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On China and other niceties
mottainai-destaca

We all destroy the thing we love most. We need only look around us, at our personal lives, to understand this irrational inertia. Mottainai!

It’s as hard to evade these internal irrational inertias as it is to ignore those external inertias, also irrational, along with their political counterparts, national and international, that reach us from every corner, all with the same goal as the aforementioned, to destroy the thing we love most. An eternal Mottainai!

Buddhists traditionally used the word mottainai to express sorrow in the face of the squandering or misuse of something of a sacred nature or of great value, for example a religious object, a teaching or a life unfulfilled, perhaps. Today, the term is widely used by environmentalists to indicate profligacy in the use of non-renewable resources.

Some readers might find all this saddening, but that’s not the impression I want them to come away with. I say what I say with the greatest optimism. We need to work harder at happiness: “happiness is like oil, we need to pump it,” as a character said in a story I once wrote. Pessimism is free, so why bother with it.

mottainai-eco-district


P.S.: Mottainai is composed of two concepts: mottai and nai. Mottai (勿体) refers to the intrinsic value of a material object, while nai (無い) indicates absence or a lack of something. In turn, mottai is divided into mochi (勿), inevitable or something beyond discussion, and tai, (体), an entity or body.

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