Re: Life Duty Death

Raven (raven@solaria.sol.net)
18 Sep 1995 21:04:11 GMT

Joseph Askew (jbask1@MFS06.cc.monash.edu.au) wrote:
| raven@solaria.sol.net (Raven (J. Singleton)) writes:
|
| >> Me and 1.2 billion Chinese.
|
| >First you claim that speaking Chinese makes you an authority on "karma"
| >(a Sanskrit term), now you claim that all Chinese are Buddhists????
|
| Which they are.

No, not all of them, by any means. While there are varieties of Buddhism
(Lamaism etc) and crossovers like Shan / Zen, there are also Confucian and
Taoist beliefs without Buddhism, a good many complete atheists, and even
some Christians, Jews, and Muslims, among native Chinese peoples. You seem
completely unaware of this diversity, which undermines your claimed knowledge.

| Nor do I claim it makes me an authority. Just
| that I know what I am talking about when it comes to Buddhism.

Well, that's the kind of "authority" we're discussing, not order-giving.

| The main Chinese religion. I am well aware of the origin of the
| term. More so than you I would suspect.

That remains to be seen. So far, you haven't demonstrated much awareness.

| >Joseph, you're talking through your hat. You're pretending to knowledge
| >that you clearly don't have, since if you did you wouldn't make these goofs.
|
| Coming from you this is contemptable.

You seem to have a habit of making raw assertions/denials, but not following
through with any details to support or even explain them. As in this case.

| >What dialect do you speak? Mandarin? Yue? Wu? Hakka? Xiang? Gan?
| >Minbei? Minnan? Do you have any skill with the WRITTEN language? How many
| >characters do you know? What animal is ten thousand? What tree is a doctor?
|
| I speak Mandarin of course

Oh, hardly "of course". If I'd tested you on the "national" dialect, you
might then have come back with a claim that you spoke only, say, Cantonese.

| and half the dialects you list are
| not Chinese dialects but separate languages.

Since they are languages used in China, you might conceivably have meant one.
(The spoken "dialects" INCLUDE "separate languages"; only the written form
is the same language across China, and even the Japanese use its characters.)

| What is worse you
| repeat yourself.

But do you know WHERE? Again, no details from you, too bad, no score.

| Yes I have skill in the written language. And
| the relevance of this is?

If you had based your claim about "no first law of karma" strictly on spoken
conversations, how could you know what was or wasn't WRITTEN in Chinese?

In fact, to support your claim, you must know EVERYTHING written in Chinese;
otherwise the strongest claim you could honestly make is "If there's any
'first law of karma', I haven't come across it in my reading."

| >In what Chinese text did you read anything at all about "karma"? By whom?
| >In what characters was the word "karma" written? In how many strokes?
|
| >Surely such a great scholar as yourself can answer these simple questions!
|
| Surely.

But I notice that you don't. Well, let's give you a while to go to the
library, get some books on Chinese, and start teaching yourself what you
claim to know already -- or, more likely, go ask someone who DOES know.

But you've just shown that you DIDN'T know what you claimed to know.

So you lied.

For those who wonder about the test questions Joseph refused to answer:

What animal is ten thousand? A scorpion. There had been no written
character for the number, but there had been several for "scorpion",
one of which was pronounced the same way as the number ("wan") -- so
the character was redefined to mean "ten thousand", although still drawn
with the claws on top and the tail curled up on the other side of its body.

What tree is a doctor? Well, I'll let Joseph have another chance to answer
the specifics, but it's a fruit tree AND a water source. This usage comes
from an old Chinese novel; it's a metaphor of the healing qualities --
rather like calling one's friend-among-enemies an "oasis", or one's lover
a "garden of delights". So, Joseph, what kind of FRUIT tree is a doctor?

Numbers and the term for "doctor" are pretty basic vocabulary. It's quite
odd, don't you think, that Joseph didn't know these, yet claims to know so
much Chinese that he can say what is NOT written about the concept "karma"?

-- Raven @1414010 VirtualNET | "Forgive no error you recognize; it will
@93:9089/0 PODSNet | repeat itself, increase, and afterward
raven @solaria.sol.net | our pupils will not forgive in us
raven1 @net-works.com | what we forgave." Yevgeny Yevtushenko