[woolion]

If you read any Chinese/Japanese literature, for example Buddhist or zen texts, it is very common to encounter very weird uses of the words blue or green-- because they mean things that somebody used to these distinct categories will classify nature according to these boxes. Trees are green, bodies of water blue -- even if that is more complex than that, some pines can be very blue, rivers or lakes can be much greener than blue, etc.

Some translators avoid this issue by always using the term "blue/green", which is really awkward, and I couldn't find any explanation for it before learning about "the crayola-ification of the world" [0]. Before I thought that was a poetic literary device.

It is really hard not to think of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis when learning about this. At the same time, taoist philosophy tends to point out that misery comes from our mind's discriminating eye; everything is categorized in boxes, good and bad, concept and not-concept. Maybe having more categories is better from a technical standpoint, but more difficult to handle from a spiritual standpoint? At the same time, this spiritual view tend to see man as needing to overcome his beastly nature, and thus this added technical discrimination is not burden since it is simply part of the path towards a higher level of consciousness?

[0] https://empiricalzeal.com/2012/06/05/the-crayola-fication-of...

[wolverine876]

> because they mean things that somebody used to these distinct categories will classify nature according to these boxes.

Very interesting. Could you explain this part in a little more detail?

[woolion]

I'm not sure I'll answer properly but I'm thinking of how information retrieval works in the brain and how similar it is to word vectors and heatmaps.

There is a well known trick (I don't know if there's actual research behind) that when asked for a tool and a color, people will answer red hammer. There are many tools and colors but these come to mind quickly because they are so frequent, simple, etc. Therefore the concept used for information retrieval implicitly creates a set of all possible words that satisfy it. For instance "bird" will make the person think of pigeons, sparrows, crows, so it naturally implies "flight". It's only by precising either "flightless" or a specific flightless bird that the association is removed. The implication goes both ways: flightless birds tend to not come to mind, despite chickens being extremely common. Furthermore, it is quite counterintuitive to just take arbitrary conjunction of categories (e.g. a bird or a chair). By comparison, discriminating further is very easy, and people tend to be able to much easier think of different elements of the same subcategory (e.g. different breeds of pigeons).

Koans tend to revolve around erroneous thought or language patterns, and so having the "blue or green" category was an obvious example of falling into either of my known boxes (blue or green) before being reminded that the concept encompassed both.

[selimthegrim]

Do you have any examples of such Zen texts?

[woolion]

I can remember it was a case in a translation of Dogen's works, which may not be the most accessible in the first place.