Hello and I am Josh and welcome to part two of us talking about Chinese proverbs.

I am once again joined by Stelios and I am Josh.

And of course this is the book that I'm dealing with if you have skipped a part two and avoided part one for whatever reason but yes it's just a book of Chinese proverbs it's a similar

Edition from the same publisher that has done a few of the other books I've covered of Eastern philosophy.

Not entirely sure about the quality of the translation relative to others, but it seems to be relatively good and the explanations are helpful.

So I think we should just get right into it and avoid waffling on.

I'm going to start with this one which is quite a classic one paint dragon add eyes

so what do you think that is I'm going to continue with a quizzing for I have no

idea no a little detail that makes all the difference or

bring something to life or a finishing touch. Those are all sort of synonyms of it. So it says this Cheng Yu is concerned with a real

artist called Zang Siniao who lived in the early 6th century. He was

commissioned to paint four dragons on the wall of a monastery when he had finished

everyone admired the painting saying how lifelikes the dragons looked. They noticed however that

Zang had not finished the eyes on any of the dragons.

When they asked him why not, he replied that if he put the eyes,

the dragons would really come to life.

No one believed him, so he applied the final strokes to two of the dragons.

There was an almighty peal of thunder, and two of the dragons. There was an almighty peel of thunder and two dragons

flew away, leaving only behind the two with unfinished eyes.

Yeah. So that's obviously something that we wouldn't be able to get without the cultural background and you can be forgiven for not knowing about an artist from 6th century China.

But I think it's interesting because there's more poetry in that that you know

obviously it's a story it's not real dragons are not real there's probably

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