| HN Mirror

So, getting back to lava[0], IIRC I'd already admitted that I needed a weak[1] rhyme for 'Schwoaba' (and having already used most of my mental bandwidth finding 'gutsy' as a syllable-truncation of 'valiant'). But why even mention the valiant Swabian? Because, like grue[2], a Schwabenstreich[3]'s denotation has spatiotemporal bifurcation: outside of Swabia, it's a dumb, ridiculous, idiotic move; inside of Swabia, it's a sly move with a good outcome.

This reminded me strongly of a paragraph from Funakoshi (冨名腰義珍):

  When birds of prey are attacking,
    they fly in low without extending their wings.
  When wild beasts are about to attack,
    they crouch low with their ears close to their heads.
  Similarly, when a sage is about to act,
    he always appears slightly dull.

By looking at the untranslated original[4,5] (1935)[6], we can see by the lack of hiragana that he's probably quoting a chinese source[7,8].

After having translated to simplified characters, and thanks to a literary search engine, I found the referent[9]:

  鸷鸟将击，卑飞敛翼；
  猛兽将搏，弭耳俯伏；
  圣人将动，必有愚色。

Which is attributed[A] to Jiang Ziya[B], someone who at first appeared to be taking the Grothendieck Option, but turned out merely to have been waiting for the right delta to strike price in order to exercise the Kolmogorov Option, all along.

Did Jiang follow his own advice?

[0] or magma, as it's called when it's at home

[1] having "rhymed" 'repeats' with 'feet'

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_riddle_of_induction#Grue_a...

[3] https://als.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwabenstreich#Konnotation

[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20140223235036/http://www.hawaii...

[5] in the earlier "8 important phases of Karate" https://archive.org/details/karate-do-kyohan_202203/page/248... I'm not sure what the first 2 are supposed to convey other than the constant waxing and waning (would we now say chaotic time evolution?) of relative concentration, relative strength and weakness, etc? However, all of the last 6 I've encountered in more than one —western origin— agonistic context as well.

[6] note that to better appeal to a mainland audience, by this date Karate (唐手 "Tang[chinese] hand") has already been rebranded as Karate (空手 "empty hand")

[7] indeed, "Shotokan" as the name of the school derives from Gichin's pen name, Shōtō (松涛 "pine billow")[C]

[8] actually Shōtō faithfully gives us the source:《六韬·武韬·发启》but for some reason (Japanese pariochialism? The cold war? or just plain ignorance, as the facing page implies, that the circles indicated sources?) his translator forgot to include it?

[9] https://m.zuowenxue.com/mingju/3069.html

[A] even if the book[D] in which this appears dates from 500 years after its supposed author, as the english wp page suspects, it's still worthwhile advice from ~2'500 years bp.

[B] who achieved literary immortality in at least two other ways: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/姜太公釣魚——願者上鉤#Idiom and https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/姜太公封神——漏了自己

[C] one suspects Funakoshi had the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Treasures_of_the_Study#Fo... in his study?

  文 房 四 寶:
  筆,墨,紙,硯

I see that 松 was also the "top grade" of a tripartite rating system (pine, bamboo, rattan: similar to our gold, silver, bronze for a relatively metal-poor society?); Funakoshi studied two other schools of karate before inventing what we know as Shotokan[E], so might his pupils have named the dojo "Shotokan" not only after him, but also with the idea that it (pine) improved upon its (bamboo and rattan) ancestors?

[D] https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/六韜#豹韜 . I have yet to delve into this, but supposedly a fair amount of it is supposed to be about first (a) laying the groundwork, and then (b) reaping the rewards when[F] the moment is propitious.

[E] in which he never awarded himself more than a 5-dan; see the 2nd idiom in [B].

[F] compare von Seydlitz, or Grothendieck's "when the time is ripe, hand pressure is enough"?