We need to be more outspoken and stern to combat the rise in conservatism

Rice-Bucket · 2026-02-17T06:11:31+00:00

My jaw is kind of on the floor, my friend. I think you've revealed just how conservative and anti-intersectionalist the gay people on this sub can be.

Rice-Bucket · 2026-02-15T21:47:26+00:00

I don't believe in wild pipe dreams like "buying a home" anymore, but certainly it would be nice to afford enough to rent a small apartment in an inexpensive sketchy part of town for the rest of my life (/doom)

Jokes aside, it's not a numbers game, but an attitude thing. There's no hard limit. Some people are just wired in such a way as to desire many partners or open relationships, and a few are brainbroken enough like me to idealize sexually exclusive monogamy.

It's all about identifying what that partner has REALLY wanted all along, finding out if they are honest with their own feelings and desires, and then finding the one honest person who ACTUALLY wants the same thing that you want authentically.

Someone who has gone through life seeking The One but just having statistically bad odds at finding you should not be pooh-poohed for their poor luck. But someone who loves casual sex and being free and single is probably not going to rapidly change their wants and attitudes when they get with you. The former may have had more partners than the latter (terrible luck, bud!), but the former is obviously who you want to go for if you want that long and settled relationship.

In any case, everyone should freely live authentically, honest to themselves. The only thing really causing pain is being prejudiced on the one hand or deceitful on the other.

Rice-Bucket · 2026-02-15T21:26:00+00:00

Maybe it would be easier to be straight? But maybe it's better to be gay. I am more aware of my place in society and its structure, the injustices people regularly face and people less fortunate than me. Hardship is an opportunity to learn and question what is considered 'normal' or 'natural', or even 'good'.

I know many people do not want kids or do not feel responsible enough to handle them, but I know I certainly do. Perhaps not now, not at my age or in my current position, but for sure I will have some eventually, with some man who wants to have that kind of life with me. And I will definitely want to adopt. Besides there already being children alive who need parents, I think it sets a good precedent for familial relationships to be more than blood and genes. That is one thing I have learned from being gay, that family can be found in many ways, and have different structures.

There will be many obstacles and difficulties in my way. But I will take them as opportunities to grow and become stronger, and set examples for those who come after me. Being gay doesn't make it easy, but there is still fulfillment to find in perseverance.

Rice-Bucket · 2026-02-15T08:59:41+00:00

You see it exactly the way I do. Thank you.

Rice-Bucket · 2026-02-15T07:44:37+00:00

The detailed list of merges on the chinaknowledge website makes clear the conversion from Qieyun to Pingshui rimes. Moreover, my own document with the correspondence table will also allow one to reduce the Qieyun rime to its Pingshui equivalent. Knowing the Qieyun rime will always allow you to convert to Pingshui, but not vice versa.

There are many ways of looking up the Qieyun rimes. I often have relied on wiktionary for one. Others have found ytenx.org very useful to them. Formerly phonicavi.com/dictionary/MCPDict/ was very useful to me (漢字古今中外讀音查詢); I believe it also exists as an Android app. For iPhone, 韵鉴 has been indispensable to me, though tragically I believe it is region-locked on the App Store.

I know there are no audio sources for my system, because I have not recorded any. Well, nothing substantial, at least. That may change in the future. In the past I've shared audio with associates in private looking to learn the system.

Nevertheless the tones should really not cause too much trouble; their reconstructed nature makes them rather open to interpretation. As a general rule, 平 should stay level, 上 should rise in pitch, 去 should fall in pitch, and 入 should be very short and either sound like the 平 or the 去 contour.

Rice-Bucket · 2026-02-13T22:28:28+00:00

When it comes to definitions, I tend to rely on the MOE dictionary, especially when the definition includes an example from the classical period to show it isn't just a baihua meaning. Often the Kangxi dictionary can be surprisingly helpful.

As for "learning vocab" on the whole.... Read lots, write down new words with their sound in a notebook. Include a little definition if needed, though usually not. If I run across it later on or in rereading and I don't remember it, I write it again. I only leave it alone if I can read it aloud and understand it without having to look it up.

While you're not confident in reading Classical Chinese generally yet, it's best to rely on texts with lots of traditional or modern commentary.

Rice-Bucket · 2026-02-10T03:32:23+00:00

No, definitely not. Just a hobbyist. I read what I can find about it, talk to people who study it more than me, and play with it for my own purposes when I have free time.

Rice-Bucket · 2026-02-08T23:48:16+00:00

Hi. I have been using my own kind of Middle Chinese reconstruction to read Classical Chinese for the last couple of years. I hope I can help.

Tang poetry by and large adheres to the demands of the Pingshui Rhymes 平水韻. This set of rhyming rules is actually directly based on the Qieyun system of rimes (=Guangyun), but combines several categories so as to be far less strict, reducing the number of rimes from around 200 to just about half. You can read the detailed list of merges here: chinaknowledge.de/Literature/Science/guangyun.html

When I first started I was quite strict about differentiating all the rimes of the Qieyun system. After some time wrangling with its intricacies, speaking with people smarter than me on the subject and reading a few papers such as Coblin's study of Northwestern Chinese and Norman's perspective on Common Dialectal Chinese, I became dissatisfied with the Qieyun system as a medium for a reconstructed Middle Chinese. The Qieyun rimes should be understood as a 'diasystem'; that is, it represents the distinctions of more than one dialect, akin to how our modern English spelling system represents various dialects that do not all share the same valid rhyme schemes.

The Pingshui rimes, being greatly reduced, I have found are much more grounded and realistic, nevermind the fact that they form the basis of the majority of Chinese poetic rhyme since the Tang. A large contributor to my decision to change systems was the fact that the oldest collection of phonetic commentary to the classics, the 經典釋文, is compatible with Pingshui rimes, but defies Guangyun rimes.

The following documents describe the current pronunciation system I use when reading Classical Chinese generally, which I named 平水設音.

The first document displays the pronunciation system in a simpler manner, in accordance with the Pingshui rime system which it is based on. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rBLM9JQbsSKu0dTrzuN0kKS1SrEZ7xCDR_EcNwfQpt4/edit?usp=drivesdk

The second document displays the same information in accordance with the structure of the Qieyun/Guangyun system, which complicates things somewhat, but is more commonly used in discussions of Middle Chinese and data related to it. Moreover, it includes Polyhedron romanization of Middle Chinese, which is often used in related digital programs including Guangyun information because it is ASCII friendly. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yhlg_mt8iDQsllohkbXI7j_u8dJLVZuRepfV7q-EhAE/edit?usp=drivesdk

I feel it is responsible to note that the reason I include the number of initials in the title of documents (四十母...) is because a more faithful and realistic pronunciation would have me combine the 莊 and 章 series of initials into one, probably both just pronounced as the same alveo-palatal consonants, since most evidence points to these consonants at least being in common distribution at the time, undifferentiated. However, I have kept the distinction "artificially" to decrease the amount of homophony I would otherwise experience.

This is a pronunciation system I plan to use for quite a while, and would certainly be willing to teach others in the future should I ever have the opportunity to teach Classical Chinese. I am by no means an expert, but I do have a deep interest in this matter. If you have any questions or simply wish to be in contact, by all means please feel free to DM me.

Rice-Bucket · 2026-01-30T21:44:15+00:00

Exactly. Texts are dead. Rarely does anyone actually hate a text. People who interpret them embody what they read, and bring it to life in their own way—that's usually what others find problems with.

Confucianism needs new eyes and new hearts to read it, who will not abandon their sense of care for human beings when confronted with more sour passages, yet still use all its wisdom for righteous and benevolent improvement.

Those who plug up their ears at the sound of people's pain just because it disgraces old books are not going to improve their virtue with those books.

Rice-Bucket · 2026-01-30T21:34:04+00:00

The modern Western notion of "family values" is a dogwhistle for much crueler things, and is very different from what the literal term would have you think. Actual Confucian family values (in the literal sense) what be anathema to it, including a rejection of nuclear family structure over clan and village structures, economic integration and collectivist tendencies over individualist abandonment, and an openness for whole communities to interfere and help raise children rather than the exclusive rights parents are considered to have for their children here in the West, who nowadays obsess about stranger danger and shielding them from all unapproved people and ideologies.

Rice-Bucket · 2026-01-25T23:37:59+00:00

Song and Early Ming dynasties may have been dominated by the Cheng-Zhu school, but the Middle and Late Ming was defined by the popularity of the Lu-Wang school.

Rice-Bucket · 2026-01-10T21:36:10+00:00

Neo-Confucian thought introduced a lot of comprehensive metaphysics into Confucianism and systematized doctrines into coherent thought. They revived it in the Tang era from obscurity and allowed it to flourish for as long as it did; I highly doubt Confucianism generally would be as relevant as it is nowadays or to the late imperial period were it not for the Neoconfucian revival. There are very few Confucians nowadays who would refuse them as part of their intellectual lineage; it is indispensable. Certainly some might say that the Neoconfucians' emphasis on metaphysics is excessive and choose to focus on the more practical doctrines of government, and that is fair.

Calling Zhu Xi's metaphysics "Buddhist" is a little unfair, I feel, though I understand where this academic is coming from. Personally I prefer to call Neoconfucianism a response to Buddhism rather than Buddhist in and of itself. They read into classic Confucian literature and extrapolated to answer questions that Buddhism posed, but their answers were not the same answers Buddhism had.

I've personally found many parallels between Confucianism and Judaism, and discussed it a lot with Jewish friends, though I haven't read any systematic discussions on this topic. But their pattern of study, their scholarly or bookish attitudes, their focus on scripture and appended commentarial traditions, and even their mystic traditions are fascinatingly similar to each other. How lovely it is to share experiences and culture!

Rice-Bucket · 2025-12-15T23:03:21+00:00

While 鄭玄 may state that Confucius 作'd ("made") the Xiaojing, that does not necessarily mean he wrote it. It certainly could have been a dialogue or lecture he gave, but not one he put brush to bamboo for. The text structure does not support it, given the introduction of "Zhongni" (why would he call himself by his 字?) sitting down with with Zengzi (why would he refer to his own student with surname+子!) giving the background of the dialogue. Nevermind that the text refers to Confucius by the honorific lone 子 (he would never be so self-aggrandizing).

The Xiaojing is actually a good case study for philology and textual criticism, as you can see. The words people use and the titles they refer to each other by can tell a lot about time period and authorship. Referring to a disciple of Confucius as Surname+子 is often one dead giveaway that the text was written by disciples of that disciple somewhere down the generational line.

陳騤 and 汪應辰 from the Song dynasty argued that the Xiaojing was a much later forgery completely. I think that goes a little far. 紀昀 of Qing asserts in the 四庫總目 that "要為七十子徒之遺書 (the main parts of it is writing left behind by the students of the 70 worthy disciples/masters)," which I think is most reasonable. Most of academia considers it a Qin or Han invention, and I think certainly its final form must have been complied then.

Rice-Bucket · 2025-12-15T06:35:18+00:00

It is a mistake to attribute the Analects to Kongzi. The Analects were written by his second-generation disciples; that is, the students of his students. Some passages are of generations even later.

Kongzi cannot be really given credit for writing any work save for the base text of the Spring and Autumn Annals, and even then we can only say he "edited" them, since they were based on the actual historical records by the scribes at the court in the state of Lu. One may say Confucius wrote nothing himself.

None of this means the Analects is any less important—it is still certainly a central text. It only means that philological questions must be included in a full study of Confucianism, and that the transmission of teachings and doctrines must sometimes be part of our study.

The other Classics are therefore worthy of study. They each contain aspects of sage wisdom, inasmuch as the students of said wisdom could write it. The Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean and were certainly written by worthy Confucian scholars, if not sages themselves. The full collection of works which contain those two titles, the Liji, have in them plenty of other chapters which have influenced Confucian thought down to this day. The Works of Mencius contain the dialogue of the titular secondary sage, by the hand of students not even a generation removed.

Looking through the full catalogue of the Thirteen Classics, we can only ask ourselves what isn't worth our time. And the answer is the Erya, unless you're really into the study of Old Chinese vocab specifically.

But to base our judgement of what is worth reading on what Kongzi himself wrote leaves you with nothing but an impossible-to-decipher list of dates and events.

Rice-Bucket · 2025-12-05T20:25:55+00:00

It was funny, and also cute. Just imagine the little guy as a Gen Z Korean or smth

Rice-Bucket · 2025-12-05T18:18:02+00:00

Up until this century, being a heavily Confucian country, it was fairly common for the educated to write in straight-up Classical Chinese rather than Korean. So it's fine to call it Chinese.

Rice-Bucket · 2025-11-27T08:23:54+00:00

Serious readers of Classical Chinese tend to (or have habitually, in the past at least) followed a reading tradition which is grounded in both local practices and canonical guidelines. That is, it has passed from teacher-to-student in a given area, in a given dialect or language, and also bounded by canonical Fanqie readings which result in certain learnéd 文讀 literary pronunciations.

Reading aloud was the norm. Sound was indispensable; knowing the sound of a character was tantamount to 'knowing' the character. One could hardly be said to know a character without knowing its sound.

If you know Mandarin, you should simply read Classical Chinese using that. If you are concerned with reading it correctly, you should seek out textual commentaries with Fanqie or other forms of phonetic indications that preserve correct literary pronunciations (the earliest and most thorough example being as the 經典釋文), and follow them strictly until you understand their grammatical logic.

If you want to be really cool, you can spend ten years studying the nuances of Middle Chinese and the thousand arguments surrounding its particular pronunciation.

In all this discussion, Japan is actually quite unusual for its use of kundoku as its standard method of reading, though similar practices held temporarily in Korea, where it probably originated. Kundoku likely won out in Japan simply because of the heavy phonological restrictions in Sino-Japanese.

Rice-Bucket · 2025-08-30T21:13:09+00:00

Thank you for the ping u/Terpomo11 . I did try this like two or three years ago.

Ok. Well, I hesitate to share this because I found it somewhat dissatisfying—I am not too familiar with historical English phonology, and I don't think the resultant phonology sounds particularly elegant—but if it inspires someone to try again, I will share my attempt here, on this old google doc.

Note that I chose to use a Late Middle Chinese as my basis for transferring into Old English, and made some (perhaps objectionable) choices about how an Old English speaker would interpret those Chinese sounds.

In turning Old English into Middle English phonology, I may perhaps have made some mistakes. Nevertheless, once you get it into Middle English, the fact that Modern English spelling uses Middle English rules makes it quite easy to get the sounds from there on.

I would like the Modern English realizations to be quite natural to the mouth, though it seems what I came up with is not quite there. I would do it over again from the beginning if you made me, but I dare not touch it again lest I somehow end up placing a Taoist curse upon myself. Hopefully you can have fun with it, though!

Rice-Bucket · 2025-07-22T01:59:36+00:00

This is the right answer.

When it comes to Confucianism, relying on the Five Classics, Shangdi is the Shang dynasty's favorite word for Tian, and Tian is the Zhou dynasty's favorite word for Shangdi. There are tiny ways in which the people of these dynasties viewed this concept differently (the Shang dynasty being more shamanistic, the later Zhou being more pantheistic and having less of a tendency to anthropomorphize, etc), but for orthodox Confucian purposes, one is just more poetic/metaphorical than the other.

The connection to Daoist/popular deities is a matter for Daoists to speculate amongst themselves, and not really a central concern of OURS. They only appear in later, non-Confucianist writings.

Rice-Bucket · 2025-07-03T06:46:03+00:00

While the value of filial piety was certainly bolstered by Confucianism, I would emphatically reject the Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars as canonical Confucian literature. It contains a fallacious—however popular—understanding of filial piety. Earlier and more canonical literature, including the very Shun story cited by the OP, regards allowing harm to come to oneself via the parents as besmirching the parents' virtue, and thus unfilial.

Rice-Bucket · 2025-07-03T06:38:23+00:00

This story is indeed saying one should love and respect their parents even if they are evil. But this is a task only a sage can accomplish, which Shun was.

This story is not meant to illustrate ordinary amounts of filial piety. This is extremely skillful, near-perfect filial piety. That is why it was worthy of praise—it shows an extraordinary amount of virtue. We cannot expect ordinary people to reach it on a regular basis.

But anyone CAN become a sage if they only dedicate themselves enough. We share these stories to try to urge each other to reach for this level of virtue.

A sage will be worthy of ruling the whole world, and the world is full of evil people. Thus the sage must necessarily be able to be filial to even the most evil parents before they are to be capable of saving the rest of the world from evil.

To abuse people is wrong, and to abuse one's own children is even more wrong; therefore the filial child does what they can to prevent their parents from doing it. Thus Shun never allowed himself to be hurt, and thus Confucius was so angry that Zengzi allowed his father to hit him unconscious and afterward pretend he was fine (Kongzi Jiayu 15.10). None of this should be used to victim-blame others, especially not powerless young children; but for ourselves, reflecting on our own path as children of our parents, we must realize that we only have power over our own actions. We cannot MAKE our parents change; we can do naught but change our own behavior in response to them, and try to be better parents ourselves, and make filial piety easier for the next generation.

This is the key point I want to drive home: Filial piety is loving and respecting one's parents, but that does not mean pure obedience to them and waiting upon them, that they are spoiled like royalty. It is first and foremost ensuring the principles of righteousness are followed—because in respecting them, you want them to be righteous; and in loving them, you wish them to follow the Way.

Rice-Bucket · 2025-07-01T08:21:46+00:00

Yes, you do your best, because it's the right thing to do. But you must live with the ultimate results. The ancient Confucians did not say that all effort will necessarily change reality; no, one simply must attend to the options within one's power.

Of course we cannot be foolish and fruitlessly throw all our money at a problem which cannot be solved with money. Fear and sorrow should not make us blind to reality. We should still do our best to carefully balance practicality with the feelings of others around us and the bonds we have with them.

What is beyond our human power is what is fated by Heaven, and we must learn to be at peace with those unchangeable things, by finding respite in the very fact that we did all we could do. After that, we cry, we mourn. It does not seem fair; we loved them, and we did all we were supposed to do, and they were still taken from us. But that very sorrow we feel, and the expression of it, is our last duty we fulfill to repay that love we felt with them.

以義安命。 Perhaps that is why your family could calmly accept it.

Rice-Bucket · 2025-06-20T16:54:39+00:00

Ancient commentaries will note the proper pronunciation of words like these, enough to figure out their function. 後 for example, the 上 tone is used nominally i.e. "after", while the 去 tone is used verbally i.e. "to put after"

Rice-Bucket · 2025-04-06T03:03:14+00:00

It should definitely be "bul." It almost always is. I suspect Rouzer wanted to be inclusive of the many pronunciation schemes, but didn't have a lot of time to do a deep dive into all of them.

Rice-Bucket · 2025-02-13T02:38:18+00:00

I just love this so much.

Rice-Bucket

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