Nonsense: Serpent and Beauty

Serpent is cursed.

      The greatest sin it's ever sinned is that it walks like a penis. And the second felon it's committed is the temptation of an innocent girl already married to a man. The girl is also cursed, along with her husband, because they made love under an apple tree grown by God the Lord in a garden where open sex is strictly verboten. However, as we always stereotype, a coin has but two sides. The shiny side of this sex affair is the first enlightenment in Christianity. After the intercourse of soul and flesh ever first recorded in the history, we began to look advanced, elevated, civilized and salvationed. Henceforth we are distinctive, superior, and can tell good from evil. Billions of thanks to Eva's virgin sacrifice as well as that evil devil's crimes.

      In China a serpent is not a symbol of sin. Nor does it have much to do with sex. A serpent is usually a beauty, with a charm that allures and powerful witchcraft to handle men. Once you read the story of A Man, A Monk and Two Serpents, you will immediately come to know how Chinese favor a reptile like serpent, or snake, which has gifted us plenty of imagination and creative motives. By nominating one of the twelve zodiac years Serpent, we honor the reptile with respectful attitudes. Serpent also has a nickname, given by us Chinese, Little Long or Little Dragon. Since you have noticed how important a role Long plays in our culture, you probably will take a new look at how we ponder the serpent issues.

      And things do not stop right here. Let me continue with something you perhaps have no idea of before. One of our ancestors, in our mysterious legends and mythical traditions, is a man by the name of Fuxi, with the tail of a serpent instead of the two legs as we have. I've coined a name for this man with a snake tail, Serpentaur, in the honor of the bull-headed monster in Greek mythology. Mr. Serpentaur invented the Eight Trigrams, something that Confucius had elaborated a book of annotations about, and that has exhausted the brains and minds of generations of Chinese who wanted to figure out what the Trigrams means on earth. Nowadays there are still many who write books to try to interpret what the Trigrams may tell us, but no one seems to have succeeded ever.

      If a Chinese woman has a water snake's waist, she then deserves your another look. I know many people have a stronger inclination to the appreciation of women's buttocks. You may add, What a nice ass she has! But this is not a Chinese way of compliments. Our attention is more fixed upon women's waists. One of the Kings in ancient China adored women with water snake like waists. Hence many of his wives starved to death in order to have their waists water-snaked to win the King's personal visit at night. Another evidence of the deadly aesthetics in Chinese history.

      Actually a water snake's waist is good. There in the world is an increasing population more obese than before, which not only poses a danger to the textile industry, but causes a more crowded heaven as well. For heaven's sake, men, and women, keep fit!

Nonsense: Monkey Prevails

Au commencement, Dieu créa les cieux, la terre, et le pierre.

La terre étais informe et vide: il y avais des ténèbres à la surface de l'abîme, et l'esprit de Dieu se mouvait au-dessus des eaux, et voyait le pierre que Dieu regardait avec attention.

Dieu dit, Que le singe soit! Et le singe fut!

Genesis I, Chanson de Singes

Of all the monkeys, the Monkey King is perhaps the most known all over China. He has a greater reputation than does King Kong, and has yet to spread an epidemic to cause a horror among crowds. People say Monkey King is another personification of Shiva, a major Hindu god, a destroyer and a transformer of the world. However, The Monkey King in China is a Buddhist. He wears a fur skirt made from the skin of a tiger he killed to protect his master, and a cap with microchips implanted to prevent him from agonies of wild joy, and he wields a magic wand that weighs exactly 6,750 kilograms and is said to be forged by the first emperor of China, Yu the Great, to hush away a flood long before Jesus Christ.

      He is a transformer, too, and more powerful than the American mechanical ones which needs lubricants to do the transforming. He needs not to read a spell before he transforms, but a slight brainwave within his head will trigger the magic. Surprising is that he has seventy-two options for what he transforms into, which is a trick a frightening wolfman or a thirsty vampire cannot ever possess. What's more, he takes great advantage of his hair, a thread of which, in an emergency, will be pulled out to make a holographic copy of him to fight off his enemies or do something funny. That is the evidence that Chinese made the first cloning of primates on this planet before the modern medical science came into being. Behold, he did it in Tang Dynasty, about six hundred years after Jesus Christ, when Europe shrank in the dark of the darkness of ignorance and stagnation.

      If you call a person a ridiculous monkey, you are insulting him/her in a western way. In China, a monkey is not ridiculous at all, nor is a chimp or a gorilla. Monkey stands for dexterity and agility. He is smarter than a fox and stronger than a bear if necessary. Roughly one out of twelve Chinese were born in the lunar year of the Monkey, and China has issued a zodiac stamp in 1980 to mark the monkey year, whose price has skyrocketed to make an owner of the stamp a good fortune. And cartoons and TV series were made to honor the Monkey King, over decades these cartoons and TV series have remained the most welcome. Even Mickey and Minni cannot beat him, not to mention Tom and Jerry, or Donald the duck.

      Monkey King's best mate, his brother-in-gang, Swine the Marshal, begins to emerge as one of his competent rivals for our appreciation because the former is too perfect. Throughout the story Monkey King never dated a girl and he obviously drinks too much. Some say it is because he is a stone boy who knows not to fuck. However, I'd rather think it is just because he drinks too much. You see, that is a common problem for men, and one of the lessons I've learned from the book, Pilgrimage to the West.

Nonsense: Dog Lovers

We love dogs in two meanings. First, we love them by raising them like family members. The other side, we love them by eating them. As the monk confessed in the movie of Shaolin Temple, Meat and wine through my guts, yet Buddha stays with me. It is a proof of how Chinese to philosophically maintain a balance between good and evil, meanwhile an evidence that we know well a tree is no forest. Making a delicious dish with dog meat does little harm to our perception that dogs are people's best mates.

      To ponder this phenomenon, one needs to know a little bit knowledge about Chinese style of thinking. There around China has long been a saying, Eating comes first. It does not matter what you eat, what matters is that you eat to live. To live, over the history of China, had been a tough job. According to the history, Chinese favored Clay of Bohdisattva, a white kind of clay, as food substitutes in the times of crop failures. Under such circumstance and environment, winners were those that survive. So if dogs could help us survive, their souls would grab their salvation in the heaven of Chinese.

      You must have witnessed that nowadays many Chinese consider eating dogs as a crime that could not be forgiven. Dogs are their children and a Chinese firmly believe even fierce cats like tigers won't eat their babies, not to mention human beings, civilized and full of emotions. Yet many of us eat dogs, which is based on the said idea. Dog eaters leave everything behind while eating. They exchange eating experiences and talk about good recipes. They are gourmets or amateur gourmets, in whose eyes, there probably is nothing tabooed in what to eat.

      I don't eat dogs I raise. I eat dogs in the manner of a mild hypocrisy, i.e. I only eat them without seeing the killing procedures. Actually for my life I can count the times I ate dogs. As a heavy consumer of pork, I pray to God the Lord, peace upon all the hogs I've eaten through my life. Amen.

All In Vain

Siddhartha Gautama, may he rest in peace, was shocked when he learned that man dies. He felt, as the young, handsome, respectable prince of the Shakyas in Kapilavastu, that the heaven fell over his head and the earth was split to let out the flames from the hell. He no longer drank the ruby wine nor watched the sexy dance, but sat in meditation.
　　
　　When Gautama's fear once struck my jug head on a quiet, breezy night, I felt dizzy in bed, pondering all the way what was going to happen during my postlife time, which was in vain. Life is made up of just two phases, one of which is living, thereof the other is death.
　　
　　That perhaps is a bothering experience almost everyone here has ever encountered. Each time a night rain gently falls, you lie in bed alone ruminating the past day, that annoying, answerless question may come and will not cease to emerge until Hypnos, the god of sleep, stealthily smooths your unrest and takes away your consciousness temporarily for this very night. But that is not an end. Once there you live, you are destined to be confronted by such disconcerting tollings.
　　
　　Looking back, I can clearly remember on how many nights I have been disturbed by that terrifying idea. To deprive himself of this fear, Gautama resorted to an ascetic life, which he failed. He then, with his companions, went to settle down beside a river where Gautama began to meditate in austerity, and on a diet of a single grain of rice a day. That nearly killed him. On the brink of starving, after some struggles, he was helped by a girl who offered him some food and drink. With all the strength he could gather, and the courage to overcome death, after 49 days of meditating under a peepul tree, he attained Bohdi, or Enlightenment.
　　
　　Where am I to attain my Bohdi? Do I need to meditate under a tree, too? Or should I go on a strict diet to keep off fleshly distractions? Over the time, I begin to firmly believe that imitations won't help. The era of Gautama has been left behind and to obtain my Bohdi I'd do it from scratch and anew, leaving the past as the past.
　　
　　This is a book about death. Not a death seen often on this planet, yet one among those that happened and will keep happening out there. And this is also a book about living. Not a dull living lived billions of times on this planet, but one among those that sparkled and will keep sparkling all through the history.
　　
　　And in the void something murmurs, Life has two sides; one is living, and the other death.