The Pitying Printer

Right. A post about a bodhisattva called Avalokiteśvara, and his relationship to my godawful printer.

Avalokiteśvara embodies the compassion of all the Buddhas, which, I'm told, is one hell of a lot of compassion. At least a metric ton of the stuff.

Ava means down; lokite means looking; and vara means lord. So Avalokiteśvara is the Lord Who Looks Down, and the thing that he usually looks down upon is human suffering and lamentation. That's why*, when the Chinese took up Buddhism they rendered his name as Guanshiyin which means He who perceives the lamentations of the world.

This brings us to the utter and delightful insanity of the Chinese name taboos. There was, of late, a popular bumper sticker in America that said "The only Bush I trust is my own". There were other such witty variants. The idea was that by using the president's name in some amusing context you make the president himself look silly. What George W. Bush should have done (and would have done had he come to me for advice) would be to make it illegal on pain of decapitation for anyone ever to use the syllable bush.

That would include ambush, bushells of wheat and, of course, bushwhacking. That way nobody can make a rude pun about you.

This policy was pursued by the Chinese emperors of old. There was an absurdly liberal emperor called Shimin who said that you only needed to avoid saying shimin, and that Shi and Min on their own were all right. He even went so far as to employ a chancellor called Li Shiji, which shares a whole syllable with his name.

Fortunately for the dignity of the imperial office, his son repealed the law, had it include the last seven generations of emperor, and made the chancellor change his name to Li Ji.

Nobody in China was allowed to write the syallable Shi. This had obvious consequences for our bodhisattva Guanshiyin, or Guanyin as he was called from then on.

It should perhaps be noted at this point that Guanyin is rather androgynous. Though Avalokiteśvara is usually a he, Guanyin is usually a she. And it was in this feminised form that Guanyin arrived in Japan, where her name was altered slightly to Kwanon, which sounds similar if you think about it.

This brings us inevitably to the invention of the camera. In 1934 a Japanese fellow by the name of Goro Yoshida started manufacturing 35mm cameras. He decided to call his company after the all-compassionate bodhisattva, and so the Kwanon camera began. Here's an original logo.

Kwanon started to do rather well. They cornered the Japanese market and then started trying to sell their products in the West. However, we westerners find Kwanon a bit of an odd-looking mouthful. So the poor bodhisattva (who, you will remember, had already lost a shi to an emperor) was stripped of her W, and had her K changed to a C.

That is why you can still buy Canon cameras to this day. You can also buy Canon printers that break down and run out of toner and jam their paper and take hours to print or cancel.  However, once you know that, ultimately, Canon means Hearing the Screams of Humanity, this suddenly seems rather appropriate.

So why is my printer not handy to use?

*Although there are some rather dull complications to this.

Jane Austen and Broken-Hearted Octopuses

In Martin Amis' novel Other People there's a girl whose only knowledge of life comes from reading the novels of Jane Austen.

She read The Jane Austen Gift-Pack. The six stories it contained spoke more directly to her than anything else had done. The same thing happened in every book: the girl liked a bad man who seemed good, then liked a good man who had seemed bad, whom she duly married. What was wrong with the bad men who seemed good? They were unmanly, and lacked candour, and, in at least two clear instances, fucked other people.

This limited experience of life is a problem when she has to lie to the police:

'How old are you . . . Mary Lamb? Do your parents know what you get up to?'
'I'm in my twenty-fifth year,' said Mary carefully. 'My parents died.'
'Of what?'
Mary hesitated. 'One of consumption,' she said, 'the other of a broken heart.'
'People don't die of those things any more. Well they do, but we call it something else these days.'

Actually, we don't. A cardiologist friend of mine told me that, just as it is possible to tug on somebody's heart-strings, so it is medically possible to be broken hearted. It is actually called broken-heart syndrome and involves the sudden weakening of one of the muscles of the heart. It is sometimes brought on by emotional strain, such as the death of your beloved, and is usually fatal. This means that it is quite possible to die of a broken heart.

However, doctors don't usually call it broken-heart syndrome. They call it takotsubo, which is Japanese for octopus trap. That may sound a trifle odd, but when you're broken hearted your left ventricle swells up until it's just the same shape as a traditional Japanese octopus trap. Like this:

The poor (but delicious) octopuses find the pot and think it would make a nice home, so they crawl inside and, once snug, the wily fisherman pulls it up to the surface, cooks his tenant and leaves the other octopuses broken-hearted.

They usually die.

Tsunami

Tsunami is Japanese for harbour waves. Tsu means harbour; and nami means waves, which is why Hokusai's painting The Great Wave Off Kanagawa is called, in Japanese, Kanagawa Oki Nami Ura.

Tsunamis used to be called tidal waves, until somebody pointed out that they weren't tidal.

The Nightingale Floor and the Empty Orchestra

I have never been to Japan, but imagine it to be a place of poetry, because their words are so beautiful. Japan itself is Chinese for sun rising, Nippon is Japanese for the same, and their language is filled with such word-pictures.

Take karaoke, which I once associated only with those who possess less shame than talent. Then I found that karaoke means empty orchestra and now I cannot hear those plaintive tuneless ululations without imagining the void among the violins, the emptiness filled only in remote repetitions.

And the empty orchestra of karaoke therefore relates to the empty hand of karate.

And manga, the darling of the spotted adolescent, seems pimpled by association until you find that manga means involuntary images, and that the term was popularised, if not coined, back in the 1814 by the great artist Hokusai, who painted the Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, and the Great Wave Off Kanagawa.

Yet we have not, dear occidental (and maybe accidental) reader, imported Japan's most delectable phrase: the nightingale floor. A nightingale floor, or uguisubari, is the creaky floorboard that sings as you tread upon in your noctivagant wanderings. Before I had heard the phrase I would get all ratty and worried at the nocturnal noise I made fetching a glass of water or hunting owls. But now that I know that those creaks are the singing of wooden nightingales, they have become beautiful.

In Japan they would make such floors deliberately so that people could not tiptoe into a temple undetected. In England we have been making them accidentally for years, without ever using the proper name.

Preparing a post at the Inky Fool offices