Holy overkill, Batman!

I just realized that was WAY too much ancient Chinese wisdom for a single blog post, so if you haven't already been overwhelmed by it and skipped to the end ("Man and wife"), go ahead and try again: I edited out a bunch, to make it a little more manageable.

Also:

Ever notice how twenty years ago was the best time to buy real-estate, but six months from now (when the next model comes out, twice as fast for the same size and price!) is the best time to buy technology?

Also:

This picture made me snicker with its unabashed brazen-ness. I guess when it comes to beer advertisements, subtlety is overrated. (Hite is a local beer brand. Lots of t'n'a in their advertisements. Maybe if I look at the poster while I drink, I won't notice that the beer's not actually very good.)




After the Tao Te Ching, I suppose I also needed to post something asinine, just to balance out the blog content.

If you don't actually know English, but you think English letters look cool, you can just mash a keyboard for a while and hope patrons of your bar don't know any English, either.

Maybe it's a different language: anybody recognize any words?

The ancient wisdom of China

According to legend (or, according to the introduction), Lao Tsu lived in the sixth century BC. An old scholar, he was fleeing his country, and a border guard asked him about Tao and Te. That night, and he sat down and wrote the entire Tao Te Ching, after which he vanished completely. I like to imagine he put so much of his essence into the text that he just kind of evaporated into his text, or maybe into the universe at large, having already contributed an entire soul's worth to the world.

The Tao Te Ching really appeals to me, as a lover of poetry, because of the way it's written. Rather than being overtly prescriptive, or offering words so deeply rooted in a specific cultural context (which makes interpretation difficult when you exist in a different time and place than the original text), the multiplicity of meanings inherent in Chinese characters, goes well with the multiplicity of meaning in poetry, and also makes for a text that moves across cultural time/place boundaries more easily than things like the laws in Deuteronomy about stoning an adulteress, or protocol for what to do if your neighbour steals your lamb. Even in the bible, the parts of the bible that touch me the most powerfully are the poetry and wisdom books -- Psalms, Ecclesiastes, and Job, as well as Christ's teachings, which are amazing.

Here are my favourite parts of the Tao Te Ching. It's food for thought, but it doesn't go and say "If you disagree with this, you're wrong," or "If you do this, or if you DON'T do THAT, you're out of the club." This makes it a bit more flexible than some of the other codes and credos, and it means that it can co-exist with wisdom from other source texts without contradicting them, and (this is important) without requiring you to choose one or the other.

Tao means "way" -- the basic idea of Tao is that mastery comes from the balance of opposing forces. The yin yang symbol represents that balance -- the world is in harmony when light and dark, life and death, creation and destruction, male and female, etc., are in harmony. The idea of finding that balance is the goal of Tao. I like that.


A lot of this is written in poem or paradox; again, this appeals to me, because its much more interesting to me to be presented with a paradox, where I have to hold both sides of the contradiction in my mind: I much prefer that to being given a statement: "This is truth. Either agree or disagree. (But you'd better agree.)" Because then if I disagree, it causes anxiety, rather than just challenging and stimulating my mind. The goal of the Tao is virtue and simplicity which, again, I like.

The Tao Te Ching is in 81 parts -- a nice, round multiple of three, the good old number of completion; here are some of the passages I liked best. The number after each entry is the book where it's found -- like the chapters in Psalms.

The translator is names Sam Hamill.


Beauty and ugliness have one origin.
Name beauty, and ugliness is.
Recognizing virtue recognizes evil.
. . .
Is and is not produce one another.
2


Bestow no honors,
and reduce contentiousness.

Cling to no treasures
and create no thieves.
. . .
The sage governs
by emptying minds and hearts
and filling bellies
3




Over-filled, the cupped hands drip.
Better to stop pouring.
9



With the greatest leader above them,
people barely know one exists.
. . .
Trust the cautious sage,
whose words are most carefully chosen.
17


Learn manifest simplicity.
Grasp the uncarved wood.
Cast aside self-interest and desire dissipates.
19


A good knot needs neither rope nor thread
and yet cannot be untied.
27


Music and fine foods
detain the passerby
But tao, explained,
has no flavour. It's bland.
35


The world's softest thing
tramples the world's hardest.
43


One hears of those who excel at grasping life.

Out walking, they don't flee from wild animals,
and in battle, don't need armor.
. . .
How, truly, can this be so?

Because they make no place for dying.
50


Heaven rescues and protects us
through compassion.
67


(I liked this next chapter enough to include the entire thing)


People are born soft and weak.
We die stiff and unyielding.

Everything--grass, trees--
begins life soft and tender,
and dies, decaying, rotting.

Therefore the hard, the unyielding
are death's companion.
The weak and pliant belong to life.

The unyielding army cannot prevail.
Unbending trees are felled.

The treat unyielding belong below,
the pliant and tender above.
76


Heaven's way is like stringing a bow;
drawing down the higher
raising the lower
77


Nothing under heaven
is as yielding as water.

And yet in attacking the hard,
the unyielding,
nothing can surpass it.
78


Sincere words are not beautiful
beautiful words are not sincere
81

Something I love about Seoul.

In Canada, if you see a steakhouse restaurant on a street, and YOU want to open a steakhouse, you think "Oh. There's already a steakhouse here. I should open a steakhouse somewhere else, where there's a need."

In Korea, instead of thinking "Oh. I should find a neighbourhood with NO steakhouses, and open a steakhouse there", entrepreneurs think, "Oh. I guess this must be a good place to open a steakhouse. Maybe I should open one here, too."

It has been explained to me that the hope is that later, another steakhouse will open there, and another, and soon, that neighbourhood will become known as "steakhouse town" or "the steakhouse district", and people will come from far and wide to sample the amazing steaks on Steak Street, and that the competition will keep prices down, and keep each individual steakhouseiere honest and committed to quality, while the area's new reputation as Steaktown will draw enough extra traffic that you'll make up in volume what you lose in cutthroat price/service competition.

Because of this tendency for Korean shops to cluster, you get neigbourhoods all around Seoul known as "potted plant district", "bulk fabric district," and pretty much any other service or product you can think of, will have one area somewhere in Seoul known as a hot spot.

Another funny thing is the random, TOTALLY random combinations that will converge on a particular neighbourhood -- an area won't have ONLY steakhouses. It'll have steak, cellphones, cosmetics and antiques, all concentrated in a small area, so that within a ten minute walk, you'll pass eight antique shops, four cellphone sales or service centers, five cosmetics shops, and three steakhouses.

My neighbourhood is known for tuna sashimi restaurants and a spicy seafood stew, and there's one little alley with about a dozen barbequed pork restaurants. Also, hanbok, the traditional Korean dress, for good measure.







Here are some other odd combinations I saw walking around today, shopping for a new chair. It's like that old sesame street segment, "One of these things is not like the others", except it's "all of these things are not like the others"

chairs, shelves, home safes, and printshops

(around the corner: textiles, lighters/engraved items, linens, and dried fish)

one block over: sewing machines, (from industrial to home-use sized) wood latticeworks and detailing, electric circuitry

(around THAT corner: more electronics components, power-tools, and porcelain bathroom fixtures, and flooring supplies, light fixtures)

across the street (approaching my house)
trophies, fresh seafood (restaurants), Buddhist icons and paraphernalia (statues, robes, shoes), traditional musical instruments, and sign-makers

(around the corner from that: a neighbourhood with about a hundred fifty shops selling jewelry, jewelry packaging (ring boxes, etc.), gems, and literally NOTHING else. I have NO idea how these places can stay afloat, except that there are just THAT many people living in Seoul, and they ALL go there to buy jewelry.)

(there's even a block near my house that carries specialized doctor's office and laboratory equipment, along with pirated DVDs, watch repair (with electric alarm clocks too), and street food)

The nice thing is that within a forty-minute walk of my house I can find literally ANYTHING I want to buy, for prices that only cutthroat competition could create, but the drawback is that I have to know which direction to walk, or I'll never find it. It's like a Walmart exploded, and then grew copies of each of its parts, kind of like the brooms in the Sorcerer's Apprentice section of Disney's Fantasia.



A former coworker swears she once stumbled upon an alley of nothing but prosthetic limb shops. Just imagine. There are enough amputees in Seoul to support an entire block of prosthetics shops, and (the kicker is), instead of planting prosthetics shops in spaced-out locations, so that there's one conveniently close, no matter where you live in or around Seoul, they've all bunched together onto this one little street, to steal each other's customers.

Makes me shake my head.

I love this city! I guess I understand the logic, but it still surprises me sometimes. How many printing presses does one neighbourhood need?

~Rob

If you live in Canada. . .

If you live in Canada, Follow this link. Get upset. Write a letter, or five, or ten. A country that claims to be one of the top five in the world needs to look very carefully at a situation like this. It's a heartbreaking post from my friend Mel, who's a paramedic, and saw it.

Some pictures.

On festival days, go to a folk village or a temple, and you can see demonstrations of traditional Korean games, including this one -- like in the cartoons when you jump on a plank and fulcrum and you shoot somebody up in the air, except in Korea it's an acrobatic form. Dancers/acrobats do turns and twists and stuff in the air, and send each other way up high. I was once told by a friend that noble women, who were usually confined in their palace walls, would play this game to see over the palace walls, to the world outside.



At temples, especially during festivals, you get these big stacks of candles set out for people making a wish or prayer.



Here's a picture of a shiny street. I call the neighbourhood where I work "megawatt alley".



I saw this ad poster. It made me smile. Western film history (Wizard of Oz) and ancient Chinese history together. The wizard of Beijing. "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. . . "

I've always wished I were bright enough to use the line "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" when I'm talking bulls__t and somebody calls me on it.


This restaurant name makes me laugh, because it's making fun of Konglish.

I got blisters on my feet by walking too much in a new pair of shoes, but now they're finally better. I like walking around -- I walked right over one of the downtown mountains, and that made me happy. Now I'm gonna go outside and find a street I've never walked down before.

Love:
Rob