the underlying faculty of your eye was actually able to see clearly all this time, and it was just being blocked. In an interview from 2016, Haruko Ichikawa said this about humans: quote:Q: And so within this cast, there’s Phos, a character with a clear sense of purpose. “I want to be of help to everyone”. Believing even they must have some sort of role, Phos, using trial and error, continues to search. I felt there was something in common between Phos and the human soul. How are your and Phos’ souls connected?
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Apr 25, 2024 15:32
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 01:02 |
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it's a long time in the future and Eyeball is finally near the end of his lifespan. The last remnant of Phos is a tiny little gemstone of phosphophyllite with a childlike innocence. The planet they arrived in is a pure land without conflict or sorrow, where flowers bloom into gemstones. Phos hitches a ride on a friendly spirit moth, and tries to examine one of the new blooms. But they fall off and crash into it and chip into smaller pieces. They become so small that the 'camera' can't even see Phos any more even when zoomed in on the scale of pebbles and grass. The other rocks tell the remnant of Phos that the rest of them is traveling out there in outer space somewhere, possibly in the form of a comet. The tiny remnant of Phos hopes that if part of them is a comet, it can brighten someone's day. Ends on a shot of a gem who looks like the original Phos, alone at night, gazing up at a bright comet.
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Apr 27, 2024 03:05
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