Alex's Blog

"But sometimes the knowledge of the scholar is a bit hard to understand because it doesn't seem to match up with our own experiance of things. In other words, Knowledge and Experiance do not necessarily speak the same language. But isn't the knowledge that comes from experiance more valuable than the knowledge that doesn't? It seems fairly obvious to some of us that a lot of scholars need to go outside and sniff around-walk through the grass, talk to the animals. That sort of thing. 

'Lots of people talk to animals,' said Pooh
'Maybe but...'
'Not very many listen, though,' he said
'that's the problem.' he added.

In other words, you might say that there is more to Knowing than just being correct. As the mystical poet Ha-shan wrote:

A scholar named Wang
Laughed at my poems.
The accents are wrong,
He Said,
Too many beats;
The meter is poor
The wording impulsive.

I laugh at his poems,
As he laughs at mine.
They read like
The words of a blind man
Describing the sun."

VIA The Tao of Pooh, Benjamin Hoff