Sedulia's Quotations

Chinese Party Secretary Zhang Jingli 張慶黎 on the Dalai Lama: "A monster with a human face"

A wolf wrapped in a monk's robe; a monster with a human face, but the heart of a beast.

       --Zhang Jingli (張慶黎) Chinese Party Secretary for Tibet, describing the Dalai Lama. Quoted in article by Paul Lin 林保華 in the Taipei Times, 25 April 2008.

Tony Judt: Europeans understand war better than Americans

   

Compared with other major twentieth-century combatants, the US lost relatively few soldiers in battle and suffered hardly any civilian casualties.

...In World War I the US suffered slightly fewer than 120,000 combat deaths. For the UK, France, and Germany the figures are respectively 885,000, 1.4 million, and over 2 million. In World War II, when the US lost about 420,000 armed forces in combat, Japan lost 2.1 million, China 3.8 million, Germany 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 10.7 million....

But it is civilian casualties that leave the most enduring mark on national memory and here the contrast is piquant indeed. In World War II alone the British suffered 67,000 civilian dead....France lost 270,000 civilians....Germany 1.8 million, Poland 5.5 milllion, and the Soviet Union an estimated 11.4 million....In China, the death count exceeded 16 million. American civilian losses (excluding the merchant navy) in both world wars amounted to less than 2,000 dead.

As a consequence, the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown now....The complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand-- in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies-- seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well.
 

       --British historian Tony Judt (1948- )in the New York Review of Books, 1 May 2008

The Chinese word for poetry means "language of the heart"

The Chinese word for poetry is shih (詩) and is composed of two parts. The part on the left (言) means "language," and the part on the right (寺) originally mean "administrative court" and later came to mean "Buddhist temple." But this was not the original form of the part on the right, and neither "court" nor "temple" has anything to do with the meaning of shih. This is because the second part was originally written chih (志), meaning "from the heart," and the later form was simply the result of calligraphic shorthand and subsequent invention. Hence, the word for poetry does not mean "the language of the court/ temple" but "the language of the heart." The Great Preface to the Book of Odes says, "When it's in the heart, it's chih. When it's expressed in language, it's shih."

    --Translator's preface to Poems of the Masters: China's Classic Anthology of T'ang and Sung Dynasty Verse (2003), translated by Red Pine [pseudonym of Bill Porter] (1943- )

Lin Yutang praises the prewar Peking [Beijing] he knew

Peking is one of the jewel cities of the world. Except for Paris and (by hearsay) Vienna as they once were, there is no city in the world that is quite so nearly ideal, in regard to nature, culture, charm, and mode of living, as Peking....

Peking is like a grand old person, with a grand old personality. For cities are like persons, with their different personalities. Some are mean and provincial, curious, and inquisitive; others are generous, magnanimous, big-hearted, and cosmopolitan. Peking is magnanimous. Peking is big. She harbors the old and the modern, being unmoved herself. 

 

Peking is a like a grand old tree, whose roots stretch deep into the earth and draw sustenance from it. Living under its shade and subsisting upon its trunk and branches are millions of insects.... How can a Peking resident describe Peking, so old and so grand?

One never feels that one knows Peking. After living there for ten years, one discovers in an alley an old crank, and regrets not having met him earlier; or a lovely old gentleman painter with a big, bare belly sitting under a great locust tree, fanning himself with a palm-leaf fan and dreaming his hours away; or an old shuttlecock player who can make the shuttlecock travel inch by inch on his head and drop flat on the sole of this shoe at the back; or a society of sword fencers; or a children's school of dramatics; or a ricksha coolie who turns out to be a member of a Manchu princely family; or a former magistrate of imperial times. How dare one say that one knows Peking?

"Peking is a jewel city, a jewel city such as the eyes of man have not seen before. It is a jewel city of gold and purple and royal blue roofs, of palaces and pavilions and lakes and parks and princes' gardens. It is a jewel set with the purple sides of Western Hills and the blue girdle of the Jade Fountain stream and centuries-old cedars looking down on human being at the Central Park, the Temple of Heaven, and the Temple of Agriculture. In the city are nine parks and three imperial lakes, known as the "Three Seas," now thrown open to the public. And Peking has such a blue sky and such a beautiful moon, such rainy Summers, such cool, crisp Autumns, and such dry, clear Winters!

Peking is like a king's dream, with its palaces, princes' gardens, hundred-foot boulevards, art museums, colleges, universities, hospitals, temples, pagodas, and streets of art shops and second-hand book shops. Peking is like a gourmet's paradise. It has centuries-old restaurants, with old, smoky signboards, and wonderful waiters with shaved heads and towels across their shoulders, whose courtesy is perfect, since they were trained in the tradition of the imperial times and catered to high mandarin officials. It is a place for the rich and poor, where every neighborhood shop extends credit to a poor resident, where peddlers sell delicacies cheaply, and where you can loll at a tea restaurant and kill an entire afternoon over a pot of tea.

Peking is the shoppers' heaven, being rich in China's old handicrafts-- books, prints, paintings, curios, embroidery, jade, cloisonnés, lanterns. It is a place where you can shop at home, for dealers come to your doors with their wares, and in the early morning the alleys are filled with the most charming musical cries of hawkers.

Peking has quiet. It is a city of homes, where every house has a courtyard, and every courtyard has a jar of goldfish and a pomegranate tree, where vegetables are fresh, and pears are pears and persimmons are persimmons. It is the ideal city, where there is space for everyone to breathe in, where rural quiet is matched with city comforts, where streets and alleys and canals are so arranged that one can find room for an orchard or a garden and glimpse the Western Hills while picking cabbage in the morning hours-- a stone's throw from a big department store.

It has variety-- variety of men. It has laws and breakers of laws, police and accomplices of police, thieves and protectors of thieves, beggars and kings of beggars. It has saints, sinners, Mohammedans, Tibetan "devil-expellers," fortune tellers, boxers, monks, prostitutes, Russian and Chinese taxi dancers, Japanese and Korean smugglers, painters, philosophers, poets, collectors of curios, young college students, and movie fans. It has political scoundrels, retired old magistrates, New Life followers, theosophists, wives of former Manchu officials, now serving as maids.

It has color-- color of the old and color of the new. It has the color of imperial grandeur, of historic age and of Mongolian plains. Mongolian and Chinese traders come with their camel caravans from Kalgan and Nankow and pass through its historic gates. It has miles upon miles of city walls, forty or fifty broad at the gates. It has gate towers and drum towers, which announce the evenings for the residents. It has temples, old gardens, and pagodas, where every stone and every tree and every bridge have a history and a legend....

Of all the things that make Peking the ideal city to live in, I would single out three: first its architecture; second, its mode of living; and, third, its common people....

As the Chinese conception of architectural beauty is serenity, rather than sublimity, and as the palace roofs are of the low and broad sweeping type, and as nobody other than the emperor was allowed to have houses with more than one story, the total effect is one of tremendous spaciousness....

But what makes Peking so charming is the mode of life, organized so that one can have peace and quiet, while living close to a busy street. Living is cheap and life is enjoyable for all. While officials and rich men can dine in big restaurants, a poor ricksha coolie can buy, with two coppers, a perfect assortment of oil, salt, pepper, and vinegar for his cooking purposes, with a few leaves of some spicy plant to boot....

The greatest charm of Peking is, however, the common people....

    --Lin Yutang 林語堂 (1895-1976) in With Love and Irony (New York, John Day Company, 1934)

In 1930 Beijing had an estimated population of 1,520,000, with a population density of 93 people per square kilometer. In 2000 it had an estimated population of 11,140,000 and a population density of 680 people per square kilometer. This year, 2008, the population is 15,000,000.

Mao had the city walls torn down in the early 1960s.

国在山河破

Maori proverb: The deserted woman

When a net is old it is cast away on the sand, useless.

          --A Maori expression, said of a woman deserted by her husband.
Ka ruha te kupenga, ka pae ki te one.

China bans reincarnation for Tibetan monks

China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnation without government permission. The Tibetan parliament-in-exile passed a resolution denouncing the new order. Sounds like the Onion.

Zhou Enlai on the French Revolution

When asked what he thought of the French Revolution of 1789, Chinese leader Zhou Enlai answered, "It is too soon to say."

  --Quoted in Simon Schama's book Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989)

Confucius: Ji Wen Zi always thought three times before taking action

Ji Wen Zi always thought three times before taking action. When Confucius heard about this, he said, "Twice is quite enough."

   --Confucius (551-479 B.C.), Analects, Book 4, ch. 19.

論語. 里仁第四.【十九章】季文子三思而後行。子聞之曰、再、
斯可矣。

Duke Huan and the ghost

As Duke Huan [of the land of Qi] was hunting in the marshes, with Guan Zhong driving [his chariot], he saw a ghost. He took  Guan Zhong's hand and said, "What do you see, Uncle Zhong?" Guan Zhong answered, "I don't see anything." The duke returned home, and felt sick; he could not go out for several days.

The sage of Qi, Huangzi Gao-ao, said, "Duke, you yourself are making yourself ill. How could a ghost hurt a duke?"...

Duke Huan said, "But are there such things as ghosts?"

The sage replied, "There are. The brazier has a ghost of shoes, and the kitchen stove has a hair-bun ghost [that looks like a pretty girl in red]. Inside the gate there is a troublesome thunder ghost. In the lower part of the northeast wall, a frog ghost and a lizard ghost are jumping around; on the lower part of the western wall, there is an yi-yang [a fabulous creature with the head of a leopard and the tail of a horse]. In the water there is a deceitful image that looks like a small child. On the mound there is a doglike ghost [with horns]. On the mountain there is a kun, a one-footed ghost, and in the wilderness there is a wavering ghost [that looks like a snake with two heads and a colored body]. Out in the marsh there is a wei-she [wrong-snake] ghost.

Duke Huan said, "May I ask what a wei-she looks like?"

The sage said, "A wei-she is as big as the hub of a wheel, long as a wagon-shaft, and wears purple clothes and a red hat. The thing about him is, he is terrified of the thunder of chariot wheels. So when he hears it, he pops up, holding his head. Anyone who sees him becomes overlord."

Duke Huan burst out laughing. "That's the one I saw," he said. He straightened his clothes and hat and sat down with the sage, and before the end of the day, his illness had gone without his noticing it.

        --From Zhuangzi (ca 370-ca 301 B.C.)

桓公田于泽，管仲御，见鬼焉。公抚管仲之手曰：“仲父何见？”

对曰：“臣无所见。”

公反，诶诒为病，数日不出。

齐士有皇子告敖者，曰：“公则自伤。鬼恶能伤公？...”

桓公曰：“然则有鬼乎？”

曰：“有。沈有履，灶有髻。户内之烦壤，雷霆处之；东北方之下者，倍阿鲑蠪跃之；西北方之下者，则泆阳处之。水有罔象，丘有峷，山有夔，野有彷徨，泽有委蛇。”

公曰：“请问委蛇之状何若？”

皇子曰：“委蛇，其大如毂，其长如猿，紫衣而朱冠。其为物也，恶闻雷车之声，则捧其首而立。见之者殆乎霸。”

桓公冁然而笑曰：“此寡人之所见者也。” 于是正衣冠与之坐，不终日而不知病之去也。

Arthur Waley hopes there is nothing he can do

He used to gaze with mild wonder and sympathy at normal domestic routines and was once heard to exclaim "I hope there is nothing I can do to help!"

    --A reminiscence by Hubert Waley of his brother Arthur, the Chinese and Japanese translator, in Madly Singing in the Mountains, an Appreciation and Anthology of Arthur Waley, edited by Ivan Morris