Comments by "John Warner" (@johncrwarner) on "Let's Talk Religion" channel.

In my classical Chinese class only after working through Hanfeizi and others were we allowed to work on Zhuangzi His writing is VERY difficult to understand even after I had done five years of an evening degree course in Modern Chinese and a year of Classical Chinese He is however very witty and challenging I had done earlier an exploration of Buddhism in the Tang Dynasty explicitly looking at the rise of Southern Chan Buddhism over Northern Chan Buddhism. When I read the Daoist classics I realised how strong the influence Daoist thought had on Buddhism in China Southern Chan Buddhism - being termed in Japan by the more familiar name Zen Buddhism. At the school I taught at at the end of the school year the teachers offered classes for a week in a topic other than our profession and I did an introduction to Chinese Language and Culture. I mention this as one of the sounds many Westerners have problems with is represented by the pinyin "zh" It is a retroflex sound so the tongue is curled back when it is pronounced. I had a girl in the class who said: "this sound is impossible to say" to which my colleague in the room said I replied: "a quarter of the world's population can say it, so may be you need to try a little harder"
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One thing that struck me when reading the Walshe translations was how "intellectually funny" his sermons were Humour is not something that survives well especially on the written page but his sermons often contain the two parts that make a joke first a narrative that leads thinking in one direction followed by a switch to a different direction often deeper and more profound. BTW did you know that Walshe, THE translator into English was a Buddhist and translated some of the Buddhist scriptures too.
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Amusingly the options the YouTube Algorithm offered me after this video were: - your video on Shankara and Advaita Vedanta - a video by a Swami on "What is Vedanta?" - your video on Marguerite Porete - a video on the Antykythera Mechanism - a Stanford University lecture on Einstein's General Theory of Relativity - your "What Religion Do I Practice?" Not sure what that tells me about my viewing or what YouTube thinks I would like LOL
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When I studied Chinese - I took a class in Classical Chinese and we started with Hanfeizi as the language is more straightforward - though the philosophy isn't very attractive. We eventually graduated to Zhuangzi which was fascinating but very VERY difficult and we needed the commentaries written by scholars in Chinese over history to help people who were reading Zhuangzi to get some insights from the texts.
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@LetsTalkReligion If you put in "this is Zhuangzi" into Google translate and go to Chinese this give you: "zhe shi Zhuangzi" and the voice gives you the three retroflex initials zh, sh, zh.
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@EcclesiastesLiker-py5ts If you look at my "about" page you will see my rational. It is non-poetry, perhaps in a Zhuangzi way.
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