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>”Some questions shouldn’t be asked. Like “What is Tao?” or “What does an >Immortal feel?” or “Do you have an empty mind?” -Max
I did not ask you any of these questions in my posts, are you referring to someone else?
>My comment about Chinese:
>”As for the chinese term of “heart” as opposed to “mind”, this doen’t >change the meaning of text. All the old spiritual texts are written in >special forms of Buddhist Chinese and Taosit Chinese — all specialized >fields that take years of training each. If a person speaks and writes >Chinese and looks at those texts, they would be unable to read them. >There is a reason it is translated “mind” instead of “heart” to preserve >the best translation possible.”Many texts like the ones that we discussed such as the “Nei Yeh” (Inner Training) and The “T’ai Shang Ch’ing-ching Ching” (Lord Lao’s Cultivating stillness classic) contain the chinese text as well as the english translation, all you need is a good dictionary to be able to translate the characters. As for the layered meanings and their contexts, you can infer the basic meaning of these from your training if you have a good teacher, and cross reference them from other sources such as “The inner tradition of chinese medicine” which has a good glossary of ancient terms and their meanings.
>There are only a handfull of people that can read fluently anscient >Buddhist Chinese and Taoist Chinese written hundreds if not thousands >years ago. It takes at least 5 years of specialized studies to even >scratch the basics of learning these forms of Chinese. These are the >people who will translate anscient texts into modern Chinese, so people >like Thomas Cleary will translate them into English.
I did not know there were separate forms of written chinese used by buddhists and taoists. It is true that there are many terms that the average Chinese person is not familiar with, but that is why we refer to scholars and books that explain this!
>If I say most Chinese people don’t read anscient Chinese, is it a right >thought/action, wrong thought/action or neither?
No, I think it was more that you did not specify this when you said “most people cannot understand these terms”, and “some questions should not be asked”. It sounded more like a blanket statement that “these are high spiritual matters that are below most mortals” my mistake.
>”The Chinese term “Hsin” has many meanings. It refers to the “heart” >when it is used in the physical sense. It refers to the “mind,” “will,” >or “wish” when it is used in the psychological sense. It means “center” >when it is used geometrically. It means “soul” or “consciousness” when >it is used in the spiritual sense. It means “essence” or “truth” when it >is used in the philosophical sense. As it may mean something rather >opposite, its relevant meaning depends on context and should be >carefully discriminated and comprehended. For the purpose of inducing >ones thought into the whole truth, one should take the word as a whole >with all its implications. But for other occasions, it should pertain to >its appropriate meaning in each specific instance.”
The term “Hsin” will also mean something different to you depending on what spiritual methods you practice, and what your bias is!
Of course we are still human while we have our vital organ shen egos. Even when we integrate them completely into the collective consciousness of the wuji, the consciousness of nature, we cannot kill the ego! Isn’t that the beauty of cultivation? Taking that individual will back to the source.
and intelligent from you about your own practice. An actual explanation or answer would be nice instead of blanket statements about emptiness that you can’t back up with your or others own experiential commentary.
HAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!! >More MIND and EMPTINESS!!!< Ya ever gonna follow your own advice? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! "The Cessation." that is rich, boy! Does the fun never stop at the healing dao? hooooeeeee! thanks fer the laugh, man.
max is right about ancient chinese. even the most educated chinese people cannot read it and understand it. sure they can pronounce all the characters, but there’s way more to it than that. i’ve only ever found one modern chinese person who can read the ancient texts and comprehend them. he was a taoist monk. it’s like a modern english speaker trying to read beowulf in the original language. everyone studies it in school, but….
even the bible loses a lot in translation and that’s translated from one indo-european language to antoher. chinese is in a completely different family.
there are a few more people than max suggests though that can read it. my one criticism of max’s assessment (which is not his fault) is the use of wade-giles spellings for chinese words. the new standard, in effect sinc ethe 1950’s, is pinyin romanization. the wade-giles method is useless, at least in mainland china, and even somewhat in the West since all the new dictionaries use pinyin for their alphabetical organization. i recommend that anyone who is serious about studying chinese familiarize themselves with pinyin romanization, since it also includes the proper tones, an essential since chinese is a tonal language. hsin could mean heart, new, or a host of other words, depending on the written character and tone assigned to it. thus xin(1) means heart and xin(4) means new, and so forth.
the word “tao” in pinyin is “dao,” and “tao” in pinyin means several other completely unrelated things. it will take approximtaely five whole minutes to explain to them that “tao” (the acceptable englsih spelling of the chinse character meaning “way”) is in fact the same as “dao” in pinyin. if they have a master’s degree or higher. otherwise they may never get it or ask why englsih speakers write it the wrong way.
i’ll go one step further and say that the vast majority of chinese today know less than any of us about ancient chinese culture, buddhist or taoist, and have very little interest in learing anything about it. they’d rather watch the NBA playoffs or “Titanic.”
i remember asking people in china about terms i found in an eva wong book and they couldn’t help me at all. in “art of the bedchamber,” the author of that book also uses wade-giles, but he includes the chinese characters for reference, thus facilitating discussion between westerners and chinese. other books i have use pinyin, and even without the characters, the people i’ve talked to can figure out the meaning and enter into productive dialogue.
finally, if you want to see what a modern daoist from wudang has to say about methods and cultivation, you can read peter falk’s recetn article about his trip to wudang at http://www.taobums.com, not to be confused with http://www.taobum.com. part three is the relevant piece.
spongin and bobbin,
sbHey sponge,
I agree that most chinese people are not familiar with daoist terms, or understand their context or meaning. I think I already said this in a post above.
The texts I was translating from had recognizable characters that I could find in a dictionary and translate. I am talking about characters, not the pinyin or wade-giles romanization. There are many books that give a good explanation of terms and their context in alchemy. One is “the inner tradition of chinese medicine” by Lonny Jarrett. Eva wong also describes these terms in a number of her books and how they were used in texts.
Of course, it is also important to have some experience as a practitioner to be able to relate to the texts from an experiential basis and so that it is not just a head trip. Michael Winn has also extensively researched the subject and gives a pretty good explanation in his lectures on cosmology, and terms. I have found these to be consistent with all the sources that I have read.
yeah, i agree. i’d just as soon never really read anything about qigong or daoism again. the living dao is all that really matters in the final analysis.
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