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[watertank]

...when Confucius, the most famous and revered East Asian teacher, was asked by his students to tell them the meaning of athoritative personhood or jen - the conceptual pivot of his entire philosophy - he refrained from ever giving them a a definition. In diametric opposition to the Platonic insistence on defining essences, Confucius related paradigmatic stories. Knowing what a word means is not knowing what it signifies, but how to conduct oneself in situations where it is used.

Reinventing the Wheel: A Buddhist Response to the Information Age. By Peter D. Hershock .p. 6

see also Eleanor Rosch, http://psychology.berkeley.edu/faculty/profiles/erosch2007.pdf

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[watertank.livejournal.com]

In Buddhism, this kind of relationship is referred to as pratitya-samutpada or codependent origination. It is not that the spread of mass media determines the disintegration of the family or vice versa, but rather that they have arisen in mutual dependence or support of one another. p. 30

[watertank.livejournal.com]

== It appears that a Buddhist world is inherently more complex than a similar "Western" world. Equipped with Aristotelian reductionism, we learned how to simplify and control our reality. Operating on essences is qualitatively easier than to deal with complex interdependencies.