Have it your way then. Primate crap. Getting closer by your own admission to
the actual source.

P.S. Not impressed by your Chinese Restaurant placemat-cum-Gung Hay Fat Choy
fortune-cookie explanation/circumvention. The story is just a typical 7th C.
degenerate feudalist mahayana Buddhist variation on Hanuman, the monkey
demiurge who figures now and again in the Mahabarata.

GAVIN

En Lin Wei wrote:
>
> ------
> 1.
>
>    "Francis P. Gavin" wrote:
>
> >Subject: Re: Pound is, and is not simultaneously and at different times
> >
> >Horsecrap.
>
> Looked at from the Chinese viewpoint, your single word can be taken various
> ways.  The horse, you know, has been revered in China since pre-dynastic
> times.  (Pound you may recall commemorates the horse sacrifice of antiquity;
> a truly barbaric rite by modern standards, even though Pound says “There may
> be lesson in animal sacrifice”.  Some modern peasants in China instead
> perform, in certain contexts, a ceremony in which the manure of horses is
> spread over the a small portion of the land, as fertiliser.  Horse manure,
> is highly valued, and many people believe that it has a highly pleasant
> odor, compared with the feces of humans, pigs, cows, monkeys and other
> animals.
>
> Human and animal waste have great symbolic significance in Chinese myth and
> literature.  In the great epic comedy, Travels to the West, a monkey spirit
> is tricked by the Buddha in the following way.  The Monkey spirit, named Sun
> Wu-kong, fights a battle in Heaven, trying to overthrow the Jade Emperor,
> ruler of the Universe.  The Buddha tells the Monkey spirit that he will be
> given control over all the celestial regions if he can perform a simple
> task.  He asks the spirit, Sun Wu-kong to stand on the Buddha’s  hand and
> simply jump off.  If he fails, Buddha says, he will be imprisoned under a
> mountain for a thousand years.
>