From: yychen@watdragon.uwaterloo.ca (Youyi Chen)
Subject: The Mysteries of Weiqi (part 10)
Organization: University of Waterloo
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 1993 08:01:01 GMT

Here goes the last one.
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!!! Acknowledge !!!

I would like to thank Bill Taylor (wft@math.canterbury.ac.nz) who 
initiated the subject "New Proverbs" that motivated me to start 
this series, Jim Yu who encouraged me to go ahead with my own 
understanding and helped me on Japanese name translation, and 
everyone who read and response to my articles.

I would like to dedicate this series to the old IGS at New Mexico 
and new IGS at Berkeley. It was IGS brought back what I had lost for 
years ----- Go and friends. This series is also for my old Go and 
Bridge buddies: khuang, Lin Po, xjc, gan, lilu, dong, lzy (lyu), .... 
who I knew back in the University of Science of Technology of China
(Hefei, 1978-1983) and in Academy of Science of China (Beijin, 83-86).

People are comparing the creation of IGS with invention of paper.
In my view, paper has no comparison with IGS. Go was invented long 
before the invention of paper. Besides, who like to play Go on a paper 
board with paper stones :-).
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Number 1 golden rule is:

                "Tan Bu De Sheng"

Tan1 =  Greedy;
Bu4  = cannot, do not;
De2 =  get;
sheng4 = victory, success.

Looks like an easy one. "Don't be greedy" is obvious to almost all
Go players. Actually, there are many Chinese proverbs reminding
people not to be "Tan". Among them, an interesting one is
"Tan1 Xiao3 shi1 Da4" which means that seek small gains but incur big 
losses. An even more explicit one for Go games is
"Ju2 Si4 Yi3 Ying1, Li4 Qiu2 Jian3 Min1" which means that 
Keep situation simple, when in winning position.

What I found interesting about this golden rule is that it was
presented as "Bu De Tan Sheng" in many books. By switching "Tan" 
to the third position in the same sentence, "Bu De" becomes 
"Never" and "Tan Sheng" becomes "hankering for victory".
This revised version may possiblely imply that "One should not 
hanker after winning". (Surprised!?!) 

Winning is the only objective of almost any game. For many people, 
to win is simply the way Go games meant to be played. However, 
there is a school of thought arguing that a player should look for 
perfection of beauty instead of winning. Winning should be understood 
as a consequence of beauty, but not the other way. (unbelievable!?!)

Among great players in modern time, I suspect Kitani Minoru's 
stubbornness and greedy in territory, and Fujisawa Hideyuki's 
bold and generous personality may well sign them up to the list of 
beauty (of their own) oriented players. On the other hand, 
I guess Go Seigen and Nie are definitely on the list of 
winning oriented players.

I am not sure which one, Tan Bu De Sheng" or "Bu De Tan Sheng",
is Ji Xin Wang's original version. Although I suspect the latter. 
There is perhaps another reason to support "Bu De Tan Sheng".
Many ancient Chinese games were bet games in which there is a big 
difference between winning 1 stone and 20 stones. "Bu De Tan Sheng" 
seems to suggest that one should be satisfied at some point.

Finally, to finish the series, I would like to emphasize again 
that Go, as an oriental game, has it's very own nature. 
If we realize that we were talking about things like "thickness" with 
no ruler and "lightness" with no weighing-machine, we have to conclude
that Go, as an art, needs imagination rather than ability to count.


Youyi Chen                                yychen@watdragon.uwaterloo.ca
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Postscript:

None of those books, I mentioned in the series, is in English. 
They are either original Chinese or Chinese translated from Japanese.

Otake Hideo's views is from a very short article On "Igo" 
("Qi2 Dao4") magazine in Japan, February issue, 1985.

I am still interested in looking for more accurate English translations
of these golden rules. Since not a single Go term is mentioned
in these rules, I guess a good translation should preserve such kind of
consistency. If you have any suggestions, please email me.

ychen
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Newsgroups: rec.games.go