User Comments - WillBuckingham

Posted on: Slippery Ground

Genius!

Posted on: Leaky Pipes and Faucets

Whilst the water is streaming down the walls, you can always try equanimously contemplating Mengzi's dictum 观水有术  - "there is an art to contemplating water" (see the link here).

Posted on: Female takeover of ChinesePod!

Nothing wrong with a nerd. The geeks, as we all know, will inherit the earth.

Posted on: 《易经》的本意

It's true David that it's pretty hard to find an ordered line to follow - and I'm itching to read some of the Chinese scholarship when my Chinese is good enough. If 易 is etymologically linked to 蜴 or chameleon, then it's not surprising that the book of changes should be so... changeable! (As for my username, I'm not sure whether I'm on the pyromaniac end of the scale or the temple-visiting end. Probably a bit of both)

W

Posted on: 《易经》的本意

Hi, David,

I'll have to respond in English, as I've not got the Chinese yet to talk about these kinds of complex things (I've headed up to these rarefied heights from the intermediate realms where I normally lurk, because the subject matter is interesting). You are right, I shouldn't be blaming the poor old professor for the mis-attribution... But on the same time, I'm not sure I buy his account of the text either.

There's a lot of or more recent work on the 周易 - the earliest Zhou dynasty part of the text - that suggests that what we are talking about is, in fact, a book of divination. And not a very pretty one at that - many of the preoccupations of the earliest stream of the text are, for example, to do with the timeliness of the execution or mutilation of prisoners and so on (see, for example, Richard Rutt's translation, the work of Richard Kunst and others). On a lot of this more recent evidence - which draws on a mass of 20th scholarship in China - the earliest streams of the text have little to do with Yin-Yang theory and so on. This kind of philosophical reading came later.

And this rich history is, in part, what makes the text so fascinating. Anyway, back to those lower realms. It's heady stuff up here!

All the best,

Will

Posted on: Introduction to Pinyin

Incidentally, there's a nice little video of Zhou Youguang (周有光) who headed up the group who devised Pinyin over on the Guardian's website.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/21/china

Posted on: 《易经》的本意

我觉得刘教授错了!  伏羲不是“易经“的作者。当然这个故事非常有意思，但是这个故事不是真的历史。There's a load of fascinating scholarship - both Chinese and English - on the early history of the 易经 (or the oldest stratum of the text, the 周易) that overturns this traditionalist view. And that makes the text much more interesting historically.

Posted on: Why is everyone looking at me?

Genius! Quick - patent the idea!

Posted on: Minor Changes, Virtual School, and a Lefty in the Studio

As a lefty myself, I'm jealous. We didn't have those coloured (American translation: colored) kindergarten scissors over here.

I'd noticed that with the chopsticks as well, tal.

Posted on: Western Zodiac

Priceless! Thanks for the link, Henning (there's also an entertaining episode of BBT, if I remember rightly, where Sheldon speaks Chinese...)