Wednesday, November 14, 2007

The Monk Part 2

I ran into the monk today after school. I was standing next to the stairs talking to one of my classmates as he came up the stairs. He was showing some other Thai people around, and decided to take them here. We talked for about an hour, and it was really satisfying because I didn't ever have to stop the conversation to ask what a word was. We did have one little glitch because the word for province and tone are the same except they have different tones. So I asked him how many tones the Thai language has, and he said 74. I was incredulous, but we finally got it sorted out. Thailand has 74 provinces, but the Thai language only has 5 tones (Chinese has 4 or 5 depending on how you count, most people say it only has 4). We talked about excersise some, and I asked him what he did. He said he runs up and down stairs, and does yoga. I asked him how he learned yoga, and he said he went on the internet just like everyone else. I just thought it was funny, a Buddhist monk from Thailand surfing the internet finding out how to do Yoga.

6 comments:

James said...

Hi Jasper

I just finished the lecture series on Buhhdism. It was quite interesting to learn how flexible the tradition is.

I was discussing with friends how several religious traditions have the comon purpose of reducing suffeing.

James said...

That should be "suffering" instead of "suffeing."

James said...

Might that be spelt "Buddhism?"

I've been grading papers, so my mind is a bit off.

Me said...

yeah. I had thought that buddhism was really mellow, and I liked it because of that, but then I heard about some Buddhists in Thailand rioting to get Buddhism declared as the main state religion. I guess there are just some bad crazies in every religion.

Nancy said...

Time for a new post, Jasper.

Me said...

I know Nancy. I got lazy, but I'm working on one now.