Zen Calendar 2023

Yeah that’s a good way to describe it

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Doing a web search for “忠告は素直に” does seem to return a lot of results with a form of 聞く (as well as 受け入れる also showing a bit).

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Sunday, January the 29th:

心は大きく豊かに

大きく豊か

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Have a mind that opens and accept things? Or perhaps loves to share?

(Actually, I googled just now. Too difficult.)

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This is a WK sentence.

本を読むと心が豊かになりますよ。
Reading books will enrich your mind.

Enrich your mind on a grand scale?

My first thought was about having a big heart. :sweat_smile:

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scrolling twitter for 「心は大きく豊かに」examples seems to indicate it is kinda more heart-y than mind-y. Maybe it’s the tone of the wk example sentence that’s a little misleading, and it’s indicating something more like “reading books will enrich your heart [by giving you empathy, or something like that]” and not “reading books will enrich your mind [by giving you knowledge]” or maybe it’s both, but context dependent. The concept of 心 gets kinda weird to western ears, and i’m probably not currently equipped to do justice to the nuance.

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Extracurricular reading:

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I never would’ve guessed the 自然 connection, but now that you mention it a lot of the posts on twitter did involve parks, flowers, trees, clouds, that sort of thing

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And yet Tokyo (I can’t speak for the rest of the country) hates nature. Just look at how the government has plans to cut down 500 trees (reduced from their first idea of 1000) around the Jingu Stadium (while replacing public sports facilities with yet more office space).

When I first moved to my current home we had some trees outside. A few remain, but goodness knows for how much longer. Replicate that across the city and you get the picture. The whole place is basically one concrete slab. Statistics bear this out too, with Tokyo being the least green of most advanced cities.

Not to mention that every river in Japan has concrete banks and over half the coastline is concrete too. Japanese people have often told me they love nature, but I’ve never seen a bird-feeder in a garden or balcony here, most people don’t have gardens and most that do exist are far from ‘natural’ (trees pruned to within inches of their lives).

I do Tai Chi in the park most mornings with the old ladies. Every couple of weeks they bring ‘rubbish’ bags and pick up every single fallen leaf they can find. To the point that the ‘park’ is utterly sterile. I don’t know how so much as an insect can survive here, let alone any other nature.

Rant over.

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This reminds me a lot about this complaint in something I was reading related to the japanese anarchist movement a while back… I’ll see if I can find it.

But the gist of it was that a lot of the “connection to nature” that exists in japan (this report was from a person who did not live in japan and was not japanese, so I’d take it with a grain of salt) is overly idealized. It’s a “return to the countryside” style of longing that treats the relationship with nature as a sort of temporary vacation, rather than a permanent connection: You can dip out of the city and go spend a summer working on a farm (a la only yesterday, or one of the office workers in kikujiro no natsu), or find it hyper-idealized in a game like animal crossing or the harvest moon series.

You get a sort of “disneyland” version of a relationship with nature. Even while you are in nature, you are a tourist (which isn’t an uncommon sentiment in the US either, I visited yosemite national park a few years ago and got to lay on my back in a chlorinated pool looking up at el capitan :melting_face:, which I don’t think would exactly get the john muir seal of approval)

Maybe giving『心は大きく豊かに』as advice is trying to push people to have a real, long term connection with nature instead of this popular, false and sterilized version, since the little description specifies 小さなころから, but maybe not :man_shrugging:

but really cmon at least put up a bird feeder or something that’s just cruel :sob:

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You’re absolutely right. My wife calls it ‘bonsai culture’, Japanese people ‘love’ nature, but only when it is rigidly controlled and presented in certain forms. Meanwhile, the dolphin hunts continue, animal experimentation for cosmetics is still the norm, Japanese zoos are the saddest places on earth, etc etc

However, on the other hand, it has to be said, that Japan is the only country in the world where natural forest cover is actually growing! Thanks to population decline and the abandonment of villages! So not all bad!

And I love your generous way of looking at today’s proverb, which demonstrates your own large and generous heart.

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That’s probably a good way to put it. :thinking:

心は大きく豊かに

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ooooooh that’s lovely :laughing: I might steal that one at some point!

I re-read a few articles that were tangentially related to this, but i’ll have to check some more tomorrow. I don’t feel I have a real picture of how their ideas relate to our ‘bonsai culture’ yet. There’s some assumptions I made back when I first read these, which was before I started to learn japanese/study japanese history, that I don’t think were wrong per se, but could definitely use another closer pass now that I have a lot more context to work with.

I’m having a hard time exactly putting words to it, but thinking about these proverbs has definitely given me a lot to chew on. Definitely counts as not forgetting to do my 反省, though :laughing:

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Monday, January the 30th:

感謝の心を持つ

感謝持つ

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I was starting to wonder whether proverbs ever contained verbs. I’m quite grateful that this one has one.

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Perhaps ‘proverb’ is the wrong word? What else could we call these? (My English is getting worse and worse!)

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perhaps ‘aphorisms’ or ‘adages’ ? I think proverb probably works well enough, though

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Nice! Thank you! Perhaps I ought to fix the opening post! Thank you @javerend !

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Another option might be “sayings”.

But I can see why you are reconsidering the term “proverb”. With the general lack of verbs in some of these, they’re more like “anti-verbs”.

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I’ve added a note to the second post! Thank you!

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