Revenge a la Confucius

My student got me on the topic of revenge today. It seems to be a popular one with Chinese people. My friend Pei in Shanghai was always an advocate and an active practicioner and I never succeeded in persuading her that revenge was silly. But it did get me noticing myself committing petty acts of revenge on a daily basis, which is wonderfully hypocritical.

We were talking about "an eye for an eye" and blind people and throwing loaves of bread at people, when my student summoned Confucius to his aid. He translated an efficient 8-character Chinese quote for me as follows: "let's say someone does something bad to you and you give them your smile. Then what will you give a person who does something good to you?" Seeing my bemused expression, he explained that the point was that you'd then have to give that good-doer something even better than a smile (though neither of us could think of any examples). With the giving season over, neither of us wanted to give a damn thing even hypothetically so we nearly agreed.

However, I still don't really understand the reasoning. It doesn't sound like normal logic, nor does it have the bitter taste of female logic (which isn't exclusively the domain of females so don't get your thong in a twist). But we breezed quickly past the (un)understanding part and into practice and it turned out my student is just biding his time until he's rich and powerful, at which point he'll dole out punishments to all those who've wronged him. I remained on my tippy-toes for the rest of the class as he'd previously demonstrated a samurai sword of his to me and I wasn't too keen on finding out how keen he was to test the keenness of the blade. Ah Commander Keen...if only my parents let me play it in peace, maybe I'd be dumber but with better teeth.

Arbor Knot:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

I feel like I'm cheating every time I learn a knot whose components are knots I already know. Somebody punish me please.