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jonathaneunice:

If You Want to Fudge Numbers, Do It In Chinese

The Chinese seem to be the masters of artful mis-counting. They love certain numbers, like five, and consider them auspicious, important, and meaningful. And so everything is bent to those numbers. There are five directions: North, East, South, and West, of course. And Center. Because that makes five.

There are five elements: Water, Wood, Fire, Wind/Air, and Earth. But they kinda also want to get Metal in there, so Metal and Wind share a bunk. When you need Metal, you got Metal. When you need Wind, you just call it Wind. Convenient, huh?

I study something called Five Animal (Five Element) Kung Fu. How many styles would you say there are in Five Animal Kung Fu?

If you said “eight,” right you are! Dragon, Leopard, Tiger, Crane, Snake. Plus Poision Hands, Iron Body, and Drunken Boxing. We count Drunken as an extension of Crane, and the Poision Hands/Iron Body pair are considered… uh… part of the salutation. Because it’s convenient to do so. Because we want the answer to be five. Because that’s meaningful. (Not that eight isn’t meaningful to Chinese cosmology in its own right.)

I’m currently studying Man, Heaven, and Earth, one of the Immortals straight sword (jian) forms from the Daoist tradition of the Wudang Mountains. It’s based on a series of seven movements. Some of those moves are complex twists and turns encompassing multiple ideas and multiple strikes and blocks. And some of them, you split a fairly simple movement into several different parts, or even, just stand there and count …two, three… before doing something else. Because the answer is seven, damnit! Even when it’s really six. Or eight. Or whatever.

So whenever you need the numbers to come out the way you want them to come out, I suggest you count in Chinese.

(Chinese number diagram via www.chinahighlights.com)

(via dadaoist)