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Reminds me of this delightful passage from the outer chapters of the Zhuangzi (tr. Brook Ziporyn): Huizi said to Zhuangzi, “Your words are useless.” Zhuangzi
by liangzhihaver 3y ago
Reminds me of this delightful passage from the outer chapters of the Zhuangzi (tr. Brook Ziporyn):
Huizi said to Zhuangzi, “Your words are useless.”
Zhuangzi said, “It is only when you know uselessness that you can understand anything about the useful. The earth is certainly vast and wide, but a man at any time uses only as much of it as his two feet can cover. But if you were to dig away all the earth around his feet, down to the Yellow Springs, would that little patch he stands on be of any use to him?”
Huizi said, “It would be useless.”
Zhuangzi said, “Then the usefulness of the useless should be quite obvious.”
- l33t7332273 3y agoI don’t understand why the patch would continue to be useless; it’s all he has to stand on!
- pkoird 3y agoBut what does the patch stand on?
- crocomama 3y agoturtles, obviously
- Guthur 3y agoHow far down?
- infoseek12 3y agoTurtles all the way down
- amusablelemur 3y agoI think the point is; where would he go? The ground he is not using fills a purpose for the ground he is standing on.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dav_Oz 3y agoSearching for a short elaboration regarding "Yellow Springs" (地獄 - dìyù) [0] I ended up digging way too deep: >In this variation of Chinese mythology, there are 12,800 hells located under the earth – eight dark hells, eight cold hells and 84,000 miscellaneous hells located at the edge of the universe. All will go to Diyu after death but the period of time one spends in Diyu is not forever – it depends on the severity of the sins one committed. After receiving due punishment, one will eventually be sent for reincarnation. Diyu is divided into ten courts, each overseen by a Yanwang. Souls pass from stage to stage at the decision of a different judge Indeed very much useless! [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diyu https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diyu