Well Vickie, our teachers are equines.
This rather special kind of discipline is not easily understood from the outside.
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LisaLCFan wrote: ↑Thu Sep 10, 2020 12:12 am
how would you translate "philosophy"
How would I translate one single word with no context! (Not even as much as specifying the source language.)
How would
you translate the word "spring" without any context?
As a flexible steel device? As a place where water runs out of the ground? As the season following winter? As the act of jumping?
(I had a few words about translating in this thread:
https://leonardcohenforum.com/viewtopic ... 16&t=38430
As for the mental discipline at work during translating, the best comparison I am able to suggest is something like a one-armed bandit inside the translator's mind:
You pull the lever, watch the combinations that appear, note the "maybe" ones, and then pull the lever again and again until with some luck you might eventually find a "maybe" combination that is less inadequate than the others.
Second step: you stop pulling that lever and start working.
And so on.)
There are not only classic Greek and Greek as lingua franca, but also medieval Greek and modern Greek, and there are modern English and western thought
— which makes it so many problems (more, actually, because of their internal difficulties each, but never mind).
And along with the passing of time, the world-pictures people (and linguistic communities) have changed quite a lot over the last 2500 years.
You mention two aspects of classic Greek philosophy: logic and ardent desire for truth.
There used to be a third major aspect, though: the homosexual procreation of the mind, complemented by the heterosexual procreation of the body. In our present-day philosophy business, this third aspect is officially non-existent, and any clandestine residues will be rather more hetero than homo.
As for the "ardent desire" in the term "philos
- lover", over time mystics and ascetics have gone much further, and they have deeply influenced the collective mind. Also, any philosopher's plunge into dukkha would be tempered by the knowledge (explicit or intuitive) about things like the Munchhausen trilemma.
The term "dukkha" or "duhkha" means an unpleasant subjective experience of the difference between the world as it is and the world as it should be, taking into account Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr's famous Serenity Prayer
(I'm quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhold_ ... ity_Prayer):
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.
Today, the term "philosophy" can mean quite a number of things, like mental constructs or personal characteristics ("Plato's philosophy").
Millenaries of wear and tear have taken so much toll that for our modern conception some "liking of/for truth" should be amply sufficient. The professionals would be ill advised hoping to awaken much more in their pupils and students. And in most cases, this "liking" would be just a poor disincarnate ghost haunting the empty corridors of schools and universities and smelling of chalk dust. A "Platonic idea", if I may say so. That's why the technical term "philosophy" is used. Avoids too much thinking.
Not that Plato should be taken at face value either. In his famous Meno dialog, he has Socrates introduce the idea of a diagonal bisecting a square (in two equal parts) into a slave boy's mind, and then "extract" it from him, pretending that it pre-existed.
Here the Meno dialog; the boy appears roughly in the middle of the text:
http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/meno.html
And here's the scene with the boy, enacted by three adults:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqDoLdmcyZo
Socrates asks the boy: "And does not this line, reaching from corner to corner, bisect each of these spaces?" The boy answers "Yes", but he does not know whether the two parts are of equal size, neither from intimate conviction (nor "true opinion"), nor from conclusive proof. Socrates simply injects that idea into the boy's mind and hopes to get away with his trick.
In the mythology of zen transmission, such cheating is sometimes used as a sign that the teacher is abdicating — perhaps most famously in the "Wild fox" koan (case number 2 of the Mumonkan).
(Hyakujo is the one who established the zen rules ("A day without work is a day without food"); Obaku saw zen buddhism through the Great Anti-Buddhist Persecution of 845-846).
Here the text as reported by Mumon, in Katsuki Sekida's translation, and with a few personal comments by the blogger:
https://faithlesszen.blogspot.com/2014/ ... s-fox.html
(Hyakujo invents the story of his own alter ego, and Obaku sees through the fake but deftly confirms it. Thereupon Hyakujo confirms the transmission by stating that Obaku is Bodhidharma himself, and not some Frankenstein assembly of dead Bodhidharma parts.)
But for the point in question
— that is, putting "Hallelujah" in a nutshell (without establishing whether such a thing is possible at all)
—, the distinction between consenting serious efforts and parroting mental crap should be clear enough.
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Alan, I agree that it's the living who should take care of the dead.
My wife immolated herself by fire, and for her cremation ceremony I used "Joan of Arc". Most of the people present didn't speak any English, and only one or two of them had ever heard of Leonard Cohen. So I had a bit of a job to get the phrasing right.
Some time later, for a small remembrance gathering, I used "Alexandra Leaving".
For my own funeral, even in case I shouldn't make it to full extinction, I trust I won't send any egos to sit on the fence and watch.
May the living proceed in peace!