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!!P38zFLDUYUh/x/40583711#40584608
6/23/2025, 3:48:57 AM
>Stories say those who tried to catch _______ were trapped in an illusion and punished.
!!P38zFLDUYUh/x/40528415#40528441
6/14/2025, 7:44:23 AM
>>40528415
For the Chinese, the fox has long been “betwixt and between”: it roams in the wild and remains untameable for domestic uses, yet it preys on domestic fowl, builds dens in human settlements, and demonstrates quasi-human intelligence. No clear line divides natural and supernatural foxes in popular imagination. Ji Yun (1724–1805), a famous scholar and an enthusiastic compiler of fox stories, summarizes the creature’s marginality:
>Humans and things are different species, and foxes lie in between humans and things; darkness and lightness take different paths, and foxes lie in between darkness and lightness; divine transcendents and demons follow different ways, and foxes lie in between divine transcendents and demons.
The marginality of the fox has generated manifold interpretations over the course of history. For example, “huli jing” (fox essence), a colloquial expression, connotes a dualism recognized by all: the enchantment of a female beauty and her power of lustful destruction. Another general term for fox spirits, “huxian ” (literally, fox transcendent, fox genie, or fox fairy), is not merely an honorific for benign foxes, as its literal translation suggests. It also carries an ingratiating undertone by which people propitiate baneful foxes. Sources about fox spirits and fox cults paint even more complex and often self-contradictory pictures. An encounter with a fox spirit could turn into deadly intercourse with a vampire, or a pleasant romance and even marriage.
For the Chinese, the fox has long been “betwixt and between”: it roams in the wild and remains untameable for domestic uses, yet it preys on domestic fowl, builds dens in human settlements, and demonstrates quasi-human intelligence. No clear line divides natural and supernatural foxes in popular imagination. Ji Yun (1724–1805), a famous scholar and an enthusiastic compiler of fox stories, summarizes the creature’s marginality:
>Humans and things are different species, and foxes lie in between humans and things; darkness and lightness take different paths, and foxes lie in between darkness and lightness; divine transcendents and demons follow different ways, and foxes lie in between divine transcendents and demons.
The marginality of the fox has generated manifold interpretations over the course of history. For example, “huli jing” (fox essence), a colloquial expression, connotes a dualism recognized by all: the enchantment of a female beauty and her power of lustful destruction. Another general term for fox spirits, “huxian ” (literally, fox transcendent, fox genie, or fox fairy), is not merely an honorific for benign foxes, as its literal translation suggests. It also carries an ingratiating undertone by which people propitiate baneful foxes. Sources about fox spirits and fox cults paint even more complex and often self-contradictory pictures. An encounter with a fox spirit could turn into deadly intercourse with a vampire, or a pleasant romance and even marriage.
!!P38zFLDUYUh/x/40515354#40518597
6/12/2025, 8:08:52 PM
>>40518570
>As a sentence proceeds, it continually narrows the freedom of the application of the succeeding terms, and tends to fix their destiny of meaning, so to speak.
>A sentence does this by means of the syntax or operational rules of the language in which it is spoken. Yet this meaning, is actually a reflection of the original choice of intent on the part of the speaker, who is the framer of the sentences. If there were no rules of operation and syntax, no orderly procession of results, no freedom would be possible. Freedom in fact means not only choice of cause but guarantee of effect once a cause is chosen. Fate and free will are two sides of the same coin. The first is the crystallization of the second. Imagine for a moment a world in which one never could know what would occur when one re-enacted the same cause. This would not be a world of freedom but of chaos, which constitutes one of the worst tyrannies.
>Almost as important as the existence in the universe of laws or patterns of consequence is the fact that one may change consequence-pattern if one changes the intent that generates the causal pattern to which the consequence is but nature’s appropriate response. We cannot always predict what the appropriate consequences for actions will be. Indeed, that ability is called “wisdom.” But we can study the configurations of relational pattern between act and consequence and thus learn better how to determine what this appropriateness in any given case means.
>As a sentence proceeds, it continually narrows the freedom of the application of the succeeding terms, and tends to fix their destiny of meaning, so to speak.
>A sentence does this by means of the syntax or operational rules of the language in which it is spoken. Yet this meaning, is actually a reflection of the original choice of intent on the part of the speaker, who is the framer of the sentences. If there were no rules of operation and syntax, no orderly procession of results, no freedom would be possible. Freedom in fact means not only choice of cause but guarantee of effect once a cause is chosen. Fate and free will are two sides of the same coin. The first is the crystallization of the second. Imagine for a moment a world in which one never could know what would occur when one re-enacted the same cause. This would not be a world of freedom but of chaos, which constitutes one of the worst tyrannies.
>Almost as important as the existence in the universe of laws or patterns of consequence is the fact that one may change consequence-pattern if one changes the intent that generates the causal pattern to which the consequence is but nature’s appropriate response. We cannot always predict what the appropriate consequences for actions will be. Indeed, that ability is called “wisdom.” But we can study the configurations of relational pattern between act and consequence and thus learn better how to determine what this appropriateness in any given case means.
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