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Trinkets of Virtue

So here is a musing on a interview with Ken Kesey for Paris Review. I read it long time ago so no much is left in my memory of it and when I found my little piece in the archives, it sounded ok so I decided to publish it again. I don’t think that many people would have read it before anyway. I wasn’t a part of the Beat generation, neither of its later sprout, the Hippy flower child. On The Road was not yet translated in socialist Bulgaria when I was at school in the late 70s. Fly over the Cuckoo Nest was translated but ‘of course, everybody knew it was written against the Capitalist society’. LSD, mescaline, the Doors, the Byrds and anything of this sort did not even exist in our world – ‘the dust bowl of reality’. My father was arrested for dancing rock&roll on a table and girls with short skirts had stamps put on their hips so they cannot ware them again.Even religion wasn’t there to give some kind of hope to the searching minds.  But both the Beat generation and we, behind t...
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One line, two meanings





'The ruler is just the boat; people are the water'. This is a beautiful saying from the 263BC Chinese philosopher Xunzi. However, it is also a striking example of how the words can have a different meaning according to the person who perceives them. For me, and for Xunzi himself, this sentence has the meaning of mutual dependance. The ruler is nothing without the people; he should try to look after them, knowing that he is above them only in the way a boat is above the water, by being supported by it.

In ancient China however this saying became the beginning of the mass slaughters of the third century BC. At about the same time as Xunzi's visit to Xiyanyang, the capital then of Qin kingdom, Qin abandoned the traditional policy of alliances and adopted one of expansion through naked aggression. 'Attack not only their territory but also their people for the ruler is just the boat, but people are the water,' advised Qin's then chief minister. Enemy forces must not only be defeated but annihilated so their state lost their capacity to fight back.

Their policy worked. Qin became the First Empire of China and although shortly lived (221-206BC) it changed the whole course of Chinese history.

There is a famous story in Vajrayana Buddhism in which a teacher gives the same instruction to two disciples. One of them achieves Enlightenment, the other one becomes a murderer. One line, two meanings.

Reading 'China, A History' by John Keay


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