Category: Guides
Practical, source-checked guides.
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Hexagram 15 (Qian, Modesty): What the I Ching Text Says
Ask an English-language site about I Ching hexagram 15 and you will be told three things: that it is called Modesty, that it is…
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Huineng Quotes: “Correct a Fault, Wisdom Is Born”, Sourced
Search for Huineng quotes and you get pages of English sentences with no Chinese behind them and no page number. Some are loose paraphrases…
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What Is a Youying Gong? Taiwan’s Temples for the Unclaimed Dead
Along Taiwan’s country roads, by riversides, at the edges of old cemeteries and sometimes in the middle of a city block, there are shrines…
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Why Taiwan Calls Her Mazu
Who is Mazu? The short answer is that she is the most widely worshipped deity in Taiwan: a woman of the Fujian coast, born…
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Why People Swore Oaths Before Chinese Gods
A politician accused of vote-buying announces that he will go to the City God temple and behead a chicken. A woman whose husband denies…
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Why Mazu Has to Travel: Incense, Pilgrimage, and Territory
Every spring, for nine days and eight nights, something like a hundred thousand people walk behind a sedan chair from the Zhenlan Temple at…
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Wuwei Was Political Before It Became Self-Help
In English, 無為 has become a lifestyle. “Effortless action”, “going with the flow”, “the art of not trying”: the wu wei meaning most readers…
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Can the Kongzi Jiayu Be Trusted?
A good many sayings that circulate in English as “Confucius said” do not come from the Analects. They come from the 《孔子家語》, the Kongzi…
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Who Made the Confucius We Read in the Analects?
The Analects is the book people mean when they say “Confucius said”. It is also a book Confucius did not write, did not compile,…
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Did Laozi Live Before Confucius?
Most English introductions give Laozi a date — “sixth century BC” — and a scene: the young Confucius travels to the Zhou capital to…
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Was the Dragon Boat Festival Really Created for Qu Yuan?
Every June the English-language explanation of the Dragon Boat Festival arrives on schedule: the poet Qu Yuan drowned himself in the Miluo river in…
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The Nian Monster Did Not Invent Chinese New Year
Ask an English-language website why Chinese New Year exists and you will usually get a monster. The 年獸 — the “Nian beast” — comes…
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Mind-Only or Consciousness-Only? What the Chinese Says
Open almost any English introduction to Buddhist philosophy and the school of the eight consciousnesses will be labelled “Mind-Only”. It is a handsome phrase,…
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Manas, the Seventh Consciousness: the Mind That Says “I”
Of the eight consciousnesses, the seventh is the one English cannot keep hold of. It is called manas, which is also the word behind…
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The Four Wisdoms: Which Consciousness Becomes Which
The eight consciousnesses are not a description of how the mind is; they are a description of what has to change. The technical name…
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Is the Storehouse Consciousness the Subconscious?
Type the eighth consciousness into any search box and within two results someone will tell you it is the subconscious. Sometimes it is Freud’s…
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The Eight Consciousnesses, in Xuanzang’s Own Chinese
Almost every English account of the eight consciousnesses is a translation of a translation. The terms are given in Sanskrit, glossed in English, and…
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Chinese New Year Taboos: What the Rules Protect
Where the Lunar New Year taboos come from, what each one is guarding, and the one class of rule Taiwan’s own museum service says…
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Chinese Dragon vs Western Dragon: What Really Differs
The Chinese dragon and the Western dragon are not the same creature with different art direction. What the Chinese sources actually define, and where…
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Traditional vs Simplified Chinese: Which Should You Learn?
The difference between the two scripts is about 350 characters, not two languages. What each one costs you, which direction reads across more easily,…