Hiya all,
I haven't been around for quite a while, last post that I wrote here was 8 years ago.
Not sure if anyone of you here remember, but at that time I was studying Bazi (8 characters, a traditional Chinese astrology, or more like cylindrical date analysis) and some other disciplines which belong to the Five Arts (五术 or 五 術 if we use traditional script). For a long time I've looked at the original texts that are assembled at ctext.org and sighed as learning Chinese well enough to read them was way beyond me.
Recently as LLMs got more prominent and I've started tinkering with them, I tried setting up an instance to help me translate those old texts, and results are great.
I've shown what we done with Google Gemini Pro to Manfred Kubny, who is a leading Sinologist working on translating texts on Bazi and he was impressed on the quality (and speed) that I was able to achieve by combining my knowledge of the subject with properly instantiated AI assistant.
(Manfred insists that Bazi not astrology but climatology, as those characters translate the date into the chart that talks about the climate of the time when one was born in, and how that translates into their temperament and other inner qualities).
Another thing that happened is that I've attended a Vipassana retreat (as taught by S.N. Goenka) and one of the things that happened is while people were seeing sankharas arising, I got to look at how Wuji unfolds into Taiji, into Liang Yi, into Si Xiang, then into Ba Gua, and then proceeds to turn into 12 Earthly Branches, 24 Solar terms and Mountains of Luopan, etc.
That got me looking into how does Chinese tradition approach meditation, so I've also started translating 太上老君說常清靜經註 — A commentary on Scripture of Constant Purity and Stillness, a book on Daoist meditation.
In other interesting thing is that I've assembled a talk on yearly planning using the Wuxing (Five Elements) model, and now turning the 8 Pure Gua hexagrams of the I Ching into an advice on what to do in every part of the year.
So, I was wondering if something like that is of interest to anyone here at Hive?
In any case I plan to use this space to post some of the things that I've done, once I figure out what is best to preserve on this blockchain.
Anyhow, I would be glad to read comments by people who we used to talk here, please write something if you see it!