[Atlantis]

Lol. ... And, as everyone knows, reality has a Marxist bias....

I like that. Marxism isn't based on reality, but reality is based on Marxism. I guess I need to have another pot of wine with old chap Li Bai to get my head around that one:

月下獨酌

花間一壺酒
獨酌無相親
舉杯邀明月
對影成三人
月既不解飲
影徒隨我身
暫伴月將影
行樂須及春
我歌月徘徊
我舞影零亂
醒時同交歡
醉後各分散
永結無情游
相期邈雲漢


Which I would tentatively render as:

Drinking alone under the moon

A jar of wine, among the flowers
Alone I drink, no one to keep me company

Raising my cup, I toast to the moon
Facing my shadow, that makes three of us

The moon knows not how to drink
My shadow never catches up with me

Just for the moment, they keep me company
In joy I go, only this spring

As I sing, the moon rocks back and forth
As I dance, the shadow fragments into pieces

Awake, we are happy together
Drunk, we go our own way

Forever we wander, without attachment
Until we meet again, beyond the Milky Way

Pot, if it doesn't compromise your class ethics to associate with the likes of Li Bai, will you do us the honors, and raise your cup, to let us have your rendering from the point of view of Marxist reality, just between the three of us ;-)

[quetzalcoatl]

I like that. Marxism isn't based on reality, but reality is based on Marxism.

I believe Potemkin has the causal arrow pointing in the right direction.

Most of what we presume to call reality (the social and communal parts of it) are constructs based on somebody's received ideology (see my sig below). You may quibble about whether it is a stable and robust reality, but reality it is. That is to say, fortune compels us to live in a realization of somebody's ideology.

[Atlantis]

I believe Potemkin has the causal arrow pointing in the right direction.

Most of what we presume to call reality (the social and communal parts of it) are constructs based on somebody's received ideology (see my sig below). You may quibble about whether it is a stable and robust reality, but reality it is. That is to say, fortune compels us to live in a realization of somebody's ideology.

The Yogacara or "mind-only" school of Mahayana Buddhism went pretty far with its reasoning to show that only mind or consciousness exists. I never really got into to that, but I think that in the end, they just got entangled in their own mind games. I find the ideas of sunyata (nothingness) and non-duality or lot more convincing, i.e., there is not arrow and it points in both directions.

[Potemkin]

Albert Einstein once said that our theories tell us what we can observe. Likewise, I would say that our ideologies tell us what we can experience.

Even in the hard sciences, the arrow does not merely point from observations to theories, but also the reverse. So it is with experiences and ideologies.

[Verv]

Potemkin elaborated my initial point very well... To expound on something Potemkin was saying about these guys knew what they were doing, a fun example is that my advising Professor who is an older Korean gent who was raised reading/writing classical Chinese and reads & speaks fluently Japanese as well, has always told me that learning Chinese to read Buddhist sutras is nothing....

He would then smile and say, "this isn't Tang dynasty poetry or anything here. These sutras are easy!"

He clarified that, of all of the literature in the Asian world, Tang dynasty poetry is obviously the most challenging and most difficult, and he said it without any qualification to the statement (and this is a Professor who normally qualifies every statement carefully). I mentioned this fact to another professor I respected and he was like, "Of course!" in the tell me something I don't know voice.

I think if I really do ever go far with my studies it would be a pleasure to try to read these.

[Potemkin]

I think if I really do ever go far with my studies it would be a pleasure to try to read these.

Best of luck Verv!

As an excellent introduction to the T'ang Dynasty poets (in English translation), I can thoroughly recommend Poems of the Late T'ang by Angus Cunningham Graham. His introductory essay is particularly good.

[Verv]

Excellent stuf f-- I will check it out when I get the chance.