I made a surprising and interesting discovery today. I was browsing through my bilingual Korean-English Dictionary of Buddhist Terms, as I sometimes do to kill time and try to learn something (I have always been fond of consuming reference texts qua reference texts, which is why I like to surf wikipedia randomly, too).
I ran across a term I wanted to try to figure out better, and so I typed the phrase into google to do a search, with some accompanying English to rule out the Korean-only sites. Lo and behold, the first site to come up was an online version of my Korean-English Buddhist dictionary. That’s pretty cool: that they’ve decided to make it accessible online like that.
The phrase I was looking for was:
무규향산곡
(無呌響山谷)
mu·gyu·hyang·san·gok
not-echo(?)-valley
The explanation given in the dictionary is “no echo valley” and the meaning, I think, is that you should stop listening so much to your mind. Turn off the echo-chamber of your brain, or something like that. Stop over-thinking things.
I don’t really know if 규향 means “echo” or not – I’m just guessing. I can’t figure out the hanja – it’s classical Chinese as opposed to something natively Korean, as is true for many Buddhist terms.
[daily log: walking, 5 km]