XPost: alt.philosophy.taoism, alt.buddha.short.fat.guy, alt.philosophy.zen
From: tanghuyen@gmail.com
On 9/18/2016 2:44 PM, noname wrote:
> It's interesting to learn that you appear to be literate in Chinese, Tang.
>
> Once upon a time, many universes behind us, I thought about translating the
> TTC from the original, but did not know where to find the original, or the
> meanings of the characters used in it, or even whether the actual reading
> order at the time the original was penned was from front-to-back or
> back-to-front. And between them, those were sufficient for my laziness to
> leave the idea where it lay.
>
> Regarding forking ambiguity, I have a particular project in progress, a new
> computing language that should also be useful in the field of philosophy.
> The nice thing about computer programming is that you can tell people
> something, and they can claim it wrong: but when you run the fucking code
> it's time to shut up and deal.
I forgot to say that when the authors of DDJ want to
say heaven-earth, they say so: tian-di 天地, "heaven"
"earth", which appears in DDJ 1.2, of which the
Chinese is 無
天地之始, 有
萬物之
。"No (wu) is
called the origin of heaven-earth, yes (you) is called
mother of the ten thousand things." Sorry, I misread
tian-di 天地 "heaven-earth" as tian-xia 天下 "what is
below heaven"! I was confused between 1.2 and 2.1,
where tian-xia 天下 "what is below heaven" appears!
But to return to your reply, those who don't know
Chinese in all its crookedness can simply peruse the
comparative translations in English on the site linked
by me, which can easily give an impression of
wild fluctuation between alternative translations
based on alternative readings, which can be drastic:
When I wrote:
<>
obviously, I meant: "not about wanting/desire and its
absence".
If one tries to hew close to the sinewy and
anfractuous reasoning of the Chinese, one can easily
get in an oceanic dither, due to all the circuitous
zigzagging of the words, which one must cut and
punctuate before trying to understand. This, even if
the Chinese characters of DDJ are relatively simple
and not recherché. The syntax is meant, methinks, to
mislead as much as to guide well.
Tang Huyen
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
|
