Chapter 13 Fuxi is asleep

As soon as you turn the corner from the busy city, you immediately enter a small street with dense trees. It's amazing how quiet it is just a few dozen steps away. I went to visit Ms. Bennett, Ph.D. in Comparative Philosophy of the Athens College of Humanities. I made an appointment as soon as I entered the door. She speaks Greek and I speak Chinese. Mr. Yin Yali will translate and talk in two ancient languages ​​without using a third language. . She is now mainly researching and teaching the Book of Changes, Confucius, Laozi, and Zhuangzi. I asked her when and where she started studying ancient Chinese philosophy, and she said it was more than ten years ago in Italy.I studied oriental philosophy, started in India and settled in China, which is the practice of most of my colleagues.

She is based on Greek classical philosophy, but has a sober perspective of a bystander on Chinese philosophy.She believes that the focus of research on Greek philosophy is knowledge, and the focus of research on Chinese philosophy is life.After a long time, I gradually discovered that among the wise men in the pre-Qin period, Lao Tzu was the one who most met the international philosophical standards. He had an ontological core, while others were more specific and narrow. What interests me is how many people in Greece study Chinese philosophy, she said very few.I said that there are many people who study Greek philosophy in China, and the theories of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are common knowledge in intellectual circles.She said it was because Greek philosophy has become the basis of the entire Western philosophy, while Chinese philosophy is still introverted.

I asked her, among her Greek students, how many are interested in Chinese philosophy?She said more and more, but more and more practical, learning Zhouyi for Fengshui, and Taoism for practicing Qigong. I said it has always been like this in China.What is flourishing is art, and what is lonely is Tao. Therefore, there is the responsibility of scholars.But Hongdao scholars will always be a minority, and it has always been the minority who have maintained the upper-level civilization. She agreed and handed me a cocktail. She loves China and Chinese culture from a Greek standpoint, and thinks it is the love of her peers, no matter how old she is.

A large part of the bookshelves are books about China, mostly in English, but also in Chinese.There are also some porcelains, which are marked on the bottom of the bottle as Ming Dynasty or Qing Dynasty, but she said that they must be fake, and they are just keeping a kind of commemoration related to China.In fact, from my point of view, most of her porcelain vases marked as produced in the Wanli period and written with the full text of "Yueyang Tower" are genuine, so I advise her not to give them away.On her bookshelf, there are also a few pieces of broken glazed tiles picked up from the Temple of Heaven and the Temple of Earth in Beijing, which are served like national treasures.

Really picked it up?I asked. Really picked it up.She answered very sincerely. What made it difficult for me to accept for a while was that she had two little turtles, one female and one male, and the female one was actually named Nuwa, and the male one was named Fuxi.She said she liked them so much that she gave them the most honorable names.She carefully held Nuwa on the palm of her hand, showed it to me lovingly, and apologized earnestly: Fuxi fell asleep. Asked whether Nuwa and Fuxi are a couple, she said: They are still young, and they will decide by themselves when they grow up.Let them live separately now, Nuwa lives in the storage room, and Fuxi lives under the bed in the bedroom. Men and women are not intimate, according to the rules of Confucianism.

In any case, at the southern tip of the Balkan Peninsula, where Socrates and Plato left their footprints, there are countless sweet voices calling for Nuwa and Fuxi every day, although it sounds a little strange to me. On October 6, 1999, stayed overnight at the Royal Olympic Hotel in Athens, Greece