We were talking about Confucianism the other day and I got to be part of a demonstration. To demonstrate, my teacher looked to me and said: "Hello." "Hey." I responded. "How are you?" he asks. And you must already know where this is going for me, but I said "Good?" and paused. The rest of the class chimes in for me after a moment: "How are you?"
But the teacher must have noticed that we were on the same page. He kept staring, knowing what I was about to point out. "Well, you have to say 'good', because nobody is being sincere when they ask that, and nobody wants to hear about it if you're not doing well."
He is clearly pleased with himself as he turns around and begins our lesson about Chun tzu. The ultimate goal of Confucius was for everyone to realize that we are all Chun tzu (the ultimate human); naturally polite, caring, generous, and all that good stuff. But, what I love is that, according to Confucius, our way of interacting with each other is all wrong. We want to be more personable. We are naturally more personable than that. Maybe I just don't belong in Western civilization, but I'd like it if we could have real conversations with strangers, rather than crappy ones. Heck, I'd much rather have no conversation at all than "Hi, how are you?" "Oh good! How are you?" "Good!" "That's great!" "Bye!"
I don't know. So far, I really like Eastern religions. I love the holistic/humanistic aspect. :)
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