Matthew David Cooke (born September 7, 1978) is a former Canadian professional ice hockey left winger. He plays for the Minnesota Wild of the National Hockey League (NHL). He has also played for the Vancouver Canucks, Washington Capitals and Pittsburgh Penguins.
He is known as a pest because of his way of aggravating opponents. He has also faced many suspensions by the NHL. In 2009, He won the Stanley Cup with the Pittsburgh Penguins.
Mencius
Mèng Kē (), who is usually known as Meng Zi ()，which means "Master Meng," or Mencius (which is the Latin form of Meng Zi), was not in the generation of students who worked directly with Confucius, but in the second generation after it. He lived from about 371 B.C. to about 289 B.C. Mencius regarded Confucius as the greatest teacher, and he wrote a book in which he tried to explain the full picture behind what Confucius taught. The book is just called by his name, so in English it is called the "Mencius."
In his book, Mencius taught that humans are born with four gifts: The first is the natural ability to feel what other people feel and to want to help and protect them. The second is to recognize when you are not doing your share of the job of maintaining a good society. The third is to recognize conflict situations before they grow big and to defuse them. The fourth is to recognize when some other people are hurting other people and want to obtain justice for those being hurt.
Mencius believed that just as the people owed things to the ruler, the ruler also owed things to the people. So if a man held the position of ruler but did not do the things for the people that a ruler should do, then it was acceptable for the people to get rid of the ruler, and even to kill him.
Mencius lived during the Zhōu dynasty.
The culture that Mencius came from believed that after people died they would have some kind of existence after life. That belief goes back to distant prehistorical times. At some time, people began to say that the dead go to 天 Tiān. Tiān has several meanings including "sky," "day," "Heaven," and "God." The earliest versions of the character 天 is a picture of a man with a very large head, which suggests "head man" or "leader." Since Chinese people believed that when any person dies he or she goes to Tiān, and that dead ancestors are more powerful than they were while still alive, it is possible that Tiān originally was the name of the earliest ancestor of the Zhōu ruling house from long before the fall of the previous dynasty, the Shàng. If that idea is correct, then "Tiān" first was a name for an ancestor. Later people may have forgotten that this very powerful spirit was originally a living human being, so Tiān became regarded as a god. After that, "Tiān" could have been used to name the place where the god lived, and since that place was high above us, it came to mean not only "Heaven," but also "the heavens," "sky," "day," etc.
China has myths that go back long before the Shàng and Zhōu dynasties. There were several culture heroes who were regarded as ancient wise emperors. There were 黃帝 Huáng Dì, known in English as the Yellow Emperor, 堯 Yáo, 舜 Shùn, and 禹 Yǚ, who all came before what is called the first dynasty, the 夏 Xià.
The story of how Yǚ came to be made emperor is very important to the Confucians. The myth says that the world started to become flooded and the father of Yǚ (whose name was 鯀 Gǔn) tried to fix the problem by building dams. Gǔn was not successful because the water just kept coming and when it went over the top of the dams then all of the water that had built up came out very fast. So Yǚ took over the job of saving China and cleaned out all of the rivers so that the extra water could easily go to the sea.
Mencius does not tell the part of the story about Gǔn, but he does tell the part about how Yǚ made all the rivers deeper to drain the land. The lesson Mencius and the Chinese people learned from the story of Yǚ was that in all things it is better to give forces a way to get out that will not cause harm, and that damming forces up will always be bad in the long run.
The founders of the Zhōu dynasty believed in the idea that King Wen, the father of King Wu (who was the first to actually rule after the Shàng rulers were defeated), continued to be able to act in the world of human beings even after his death. He and his own father and grandfather were central figures in an important document called "The Brass-bound Coffer." Another important document is called "The Announcement of Duke Shao." Both of these documents introduce and support the idea that Tiān decides who will be the human to act as steward or helper to carry out the will of Tiān on earth, and the idea that Tiān will only let someone be king as long as he looks out for the welfare of all human beings.
Mencius told the story of Yü in his book at 3B:9:
當堯之時，水逆行，氾濫於中國。蛇龍居之，民無所定。下者為巢，上者為營窟。書曰：『洚水警余。』洚水者，洪水也。使禹治之。禹掘地而注之海，驅蛇龍 而放之菹﹔水由地中行，江、淮、河、漢是也。險社既遠，鳥獸之害人者消﹔然後人得平土而居之。
At the time of [the sage emperor] Yao, the rivers ceased their normal flow and flooded the Central Kingdom. Then snakes and dragons took up residence and humans had no fixed abodes. Those in lower places created nests in the trees for themselves, and those in higher places made underground redoubts.
書曰：『洚水警余。』洚水者，洪水也。使禹治之。禹掘地而注之海，驅蛇龍 而放之菹﹔水由地中行，江、淮、河、漢是也。險社既遠，鳥獸之害人者消﹔然後人得平土而居之。堯、舜既沒，聖人之道衰。
The "Book of Records" says: "The inundation alarms me." "Inundation" means "flood waters." Yü was employed to manage the flood. Yü dredged the earth and conveyed the water to the sea. He drove away the snakes and dragons and exiled them to the marshes. When water traveled through the land it formed the Yangze River, the Huai River, the Yellow River, and the Han River. Since the [marshes] were in remote and cut off places, the depredations visited upon humans by birds and beasts were eliminated, and after that humans got to live on the plains. [However,] after [people's memories of] both Yao and Shun fell into obscurity the way of the sages went into a steep decline.
At 4B:26, Mencius also said:
如智者若禹之行水也，則無惡於智也。禹之行水也，行其所無事，則 智亦大矣
If these wise ones could conduct themselves as did Yü in managing the flood waters, then what would there be to dislike about them? Yü managed the flood waters by doing his work in ways that involved no great fuss. If these wise ones could also conduct themselves without making any fuss, then their wisdom would be great.
For Mencius, Yü's way of doing things was the best. Yü was one of the great heroes of Mencius.
In the West there was a scientist named Konrad Lorenz (1903 - 1989) who studied animals. He was an ethologist, which means that he carefully studied the behavior of animals and tried to understand why they do the things that they ordinarily do. He saw, for instance, that if baby ducks see a human instead of a duck right after they hatch, they will ever after follow humans and take them to be their parents. He called this kind of learning "imprinting."
Mencius studied humans the way Lorenz studied other animals. Mencius was an ethologist too, but in the language of ancient China he was regarded as a "master," that is, a teacher. He was a Confucian, and Confucianism is sometimes called a religion. However, Mencius does not quote religious texts and try to get people to act the way those books say to act. He also does not name fundamental truths or axioms and try to figure out how people ought to act. So he is not like most people that we regard as either religious leaders or philosophers.