/lit/ - Literature

>>15612728
No for east asia, you start with philosophers in the Warring States period
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Schools_of_Thought
The is one book that often regards as the greatest piece of Chinese literature - The Zhuangzi. The English translation looks kinda weird so I don't know if westerners could appreciate it or not, but you should definitely check it out

>>12405295
You are the first person I have seen posting about Leve ever on /lit/ other than myself. I have only read his book autoportrait but I enjoyed it. I myself could relate to it as I am also an artist and feel as though I am similarly drifting through life in a detached manner while somehow still managing to pursue sex.

>>12402684
>implying detachment is a bad thing

>Hence, Pao Ding concludes, a good butcher doesn’t rely on the technical objects at his disposal, but rather on Dao, since Dao is more fundamental than the Qi (tool). Pao Ding adds that a good butcher has to change his knife once a year because he cuts through tendons; a bad butcher changes his knife every month, because he directly chops the bones with the knife; while Pao Ding has not changed his knife for nineteen years, and yet it looks as if it had just been sharpened with a whetstone. Whenever Pao Ding encounters any difficulty, he slows down the knife, and gropes for the right place to move further. The knowledge of living thus consists of two parts: under standing a general principle of life, and becoming free from functional determination. This could be regarded as one of the highest principles of Chinese thinking on technics. However we must also note that Dao is not only the principle of beings but also the freedom to be. in this particular conception of Dao, then, Dao may not lead technics to its perfection; indeed Dao may be subverted or even perverted by technics.

>We find this concern in another story in the section of the Zhuangzi entitled ‘Heaven and Earth’, in which the character Zigong (who shares this name with one of Confucius’s most famous students, known as a businessman) encounters an old man who is occupied with manually carrying water from a well to his farm:

>‘There is a machine for this sort of thing', said Zigong. ‘In one day it can carry water across a hundred fields, demanding very little effort and producing excellent results. Wouldn't you like one?’

>The gardener raised his head and looked at Zigong. ‘How does it work?’

>‘It's a contraption made by shaping a piece of wood. The back end is heavy and the front end light, and it raises the water as though it were pouring it out, so fast that it seems to boil right over! It’s called a well sweep.’

>The gardener flushed with anger and then said with a laugh, ‘I’ve heard my teacher say, where there are machines, there are bound to be machine worries: where there are machine worries, there are bound to be machine hearts. With a machine heart in your breast, you’ve spoiled what was pure and simple, and without the pure and simple, the life of the spirit knows no rest. Where the life of the spirit knows no rest, the Way [Dao] will cease to buoy you up. It’s not that I don’t know about your machine— I would be ashamed to use it!’

>Zigong blushed with chagrin, looked down, and made no reply. After a while, the gardener said, ‘Who are you, anyway?’

>‘A disciple of Kong Qiu' [Confucius].

true, there is something of a slippery slope argument here in Zigong's tale. but you get the idea.

Who else wants to join me in starting a new movement of recluse literature? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recluse_literature

We should create a canon of modern recluse works (like Welcome to the NHK, Dickinson, Proust, Salinger) and then we should start on creating our own works while living the recluse lifestyle.