中道

[randomness]

bedfull_o_books just called me over to watch a scene in Spirited Away: the scene in which Chihiro takes a train to get to Zeniba's house.

The first thing I noticed was the "中道" placard on the front. On a transit vehicle, this might mean "Central Line". It also means something else.

From the Wikipedia article:

The Central Path, Middle Way or Middle Path (Pali: majjhimā paṭipadā; Sanskrit: madhyamā-pratipad[1][a]; Chinese: 中道 zhōngdào; Japanese: 中道 chūdō) is the term that Siddhartha Gautama used to describe the character of the path he discovered that leads to liberation.

There's not much in English about this, but there is a bit in Japanese.

Comments

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

struck out on looking up the character I didn't know.

I'm assuming it was the character 道, because I'm pretty sure you know 中.

I hear there's an app for that. Seriously. I just don't know if it works if you take an image of a stopped movie. Might be too fuzzy.

[digitalemur.livejournal.com]

I think I was learning to find characters with the trackpad on my computer, at the time, and that's a damn hard character to do when your writing isn't very good yet. And yes I definitely know 中, one of the first characters I learned.

I could be misremembering-- I may have given up by that point in the movie, I know earlier in the film I was trying to look up characters on the bathhouse door or something, and was having trouble. There are characters that have a radical (possibly, not sure if it qualifies as a radical or not cuz I don't know the meanings!) that looks sort of like ß that I have a lot of difficulty drawing correctly on the trackpad.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Run the scene by me and I'll have a look if you like. I'm sure there are similar touches throughout the film.