Trick wrote:Doc Stier wrote:These most recent posts are worthy of a separate thread topic, as they are quite interesting and have no relationship to silk reeling. That said, Chinese Freemason organizations like An Leong, Hip Sing and Moy Shee Gung Shaw, etc, are still alive and well in virtually all Chinatown communities throughout the USA and Canada today.
The upper floor spaces of commercial buildings typically used by such Tong groups are also the site of regular Mah-Jong gambling, special event banquets, and weekly gung-fu classes taught by member Sifus.
To the general public, these organizations are simply seen as Chinese Free Mason groups, but there's so much more going on there which usually flies under the radar of outside perception.
yes you are right its going off-topic, however still slightly on topic. A lot of if not all masonic symbolism work on understanding the relationship and interplay of opposites - duality, something we in at least the IMA also work on, you have your bagua, and there is the harmony of the 6-directions, and the taijitu as some examples....and somewhere in there silk-reeling might have a place ?
But yes a masonic thread of it own is more suited so to not further blur this thread
A lot of the math is in the chinese systems. The post heaven bagua is a magic square, the i ching basically demonstrates binary, octal, and hexadecimal encoding of information the way we do in IT, the "important numbers" approach Phi, 5 (elements) and 8 (trigrams) being particularly important there, the 13 postures, etc. can be a reference to Venus.
Not saying it's necessarily intentional, but the basic idea of freemasonry is understanding and working with the fundamental forces of the universe and they don't change based on your accent. Numbers are the most consistent concepts across cultures.
Which is to say you don't hear much about Chinese arithmetic, but these dudes knew their shit.