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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

Comments

[watertank.livejournal.com]

Practicing emptiness commits us to seeing all identities or distinctions - whether that of 'self' or 'other' or 'idea' and 'reality' - as more or less purposeful abstractions, not as 'atomic' building blocks.

The world in which we live should be seen as a narration - a meaningfully ordered pattern of interrelationship - structure by our own values and intentions. p.110-11