Road to Rwanda---Confucius Birth Place

 

If one of my previous Face Book  posts shows up in my timeline inbox that might be interesting, I am trying to post it here.  The date on this post is May 1, 2017. 

Confucius has been the main force in Chinese philosophical thought since about 400 B.C. I am talking a long long time and a very pervasive force. Yesterday we went to his birth place. By regular train it would have been 2 hours. By fast train it took us 20 minutes (price about $4.50). By fast, I do mean fast. It said it was going about 300 kph. (Rick says that is about 185 mph.) When you were on the inside of the train, the terrain was going by quickly but not at a dizzying pace. However, standing on the platform with a through train buzzing past was quite exhilarating. The town of QuFu itself had a more "Chinese" feel to it than what the big towns have. It was a long day of seeing old buildings and a beautiful forest with hundreds of huge headstones spaced through out. (As we were viewing the forest/cemetery from a tour bus, a group of white clad people walked by. From past experience I knew is was a funeral. It turns out that the ashes from a descendant of Confucius was being buried. I find that rather astounding. How do you keep track of your ancestry for 2,000 years? I was also told that since 1949 all bodies in China must be cremated. Just not enough space.) It was an interesting...and exhausting day. I also am sure that it would mean more to a Chinese person whose history is so long and intricately entwined with this philosopher.

P.S. On that visit to Cufu I bought a pretty caligraphy to hang on my wall. After I got it home, I realized I had no idea what it said....I felt rather foolish. It could be cursing us or something. So I decided I would have our students who would come to our house for English Corner on Saturday translate it for me. The first time they tried to translate it, they just looked up the words one by one in a Chinese/English dictionary. The result: Heavy morality carries material. I assured them that a literal translation was not correct. So then someone tried an idiom dictionary. The result: Great virtue bears all things. I am happy to have it displayed on my wall. It rolls up and has been easy to for us to carry from TaiAn to Beijing to South Carolina to Indonesia and now to our apartment in Rwanda.