Re: Life Duty Death

Raven (raven@solaria.sol.net)
21 Sep 1995 12:15:17 GMT

Joseph Askew (jbask1@MFS06.cc.monash.edu.au) wrote:
| raven@solaria.sol.net (Raven (J. Singleton)) writes:
|
| >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.
|
| I am not going to spend more than five minutes arguing with
| you over this as you clearly don't have a clue what you are
| talking about. There is virtually no such thing as a Chinese
| who is either Daoist or Confucian or Buddhist without any
| influence or belief in the other two. Chinese take what they
| like from all three and ignore what they have no use for. But
| when asked to describe themselves the majority of Chinese will
| opt for "Buddhist" alone if they have to chose one. There are
| not a good many atheists or rather historically there have been
| few, we cannot tell how many there are now thanks to the CCP
| but there is no reason to think there are large numbers. There
| are some Muslims, enough to be classed as an ethnic minority
| of their own and get a star on the PRC flag but these are Hui
| not Han and hence difficult to call Chinese (even though they
| are) The numbers of Christians and Jews is neglible.

Make up your mind whether the Muslims are Chinese or not -- since your earlier
claim (that ALL Chinese are Buddhists) depends on Muslims being "not Chinese".

Then compare the figures for "Adherents of Religions by Continental Areas"
in the World Almanac or Encyclopedia Britannica Book of the Year with your
statement that all 1.2 billion Chinese are Buddhists.

1995 World Almanac (page 731) shows just 334+ million Buddhists worldwide,
of which 332+ million are in Asia; Chinese folk religionists amount to
just under 141 million (all but about 3E5 in Asia, unsurprisingly), so we
could stretch a point and add their "Buddhist elements" to get a grand
total of 373+ million Buddhists in Asia, 375+ million worldwide, still far
short of 1.2 billion.

But no doubt you claim to be more accurate than these sources.

| >>>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?
|
| >> I speak Mandarin of course
|
| >Oh, hardly "of course".
|
| Of course it is of course. If you had been paying attention
| or knew anything about the teaching of Chinese.

Joseph, evidently YOU do not know that other dialects are taught as well as
Mandarin, and while Mandarin is usually taught first, it isn't always. Army
Intelligence, for instance, may need translators for the minority dialects,
and have them become fluent in those rather than the major dialects.

| >If I'd tested you on the "national" dialect, you
| >might then have come back with a claim that you spoke only, say, Cantonese.
|
| I might but then unlike you I have a close affinity to the truth.

Yet to be seen, and from the exchanges below it seems unlikely.

| >> 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.
|
| Yeah right.

See below.

| >(The spoken "dialects" INCLUDE "separate languages"; only the written form
| >is the same language across China, and even the Japanese use its characters.)
|
| It isn't the same written form exactly. Learn something about
| Cantonese before wasting my time. But yes Cantonese is a separate
| language even if it is classified by the Chinese as a fangyin.

And yet it too is "Chinese". And you might conceivably have spoken it.

| >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.
|
| No I don't. Nor am I going to come to think of it.

Because you can't.

| >But you've just shown that you DIDN'T know what you claimed to know.
|
| Not at all. I've shown that I am not going to waste time
| playing with a fool.

You claimed knowledge. When tested on it, you flubbed the test.

| >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.
|
| Well those with real dictionaries will be able to trivially
| check that in fact the Chinese for scorpion is xie1zi not
| wan4 and wan4 all by itself lacks the zi4 on the end which
| usually indicates you are talking about an object like an
| animal. Nor does wan4 have claws on top but a grass radical
| and is clearly missing the insect radical as you might expect
| if it referred to an insect. So much for learning Chinese from
| _Reader's Digest_.

Well, those who are (unlike you) able to read the paragraph you just quoted
will see that I said there were SEVERAL characters for "scorpion", of which
one was redefined to mean "ten thousand"; you are citing a different character
as "the" character, which is disingenuous.

Since evidently your teachers (if you had any) neglected to teach etymology,
I suggest you study L. Wieger's _Chinese_Characters_, Lessons 23H and 47X,
and read the introduction on the sixth category of character, chia-chieh.
The origin of the character for ten-thousand is traced there, from "scorpion".

So much for learning Chinese from a dictionary.

| >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?
|
| I can't say I even care.

And you don't know. Just as you didn't know about scorpion/ten-thousand.

What you have is dictionary-Chinese, words you've only just looked up,
rather than the sort of familiarity with the language you would need to
have in order to make any honest claims about what is NOT written in it.

| >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"?
|
| Numbers are an easy concept. One you have failed.

No, Joseph, one YOU have failed, as anyone can check in Wieger.

| The Chinese have several terms for doctor but so what? None of them I can
| think of is a type of tree and I am not interested in even thinking about it.

In short, you never knew, and you can't find it in your dictionary.

-- 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