Still learning Koine, reading at least one chapter of it every day. Slowly but surely I'm finally beginning to unpack St. Paul. He went from incomprehensible to me to now not being as bad. I still have work to do but my vocab has increased ten fold and I'm really just focusing on absorbing his writing style. It's a really interesting process. Any other anons in the middle of something similar?
>>18447489I have slowly built up a vocabulary of sanksrit words from close to two decades of studying buddhism and hinduism, and then keeping track of those same words as they go to tibet, china, japan, and in shin doku and it's interesting then seeing those words appear with intentional meaning in like manga or anime or japanese video games. I will probably never go and get the education I need to actually learn one of these languages but I'm happy for you to achieve a level of being able to actually read the NT in greek.
>>18447489Are you the same one I told Paul sounded very Gnostic? Join the club.
>>18447861Paul can sound Gnostic but only if you read him as a Gnostic. You have to remember that when he uses big words like pleroma, pneumatikos, or psychic, they didn't yet acquire the meaning they'd later have as Gnostic technical terms. But Paul does engage in heavy allegorizing of the OT, though that is still accessible through English though somewhat obscured. Actually I would say that Paul has anti-proto-Gnostic elements to him. For example I was reading 1 Corinthians 1 the other day and noticed a neat little play on words he does between the name Apollos and the Greek verb apollumi which in context means something like "those who are perishing". He's basically saying "the cross is foolishness to Apolloarians (followers of Apollo/those who are perishing)". Sorry kinda hard to make that sound right in English that's the best I can do. But it makes sense since it comes right after Paul criticizes the Corinthians for having schisms, one of which belong to Apollos. Another interesting thing I noticed was how Paul uses the Greek word "aphemi" as a legal term to refer to divorce, "to release", but it can also mean something like "forgiveness" or "permit". Just something random I picked up on. Greek has a lot of semantic range to its words, but in most cases the range is like in the same ball-park in the semantic content it conveys. Another funny thing I noticed is that the word we derive for planet, "planetes", which means "wander" is the word the NT uses for being deceived by heretics or being "led astray".>>18447861That's amazing anon. I will never be able to learn something like Sanskrit, probably. How much Sanskrit can you read?
>>18447866I meant the first part of >>18447921 for >>18447866
>>18447921>How much Sanskrit can you read?Shockingly little. If someone shows me a page I can pick out a namaha and a few deity names, as well as important metaphysical concepts. I should be a case study to show that you either need serious devotion to self leraning, or you need to attend an actual institution if you want to learn any particular language for religious reading. I feel shocked I've even picked up this much. Most of what I learned is struggling with a large (or small) number of translations of a given work, then needing to go online and reference the original wordings with translations. What I've found is that Hinduism is shockingly easy to study in English, but Buddhism not so much, because Buddhism works with Pali as a sister language of Sanskrit, with some Mahayana freely using Sanskrit words instead, with Chinese, shin doku (chinese words pronounced the japanese way, becoming neither language in the process) and Japanese. in English trnaslation for many buddhist texs the word "causation" may be used instead of karma, for instance. So effectively if anybody reading wants to study Buddhism better, you need to keep in mind the word for Karma in several foreign languages, as well as how it might be translated in English. There were many times when I was a Buddhist where I missed something because I wasn't expecting an English translation of a well known concept. Something like Sunyata/Emptiness is not confusing, but other technical terms like nirvana becoming extinction, or extinction with no remainder, karma becoming causality, causation, action, etc., can throw you off.
>>18447861>it's interesting then seeing those words appear with intentional meaning in like manga or anime or japanese video games.Can you give an example of this?
>>18447952In the Nasuverse in Kara no Kyoukai (cant remember the English title) the main character is Shiki, shiki is shin doku for 'emptiness' or sunyata in Buddhist thought, if you go on youtube and listen to a shin doku recitation of the Heart Sutra for instance, you'll see the word shiki is used for emptiness. But you have to remember Buddhism's syncretist nature and thus how many characters and aspects of Hinduism traveled to China and later to Japan alongside Buddhism, deities like Kannon being Avalokiteshvara and Buddhists and Hindus going back and forth saying avalokiteshvara is Buddhists approriating our beloved Shiva, or yes Hindus have Shiva, which is a manifestation of Avalokiteshvara.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgfmLuUGETcOr if you like Souls games, in Sekiro, the one armed sculptor is Sekijo, one armed monkey, he's frequently referred to as an animal despite being human, both by himself and other characters. Later he transforms into a demon which you have a boss fight with. In Buddhist cosmology there are 10 realms, with Buddha at the top and Hell at the bottom. Animals are level 3, and demons are level 4. This means that Sekijo was undergoing an upward reincarnative trend and by going from 'animal' to a demon, after the player kills him he's likely to be reborn as a human, which is a blessing in buddhist thought, so a little knowledge there recontextualizes the story. Or the Nioh series referencing a loooooooot of Buddhism, with the title itself, Nioh being the bodyguards of the Buddha and thus Goku-level super universal warriors, the goal of the game is to become stronger through gearing and skill and becoming symbolically as strong as the Nioh themselves.
>>18447952>>18447975also sorry disregard that i suck cocks, Shiki is form, ku is emptiness, but in the heart sutra form = emptiness as a metaphysical teaching for the practitioner to contemplate. I'm having a bad neurological flare up. But the main character's name is meant to be a meaningful connection with Buddhist thought which is obviously a large part of Japanese culture is what i was trying to get across, vocabulary mixup aside.
>>18447982>the main character's name is meant to be a meaningful connection with Buddhist thoughtIs this ever referenced in the show itself? Because the character for her name is a different one from the Buddhist concept.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rūpa
>>18447945>you either need serious devotion This. You need this. There's a few languages I know I could never learn without formal academic training like Hebrew. I won't attempt that on my own. But Greek? Latin? I devoted myself to study. Learned almost all the paradigms. Now it's about cementing vocab mostly for me. I did this all as an autodidact with a desire to read the sacred texts of my faith in their original language. I can't believe how far I got. I can sight read a lot of the NT. But I am by no means 100% fluent. I can read something like 1 John like 99% fluently in Greek. But don't get me started on Hebrews. I haven't gotten that far with it yet and still need more vocab acquisition before I touch that. For now I am doing that through the Pauline epistles. Reading him in Greek shot up my vocab by so so much.
>>18447921There is a book by Elaine Pagels called „The Gnostic Paul” which explores how gnostic sects would have interpreted Paul. It’s good.
>>18447997It's been a million years since I wached kara no kyoukai but I want to think yes in the 5th movie, Japs love wordplay with character names, see Hideo Kojima
>>18448005Fair enough. I know a decent amount of Japanese but I've never studied Buddhism in any capacity. Closest I've ever come is reading Mishima's sea of fertility tetralogy which is deeply interwoven with buddhist concepts.I don't know if the ending was supposed to be deep and shit but to me it just felt like a cop out. Unironically felt like it was rushed so he could meet the deadline before he sashimied himself.
>>18448017>JapaneseI love Japanese stuff but I could never. If I had to choose just one language at gunpoint I would pick sanskrit because it's such a functionally interesting language (NASA was considering using the grammar of sanskrit for AI last century) and I find a lot of value in a lot of Hindu scriptures. I've never read Mishima, I just know him through memes on /lit/. You can get a lot of value from Japanese stuff if you learn some basic Buddhism and the Japanese equivalents. You've probably seen at least one anime with a priest going 'nam amida butsu', which mean's he's a Pure Land buddhist, and that informs you about their beliefs you wouldn't get otherwise, etc.
>>18448030I just sort of stumbled into it. I watched a few animes when I was a teenager and anime by it's very nature makes learning the language extremely easy. For one the plot is usually basic, formulaic, and predictable, so you're not really having to work at following it. Then there's the fact they use extremely simplistic language, set phrases, and speak clearly. Even without trying you can pick up basic shit like Ohaiyo gozaimasu, Daijoubu, baka, etc due to how often they say them. I haven't watched anime in years, my weeb phase is well and truly over, but if ever Japanese randomly comes up I can understand it perfectly without even trying. Kind of a waste as I want to learn other languages but can't.>I've never read Mishima, I just know him through memes on /lit/Everyone of his books seems to just be varying degrees of an auto-biography. He can't help but make his characters self-inserts.The Sea of fertility Tetralogy I referenced would be a good read for you though, because it frequently goes into buddhist concepts. It starts with two teenage boys growing up during the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese war, the main character/narrator watches as his friend falls in love with a noble girl, they love each other but she gets engaged. The friend dies and the woman is put in a buddhist monastery.The other books follow the main character as he tries to find the "reincarnations" of his friend, with varying degrees of success but never having actual confirmed truth. He even goes to I think it's Thailand or some shit to find one.Anyway in the final book he's close to death, having found no proof of his friend's reincarnation, and he finally decides to go see his friend's girlfriend, something he promised he'd never do. He goes to her seeking closure and she [spoiler]doesn't know either of them, she's lived her entire life as a nun.[/spoiler]Honestly, spring snow (the first book) is peak, the rest drop off and I mainly read them for a sense of completion.
