China Yesterday

One day, the Leader of the School called all his pupils and declared, "Life and death are serious things. You pupils waste your time making offerings, seeking worldly blessings and not even trying to break out of the cycle of life and death! If you give yourself over to delusions, how can blessings save you? Go to your rooms and think for yourselves! "Those who have true wisdom, use it! Each of you has to write a verse for me. For the student who best sums up the basic ideas taught by the Buddha, I will hand over my robes, naming that person the next Leader of the School. Go on! Hurry!" ...Late that night, Head Monk Shen-hsiu snuck out and wrote a verse on the wall by… [more]

The perfected person penetrates infinity with a wonderful mind, and the finite world can't stand in the way. He absolutely dedicates his ears to listening and his eyes to seeing, and neither sound nor color can hold him back. Is this not because he leaves the emptiness of things in ordinary reality, so these things can't affect his innermost mind? Thus, the sage uses his true mind. He is in agreement with li (principle or propriety), and there's no obstacle he can't overcome. He sees the transformation of all things and clearly understands that they're all part of one material force - so he is in accord with everything he encounters. There are no obstacles he can't overcome, thus he can mingle with the impure… [more]

I'm not a Chinese-American, but my kids are. Here's something about what that means. The Fortune Cookie Chronicles is a blog that's mostly about all-American Chinese food, but recently devoted a little attention to Chinese-American history, thanks to the publication of a new book by Jean Pfaelzer, a professor of English and American studies at the University of Delaware. Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans by was recently the subject of a fairly comprehensive New York Times review. (And they also put the first chapter up for your delectation over yonder.) Among other things, Pfaelzer writes about Idaho when it was 30 percent Chinese and… [more]

...On Universal Love. When the princes love one another there will be no more war; when heads of houses love one another there will be no more mutual theft of office; when ordinary people love one another there will be no more mutual injury. When ruler and ruled love each other they will be benevolent and loyal; when father and son love each other they will be affectionate and supportive; when older and younger siblings love each other they will have harmonious words for everyone. When all the people in the world love one another, then the strong will not subdue the weak, the many will not oppress the few, the wealthy will not mock the poor, the famous will not look… [more]

Things I've been reading worth passing along: * How to foster attachment. This is a page of great suggestions, one of many pages on a site filled with great suggestions. I'm not so sure about the business with singing goofy songs, but I have recollections of playing the Cheerio-passing Cereal Kisses game and it working on her. Reader, she married me, and then we decided to have some kids via adoption. No, seriously - skin contact + eye contact + fun with food is a good thing. The Mirror Images one (like mimes pretending to be each other's reflection) and the Blinking game (where you, like, blink at each other) I also… [more]

So, here we go with the next drive-by reading of the I Ching, with a lesson filled with sunshine and promises. Everything about this hexagram seems optimistic, although according to Wikipedia, variations on its name include "aquas," which makes no sense at all (shades of blue?). What's the character mean? The character for jin shows two swooping birds descending over the sun, and literally means to advance or go forward (onward and upward!). Master Huang here veers away from the dictionary and says the character depicts the sun rising over a horizon with two plants on it. Either way, it's about sunshine going forward. It's also the name for the Jin Dynasty and way to refer to… [more]

Listening to the Wind in the Pines, Ma Lin

Curious why this is in a blog about Chinese adoption? Read this explanation. OK, back to my notes on the Big Text of Chinese Culture, gleaning advice from one of the world's best sources of wisdom. With da zhuang, we've gone from the last chapter's Retreat to a position of power. Obviously, we weren't running away, but repositioning ourselves to make an even greater advance. The lesson of this hexagram seems to be: Time to stop fleeing! What's the character mean? The character for da zhuang shows a big person standing up (the da part, meaning "great" or "big") and a bamboo weapon to the left of a strong person standing with arms… [more]

China and Europe have connections that go back further than you'd think. So what *does* a "Chinese" person look like anyway? National Geographic brings news of a fellow named Yu Hong found in a 1,400-year-old Chinese tomb. He was buried there with "a woman of East Asian descent" (my guess, and theirs, would be his wife), but his DNA is different. Despite being buried in Taiyuan, which is farther east than Xian or Chengdu, and nearly as far north as Beijing, he's got the DNA of a European. And paintings on the walls of the tomb also seem to depict Europeans - people with "deep-set eyes" and big noses. Yu Hong also seems… [more]

So, back to my notes on the I Ching, that cornerstone of Chinese culture. If you want to know China, there's no way around the I Ching. After the wise advice of the last hexagram, which was all about hanging in there and keeping on keeping on, we come to the inevitable stopping and backing away. Not all courses are worth following. What's the character mean? The character for dun shows three footprints over a stop sign (yes, really, it's the character for "zhi," meaning "stop") on one side, and on the other side, a pig divided by a piece of meat and a hand. Huang explains this as someone offering a pig up as a religious sacrifice. In other… [more]