flemmings | (no subject)

Oh happy day. A post from

cougarfang sends me off to squint at Minekura's wp, which I've avoided for several years because even at my ridiculous resolution and even bolding to read it gives me migraines in about three seconds. And all fuman about the Japanese and their damnable love of frames and their damnably high resolutions (must be a Mac thing) being taken as read, the woman has a Homura short story 'The People of Illusion,' preceded by neat dragons and "Tell me what you desire. I'll give it to you. In return for everything you are."

(More Buddhist phrases. 色即是空, all is illusion, I suppose, unless there's another more common translation than illusion. Oh, and

paleaswater, if you're here- a question about Chinese titles.

In Onmyouji- the Phoenix volume, for reference- Seimei's tutelary deity is 泰山府君. From the Japanese webpages I'm getting that the 府 is a kind of office where the dead are dealt with. (What a pity I know nothing of YnM's set up because that's what this sounds like. The Buddhist texts have Taishanfu as a regular stop souls make on the road after death.) This however turns Seimei's deity from the terrible Lord of Tai Mountain into Chief Official of the Taishan Post-mortem Sorting Office. OK, I'm being facetious, but what was your instinctive reaction to the title? Buddhist or bureaucrat or possibly Taoist? (I'm getting that, once again, the Buddhists insinuated themselves into an older belief system here.) Thanks.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

And here's one last possibly useless link. Alas that I do not actually have a learned opinion of my own to offer. (But this is livejournal, so I must offer an uneducated, unsolicited, and lengthy one.)

Thanks for the links. ^_^ Yes, that article sounds interesting, though everything I read is tending to reinforce my idea of Buddhist co-option of Daoist divinity. But from Seimei's pov I'd say the Daoist connotations were still uppermost: there's something very unchancy about the god in the story that bears his name.

What I wanted was an idea of what fujun would convey to a Chinese mind- some archaic meaning to fu that gets left out of modern dictionaries or what?- as a guideline on how to translate the thing. As it is I guess I'll go with M's suggestion up there of it being a Daoist WTF kind of name that needn't be rendered literally. And ignore the Japanese webpages that want to incorporate the thing into Buddhist schematics.