Re: CHAT: OT/CHAT: YATT (Yet Another Teohie Thread ;) (wasRe: Results of Poll by Email No. 26)

en mem0 2003 KE/4208 sijn0 : 03: 31 08:11:30 AM/g0zen,
devobratus@MYACTIVEWARE.COM graeffii:

>CYSZhang wrote:
>
>>    I _have_ on my altar a copy of my family scroll that traces my father's
>>lineage back about 2,000 years. I have to have it translated someday...
>>most of it is written in very poetic Classical Chinese (the more recent
section
>>-from about 1911 CE - is rather prosaic and Modern).
>
>Two thousand years!? Wow! That's really something! <majorly impressed>
    LOL, I wish we had a more complete record ::wry grin:: like back to Year
Zero of the Chinese civilization (4208 years back)...

>We've only ever managed to trace my father's family back to about 1450,
>which is a long way back by European standards.
    My father's ancestors evidently started recording the /dZaN/ lineage when
they became more civilized landed nobles and scholar-class people (from being
- more or less - "uncivilized" mercenaries, warrior-scholars and minor
landless nobles).

>Although *technic'ly* the family could, by way of an interesting ancestor,
be traced >right back to 400 CE or so :o).

    One of the Family's earliest renown figures is an irreverent student of
Confucius who made Confucius reaaaally annoyed or made the Old Man rack his
brains to come up with answers to complicated questions... or - quite often -
both.

>If it's not prying, does your family scroll just give the names of your
>ancestors or does it give more information about them, such as what they
>did and where they lived?
    It seems that it was quite dependent on who was keeping the scroll at the
time, so some earlier parts just give a male's full name, birth and death...
other more recent parts are more detailed: male or female's name, birth,
place of birth, occupation, death and place of death and a little poetic
tribute line or two.

---
Hanuman Zhang, _Gomi no sensei_ [Master of junk]
& Gatherer of Extremely Enlightening Knowledge (or GEEK, for short ;)
¶•§¶•§¶•§¶•§¶•§¶•§¶•§¶•§¶•§¶•§¶•§¶•§

    "To live is to scrounge, taking what you can in order to survive. So,
since living is scrounging, the result of our efforts is to amass a pile of
rubbish."
                            - Chuang Tzu/Zhuangzi, China, 4th Century BCE

    "The most beautiful order is a heap of sweepings piled up at random."
                            - Heraclitus, Greece, 5th Century BCE

    Ars imitatur Naturam in sua operatione.
    [Latin > "Art is the imitation of Nature in her manner of operation."]

"The usefulness of the useless is good news for artists, for art serves no
useful purpose. It has to do with changing minds and spirits." - John Cage

"We do not make art to say what it is, we make art to ask, 'WHAT IS IT?????''
- Robert Wilson

    " jinsei to iu mono wa, kichou na geijyutsu to ieru deshou "
    [Japanese > "one can probably say that 'life' is a precious artform"]

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