| Dao De Jing, 12 |
[Apr. 18th, 2009|11:16 pm] |
We’re blinded by color,
deafened by sound,
numbed by flavor,
maddened by gallops and hunts.
When we get what’s hard to get,
we get stuck.
That’s why the wise act from the belly,
not the eye.
So let go that and pick up this. |
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| Dao De Jing, 11 |
[Apr. 16th, 2009|08:35 am] |
Thirty spokes join a hub:
the axle goes in the empty space.
Shape clay to make a pot:
the water goes in the empty space.
Cut doors and windows for a house:
you go in through the empty space.
So thingness is what you have;
nothingness is what you use. |
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| What's up with these Tao Te Ching posts? |
[Apr. 14th, 2009|08:03 pm] |
The Tao Te Ching (or Dao De Jing) is an classic Chinese work, very short and very frequently translated. Here's a link to 29 versions! Because the original can carry really different meanings, translations vary wildly. So once you get into it, there's an itch: what does it really say? Is it a mystical book with political asides, or is it a political book with mystical asides? In my twenties I read several versions and started writing down a version that appealed to me, but had no way to check my accuracy (or lack thereof). These days there are several verbatim translations available, including one that's freely downloadable. (Click on the Matrix Translation.)
So I've started back on creating an English version that fits for me. I don't know Chinese, let alone archaic Chinese, so this isn't a translation; but the verbatim translations let me hew closer to accuracy than I could imagine thirty years ago. Such non-translations are almost as common as real translations: I follow Ursula K. Le Guin (whose version I admire very much), Stephen Mitchell, Aleister Crowley, and many others.
For now I'm just trying in each chapter to come up with language that captures something of the poetry of the original (and doesn't mangle the meaning!) When I get through with all 81 I'll go back and wrestle with the Hobgoblin of Consistency.
If you're intrigued, I'd start with Le Guin's version. She is a wonderful poet, and she uses the fact that Chinese doesn't make gender or singular/plural distinctions to talk about wise people rather than the (male) Sage. (As do I.) The book by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English remains the most readable true translation I've found. Gregory Richter's Gate of All Marvelous Things is a very approachable verbatim translation, while Jonathan Star's offers many alternative meanings for each word.
P.S. on Tao Te Ching versus Dao De Jing: These days more and more people use the pinyin romanization (Dao De Jing), rather than the older Wade-Giles system, and I may well start using that as a title. |
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| Tao Te Ching, 10 |
[Apr. 13th, 2009|07:29 am] |
Can you embrace your souls in unity,
and keep them from parting?
Can you focus your breath
gently as a baby?
Can you wash the dark mirror
free of dust?
When you love the people and govern the country
can you be unknown?
When heaven’s gate opens and closes,
can you be a mother bird?
When your vision shines in the four directions,
can you be still?
Giving birth and feeding them,
giving birth without owning,
acting without expectation,
leading without domination:
this is called dark power. |
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| Tao Te Ching, 9 |
[Apr. 9th, 2009|11:00 am] |
To overfill the bowl is worse than stopping.
To file away the blade will end its sharpness.
Fill your house with gold and jade — you cannot guard it.
Pride yourself on wealth and honors, and bring your downfall.
Leave when the work is done.
That’s heaven’s way. |
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| Tao Te Ching, 8 |
[Apr. 7th, 2009|07:09 am] |
Highest good flows like water.
Water's good helps everything without a fight.
It settles in everyone's ugly place
so it's close to the way.
Land is good for houses,
depth for hearts,
kindness for giving,
truth for words,
justice for government,
skill for work,
timing for action.
Don't fight over it and it won't get broken. |
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| Tao Te Ching, 7 |
[Apr. 6th, 2009|09:01 am] |
Heaven remains; earth endures.
How can they remain enduring?
Because they don’t self-live,
they can remain alive.
That’s why the wise hang back
and come first;
let loose of self
and keep it safe;
have no aim
and always find the target. |
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| Tao Te Ching, 6 |
[Apr. 5th, 2009|10:02 pm] |
She who spins the valley never dies.
She is called the dark mother,
her gateway the spindle of heaven and earth,
threading a thread like endurance.
Drawing upon her is easy. |
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| Tao Te Ching, 5 |
[Apr. 4th, 2009|11:52 am] |
Heaven and earth are not kindly.
They see the ten thousand things as straw dogs.
The wise are not kindly.
They see the hundred families as straw dogs.
Between heaven and earth is like a bellows,
Empty yet never exhausted.
The more it pumps the more comes out.
Much talk murders speech.
Better stay centered. |
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| Tao Te Ching, 4 |
[Apr. 3rd, 2009|08:43 am] |
The way’s an empty pot,
but somehow use can’t drain it.
Sea deep!
Likely the ancestor of ten thousand things.
Blunt the sharpness,
Loosen the knots,
Dull the glare,
Mix with the dust of the world.
Dark pool!
Likely somehow to endure.
I don’t know whose child this is,
Reflecting the time before God. |
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| Tao Te Ching, 3 |
[Apr. 2nd, 2009|06:51 am] |
Don’t honor the worthy and people won’t compete;
Don’t value treasures and people won’t steal;
Don’t show advertisements and people won’t be distracted.
That’s why the wise, to bring order:
Empty the heart and fill the belly,
Weaken ambitions and strengthen bones.
Make people uncrafty, undesiring;
Make the crafty ones afraid to act.
Do without doing.
Then there’s no disorder. |
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| Tao Te Ching, 2 |
[Apr. 1st, 2009|07:49 am] |
All under heaven see beauty making beauty:
Hence ugliness.
All see goodness doing good:
Hence wickedness.
So thingness and nothingness give birth to one another;
Hard and easy finish one another;
Long and short shape each other;
High and low lean on one another;
Note and song harmonize each other;
Front and back follow one another.
So the wise
Do without doing,
Teach silent teaching,
When ten thousand things arise do not reject them,
Bear them without owning them,
Act without claiming them.
The wise finish the work and let it go.
They don’t settle down,
So there’s no departure. |
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| Tao Te Ching, 1 |
[Mar. 31st, 2009|09:00 am] |
The way we can walk is not the heart way.
The name we can name is not the heart name.
Heaven and earth are born unnamed.
The ten thousand things are born
From names.
So: undesiring, see the mystery,
Heart’s desiring, see the form;
The two of them born twins,
But separated by name.
This is called darkness,
Darkness on darkness,
Mystery’s gate. |
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| Calling on the lightning |
[Dec. 20th, 2008|09:23 pm] |
My sleep schedule has been disturbed recently by a cold. I fell asleep this evening, and awoke with the following dream:
Thrid is explaining the plan for our people to make its escape. We have been anointing the children. Soon we will name Thrik as First and be ready.
Suddenly the enemy general is among us, and I realize that we must act now. “Thrik, you are First”, I say, and hold my hand inches away from the general’s chest as if to hold her with an energy field. She sweeps past me to the other side of the room, away from our people and facing them, and grows more than twice my size. I am instantly in front of her, both arms up with my palms toward her, again doing some kind of energy work. She says something I don’t now remember, cheesy movie dialog of the “What? Do you puny insects think you can defeat me?” variety.
Indeed, she is awe-inspiring, towering above me in purple and gray, with long curly gray hair and a craggy, conventionally ugly face that nevertheless achieves beauty. I remind myself that our goal is not to defeat her but to live in peace with her. I stretch my hand up and touch her lower belly. I can feel her pubic hair through the cloth. It comes to me that our plan does not go far enough, that we must have the courage not just to call on the power of [a goddess whose name in my thoughts is not a sound but an image of lightning dancing] from afar, but to call Her, to ask Her to come among us and our enemies, to accept that we and they both will be undone and remade by Her living presence.
Blessings to all on this longest night.
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| Replacement land line |
[Dec. 17th, 2008|08:07 pm] |
The last useful function of my land line was to call my cell phone when I'd misplaced it. Not worth the monthly charge! But I'd always been a bit regretful about giving it up -- until today, when I had a sudden rush of brains to the head and got a Skype account.
You have to pay to call out to ordinary phones, but U.S. time is less than two and a half cents per minute. (Also, the first call is free, so I won't actually pay until the next time I lose my phone.) |
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| NaBloPoMo |
[Dec. 1st, 2008|01:02 am] |
National Blog Posting Month is over! Yay! I missed one day.
I don't know if I'll keep up frequent posting or not.
Offering:
The unstolen acorn
dies beneath the tree.
The stolen acorn, unforgotten,
dies inside the squirrel.
Theft and forgetfulness: the staff of life. |
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| Dukkha |
[Nov. 30th, 2008|12:17 am] |
In Nothing Special, Joko Beck says "As we settle into our sensation of pain, we find it so appalling that we skitter off again." And she gives the usual (and valuable) Buddhist advice not to skitter off, to stay with the pain until it becomes an ally.
But, you know, I skitter off from everything! Ecstasy and pain, hunger and repletion, love and anger, fear and joy: they all pass -- and if they don't, I pass from them. I think skittering is part of the human condition.
The advice about sitting with pain is of great practical usefulness, because it's something that has to be done to break addictive cycles. (My definition of addictive cycle, which I think I got from Jerry Weinberg, is a situation where we keep doing something that offers short-term relief but makes things worse in the long run, as alcohol for the alcoholic relieves the pain of a life ruined by alcohol. Not all of us get caught that badly, but we're all creatures who can imagine the future, so we all experience tension between our short-term and long-term interests.)
And sitting-with is good practice for everything: not just pain but ecstasy, not just hunger but repletion, not just anger but love, not just fear but joy. Still, for me sitting with what's here means sitting with it longer, delaying but not transcending the urge to skitter.
The Sanskrit and Pali word dukkha (that which the Four Noble Truths are truths about) is usually translated as suffering; but skittering is probably just as accurate. (Accurate as an ancient word, not as a Buddhist technical term: the First Noble Truth, as quoted by Wikipedia but with dukkha left untranslated, leaves little doubt as to the meaning in Buddhist practice: "This is the noble truth of dukkha: birth is dukkha, aging is dukkha, illness is dukkha, death is dukkha; sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief and despair are dukkha; union with what is displeasing is dukkha; separation from what is pleasing is dukkha; not to get what one wants is dukkha; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are dukkha.")
Which is one reason that while I respect many Buddhist teachers enormously, I'm not a Buddhist: I'm pro-skittering. I think that the Universe runs on skittering.
Offering:
Love comes inexorable,
like death or hope: a club or key
to open every door, a bull,
a rose, a storm across the sea. |
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| Rake |
[Nov. 28th, 2008|10:25 pm] |
I've been doing more and more with Ruby, mostly Ruby on Rails. The current project, though, is a non-Rails application that needs to cooperate with PHP code -- the PHP code will send requests to update files to a Ruby daemon that will fetch them from other web servers.
( Read more geekery... )
Offering:
Into the water,
Cold or warm,
Into the water,
Into the sea,
To drown, to swim, to breathe beneath the wave.
Into the water,
Into the sea. |
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| Scientists Discover Ghost Lyre (with Teeth) |
[Nov. 27th, 2008|09:57 am] |
An ancient turtle has been discovered that had a plastron (belly armor) but no carapace (the shell proper, that guards the back). The hypothesis is that the animal was aquatic, so it was more important to defend against attacks from below than from above.
It also had teeth, so the scientific name is Odontochelys semitestacea, which any scientist can tell you means Toothed (Odonto) Turtle (Chelys), Half Shelled (semitestacea).
Musicians, on the other hand, understand a chelys to be an kind of ancient Greek lyre, made from a tortoise shell. Chelys is actually a Latin word, borrowed from the Greek kelus. It's not clear to me whether chelys in Latin meant turtle and also lyre, or whether it just meant lyre. (The Latin for turtle, testudo, was also used for lyres.)
So one mangling of Odontochelys semitestacea would be Toothed Lyre with Half a Shell, or just Toothed Half-Lyre. But chelys lyres were made from the carapace, so it's the lyre half of the shell that's missing. A lyre without the lyre is pretty ethereal; thus Ghost Lyre (with Teeth).
This has been another installment of Complicated Answers to Unasked Questions.
Offering:
Spring comes in time --
Or in dream.
Time comes with the passing of time.
Dream comes when it will. |
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| Dilworth's theorem |
[Nov. 25th, 2008|10:21 pm] |
A set P is partially ordered if for every x, y, and z in P:
- Reflexivity: x is less than or equal to x;
- Antisymmetry: If x is less than or equal to y and y is less than or equal to x, then x equals y; and
- Transitivity: If x is less than or equal to y and y is less than or equal to z, then x is less than or equal to z.
If x is less than or equal to y or y is less than or equal to x, then we say that x and y are comparable. If it is neither the case that x is less than or equal to y or y is less than or equal to x, then we say x and y are incomparable.
A chain in P is a subset of P where every two members of the subset are comparable.
An antichain in P is a subset of P where no two members of the subset are comparable (unless they are equal).
The width of a finite partial order is the size of its largest antichain.
Dilworth's theorem says that the width of P is equal to the smallest n such that P can be written as the union of n chains.
I keep nibbling away at the proof of this one, but it's slippery.
Offering:
Doors are solemn things, guarding entrances,
Opening to the favored,
Closing to thieves and weather.
Doors are solemn things, but
Cat doors are for cats. |
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