Concept tag
#false-friends
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Is the “flow state” players reach in a good game the same thing as wu wei, or a false friend?
I design puzzle games for a small studio in Tainan. Our whole craft is building challenges that match a player's skill closely enough that they lose track of time. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called this "flow": deep absorption, loss of self-consciousness, action…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting6 replies -
Translating wu wei as “effortless action” does more harm than good; better to leave it untranslated
I spend my working life with words that will not cross borders. Wu wei is a strange case for me, because in Vietnamese it already exists as a Sino-Vietnamese word, vô vi, and it carries baggage that English translators rarely notice. Consider…
Started by Vũ Quốc Bảo6 replies -
Was Laozi the first laissez-faire economist? Why wu wei is not the invisible hand
Every few years a younger colleague at work brings me a quotation from the Laozi with great excitement. "The more prohibitions there are, the poorer the people." "Governing a large state is like cooking a small fish": don't keep poking it. And…
Started by Javier Ferrandis6 replies -
Is Yogācāra “consciousness-only” idealism? Three readings and a false friend
Every year someone in my reading group says "Yogācāra is Buddhist idealism, like Berkeley". It's one of the more interesting mistakes, because it's partly right. The Yogācāra school, systematised by Asaṅga and Vasubandhu in the fourth and fifth centuries and carried to…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho6 replies -
‘Illa, kāraṇa, gù: what each tradition’s word for ’cause’ lets it ask
I've been thinking about how the translators of the ninth and tenth centuries handled Aristotle's aitia. They used 'illa and sabab, and here is the interesting part: 'illa already had, or soon acquired, a second life in law. In Islamic jurisprudence, the…
Started by Layla Sfeir6 replies -
Why do scholars keep saying “duty” is a bad translation of dharma?
I am translating some Malayalam devotional poems into English, and I've hit a word I can't carry across. The word dharma comes up constantly, and every English version I look at uses “duty” or “righteousness”. Then a lecturer in a comparative philosophy…
Started by Kavya Menon5 replies -
Is Nāgārjuna’s conventional truth a kind of instrumentalism about science?
In the tea houses on the Annapurna circuit I have been reading Nāgārjuna's Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way with a commentary a monk in Manang gave me. Last season a client of mine, a physicist, explained over dal bhat that some…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung5 replies -
Why do some translators refuse to render ren as ‘benevolence’?
This question came to me through my work. A French colleague asked me why English translations of the Analects disagree so much about the word 仁, ren: Legge often has "perfect virtue", D. C. Lau "benevolence", Waley and Slingerland "Goodness", others "humaneness",…
Started by Vũ Quốc Bảo5 replies -
Does every culture have a word for ‘art’? Technē, kalā and the Japanese ‘ways’
I spend a lot of time warning people about false friends in comparison. One of the biggest sits under the whole debate about defining art. Greek technē is usually translated "art", but it means skilled making of any kind: medicine, shoemaking, navigation,…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho5 replies -
When Aristotle calls humans political animals, does he mean we need a government?
At least once a debate tournament some student cites Aristotle: "man is a political animal." It always gets used to mean that people need government, or that humans are naturally into politics, like campaigning and voting. I have a nagging feeling that's…
Started by Sam Ellery4 replies -
The “false friend” warning about Hume and anattā is overstated
I've read the warnings: Hume's bundle theory is not the Buddhist doctrine of not-self, because Hume merely reports failing to find a self, while Buddhism asserts its absence and builds a practice on it. I agree with the facts. I think the…
Started by Alistair Gow4 replies -
Hume’s bundle and the Buddha’s no-self sound identical to me. What is the real difference?
I've just read two things in the same week and they seemed to say the same thing. Hume, in the Treatise, looks inward for his self and reports that he never catches himself without a perception, and never observes anything but the…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
Kalam atomism did not anticipate quantum theory, however tempting the comparison
I read kalam for pleasure. Twice this year I have sat through talks claiming that the Ash'ari theologians "anticipated quantum mechanics": the world made of discrete atoms, accidents re-created at each instant, no necessary connection between cause and effect, and al-Ghazali's cotton…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam4 replies -
I’ve stopped translating qi as “energy”, and Zhang Zai is the reason
In our taiji group in the park, the younger members say qi means "energy". It sounds scientific and it is easy to say. I used to say it too. After a winter with Zhang Zai, I have stopped. Zhang Zai, in the…
Started by Liu MingqiaoReply first (no replies yet) -
Translating śūnyatā into Vietnamese: why “không” keeps sliding into “nothing”
I translate philosophy into Vietnamese, and I have run into a problem that the English-language warnings about emptiness don't quite cover. The Sino-Vietnamese word for emptiness is không (空). In the Heart Sutra, which many Vietnamese Buddhists chant, form is emptiness and…
Started by Vũ Quốc BảoReply first (no replies yet) -
The chariot and the bundle: why anattā is not Hume’s theory of the self
Hume looked for a self and could not find one. The Buddha's teaching of not-self is often called the same discovery. It is a different kind of claim, made for a different reason.
Started by Nirmala JayasekaraReply first (no replies yet)