I've spent a lot of $20's in my time, and one of the best $20 I spent was on a beat up, used copy of Ken McLeod's Wake Up To Your Life
. I didn't buy it from a bookstore, but from a friend, making it that much more special. The book is an introduction to Buddhist meditation aimed at Westerners. It's a kind of "applied Buddhism", stripped of any religious content and boiled down to a pragmatic (but nonetheless extremely insightful) treatment of meditation.
I'm also studying Japanese and Mandarin, and I noticed some features of these languages which lend themselves to Buddhism in a way that English does not.
THE ILLUSION OF DUALITY
Everyone's heard of the idea of seeing oneself being at one with the universe. This idea is called the illusion of duality. Duality is the property of separateness and distance. The notion that all things are part of a single whole is pretty tough to swallow, but it seems slightly easier in the Japanese language because of how Japanese handles subjects.
There's a common joke among Westerners studying Japanese: An American and a Japanese go to a restaurant. The Japanese is very new to English and doesn't speak it very well. The waitress comes to take the orders. The American says, "Give me a hamburger." The Japanese says "I'm a fish."
The joke comes from the fact that the sentence "私は魚です"- "watashi wa sakana desu"- can mean either "I'll have fish", or "I am a fish", depending on context. A more literal translation would be "As for me, is fish." This explains where the ambiguity comes from: is the person a fish, or is the order a fish?
Understanding exactly how subjects work in Japanese is so complex people have written Ph.D. theses on it. Fortunately it's not too big a problem for learners: most the time, the subject is completely omitted. Not even spoken at all, rather implied by context. (Notice what I did there? That last sentence had no subject. This is possible in English, but it's much more rare, and it annoys English professors. In Japanese, this sort of construction is used constantly!) The same thing can be done in Mandarin, although the Chinese tend to include the subject more often than the Japanese.
If a Japanese monk is meditating, and she opens her eyes and sees a mountain, she might say "山だ" - "yama da" - "Is mountain." By context, we assume the sentence means "That's a mountain," but strictly speaking it could just as well mean "I am a mountain." Except Japanese doesn't have articles ("a", "an", or "the"), so it would actually be "I am mountain." Japanese doesn't have plurals either, so we may as well make it "I am mountains."
The weird way that Japanese subjects work (or, don't work, when they're omitted) makes the idea of oneness just a little easier to grasp.
The Japanese subject omission is different than, say, the Spanish subject omission. In Spanish, the subject can be left out because it's indicated by the way the verb is conjugated. Japanese verbs don't conjugate based on case (thank god), so the subject truly is left up to context.
EXERCISE Experiment with removing some subjects from your mental dialogue. Easier than it sounds, actually. If nothing else, a fun alternative way of thinking.
THE ILLUSION OF TIME
The whole reason I was interested in Buddhism in the first place is because that's where the modern Eckhart Tolle notion of "presence" is derived from. Presence is the state of existing in the present moment, acting in the present moment, and aware of the present moment. Although in a certain sense the past and future do exist, we never actually exist in them: you'll never live in tomorrow, because when tomorrow arrives it's no longer tomorrow but today. Likewise you'll never live yesterday. Even if you hop in a Delorean and time travel back to 1965, the day you hop back to will still be "today" to you, and the moment you hop back to will still be the "present", just because it's the moment that's happening to you.
Japanese does have a past tense, but it has no future tense. Chinese has neither past nor future tense. In Chinese, when necessary, temporal information is conveyed with time words, but the verbs themselves do not conjugate. In Japanese, unless you specifically go out of your way to specify the future (which you usually don't), a present-tense sentence and a future-tense sentence are identical.
Example: "部屋をきれいにする" ("heya wo kirei ni suru") means "I clean my room."
Example: "部屋をきれいにする" ("heya wo kirei ni suru") means "I will clean my room."
Which one is it? You have to decide from context.
The more time is left up to context, the easier it is for the idea of presence to make sense.
APPLICATION: Positive affirmations. Athletes in training are sometimes taught to move closer to achieving a goal using positive affirmations, which is where you take your goal and state it, like "I'm an excellent shortstop" or "I will master the triple axel." The question is whether to state the affirmation in the present tense (like the first example) or the future tense (like the second example). People new to affirmations tend to avoid the first example because it feels like a "lie". On the other hand, if the future tense is used, the affirmation becomes weaker because the future is always the future. If the affirmation is "I will be fit and healthy and eat right", it could be referring to tomorrow, or it could be referring to a hundred years from now. Even if you modify it and say "I will be fit and healthy a week from now", "a week from now" still keeps slipping forward in time.
The temporal dilemma of affirmation doesn't exist in Japanese. Since past and future tense are the same, the problem evaporates.
In English, sometimes past tense conjugations are omitted in a casual storytelling environment. Picture a guy telling some friends a story. "So I'm walking along, and this girl smiles at me. She's totally hot and when I go over she..." Not very common to drop future tense, though.
THE WORD "ZEN"
Japanese has tons of homonyms. Because it has so few distinct sounds, lots of words overlap. There are four or five distinct meanings of "zen" in Japanese, and three of them are interesting.
First, of course, there's the same zen we have in English, the Zen of Zen Buddhism and enlightenment. The character for this zen is 禅.
Next, there's a "zen" which means "goodness"/"virtue". I have no idea whether there's any actual etymological connection between this "zen" and the previous. There probably isn't. It's still an interesting coincidence. The character for this zen is 善. The top half of that character is the character for "sheep".
Last and most interesting, there's a "zen" which means "all", "complete", "whole", etc. Most interestingly, though, is what happens when you redouble this. You get "zenzen", which can mean "all"- and which can ALSO mean "nothing". (Actually I'm simplifying it slightly, see the anonymous comment below for more precise details) The equation of "all" with "nothing" reminds us once again of the illusion of duality. Again, I have no idea if there's a linguistic, etymological link between this "zen" and the Buddhist "zen", it's still interesting though. The character for this "zen" is 全, and for "zenzen" it's 全然.
THE GRAMMAR OF CHI
While real life Buddhism (at least the type I've read about) doesn't really focus much on the mystical "chi" energy of karate movies, it's still interesting to look at the origin of the word. English "chi" comes from Japanese "ki" (気). [See the comment below from carlsensei for more etymological info about this word's origin! :)] A dictionary defines ki as "spirit; mind; heart; nature; disposition", but that doesn't even begin to describe it. It's one of the most important words in Japanese, the center of so many idiomatic expressions that it's practically a grammatical item on its own.
You see, many abstract actions are described in Japanese as actions involving ki. For example, where we would say "be careful", they would say "attach your ki". Where an English speaker would say "It's my imagination", a Japanese speaker says "it's my ki's fault". "Pity" becomes "ki's poison". "Having a hunch about something" becomes "ki does something". The list goes on and on! And these idioms aren't reserved for hardened monks who spend all their time meditating under waterfalls. People use them casually every single day.
Tae Kim talks about this too, and I pretty much learned it from him. *Bows to the sensei*
CONCLUSION
Since I've still got a lot to learn about Japanese as well as Buddhism, I'm sure I'll always be finding other little connections. My Mandarin is only at a freshman 101 level so I have a lot to learn there too. If I find any other major connections, I'll update this article.
As a final parting word, I should point out the connection between the illusion of duality, and my Mirror Model of Reality. The Mirror Model says that in a social situation, people mirror your own state. Since reading about the illusion of duality and some of the philosophy around it, I wonder whether the ancient gurus had maybe stumbled on their own Mirror Model.
Below are some other articles. Be the first kid on the block to read 'em all!
Subjective Reality
The Joys of Change
The Three Scariest Things
. I didn't buy it from a bookstore, but from a friend, making it that much more special. The book is an introduction to Buddhist meditation aimed at Westerners. It's a kind of "applied Buddhism", stripped of any religious content and boiled down to a pragmatic (but nonetheless extremely insightful) treatment of meditation.I'm also studying Japanese and Mandarin, and I noticed some features of these languages which lend themselves to Buddhism in a way that English does not.
THE ILLUSION OF DUALITY
Everyone's heard of the idea of seeing oneself being at one with the universe. This idea is called the illusion of duality. Duality is the property of separateness and distance. The notion that all things are part of a single whole is pretty tough to swallow, but it seems slightly easier in the Japanese language because of how Japanese handles subjects.
There's a common joke among Westerners studying Japanese: An American and a Japanese go to a restaurant. The Japanese is very new to English and doesn't speak it very well. The waitress comes to take the orders. The American says, "Give me a hamburger." The Japanese says "I'm a fish."
The joke comes from the fact that the sentence "私は魚です"- "watashi wa sakana desu"- can mean either "I'll have fish", or "I am a fish", depending on context. A more literal translation would be "As for me, is fish." This explains where the ambiguity comes from: is the person a fish, or is the order a fish?
Understanding exactly how subjects work in Japanese is so complex people have written Ph.D. theses on it. Fortunately it's not too big a problem for learners: most the time, the subject is completely omitted. Not even spoken at all, rather implied by context. (Notice what I did there? That last sentence had no subject. This is possible in English, but it's much more rare, and it annoys English professors. In Japanese, this sort of construction is used constantly!) The same thing can be done in Mandarin, although the Chinese tend to include the subject more often than the Japanese.
If a Japanese monk is meditating, and she opens her eyes and sees a mountain, she might say "山だ" - "yama da" - "Is mountain." By context, we assume the sentence means "That's a mountain," but strictly speaking it could just as well mean "I am a mountain." Except Japanese doesn't have articles ("a", "an", or "the"), so it would actually be "I am mountain." Japanese doesn't have plurals either, so we may as well make it "I am mountains."
The weird way that Japanese subjects work (or, don't work, when they're omitted) makes the idea of oneness just a little easier to grasp.
The Japanese subject omission is different than, say, the Spanish subject omission. In Spanish, the subject can be left out because it's indicated by the way the verb is conjugated. Japanese verbs don't conjugate based on case (thank god), so the subject truly is left up to context.
EXERCISE Experiment with removing some subjects from your mental dialogue. Easier than it sounds, actually. If nothing else, a fun alternative way of thinking.
THE ILLUSION OF TIME
The whole reason I was interested in Buddhism in the first place is because that's where the modern Eckhart Tolle notion of "presence" is derived from. Presence is the state of existing in the present moment, acting in the present moment, and aware of the present moment. Although in a certain sense the past and future do exist, we never actually exist in them: you'll never live in tomorrow, because when tomorrow arrives it's no longer tomorrow but today. Likewise you'll never live yesterday. Even if you hop in a Delorean and time travel back to 1965, the day you hop back to will still be "today" to you, and the moment you hop back to will still be the "present", just because it's the moment that's happening to you.
Japanese does have a past tense, but it has no future tense. Chinese has neither past nor future tense. In Chinese, when necessary, temporal information is conveyed with time words, but the verbs themselves do not conjugate. In Japanese, unless you specifically go out of your way to specify the future (which you usually don't), a present-tense sentence and a future-tense sentence are identical.
Example: "部屋をきれいにする" ("heya wo kirei ni suru") means "I clean my room."
Example: "部屋をきれいにする" ("heya wo kirei ni suru") means "I will clean my room."
Which one is it? You have to decide from context.
The more time is left up to context, the easier it is for the idea of presence to make sense.
APPLICATION: Positive affirmations. Athletes in training are sometimes taught to move closer to achieving a goal using positive affirmations, which is where you take your goal and state it, like "I'm an excellent shortstop" or "I will master the triple axel." The question is whether to state the affirmation in the present tense (like the first example) or the future tense (like the second example). People new to affirmations tend to avoid the first example because it feels like a "lie". On the other hand, if the future tense is used, the affirmation becomes weaker because the future is always the future. If the affirmation is "I will be fit and healthy and eat right", it could be referring to tomorrow, or it could be referring to a hundred years from now. Even if you modify it and say "I will be fit and healthy a week from now", "a week from now" still keeps slipping forward in time.
The temporal dilemma of affirmation doesn't exist in Japanese. Since past and future tense are the same, the problem evaporates.
In English, sometimes past tense conjugations are omitted in a casual storytelling environment. Picture a guy telling some friends a story. "So I'm walking along, and this girl smiles at me. She's totally hot and when I go over she..." Not very common to drop future tense, though.
THE WORD "ZEN"
Japanese has tons of homonyms. Because it has so few distinct sounds, lots of words overlap. There are four or five distinct meanings of "zen" in Japanese, and three of them are interesting.
First, of course, there's the same zen we have in English, the Zen of Zen Buddhism and enlightenment. The character for this zen is 禅.
Next, there's a "zen" which means "goodness"/"virtue". I have no idea whether there's any actual etymological connection between this "zen" and the previous. There probably isn't. It's still an interesting coincidence. The character for this zen is 善. The top half of that character is the character for "sheep".
Last and most interesting, there's a "zen" which means "all", "complete", "whole", etc. Most interestingly, though, is what happens when you redouble this. You get "zenzen", which can mean "all"- and which can ALSO mean "nothing". (Actually I'm simplifying it slightly, see the anonymous comment below for more precise details) The equation of "all" with "nothing" reminds us once again of the illusion of duality. Again, I have no idea if there's a linguistic, etymological link between this "zen" and the Buddhist "zen", it's still interesting though. The character for this "zen" is 全, and for "zenzen" it's 全然.
THE GRAMMAR OF CHI
While real life Buddhism (at least the type I've read about) doesn't really focus much on the mystical "chi" energy of karate movies, it's still interesting to look at the origin of the word. English "chi" comes from Japanese "ki" (気). [See the comment below from carlsensei for more etymological info about this word's origin! :)] A dictionary defines ki as "spirit; mind; heart; nature; disposition", but that doesn't even begin to describe it. It's one of the most important words in Japanese, the center of so many idiomatic expressions that it's practically a grammatical item on its own.
You see, many abstract actions are described in Japanese as actions involving ki. For example, where we would say "be careful", they would say "attach your ki". Where an English speaker would say "It's my imagination", a Japanese speaker says "it's my ki's fault". "Pity" becomes "ki's poison". "Having a hunch about something" becomes "ki does something". The list goes on and on! And these idioms aren't reserved for hardened monks who spend all their time meditating under waterfalls. People use them casually every single day.
Tae Kim talks about this too, and I pretty much learned it from him. *Bows to the sensei*
CONCLUSION
Since I've still got a lot to learn about Japanese as well as Buddhism, I'm sure I'll always be finding other little connections. My Mandarin is only at a freshman 101 level so I have a lot to learn there too. If I find any other major connections, I'll update this article.
As a final parting word, I should point out the connection between the illusion of duality, and my Mirror Model of Reality. The Mirror Model says that in a social situation, people mirror your own state. Since reading about the illusion of duality and some of the philosophy around it, I wonder whether the ancient gurus had maybe stumbled on their own Mirror Model.
Below are some other articles. Be the first kid on the block to read 'em all!
Subjective Reality
The Joys of Change
The Three Scariest Things
Posts
4 comments:
全然 doesn't quite mean "all" or "nothing." It is an adverb which means "entirely." Its meaning itself does not change, but the form of the verb may change.
全然分かる。(This is not as common as the negative though.)
I entirely understand.
全然分からない。
I entirely do not understand.
This was an interesting read though. It should be noted that Shinto can be connected to the Japanese language too.
You're right about zenzen, the examples you gave are precisely what I was trying to get at. I just wanted to make it as simple as possible. Thanks for the further clarification, I'll add a note in the text!
The English word "chi" comes from the Chinese word 氣, which is "chi" in the old romanization scheme, qi in pinyin. 氣 is, of course, the origin of the Japanese word 気 ki. (They simplified the kanji slightly. Mainland China now further simplifies 氣 down to just 气. Taiwan and Hong Kong retain the complex version.)
Thanks, Carl-sensei! That's really neat. It's interesting looking at how Chinese/Japanese characters morph through the ages. Makes me wonder what Japanese will look like five hundred years from now!
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