Geof Nanto

It seems you’re entirely content with your existing concepts, hence there is obviously no need for you to explore further. I don’t see it as my role to try and persuade you otherwise. My posts here can only ever be glimpses of perspectives I find interesting to explore; anyone wanting more information will need to do their own research. These perspectives resonate with some people, for others they have no meaning – or worse, are perceived as a hostile attack….. From Carl Jung - “These melting processes [of conceptual reality] all express a relativisation of the dominants of consciousness prevailing in a given age. For those who identify with the dominants or are absolutely dependant on them, the melting process appears as a hostile, destructive attack which should be resisted with all ones powers. Others, for whom the dominants no longer mean what they purport to be, see the melting as a longed for regeneration and enrichment of a system of ideas that has lost its vitality and freshness and is already obsolete. The melting process is therefore either something very bad or something highly desirable, according to the standpoint of the observer.” From Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - “Consider, for example, the men who called Copernicus mad because he proclaimed that the earth moved. They were not either just wrong or quite wrong. Part of what they meant by ’earth’ was fixed position. Their earth, at least, could not be moved. Correspondingly, Copernicus’ innovation was not simply to move the earth. Rather it was a whole new way of regarding the problems of physics and astronomy, one that necessarily changed the meaning of both ‘earth’ and ‘motion’.”

These are all changes.

You raise some interesting issues here. It seems to me our perspectives, while not at odds, are somewhat different. One of my interests in studying classical Daoist thought is to try and orientate myself to a worldview shaped by a foreign ontology. By way of establishing such an outside reference it’s possible to break out of the unconscious assumptions that underpin our contemporary thought. That was my purpose in referencing Wai-Lim Yip and David Hilton insights into Chinese poetry. It’s also why I want to read Zhuangzi and the Happy Fish. I’m hoping for some poetic interpretations, rather than yet more philosophical ones. (It will be a week or so before I receive the book; it was just today dispatched from the Book Depositary in the UK.) Your mention of different linguistic expressions of time between Chinese and English is exactly one such point of departure I have in mind. Time as commonly perceived as a continuum is entirely a cultural construct. For instance, if I discount any conventional notion of time and instead orientate myself to a world where there is nothing but continual change, then my reality shifts into a continuing present. According to David Hinton in the chapter of Hunger Mountain titled 宇宙 (which he translates as ‘Breath-Seed-Home’), “It [宇宙] describes the Cosmos as an all-encompassing present, a constant burgeoning forth that includes everything we think of as past and future. This cosmology survives from such an early level of Chinese culture that it even shapes the verbal structure of classical Chinese. Rather than embodying a metaphysics of time, rather than tenses reifying a metaphysical river of past, present, and future, the uninflected verbs of classical Chinese simply register action, that steady burgeoning forth of occurrence appearing of itself (tzu-jan)…...”

On what evidence do you base your assertion "that english is lifelong torture" for him? I have never heard him speak but the quality of his written English is excellent, as testified by his numerous works..... Wai-lim Yip has been Professor of Literature at the University of California at San Diego for the past 30 years. A bi-cultural poet, translator, critic, and theorist, Yip has written more than 40 books in two languages. His works of poetry include Fugue, Crossing, Edge of Waking, Thirty Years of Poetry, Between Landscapes, and The Voice of Blooming. Yip’s scholarly works include Ezra Pound’s Cathay, Reading the Modern and the Postmodern, Chinese Poetics, and Diffusion of Distances: Dialogues between Chinese and Western Poetics. His translations include Modern Chinese Poetry 1955–1965, Lyrics from Shelters: Modern Chinese Poetry, 1930–1950, and Hiding the Universe: Poems of Wang Wei. He has been honored as one of the main figures of modern Chinese literary and cultural theory in Beijing and Taiwan and was awarded recognition in Taiwan as one of the “Ten Major Modern Chinese Poets.” https://www.dukeupress.edu/chinese-poetry-2nd-ed-revised/?viewby=title I'm no expert on Martin Heidegger but I do know he was one the first Western philosophers to take Eastern thought seriously, and because of this alone, in my eyes, he is worthy of respect. Although his relationship to Eastern thought is complex and ambiguous, he certainly seriously studied such works as the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi. For instance, he worked for a period of time on his own translation of the Daodejing with translator Paul Shih-Yi Hsiao. (I note with some amusement that you have criticised Heidegger for not being fluent in Chinese and Wai-lim Yip for being fluent in Chinese.)

Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind : Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice By Shunryu Suzuki "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few." So begins this most beloved of all American Zen books. Seldom has such a small handful of words provided a teaching as rich as has this famous opening line. In a single stroke, the simple sentence cuts through the pervasive tendency students have of getting so close to Zen as to completely miss what it's all about. An instant teaching on the first page. And that's just the beginning. In the forty years since its original publication, "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" has become one of the great modern spiritual classics, much beloved, much reread, and much recommended as the best first book to read on Zen. Suzuki Roshi presents the basics--from the details of posture and breathing in zazen to the perception of nonduality--in a way that is not only remarkably clear, but that also resonates with the joy of insight from the first to the last page. <snip> EDIT: Link removed by Moderator

I've checked and under US law it's illegal to link to copyrighted material, unless this is done without knowledge that the material is copyrighted. (See http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/linking-copyrighted-materials ) In this case it's highly probable that the material is copyright, hence my preferred option is for Dawei to remove this entire thread.

I found it quite straight forward. Perhaps you might relate more to this perspective from the the preface of David Hinton's Hunger Mountain....... I've been translating classical Chinese poetry for many years, and slowly over those years I've come to realize that in translation I've stumbled upon a way to think outside the limitations not just of the mainstream Western intellectual tradition, but also of my own identity, a way to speak in the voice of ancient China's sage-masters, and for them to speak in mine. Ancient China had a long and diverse philosophical tradition centered on the nature of consciousness, the empirical world, and the relationship between them; but virtually all of that tradition's diversity begins with the same, relatively simple conceptual framework. This framework, apparently originating at the earliest levels of Chinese culture, in Neolithic and Palaeolithic times, appears in the Taoist and Chan (Zen) Buddhist philosophical traditions and, even more fundamentally, in the structures of the classical Chinese language itself. It therefore provided a deep form that the minds of all ancient Chinese intellectuals shared, even across their remarkable diversity, as did all aspects of the cultural tradition they produced: classical poetry, for instance, or landscape painting. Inhabiting the minds of those poets and philosophers as I translate, I have inhabited that conceptual framework. It is a kind of practice in which I have slowly cultivated the elemental dimensions of that framework over the years; and eventually I wanted to work through that framework with as much thoroughness and clarity as I could, in part because it represents such a remarkably contemporary worldview. It is secular, and yet deeply spiritual. It is thoroughly empirical and basically accords with modern scientific understanding. Although articulated in the written tradition entirely by male members of a virulently sexist society, it is profoundly gynocentric: a primal cosmology oriented around earth's mysterious generative force, a cosmology whose deep sources in the oral tradition may well be female. And it is what we now call "deep ecology," meaning it weaves human consciousness into the "natural world" at the most fundamental level. In fact, the West's separation of "human" from "nature" is entirely foreign to it.

I could well add that the preferred method of the Zhuangzi is allegory and imagery. I know next to nothing of the Chinese language but gather that written Chinese is well suited to conveying such poetic forms. Hence, for me, appreciation of Chinese poetry is extremely helpful for understanding the Zhuangzi. According to Wai-Lim Yip, writing in the preface of Chinese Poetry….. The words in a Chinese poem quite often have a loose relationship with readers, who remain in a sort of middle ground between engaging with them (attempting to make predicative connections to articulate relationships between and among the words) and disengaging from them (refraining from doing so, since such predicative acts would greatly restrict the possibility of achieving noninterference). Therefore, the asyntactical and paratactical structures in Chinese poetry promote a kind of prepredicative condition wherein words, like objects (often in a coextensive and multiple montage) in the real world, are free from predetermined relationships and single meanings and offer themselves to readers in an open space. Within this space, and with the poet stepping aside, so to speak, they can move freely and approach the words from a variety of vantage points to achieve different perceptions of the same moment. They have a cinematic visuality and stand at the threshold of many possible meanings. In retrospect, I must consider myself fortunate to live during a time when both poets and philosophers in the West have already begun to question the framing of language, echoing in part the ancient Taoist critique of the restrictive and distorting activities of names and words and their power-wielding violence, and opening up reconsiderations of language and power, both aesthetically and politically. When Heidegger warns us that any dialogue using Indo-European languages to discuss the spirit of East-Asian poetry will risk destroying the possibility of accurately saying what the dialogue is about, he is sensing the danger of language as a "dwelling," trapping experience within a privileged subjectivity.' When William Carlos Williams writes "unless there is / a new mind there cannot be a new / line," he also means "unless there is / a new line there cannot be a new / mind." Until we disarm the tyrannical framing functions of the English language, the natural self in its fullest sentience cannot be released to maximum expressivity. The syntactical innovations initiated by Pound (aided by his discovery of the Chinese character as a medium for poetry), Stein, Williams (who, among other sources, took William James's lesson very seriously, i.e., to retrieve the real existence before it is broken up into serial orders through language and conceptions), and E. E. Cummings, and reinforced in practice and theory by the Black Mountain poets, John Cage, Robert Duncan, and Snyder, suddenly open up a new perceptual- expressive possibility in English, a new ambience whereby I can stage Chinese poetry according to its original operative dynamics rather than tailoring it to fit the Western procrustean bed.

Here are some photos taken from the veranda of my house. (The previous cloud photos I posted were not my own.)

Yes, probably but it's an interesting website, and these issues are not black or white. It's a non-profit Indian website set up for the purpose of providing knowledge for free to the billion who can't afford it. I can afford books and buy plenty. (I greatly prefer printed books over ebooks.) I fully appreciate that most authors struggle financially. I have a printed copy of Zen Mind, Beginners Mind, but it's great to also have it as a pdf file for easy searching and quoting.

I find it most interesting to read different commentaries for what they tell me about our ever evolving human conceptual reality. These enigmatic stories can be a gateway into the unknown. Hence my interest in reading the essays in Zhuangzi and the Happy Fish. From The Daoist Tradition by Louis Komjathy...... The foundational Daoist worldview incorporates a vision of human existence in a larger energetic, cosmological and theological context. One endeavors to follow a way of life that is participatory, that is fully present to the moment. For example, we encounter an exchange between Zhuangzi and Huizi, a famous representative of the so-called Mingjia (Logicians / Terminologists). THE JOY OF FISH Zhuangzi and Huizi were strolling along the dam of the Hao River when Zhuangzi said, "See how the minnows come out and dart around where they please! That's what fish really enjoy!" Huizi said, "You're not a fish, so how do you know what fish enjoy?" Zhuangzi said, "You're not me, so how do you know I don't know what fish enjoy?" Huizi said, "I'm not you, so I certainly don't know what you know. On the other hand, you're certainly not a fish—so that still proves you don't know what fish enjoy! " Zhuangzi said, "Let's go back to your original question. You asked me how I know what fish enjoy—so you already knew I knew it when you asked the question. I know it by standing here beside the Hao River." (Zhuangzi, Chapter 17; adapted from Watson 1968: 188-9) Although passages like this tend to be read "philosophically:' I would suggest that they are about being alive in the world. Huizi can only understand the conversation , and "reality" through his own linguistic and conceptual frameworks. He can only speak from the limited perspective of his own philosophical commitments, especially through the cognitive faculty of intellect and reason. In contrast, Zhuangzi views existence from a different perspective. By walking through the landscape, by enjoying its contours and presences, by observing the joy of fish, Zhuangzi participates in the underlying mystery and all-pervading sacred presence of the Dao. While the experiences of fish and humans appear to be different, the actual condition of experiencing and participation is the same. Once again we have the recurring Daoist theme of moving beyond words and concepts. And how do we convey this? Through words and concepts.

Here’s an interpretation I’ve previously read, written by one of my favourite theorists...... THE HAPPY FISH—OR: JOY WITHOUT JOY A short but rather well-known story in the Zhuangzi contains a discussion about the happiness of fish. While Zhuangzi and his philosopher friend and opponent Huizi are out on a leisurely stroll, a dispute arises between them: Zhuangzi and Huizi were rambling around [you] at the bridge across the Hao river. Zhuangzi said: "Out come the minnows and drift along [you], so free and easy. That's the happiness of fish!" Huizi said: "You are not a fish. Whence do you know about the happiness of fish?" Zhuangzi replied: "You are not me. Whence do you know that I don't know about the happiness of fish?" Huizi answered: "I am not you, so I surely don't know about you. You are surely not a fish, and this proves completely that you don't know about the happiness of fish." Zhuangzi said: "Let's go back to where we started. When you said 'Whence do -you know about the happiness of fish' you asked me the question already knowing that I knew. I knew it from up above the Hao.” Just like many other allegories in the Zhuangzi, this story includes several puns (which unfortunately do not receive appropriate recognition in many English translations). The crucial pun occurs in the first line of the story, and understanding it is necessary for understanding the debate that unfolds in the following sentences. Zhuangzi's and Huizi's stroll is described as "rambling around," which is you in Chinese (not the same character as you meaning "presence"!). This word is also used in the title of the first chapter of the Zhuangzi: "Going Rambling without a Destination" (xiao yao you) and is an important term for the "lifestyle" of the Daoist sage. When Zhuangzi starts talking about the fish in the river Hao, he uses the very same word for their "drifting along." Both the men's wandering and the swimming of the fish is thus described with a Daoist terminus technicus for the complete absorption in one's natural environment or in one's natural place and position. If one "rambles" free and easy, one has no friction whatsoever with one's surroundings and so is part of a seamless, easygoing process. The notion of you expresses how it feels to be part of a perfect scenario—it is the perfect Daoist "feeling," so to speak. The second pun is based upon the ambiguity of Huizi's question, which initiates the philosophical dispute: "Whence do you know about the happiness of fish?" This can be—as it was obviously intended by Huizi—a rhetorical question meaning simply, "How should it ever be possible for you to know about the happiness of fish?" Huizi seems not to be merely asking Zhuangzi how he can have such knowledge, but denying that he can have it at all. Huizi is addressing an epistemological issue: One should not claim to have knowledge to which one has no access. Zhuangzi, at first, takes Huizi's philosophical attack seriously and tries to defeat Huizi by his own means—but this attempt is not successful. His argument that Huizi cannot claim any knowledge about him—not even his claim about the fish—is defeated by Huizi's reprisal that this argument—the invalidity of knowledge claims about realms one is somehow separate from—proves Huizi, and not Zhuangzi, to be correct. It is epistemologically problematic to claim such knowledge, and thus Zhuangzi's claim to know the happiness of the fish may be some "poetic" expression of one's feelings strolling along the river, but it cannot be taken seriously as a philosophical statement. Zhuangzi, having lost the epistemological dispute, twists the whole philosophical direction of the discussion in the last sentence of the dialogue. He plays with the ambiguity of Huizi's initial question. Both in English and Chinese the question "Whence do you know about (an zhi) the happiness of fish?" can also mean "From where do you know about the happiness of fish?" It can be a question like "From where did you see that fish hiding behind the stone?" If the question is understood in this way, it is not a rhetorical question, but a real one. Literally, Huizi had indeed asked this question, and by asking this question—although not intentionally but linguistically—acknowledged that Zhuangzi knew about the happiness of fish whereas he himself did not. Thus Zhuangzi now answers Huizi's question in a literal way: "From where did you see the happiness of the fish?—"Oh, I just see it from here, from my perspective while strolling along and above the Hao river." And this has again a double meaning: It means, first of all, "I simply see the fish from here where I am" but it also means: "I see that the fish are happy, because while I am rambling here (you) and they are drifting there (you), we are actually sharing the same 'lifestyle.' We are both youing! That's how I know what they feel." This pun with the term you explains whence Zhuangzi knows about the happiness of fish. With his final sentence he answers Huizi in a Daoist way. He fails to convincingly prove his knowledge claim using Huizi's epistemology, but with the final sentence he alludes to the notion of you—and thus supports his claim in a particular Daoist manner. Guo Xiang's commentary to the fishnet allegory explains this Daoist "epistemology": Well, what things are born into and what they rejoice in—heaven and earth cannot change this position, and Yin and Yang cannot take back this livelihood. Therefore it cannot be called strange if one can know what beings born into the water are happy with from [being familiar with] what beings born on land rejoice in. With Guo Xiang's help, Zhuangzi's point is elucidated: Zhuangzi is a human being and his way to you is to ramble around carefree on the land. Fish have a different position and "livelihood," they have a different place in the scenario of Dao, they have a different nature, and accordingly, they have a different way to you—they you by drifting along in water. Each being has its own natural place in its environment, and Zhuangzi can only feel like fish in the water while on land. Both species have their respective "elements." When Zhuangzi claimed to know about the happiness of fish, he did not claim to be able to feel the exact same feeling. He was just saying: I feel perfect by rambling around, and the fish feel perfect by drifting around. Both are you—but two kinds of you, a fish-you, and a human-you. There are different kinds of "happiness," a fish-happiness, and a man-happiness, and these are not exchangeable! The fish will never be able to ramble on the land and feel perfectly happy there, and it would be a miracle for a man to drift around in the water just as happily as fish. Both kinds of happiness are entirely different and separate, but they are both equally in perfect accord with the Dao. Comparing this story with the butterfly dream allegory one might say: Just as the butterfly call be perfectly content and in its element during the time of the dream, and as Zhuang Zhou can be perfectly content and in his element while being awake, so also the fish in the water and the human being on land can be perfectly content and in their elements. They do not know exactly how the other feels, but they can know that each of them can rejoice in what they are. Because one can be self-content in a dream, one can know that one can be self-content when awake; and because a man can be self-content on land, one can know that fish can be self-content in water. The happiness of the fish is the happiness of complete absorption in one's natural environment or in one's natural place and position. This happiness is attainable for fish, humans, and butterflies. But this happiness is not just some kind of emotional "joy." The perfect happiness of the fish or man is that they lose themselves in their respective element. And if they lose themselves, they will also be able to lose their joy. The perfect Daoist happiness is joy without joy. It is not tied to any particular emotional sensation and is not felt in a specific way. The Zhuangzi also says: "Utmost happiness is without happiness." A Daoist sage does not only forget words, ideas, and him/herself, he/she also forgets any particular kind of happiness. The perfect emotional quality is a feeling one no longer feels. A Daoist sage takes on the "zero-perspective" of joy—he/she will know about the happiness of men and fish while enjoying the "utmost happiness without happiness" him/herself. (from Daoism Explained: From the Dream of the Butterfly to the Fishnet Allegory, by Hans-Georg Moeller)

Me too! I remember the first time in a plane just watching the tops of the clouds with wonder for the whole flight. With that marvel of nature there for all to see, I couldn't understand why the other passengers preferred to watch a movie.

Everything about the ever changing weather patterns fascinates me; not only cloud formations but the whole show; wind, mist, rain and stillness itself. I have The Cloudspotter's Guide and it's good but a little too much into identifying clouds for my liking. I prefer to watch them with wonder; my interest is more like that portrayed in the manifesto of the Cloud Appreciation Society you quote. It's coming into thunderstorm season where I live and these are true marvels to experience. My house is in an elevated position so I get an excellent view and can watch them rolling in from way off.

Science is not, indeed, a perfect instrument, but it is superior and indispensable one that works harm only when taken as an end in itself. Scientific method must serve; it errs when it usurps a throne. It must be ready to serve all branches of science, because each, by reason of its insufficiency, has need of support from the others. Science is the tool of the Western mind and with it more doors can be opened than with bare hands. It is part and parcel of our knowledge and obscures our insight only when it holds that the understanding given by it is the only kind there is. The East has taught us another, wider, more profound, and higher understanding, that is, understanding through life. We know this way only vaguely, as a mere shadowy sentiment culled from religious terminology, and therefore we gladly dispose of Eastern 'wisdom' in quotation marks, and relegate it to the obscure territory of faith and superstition. But in this way we wholly misunderstand the `realism' of the East. (From Jung’s commentary to The Secret of the Golden Flower.) There is a wonder that flows naturally from full immersion in the experience of life. Hence Daoist praxis aims at enhancing our attunement to life This is what Jung refers to as the wisdom of the East. It is a realism that many people have never experienced and therefore label it as mysticism with the negative connotations of faith and superstition. Our education focuses on enhancing the intellect and hence many people put their faith in science as their primary source of knowledge. And the scientific method is undoubtable a powerful tool on any path, but as Jung states, “Scientific method must serve; it errs when it usurps a throne.”

“I was a sceptic, a materialist, an engineer, a cynic — and I am grateful I was those things, I needed and need the toughness of mind they have given me, the clarity and the power of judgment. Do not imagine that the spiritual life requires only abandon; it demands the highest kind of intelligence also, the clearest powers of discrimination and judgment. I do not feel I have abandoned my old life; I feel I have built on its foundations, begun to bring it to ripeness.". (Spoken by Dilip, an businessman and engineer, and recounted in A Journey to Ladakh.) From my perspective, this forum operates excellently. In the six months I've been a member, there's only been one person whose posts I thought were out of place to the extent of causing disharmony. That's because he was a prolific poster with excellent rhetorical skills promoting a political agenda of his own. He had little knowledge of Daoism or Buddhism, no interest in learning more, and no respect for these traditions.

I like the title of this thread. The metaphor of Daoists as gardeners of the world – as cultivators of personal landscapes – is an apt one. It reminds me of the Daoist poets with their love of nature. I relate to their reclusive ways and their need to escape the busyness of urban life. I've lived for many years within a semi-wilderness environment; it continues to be a great source of wisdom for me. Here’s an excerpt from David Hinton’s Mountain Home: the Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China….. T'ao Ch'ien (365-427 CE) is traditionally spoken of as founder of the fields-and-gardens tradition, in contrast to Hsieh Ling-yun, founder of the rivers-and-mountains tradition. This is a useful distinction, describing a real difference in emphasis not only in these two originary poets, but throughout the tradition to follow. But there is no fundamental distinction between the two: both embody the cosmology that essentially is the Chinese wilderness, and as rivers-and-mountains is the broader context within which fields-and-gardens operates, it seems more accurate to speak of both modes together as a single rivers-and-mountains tradition. T'ao Ch'ien's domestic fields-and-gardens feel is more a reflection of his profound contentment than some fundamental difference in his poetic world: unlike Hsieh Ling-yun, whose poems are animated by the need to establish an enlightened relationship with a grand alpine wilderness, T'ao effortlessly lived everyday life on a mountain farm as an utterly sufficient experience of dwelling, his poems initiating that intimate sense of belonging to natural process that shapes the Chinese poetic sensibility. And though this dwelling means confronting death and the existential realities of human experience without delusion, a central preoccupation in T'ao Ch'ien and all Chinese poets, the spiritual ecology of tzu-jan (ziran) provided ample solace. If T'ao's poems seem bland, a quality much admired in them by the Sung Dynasty poets, it's because they are never animated by the struggle for understanding. Instead, they always begin with the deepest wisdom. Home Again Among Fields and Gardens Nothing like all the others, even as a child, rooted in such love for hills and mountains, I stumbled into their net of dust, that one departure a blunder lasting thirteen years. But a tethered bird longs for its old forest, and a pond fish its deep waters— so now, my southern outlands cleared, I nurture simplicity among these fields and gardens, home again. I've got nearly two acres here, and four or five rooms in this thatch hut, elms and willows shading the eaves in back, and in front, peach and plum spread wide. Villages lost across mist-and-haze distances, kitchen smoke drifting wide-open country, dogs bark deep among back roads out here, and roosters crow from mulberry treetops. No confusion within these gates, no dust, my empty home harbors idleness to spare. Back again: after so long caged in that trap, I've returned to occurrence coming of itself.

Somewhere previously Taomeow commented on how Western's sometimes choose traditional designs for tattoos without any knowledge of the cultural context or symbolism they are appropriating. As well as possible esoteric ramifications, here's a story of what can be the overt consequences of such insensitive appropriation....... Australian couple mobbed in India over Hindu deity leg tattoo An Australian couple have defended their right of expression after they were mobbed, harassed and unlawfully detained in India over the man's tattoo of a Hindu deity. Melbourne law student Matthew Gordon was at a restaurant in the southern city of Bangalore with his girlfriend on Saturday when around a dozen activists from the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party began harassing the couple. They said a tattoo of the Hindu fertility goddess Yellama on his shin offended their religious sentiments, and ordered him to remove it. "One of them came to me and confronted me about my tattoo. Soon they surrounded us and threatened to skin my leg and remove the tattoo," Mr Gordon told Indian media on Sunday. It was reported the group quickly grew to over 25 men who blocked them from exiting the restaurant. PHOTO: Leg tattoo of Hindu Goddess Yellamma. Matthew Gordon said he respects Hinduism "completely" which is why he got the Hindu Goddess Yellamma tattooed on his leg. (from http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-20/australian-couple-mobbed-in-india-over-hindu-deity-tattoo/6867722 )

It's not Buddhism, but do you realise that this is directly addressed by Moeller in The Radical Luhmann? If not it's almost eerie in its synchronicity.

Thanks Dawei, for both the reference and noting the synchronicity of 'Tracks'. I've read a little of the excellent discussion by Victor Mair you reference. As a sample for Dao Bum readers short on time, here are the first couple of paragraphs of his analysis of te. If this whets your appetite, the remainder of this section is on pages 25 to 27, and, in my opinion, well worth reading....... INTEGRITY / te (pronounced duh) The second word in the title of the TTC, namely te, is far more difficult to handle than the first. A sample of its intractability may be gleaned from the astonishing sweep of the following thoughtful renderings which have previously been applied to it: mana, sinderesis, power, life, inner potency, indarrectitude, charisma, and virtue, to name only a few of the brave attempts to convey the meaning of te in English. Of these, the last is by far the most frequently encountered. Unfortunately, it is also probably the least appropriate of all to serve as an accurate translation of te in the TTC. Much of the confusion surrounding the term te in the study of the TTC stems from the fact that, after appropriation by Confucian moralists, it did indeed gradually come to mean "virtue’’ in a positive sense and not merely the Latinate notion of "manliness, strength, capacity." Virtus would be an acceptable translation of te but, regrettably, the English word "virtue" has taken the same moralistic path of evolution as that followed by MSM te. To illustrate how far we have departed from the Old Master, tao-te as a bisyllabic word has come to mean "morality" which is surely not what he had in mind by tao and te. To return to our exploration of the latter term alone, in the very first chapter of the Ma-wang-tui manuscripts (actually only in B, since the first 16 graphs are missing in A), we encounter the expression hsia-te which means "inferior te." Another common expression that was current about the same time as the TTC is hsiung-te which signifies "malevolent te." If we were to render te as "virtue" in such situations, we would be faced with unwanted and unacceptable oxymorons. It is plain that we must seek a more value-neutral term in Modem English. To find what that might be, let us begin by looking intently at the etymology of the Chinese word, after which we will describe the tetragraph used to write it.

A good reference is Robert Henricks, Lao Tzu: Te-Tao Ching - A New Translation Based on the Recently Discovered Ma-wang-tui Texts. http://www.amazon.com/Lao-Tzu-Translation-Discovered-Ma-wang-tui/dp/0345370996/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1445206664&sr=1-1

I’ve enjoyed reading all these insightful comments; and enjoyed following the progress of the thread as each comment furthered the discussion. Here a passage from Robyn Davidson’s book Tracks. (Tracks is an account of her walk across 1,700 miles of harsh yet magnificent desert from Alice Springs in Central Australia to the sea with only four camels and a dog for company.) For me, it’s an excellent description of de in the person of Eddie – a non-English speaking Aboriginal elder who guided her for a few days….. “For the next two days Eddie and I walked together, we played charades trying to communicate and fell into fits of laughter at each other’s antics. We stalked rabbits and missed, picked bush foods and generally had a good time. He was a sheer pleasure to be with, exuding all those qualities typical of old Aboriginal people – strength, warmth, self-possession, wit, and a kind of rootedness, a substantiality that immediately commanded respect. And I wondered as we walked along, how the word ‘primitive’ with all its subtle and nasty connotations ever got to be associated with people like this. If, as someone has said, ‘to be truly civilized is to embrace disease,’ then Eddie and his kind were not civilized. Because that was what was so outstanding in him; he was healthy, integrated, whole. That quality radiated from him and you would have to be a dolt to miss it.” To my reading, ‘to be truly civilized is to embrace disease,’ is exactly the dilemma the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi are attempting to redress. Now we need to consciously strive for de that was natural, spontaneous, as well as central to the cultural heritage of people like Eddie.

Modern humans may have occupied southern China at least 30,000 years earlier than previously thought. Archaeologists have found 47 Homo sapiens teeth closely resembling our own, dated from 80,000-120,000 years old, in a cave in Hunan province, according to a letter published today in Nature. PHOTO: 47 human teeth found in the Fuyan Cave in the Daoxian Province in China are between 80,000 - 120,000 years old. The discovery adds a new chapter to the story of modern human migration, suggesting that our genetic ancestors were not the first H. sapiens to populate east Asia. Until now, the earliest fossil evidence of H. sapiens further east than the Arabian Peninsula was been dated at 40,000-50,000 years ago, from Northern China, Borneo, and Lake Mungo in southwest Australia. While the researchers did not find any other human bones or stone tools at the Hunan province site, they did uncover a large number of teeth from other animals, including five extinct large mammals such as an ancient elephant and an ancestor of the giant panda. Researchers said the discovery also showed modern humans were living in southern China 30,000-70,000 years earlier than they were found in Europe. From http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-15/earliest-modern-humans-in-southern-china/6854486

To my mind what you are acknowledging here is an aspect of what Carl Jung calls the shadow. It is a major archetype that we all possess….. The shadow is simply the black side of someone's personality. It personifies everything that a person refuses to acknowledge about himself or herself, and is always known only indirectly through projection upon others. This is why the first meeting with the shadow is considered to be a moral effort. Also one discovers his black side as like coming from the outside (because of the psychical projection). The difficulty of absorbing the shadow is huge if we have to face alone this powerful feature. However, once integrated it results in a great expansion of consciousness. Jung also believed that "in spite of its function as a reservoir for human darkness—or perhaps because of this—the shadow is the seat of creativity."; so that for some, it may be, “the dark side of his being, his sinister shadow...represents the true spirit of life as against the arid scholar”.

I don't like the idea of a specific science section because I think it's important for Dao Bums to maintain at least a loose focus on its core areas, namely Daoism, Buddhism and spiritual paths in general. I would actually like to see the holding of respect for such paths and traditions added to the guidelines for members.