[Buddha-l] Lamas and such

[Dan Lusthaus]

Eric,

> About the use and meaning of the word xiao I have different data. On
> CCTV there is a daily course in Mandarin Chinese and there is an online
> course in Chinese called Chinese Pod.

And you believe them. Too bad. Run down to your local bookstore and get a 
bilingual copy of Confucius' Analects (e.g., Legge's version) and look for 
the discussions of xiaoren. Report back to us when you're done.

And in case you think that usage is restricted to the Analects, grab almost 
any Chinese text written in the last 2500 years and see how xiaoren is 
treated.

A faster way to finish this exercise would be simply to get a good 
Chinese-English (or Chinese-Dutch, or whichever language[s] you prefer) and 
simply look up the character xiao 小. Try some of the online dictionaries. 
For instance
http://usa.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=chardict&cdcanoce=0&cdqchi=%E5%B0%8F
gives this short and sweet definition: "small, tiny, insignificant "

Muller's CJKV-English Dictionary (not the DDB) http://www.buddhism-dict.net
gives three meanings for xiao:
a.. Small, little, few; tiny.
a.. Trifling, of little note. Petty, small-minded.
a.. Young.

And the following for xiaoren
小人 A little man (morally); a petty, mean, ignoble, limited person. The 
antithesis of the 君子.

君子, of course, in the junzi, the noble, superior person, in valuative 
terms like Arya in Buddhism.

Maybe you should write the TV teachers and tell them you see through their 
propoganda. Communism was supposed to make everyone equal, although, as 
George Orwell pointed out, it ended up that some are more equal than others.

Of course, maybe they're right and all the Chinese literature and 
dictionaries are wrong. You decide.

Dan