The mysterious mystery of the Far East is a lying lie

They have here an occasional program about the Far East. Today was one on Oriental (meaning North Asian) gardens. The explication by a distinguished-sounding professor (granted, in his defense, of architecture, not Oriental Studies) involved much feng-shui and Daoist mumbo jumbo. (By which I mean not Daoism, or feng-shui, or their influence on Chinese garden ideas, but the venerable professor's interpretation of just what the influence was). And, while listening, I realized yet again how effective the Asian strategy of choosing to be inscrutable (“you will never understand the Japanese psyche”) is. Asians manufacture it to hide things by which they are embarrassed; Europeans buy it because it fits with Hegel’s ideas about mutual incomprehensibility of East and West: it excuses us for not giving a damn. "They are completely different."

It’s of course all stuff and nonsense. A Polish saying captures this rather well: “When you don’t know what the matter is, the matter is money”. Understanding what is going on does not require any particularly deep knowledge: just basic understanding how the human psyche works. And it works the same everywhere in the world.

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Several days ago Kazik asked me whether oriental languages were like Hebrew: that is, whether any given text contained all sorts of meanings, some veiled, some hidden, some hermetic.

But this only shows his lack of understanding of how Hebrew actually works. Modern Hebrew is clear and effective in getting ideas across. Few statements pose any problems at interpretation. What puzzles Hebrologists today (and has for centuries, if not millennia) are texts which are several thousand years old – The Holy Writ as it is usually referred to. And it puzzles us because a) we simply do not understand the vocabulary; and b) have insufficient knowledge of the context (such as historical and economic realities of the day) of the kind which might allow us to make accurate guesses about the intended meaning of texts we’re trying to unravel. In this sense, of course, classical Chinese and ancient Japanese are just like Hebrew: we do not understand them, and have only a poor grasp of the context in which these texts were written.

So, they puzzle us.

But just because they appear puzzling and mysterious to us today does not mean that they were written with such intention; that they were in any way puzzling or mysterious to their contemporaries.

Of course, Asian speakers often intentionally choose to be vague (so as not to betray ugly realities, such as that they want to be paid, for example); but this is not too difficult to unravel. Feng shui and Daoism aren’t really of much use here. If anything, they only serve to muddle the waters.