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by svat 159 days ago
Here are some other translations of that passage (Enchiridion 26): https://enchiridion.tasuki.org/display:Code:e,ec,twh,twr,gl,...

- The first part says: if you shrug off someone else's cup being broken as just an accident, you should also do the same when yours gets broken.

- Then he clearly says “Apply now the same principle to the matters of greater importance.”

- The last part says that if you respond to someone else's bereavement with platitudes like “Such is the lot of man” or “This is an accident of mortality” (this does not preclude some amount of sympathy and compassion preceding those statements!), then you should respond the same to yours, rather than thinking of yourself as uniquely wretched and unfortunate.

The main point is about being consistent in how you view others' fate and yours: not that you should care equally about someone's wife and yours (or that you should be indifferent to either), just that the story you tell about life and fortune should be the same.

[He's also obviously distinguishing the cup situation (a simple everyday thing where the principle is easy to see and follow, given as an establishing example) from the wife situation (a situation where the principle is harder to apply), by saying “greater things” / “higher matters” / “matters of greater importance”.]

1 comments

There's logic to prevent you from viewing more than five translations at one time, but I'm happy to see you got right past that by url-hacking. It breaks the layout a little bit and makes the site even worse on mobile.

I see you included all the translations except Stephen Walton's. Yes he took some liberties, but I like it anyway :)

Thanks for making this site; I love it and have returned to it many times. (I don't mind the layout with all translations even on mobile; I just rotate my phone or decrease font size.) I read through the whole thing recently. (https://twitter.com/svat/status/2004591889010643102)

Thanks also for making it open-source. I used it for a blog post about a story I remembered from my school textbook :) https://shreevatsa.net/post/bazin-letter-box/ -> https://shreevatsa.net/bazin-letter-box/

Stephen Walton's translation is actually my favourite! I omitted it here because this is HN and likely someone would complain the translation is clearly incorrect because it talks about “Your neighbor’s car gets hit in a parking lot”. But to include it too just for completeness :) https://enchiridion.tasuki.org/display:Code:e,ec,twh,twr,gl,...

I'm very glad to hear all that! My goal was to make it easy to use, so the following part of your blog post (2019!) absolutely made my day:

> The software too pleasantly just worked, with no setup or install required: just clone the sample app, change the filenames and <base href="..."> in index.html as it mentions. It’s a joy when that happens.

Suffice to say, many people haven't had as much success as you: they fumbled around for 10-20 commits and ended up with something broken. I think requiring people to edit json is just too much :)