From: psc@sei.cmu.edu (Peter Capell)
Subject: Re: Well, well... (last)
Organization: Software Engineering Institute
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1993 12:17:45 EST

>08-Jan-93 schan@birch.srg.af.mil (Stephen Chan x4485)	Re: Well, well, well...

>...so you want to push hands do you?  
>
>			(okay okay :-)

>>Well, in this at least, I probably have close to the same amount of
>>experience...

For our viewing audience: Steve and I are friends.  Steve asked me privately
if we could push hands when he comes to the 'Burgh.  The phrase above was a
joke because Steve was arguing with me and I am just being pompous with him on
purpose.  

>Steve, (you ignorant slut)

>>Not at all, I am a well educated and sexually deprived.

Alas Steve, you are apparently too young to remember the Saturday Night Live
parody by Dan Akroyd and Jane Curtin mimicking the CBS segment on Sixty
Minutes called "Point/Counterpoint."  It featured a popular conservative
writer whose name (I think) is James Kirkpatrick and a woman whose name I
cannot remember.  They would always debate rather vociferously on an issue of
the day.  Dan Akroyd would mimic Kirkpatrick's contentious manner by opening
with "Jane, you ignorant slut..."  

I'm sorry if you actually thought I would say such a thing to you.  I do love
you after all.

>This is your conjecture.  The way a yogi might study the Vedas for example, is
>to take a single line and meditate on it for hours, maybe days, maybe years.
>Sound familiar?  
>
>	NOT!

>> This one just whooshed by me...what are we talking about?

My comment here was that Christianity (the west) has no analogous activity to
eastern meditation to derive meaning.  It is an essential distinction.  It
could not possibly "sound familiar" that people might spend hours meditating
on a single Bible phrase for example, because it doesn't happen at all in the
same way.  There is no analogous activity.

>Nope. I'll cite a whole bunch of "Masters" if you wish.

By all means, cite a bunch of eastern masters who advocate book learning as
being essential to enlightment.  Further, document that this is the real
character of eastern thinking on the subject of enlightenment.  I believe that
you will find that most eastern religions find that book knowledge is an
option for dialectical scholars of religion--quite a separate concern from
true enlightenment.

>The west has all kinds of relaxation and exercise programs too. How is
>this this relevant?

First off, if you're talking about any program post the 1960's, they are
virtually *all* derived from eastern practices.  If you are talking about the
hypnosis thread derived from Freudian or Jungian folks, okay, but these are
not really intended for enlightenment or increase in knowledge.  

Second, it was the east that pioneered command of the autonomic nervous
system.  The west can make no such claim at all.  The west (arguably) via some
mystical practices of the *eastern* orthodox Christians, can lay claim to the
use of mantras.

>We're comparing apples to oranges. 

Nope. At least not if you accept the premise that calmness is the first step
to knowledge.  For an easterner, their are first principles--there is no
enlightenment in the intellect itself is one of them.  There is no
enlightenment without complete calm, is another.  

Yogananda puts it something like this in "Autobiography of a Yogi":

[paraphrasing] The intellect, like the world it cognizes is in constant
	       flux, and therefore can yield no finalities.

You could now accuse me of citing "the Big Name" however, please understand
that the only reason I can even consider Yogananda's teaching is because he
takes a posture of, "don't bother *believing* me, just try what I suggest as a
practice, and see if you see some of the same things..."   He never pretends
that his words are Truth.  But my experience and belief do follow this model.

>If you want to compare a life of
>consistent yogic meditation, then you ought to compare it to monastic life -
>that aspect of Christianity was removed from the mainstream, because it was
>too demanding and rigorous - impossible to popularize something if it is too
>difficult.

You said it not me.  Westerners are in general to uncommitted, too weak, and
too frivolous to take the real medicine, so they water it down.  I'm as guilty
as any.  Instead of practicing my martial arts 4 or 5 hours, I watch a little
tv, go out with friends...  So, then I only do two hours.  Instead of
meditating 3 hours at a stretch, I do half hour morning, half hour night...
Our way of life is destructive of others and itself.  

>	(hmmm...sounds like the long vs short form discussion)

Precisely.  Talk to Lu Ping about "short forms."  Basically he will tell you
that the short forms were created to appease the crowd, and that all the
meaning was lost anyway when modifications to sets were made by people with no
combat experience on which to base their modifications to gestures that in the
original system had specific martial applications.

>
>"There is counterfeit because there is real gold."
>

>>The same can be said about your criticism of the west.

I know.

>Big deal. People do that with everything. And people always will.

Nyah nyah to you too.

>	Then how do you distinguish between the "ch" sound in qi and the "ch"
>sound in chang? In Chinese, they are 2 distinct sounds, but in English, they
>are pretty similar.
>	qi means air/breath, chi (same tone) means to eat (caveat: my Mandarin
>is pretty shaky)

See my post to Mikel (a little earlier).  The point is that there is no
optimal representation of these sounds in english--you learn language by
hearing it, not reading it.  The written word should reflect something as
close to the english sound as possible however, and in no (f'ing) way
does an "X" sound anything like a "sh" or a "q" sound like a "ch."  

>	Maybe you should turn this around. You don't know much about Chinese,
>so what basis do you have for criticizing their work?

My basis for criticizing their work comes from my knowledge of how linguists
have done transliteration of the Persian alphabet to english.  As mentioned in
the earlier post, they transliterate "kh" (as in Bach -- the south German soft
pronounciation) as "X" or something like that.  I have a table that shows
what the mappings are.  I am critical of their work because as a 1st-grade
level Persian speaker, I can see that their work is just kind of a scholarly
over precision that has no utility at all in learning the language.  If I were
studying the language in a setting where I didn't care to speak it, I suppose
having a table mapping a more accurate model of the sounds from Persian to
english might at least apprise me that "something is up... this is not the
same as the english 'O' sound" for example.

What's totally f'dup (if you ask me) is that spelling the word for day
(pronounced "Shanbeh") as "sienbe" (as they do in some gov't language
education materials, shows a frightening ignorance (and arrogance) towards
practical issues of teaching and learning.  Nobody would map the spelling
"sienbe" to a pronounciation like "shanbeh."   And you're right, I am mapping
this model onto Wade-Giles, probably because it was derived from the same
model of linguistic analysis as I have alluded to in Persian.

>	The written english language is a confusing, irregular and inefficient.
>If you have to create a system for romanizing a language, why not make it
>concise, efficient and unambiguous?

A nice computer sciencey -type expression that avoids reality entirely.
First, nobody learns a language by reading it.  Second, if I have to look up
the mapping of a phoneme to a symbol, it is idiotic as a teaching tool.  And
besides, if you got serious about this process, you would use the method
employed by the Chinese authors of posts on soc.culture.china, and you would
make the mapping usable for reading where a representation such as "bei[4]"
indicates not a phoneme, but a specific character's meaning.

>	And if it seems weird to English speakers, maybe that's just because
>they're used to something different.

Chinese speakers are not "used to" anything in english.  Therefore you are
teaching them an abstract and indirect mapping of phonemes to irrelevent
symbols in the foreign language.  Why not make symbols for every nuance.
Since we say the A in  "ball" different from the A in "at", why then don't
they change ball to b3ll and at to 2t, where 3 maps to one pronounciation of A
and 2 maps to the other.   Why?  Because we can only learn language in the
context of in-class training.  Sound is everything for spoken language.  The
symbols are secondary, and should be made as intuitive as possible.  Are you
saying that Chinese people have an inherent affinity for the letters "X" and
"Q?" 


>	You obviously do have some consideration, otherwise you wouldn't go
>through the effort of posting them.

Well, it's true, I like the interplay.  But the value of the interplay which I
ascribe to my views is another matter entirely.