Merely Transitional was started late August 2011 when the author of this blog - Rodin van Erven - had just graduated from University, where he obtained a Bachelor's degree of Arts after he completed his study ('Languages & Cultures of South and Southeast Asia' with an academic focus on 'Buddhist Studies').
But besides being academically educated in Buddhist Studies over the past few years, the author also gained some direct insights through personal experience of the practice of Buddhist teachings. Primarily for this reason, he was inspired to create a blog in order to share his personal opinions on several different aspects of Buddhism in ways that deals both with intellectual and practical views on these matters.
Also, part of the initial plans for this blog was the goal to open an online store, primarily aimed at Thai Buddhist Amulets. The amulet store soon became the most visited part of the blog, and thus its maintenance required more attention. After a few more months, there came thoughts of building a website for trading amulets. Due to the author's inexperience with web development it took some time before the website was launched.
During the time of building the new website much of the original content from this blog was transfered to Thai Buddhist Amulets dot net. Unfortunately, this lead to cross-posting of the same content. Once all the data was transfered to the new domain the website finally went online in November 2011. Since then, posting new content to this blog basically came to a hold until April 2012, when the design for the website finally was completed. From then on the author had more time again to start using the Merely Transitional blog once again.
The aforementioned stages of development have lead to a slight shift in focus regarding the content planned for this blog. However, for practical reasons the amulet store remains part of this blog, though. But apart from occasional separate blog posts on Thai amulets you will find a wide array of other topics that will be discussed here as well. For example, posts on Kejawen (Javanese spiritualism) and Indonesian mystical traditions and stories, articles on Hinduism and Brahmanism, and Burmese Theravāda Buddhist teachings.
