Nah, I feel silly writing long posts. This is the last post in this thread from me.

I often feel that my English skill is just inadequate to explain things well and this might be another case.

It seems like you are getting very technical with how things are written or concerned about exact role of each character in a word.

Simply, what I am saying is that 'bushido' 'muyedo' or 'do' is a concept. You might have it or might not have it in your culture but that is different from saying that the concept is different in every culture.

People in many tropical countries have never seen snow and some don't even know what it is. I work with plasma all the time in my work and I know that a lot of people have no idea what plasma is or what it look like. However, when you learn about them, be it snow or plasma, I believe that what people think of snow or plasma would be the same as what I think of them.

Your brother in law was shocked when you presented an 'American' football and pads and told him that is it 'football'. So the American word 'football' and English word 'football' would be different but the concept of a game 'soccer' in American and 'football' in any other language would be the same. Heck, I call it '??'.

I totally understand that you have not met Chinese martial artist using word ??. It is likely that such word might not even exist in Chinese, just like there is no word for 'American' football exist in English other than 'American football'. That doesn't mean that Chinese martial artist do not have concept of martial art code of conduct.

I understand what Daesan was using the word Do in martial artist context. That is why I generalized that concept of do in any country is the same in this context.


The reason I used die as an example was that it is an English word with a few totally different meaning just as you listed a few different meaning for ?. Nothing more than that. Perhaps the market example was a better one.



It is hard to describe a such complicated concept and by making it not very clear, he did a good job of not making a fool out of himself. If he said 'the exact concept of do is ............... (insert your explanation here) and I know that for fact,' then he is just a moron.

I will give a few interesting examples from modern physics. (Physics is my main job)

-The uncertainty principle states that you cannot be sure of the location of any object. I see my fingers but the exact location of them are unknown.
-There are electrons orbiting a nucleus of an atom but you cannot be certain of its position. Where is the electron? It is there somewhere but you cannot measure it.
-The vacuum means nothingness. Therefore, cencept like that there 'exist' vacuum in outer space is wrong. There is no vacuum. However, vacuum is constantly created and dissappear in any given location. In other word, ???? ????. Being is not being and not being is being. lol
-Boundaries between two objects are not very clear as atoms have finite chances of overlapping or even channeling through each other. When you type your keyboard, your finger and your keyboard are sort of one.

Sounds like a lot of Taoist BS stuff to me.


Johan, install language pack from winXP to write chinese character. Thanks for explanation for ? and ?

Aaron, here is my feeling about the sword in Korean

War Weapon
_______One sided _______________ Two sided
long_____??(jang gum), ??(dae do)______?(gum), ???(yang nahl gum)
short____ ??(dan gum) _______________??(bisu)

House Tool

_______One sided__________Two sided
long_____none______________none
short____?_______________none

but all of them are just ?(kal)

I'm sorry to hear that . If it means anything, I have never thought to myself that your English was ever unclear or awkward...



Perhaps we are looking at the question in a slightly different way. Which is just fine. The way I see it, to answer the question, the exact function of the word 'do' in the various phrases must be explicitly qualified, or else comparing meanings won't be useful.



This may be exactly what you brought up before... Perhaps in Korean, the native way to express this is simply 'do', so the idea of trying to pin down the meaning in each case, or even decide if the context or grammatical usage is the same makes no sense to you. For me, I speak broken Chinese, clearly not natively, so words with so many meanings and contexts (ever done a reverse look up of the word qi4 ??) require a lot more work for presice understanding.



I hope I didn't make you think that I think Chinese martial artists didn't have a concept of a code of conduct. If I remember right, and feel free to correct me, anyone who knows, Chinese call it the much more clear wu3 de4 (??), or literally translated "martial morality".

But on this topic if you don't mind (if you do, its ok, i'll just be sad and cry a little!), in your intuitive understanding, do the terms 'budo'/'mudo' also refer to code of conduct, or do you see them as equivalent to bujutsu/musool (ie technical only) or is it ambiguous and only mean something to you when put in context?



My calculus based physics ended somewhere around e&m and light... but this is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle right? And also, you can't meausre it without affecting it...something like that? I actually feel that way about MS Windows sometimes. Quantum physics is quite beyond my pay grade, but a friend of mine told me Quantum physics essentially says that the reason that the air in the room never all goes up into the corner of the room is simply because there are so many more possible states where the air is distributed across the room. Since then, I always wondered if that implies that across the infinity of time, if the air will be guaranteed to all move up to the corner of the room at one point! haa haa haa. But since we never know exactly where it is, I suppose that even if it did, we could never know it! Well, except for that nagging instantaneous lack of oxygen.

Oh, no. It's not that. I just feel that my ability to explain a complicated argument is limited. For some reason, I think bit more clear in Korean but sometimes when I try to explain something complex in English, my thought train becomes not very straight and I lose track of my thoughts. Then I start feeling stupid. @_@

When I hear mudo/budo, I think of code of conduct or mental aspect of the martial art. bujitsu/musool reminds me of the physical training aspect and more of technical issue. But I believe Budo/mudo refers bit more than just code of conduct and it is more like a 'way'

yeah, that is Heisenberg undertainty principle. The exact statement is that both momentum and position of any object cannot be precisely known. You can always measure one of them.

Aaron asked, "When you say 'the dao of China' which dao do you mean?"

Well, it was a long time ago when I phrased the initial question, but essentially what I was getting at was not the etymological differences of the word, but rather our understanding of the application in life of this concept in the three countries mentioned.

At the time I wrote the question I was pretty certain there were different standards or rules comprising "the way" in each country. The way to which I refer here is the "way of living as a martial artist" not "the way of swinging a weapon so that it does something specific". From my point of view the Chinese approach to those troublesome questions of whether to resort to force or not, or what things require restraint, etc is different than that of the Japanese or Koreans.

Again it comes back to an early impression made on me by my Kwanjang-nim when he emphasized that Muye was more important than either mudo or musool in Korean Martial Arts.