菜根譚 / Tending the Roots of Wisdom

Often, I think I know China well. However, just as often, it occurs to me that I don't really know what I thought I knew. The visions and experiences collected and stored in my mind while I am awake are gone after I have slept. Reasoning and understanding seem to last only for a few hours before becoming illusory: the images and meanings disappear one by one, stolen from me by apparitions and secreted away, never to be returned in their original form. The understandings that I have assiduously acquired are nothing more than banal when bound together to try and shape the oldest continuous civilization on earth. Experience, learning, and proudly possessed knowledge, gained from many sources and from interaction with its people, are taken from everyone who thinks they know China and passed on to others who share them smugly, use them with confidence, reverently broadcast them as Gospel for a few praiseworthy moments. "I know China." Then, time and circumstance mangle them until they are beyond comprehension. These ,too, will be passed on and shared as truth, only to be proved wrong again. The enigma is this: China never changes, but China always changes. Its people beset by burden, affected with melancholy, inured to bewilderment, and suckled on uninterrupted millennia of incalculable hopelessness and sorrow. "There is chaos under heaven and things could not be better", said Mao Zedong. This is the real truth: "China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese" - Charles De Gaulle. China: don't ask, it is what it is... ,,,,,,,,W.D. Box

08/17/2011

菜根譚 / Tending the Roots of Wisdom

Uploaded by tomorallen on Dec 7, 2006

Tending the Roots of Wisdom was written by Hong Yingming during the Wanli reign period (1573-1620) of the Ming Dynasty. Hong Yingming adopted the Confucian virtue of "self-cultivation" with the Taoist and Buddhist doctrine of "returning to simplicity and the unadorned truth". These two appellations thread together and fuse the three major trends of traditional Chinese thought - Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism. Tending the Roots of Wisdom is filled with precepts stressing self-cultivation.

Aug 17, 2011 2:04:13 PM | Art, Books, Culture, History, Philosophy

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