I don’t know why I feel the urge to try to understand such difficult things in Korean when I can still barely communicate my needs in a restaurant. I guess it’s just more interesting to me.
I was somewhat randomly poking around in my Korean-English Dictionary of Buddhist Terms and ran across this phrase:
이분법(二分法)에 대한 경계(警戒)
dichotomy-LOC face-PASTPART caution
I would translate this, roughly, as:
Beware of Dichotomies
Which is awesome, as it could be caveat dichotomia in Latin.
The context was an entry on 시비구불선 (是非俱不禪) on p. 645 of my dictionary – the mistake of meditating on right and wrong, more or less.
Here’s what the rest of the Korean says:
시비는 참선과 거리가 멀며,
right/wrong-TOPIC meditation-WITH distance be-far-WHILE
시비가 있는 곳엔
right/wrong-SUBJ have-PRESPART place-AT-TOPIC
진리가 있을 수 없다.
truth-SUBJ have-POSSIBLE-NOT
The English on the same entry isn’t really a translation – it’s its own thing:
Meditation has nothing to do with arguments: Where there is an argument about right or wrong, this and that, there is no wisdom or truth.
The gist is the same, but the detailed meaning seems widely variant.
Here is a random picture: the luminous November sky in Hongnong, 2010.
