Thursday, September 03, 2009

go down from the mountain!

Hanna taught me a fascinating Korean idiom today. 하산해 - "ha san hey" - which literally means "go down from the mountain", in common speech is used by a teacher when a student has mastered something. In ages past, it was common for the old masters to live on mountains, and the students would come up to visit and learn from them for a while. When the master had nothing left to teach, he would say "go down from the mountain, go back to society!" Such a great image, in just three syllables! It comes from:
the Chinese 下, which in Korean is 하 (ha), meaning down,
Chinese 山, Korean 산 (san), meaning mountain,
and the Korean imperative verb ending 해 (hey) meaning to go, do, etc.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

와-정말 정확하게 이해했어!! 헨리~진짜 하산해!!! 더이상 가르칠 것이 없어...

Henry said...

좋은 선생님 때문에 ^^


"I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive." ~ Joseph Campbell

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