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1. 🌲Hidden🌲 (hidden@cawfee.club)'s status on Monday, 30-Dec-2024 14:38:13 JST 🌲Hidden🌲
   I should make an actually good translation of the Dao De Jing
   • 🌲Hidden🌲 (hidden@cawfee.club)'s status on Monday, 30-Dec-2024 14:38:07 JST 🌲Hidden🌲

     in reply to

     • 御園はくい
     • Hot Karla
     @hakui @k Yeah in daoism any end time would be the same as the cycle of the seasons or of life so it's not particular important
   • 🌲Hidden🌲 (hidden@cawfee.club)'s status on Monday, 30-Dec-2024 14:38:08 JST 🌲Hidden🌲

     in reply to

     • Hot Karla
     @k Interesting! I think Daoists would be pretty skeptical of that in general, I cannot imagine any of our creations perfected or existing in the image of God. They'd be much more likely to see technology as causing increasing and increasing imbalance until another force rights the balance. Usually Hong Li, the sage who ushers in the end of the world and the start of something new, but Daoism is far less interested in eschatology or prophecy than other religions generally.
   • 御園はくい (hakui@tuusin.misono-ya.info)'s status on Monday, 30-Dec-2024 14:38:08 JST 御園はくい

     in reply to

     • Hot Karla
     @hidden @k when your whole philosophy is about dynamic equilibrium it's silly to talk about a future "end times"
   • Hot Karla (k@wizard.casa)'s status on Monday, 30-Dec-2024 14:38:09 JST Hot Karla

     in reply to

     @hidden In the Books of Genesis, Enoch, and Jubilees, you have a very similar primitivist idea. Humanity begins with a lifespan of a thousand years, but the more artificial they become, the shorter their lives become.

     What shortens your life, causes dissatisfaction, and further depart you from Eden are things like tools, make-up, towns, and magical rituals.

     The solution in this tradition isn't to abstain from these things, though. It's the perfection of them. The first town is founded by murder, the first kingdom is founded by war, but the way to perfect this, in the Abrahamics, isn't to put the genie in the bottle, it's to perfect the structure. One would expect in the Christian eschaton, there would be factories, computers, and art, but without the poisonous elements of those things (some medievals more or less abandon the idea of physical Resurrection but that's not faithful to what came before)

   • Hot Karla (k@wizard.casa)'s status on Monday, 30-Dec-2024 14:38:10 JST Hot Karla

     in reply to

     @hidden Yet they don't seem to share the same emphasis on primitivism.

     I have another question about the primitivism, actually. Is the use of tools; say something like a screwdriver, a departure from the Dao?

     That seems a bit simplistic but I have a reason for asking.

   • 🌲Hidden🌲 (hidden@cawfee.club)'s status on Monday, 30-Dec-2024 14:38:10 JST 🌲Hidden🌲

     in reply to

     • Hot Karla
     @k Departure from the dao is internal so it’s hard to say the specific point at which technology departs. Judging as best I can there is a daoist and a non daoist way to use tools, and the more complex the tool the harder it is to align with the dao while using it
   • Hot Karla (k@wizard.casa)'s status on Monday, 30-Dec-2024 14:38:11 JST Hot Karla

     in reply to

     @hidden I've seen you bring this up before. Doesn't Lao Tzu predate Confucius?

   • 🌲Hidden🌲 (hidden@cawfee.club)'s status on Monday, 30-Dec-2024 14:38:11 JST 🌲Hidden🌲

     in reply to

     • Hot Karla
     @k Generally they’re considered to be contemporaries who produced rival (in a friendly way, they later combined and worked together lots) schools of philosophy seeking to bring morality to the bureaucratic wasteland that legalism produced. The dates of the texts and the amount of intertextuality and stories about the two and the time period all corroborate this
   • 🌲Hidden🌲 (hidden@cawfee.club)'s status on Monday, 30-Dec-2024 14:38:12 JST 🌲Hidden🌲

     in reply to

     • Hot Karla
     @k Cleary is not bad, definitely acceptable. Although i think every ddj should come with a small amount of commentary to clear up some things that are confusing in English but make sense in Chinese, like certain characters having specifically Confucian associations that are lost in English and make you think “Why does this old crackpot hate morality so much?!?!”
   • Hot Karla (k@wizard.casa)'s status on Monday, 30-Dec-2024 14:38:13 JST Hot Karla

     in reply to

     @hidden The copy I have RN is Cleary's (part of his 4 volume set) Idk if he's good bc I never got into his Buddhist translations either and I don't know any Chinese. He seems to be one of the main guys who translated classic Chinese philosophy tho so I'd like to think he's competent.

   • 🌲Hidden🌲 (hidden@cawfee.club)'s status on Monday, 30-Dec-2024 14:38:40 JST 🌲Hidden🌲

     in reply to

     • 御園はくい
     • Hot Karla
     @hakui @k Also they probably thought they were in an end time while writing the formational texts lol thanks Zhou dynasty