dust

I'm sure they still do. But yes, much more so back then. This is why when it comes to the GD especially, I never discount the original meaning of a word.. edit: H.E. also, if you were wondering how the hell I came to certain conclusions about meanings, I've been finding these websites very useful: http://dict.shufaji.com/word-2880.html http://dict.variants.moe.edu.tw/suo.htm http://www.zdic.net/ and for looking at character variants, http://www.zitizhuanhuan.com/zixing/ can be of use I'm always open to other sources & suggestions!

The thing is...it IS yummy!

My translations are only based on the GD text. For now, I haven't considered modern Taoist thought. So, what I translate might not always agree 100% with modern Taoist ideas. Or, more likely, it will agree, but not how one expects it to. If we assume that this is a very early version of the DDJ, any Taoist ideas that have developed over the last 2300 years since the GD was written were not necessarily fully-fledged conceptual traditions back then, 300 BCE, right? So, as I understand the concept of 為无為 from this particular chapter, I think it is very similar to 无為 . I think that perhaps he was describing the same idea -- 无為 literally means "without action", while 為无為 means "action without action". I don't think he was saying "practice non-action", but rather "to action, there is no action" Then later on this phrase, 為无為 , came to represent the entire meaning of the chapter: become one with action or become one with difficulty etc Did I explain myself well?? Feels like I can't get the words out right tonight

Yes.. Thing is, I took a slight liberty with that particular interpretation. You could see my second translation as following on from the first one, and making assumptions based on it. Action knows no action, therefore There is no action, Service knows no service, therefore There is no service, The ending knows no ending; therefore There is no ending; Great or small, the easiest is hardest; = Great or small, the easiest is hardest; So the wise man, lost in difficulty, or in other words So for the wise man, at one with difficulty, Knows no difficulty There is no difficulty

No problem. I'd been looking at it recently, then yours and Marblehead's comments in the other thread spurred me on to wrap it up and try to get some feedback... I'm doing the transcription of the characters myself. I've been writing them as closely as I can to how they appear on the slips, but of course the meaning is often not the same as it was back then. I've found that this source is closer than most others: http://www.docin.com/p-309516841.html Though Henricks and others have transcribed as 惕, I think that it is in fact 易 written in a funny way (kind of rotated 90o) -- what they seem to have taken to be the 心 radical I think is actually the 日 from 易 猷， though it now means to "plan", originally was a pictograph of a drunken dog, and meant "lost" or "confused". So, it could be either, I have no idea! But in chapter 15 it is used as "cautious" (Henricks), or as I see it, "lost" Also, 古, though it now means "ancient" or "past", originally meant a summation, just as 故 and 冬, though it now means "winter", originally meant "in the end" so together, 古冬 is the ancient variation of 故终 -- "therefore, in the end...." These are just my own ideas... many don't agree! edit: link to scans of the slips: http://www.alice-dsl.net/wulfdieterich/index.htm/

A pretty good friend of mine is from Baoding..she never mentioned this. I'm not sure if that's because she doesn't know, or doesn't want to talk about it, or just doesn't think it's important. She doesn't drink booze, so that wouldn't have helped! Interesting to know though..

Tuscan, a Kazakh from Xinjiang singing in Kazakh and Mandarin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMvosGXWpPE

Marblehead sir.. you asked for it... I really like this chapter, though it's given a bit of a headache. It's already been interpreted in a number of ways, and I feel like there are even more possibilites, especially with the relatively limited text from the Guodian. Here are my 2 translations (so far), in parallel: 為亡為 Action knows no action, There is no action, 事亡事 Service knows no service, There is no service, 未亡未 The ending knows no ending; There is no ending; 大少之多易必多難 Great or small, the easiest is hardest; Great or small, the easiest is hardest; 是以聖人猷難之 So the wise man, lost in difficulty, If the wise man becomes difficulty, 古冬亡難 Knows no difficulty There is no difficulty In the first 3 lines, there is not necessarily a directive. Many people translate as "do this/don't do this", but it doesn't read as a suggestion to me -- rather, as a matter of fact. The directive comes at the end (So the sage does...). 亡 -- literally death or non-existence i.e. action there is no action, service there is no service, end there is no end Or: to an action itself, there is no such thing as "doing action“. For example, to a gun, there is no such thing as firing a gun -- there is only being a gun (that fires/gets fired). So, can we see the traditional idea of 为无为 wei wu wei as "becoming one with action" ? i.e. if all life is energy/action, and if the sage goes with the flow and is in tune with all things, though he may act, he does not know it as "action" -- simply as being one with all things, and the Dao 未 -- the consensus is 味 flavour, but as in previous chapters, that's not how it's written, and it doesn't necessarily have to be what was originally meant. But "to an ending, there is no ending" and "to a flavour, there is no flavour" make equal sense. The rest is fairly self-explanatory..? The ultimate meaning here is the same as Feng's or Henricks's; it's just the expression that's a bit different, I think.

I figured that was it, but was kinda hoping you were quoting Yamamoto sensei! (would've brought a twist to the conversation!) I've been struggling with chapter 63. There seems to be very little agreement amongst translations... but that's a discussion for the TTC forum..

辠莫厚唬甚欲 No crime is worse than deep desire, 咎莫僉唬谷㝵 No fault is more common than greed, 化莫大唬不智足 No turmoil is greater than not knowing what is enough. 智足之為足 Knowing enough as enough, 此恆足矣 This will always be enough (from the Guodian) As I see it, defending oneself from an attacker and eating chocolate and drinking beer and running naked through the mountains are perfectly natural things for a human to do. One can be selfless and still enjoy the experience of being alive. For me, the warning is not to get too caught up in any particular thing. The DDJ is there to help me enjoy life more thoroughly, not to make me live an ascetic existence of fasting, celibacy, and boredom... (Henricks's Guodian translation ch.13)

Which chapter is this? Sounds a lot like advice from the Hagakure, but I don't recognize it from the DDJ...?

Still Dilla And..live instrumentation of Dilla beats. Pretty cool:

I think imports are safe (assuming you trust the brand that's been imported!) As far as pricier imported bottled waters, there isn't a big enough market to be worth it, and besides, the people who buy them are rich folk, including government officials. Nobody wants to mess with rich folk or government. It's the commoners' drinks -- cheap bottled water and made-in-China coke etc -- that I'd suspect. But again, I don't know how common it really is. Always felt it was better not knowing! Can't worry about everything... I came across fake Marlboro cigarettes, but they were easy to spot (apart from the horrible flavour) as they had Vietnamese written all over them...

Available, but not cheap, and not everywhere edit: by "not cheap" I mean that on my average city salary I couldn't afford to be heading to a foreign food store or the Imports section of the local supermarket and stocking up on Evian every week! Though many foreigners make a lot more money than I did!

On a related note, and again I haven't done research on this, I heard from a few friends that some bottled drinks, including water and Coke, are recycled bottles filled with an approximation of the original drink and with the cap fixed back on (which you can supposedly recognize as they melt the plastic back together). Again, don't know how true this is. I started drinking a lot more 青岛 Qingdao when I heard about it... (can't fake that flavour!)

I wish I hadn't watched that now Linking back to the original topic: this is one of the reasons why I don't trust that bottled water is necessarily what it says on the label.. not that it's recycled sewer water or anything that bad, just that it seems unlikely that the millions of bottles of water sold every day in China all come from pure mountain springs...

Well, I suppose we don't always know what others want. People are all different. The "Golden Rule" offers a baseline: you know what you want or don't want -- as opposed to guessing what other people might not want. But there's no point getting too caught up in it. I think over-indulgence in moral guidelines based on arguments of linguistics and logic probably distracts from people actually just being nice to each other...

Enough said. A shame you couldn't have realised this before you spewed that racist nonsense in the other thread.

Yeah, but not just fryers. Lots of nasty places. I don't know how common it really is, but chances are someone who lives in Beijing (or another large city) will have consumed it at some point. Can be quite toxic. I got very sick one night in 2012, ended up in hospital. Seemed like food poisoning, but I hadn't eaten any meat/eggs/etc that day -- in hindsight, I can only assume that it was gutter oil. edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutter_oil

I agree with everyone. I think. I'm made to think of Alan: What follows is just me pontificating based on Mr Watts's words. Probably not adding anything new. Words are names. Nouns, verbs, adjectives... "jump" is the name I give to the thing I do when I propel myself into the air. "Beautiful" is the name I give to something I like to look at. Names are symbols. They represent something, but are not that actual thing. We need to be able to represent things with symbols in order not just to communicate with each other but to communicate with ourselves. Human thought is based on words. So, I suppose it just depends on whether or not one believes that human thought creates a schism. And as the goal of many of us is to be free from thought, we must believe that it does..?

Do you really think it's mountain spring water in those canisters? I'm not saying it's not... just that..y'know.. it's China. Take any ingredients/origin labels with a grain of salt... We're 65% water, so I can't disagree with its importance, but I think people get a little obsessive about the "quality" of the water they drink. H2O is the important part. In Beijing, I mostly drink soft drinks and coffee -- boiled tap water for the coffee, and never had a problem. If you eat in a restaurant, they're likely cooking with tap water and gutter oil, so being picky's not much of an option.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule It seems to have been covered fairly well throughout history. Most seem to be in agreement... As far as the specific wording in your post.. it depends on how strictly one interprets it, doesn't it? I know people who give to charity but who would balk at the idea of receiving charity; I know a tattoo artist who doesn't want a tattoo...

Nicely put "Through meditation I program my heart to beat break beats and hum basslines on exhalationnnnnnn........" Excellent! Can't believe I haven't listened to that yet But... Donuts.. ..you've got me on a Dilla kick now!

it does keep me up on the slang Actually.. almost everything I listen to these days is from the '80s and '90s Or newer stuff from artists who've been around since the '80s, most of whom are now in their 40s and 50s. There's some real wisdom in hip-hop these days..

I go through phases in my music listening. Since late last year until a month or 2 back, I was listening to a lot of Led Zeppelin, Jason Mraz, Michael Jackson, Wang Feng, Wang Fei, Billy Joel, Incubus.. a fairly random collection. The kind of stuff I'd choose at karaoke... Now, though, I find myself back in the hip-hop. Is it a seasonal thing?