Fasting in chuang tzu

[Pietro]

So, how's your chinese?

 

I was rereading chuang tzu, and read the first story of chapter 4. In that a student asks confucious about how he can go and help a neighboring kingdom. Confucious (who is often depicted as not very smart in this book, but here he is wise) answers that he has to:

 

apply 'fasting'.

In particular 'fasting of the mind'. He then gets into describing how this is done.

 

Now I have two questions:

The chinese ideogram used for 'mind' in the original text, is it the same term that have often been described as 'heart-mind'? This is quite relevant because many Taoist tradition speak about 'fasting of the heart' and would be interesting if this piece of litterature can be seen as a root to those practices.

 

Few lines later he speaks about hearing with your 'primal breath' (Victor Mair translation): Is that what we know as "Yuan ch'i"?

 

Thanks to all who can help (M. Banu for example).

 

 

Pietro

[monucka]

I almost always assume that mind is a translation of xin (or hsin) unless it's prefaced with some qualifier like 'original' or 'monkey'... And even then it might be the same character. No guarantees, but that's probably a good guess. No idea about yuan qi, but qi usually gets translated as breath, so that's half of it, maybe. I would love to see more etymological and linguistic concepts posted- wu can mean primodial too, right? So there's a difference between yuan and wu, but I'm not sure what it is. - j

[peter falk]

i'm in china and can easily find out if you can get me the original passage or verse so i can look it up. i do know that the chinese character for "think" is a combination of three characters, and it also means "want" and "need." the three characters it combines are "wood," "eyes," and "heart." the pinyin spelling is "xiang" and it is pronounced with the 3rd tone. the same character also means "mind." there is another word that means "mind" as well: "naozi." nao means brain and zi mean "child" or "son" and it's often added to words as a sort of modal particle to indicate a certain kind of relationship or status. nao is also pronounced with the 3rd tone and zi is neutral.

 

"xin" pronounced with the 1st tone means heart, and it is combined with any number of other words and characters to convery various meanings, usually having to do with emotions or central location, for example zhongxin means "center" or "dwontown".

 

now this is all modern chinese and most people here have as much trouble with ancient chinese (if not more so) than we have with latin. sure we can recognize a lot of words but we dont really know what they mean. so i need the original text inorder to ask a knowledgeable person, (assuming they can translate it into english for me). you can't jsut send me the pinyin spelling of the passage. it'll be useless because there's 1000's and 1000's of homonyms in chinese and the actual written character is essential to understanding the meaning.

[Max]

Thorny,

Thank you for your comment on HT board. I wish you all the best in your spiritual journey.

Metta.

[Guest thorny]

not exacly sure what yer referring to, max. i'm kinduva dolt sometimes. but thanks for the good wishes. and to you. in fact, let me say our journey. we're just in different parts of the forest right now. and it is a beautiful forest.....no matter where yer seeing it from.

[Pietro]

Thanks to all who contributed to this discussion. I could not check the internet for some time. But before that I also sent a copy with the same question to an advanced student of Bruce (Alan Peatfield) who explained me that the word is indeed 'xin', which is heart-mind.