thus i know

There was a short stint in my IT career where I played the role of a liaison officer between a US telecom device design house and its manufacturing subsidiary in Taiwan, and one day my Japanese-American boss asked me a question with true curiosity: "Why do engineers in Taiwan always say they understand something when they don't?"

For reasons unfathomable to me now I came up with a wind-around answer that basically said it all came from the deep rooted respect for learned people in Chinese culture that came from the Confucian emphasis on education that people feel embarrassed if they admit they don't know something they are supposed to know for the position they hold...

"Blame it all on Confucius, huh", my Japanese American boss, who's at times my fellow interlocutor on Chinese history and philosophy, chuckled and said after musing my answer for a while.

Indeed I did an injustice to Confucius on this account, grossly missing one famous saying he made on what constitutes true knowing: "Knowing there are things you know and there are things you don't know means you do know" (知之為知之,不知為不知,是知也). If only these engineers stick to that teaching!

There is no shortage of things we know or can get to know in this info-saturated world of ours. Want to know who won the NCAA basketball championship last year, how to adjust a Kohler shower valve in your bathroom, where to eat when you come to a strange new town... Just pull a Google search, view a YouTube video, or ask Siri or Alexa, and you'll get your answer right then and there, like water from the tap, light at a switch. 

There is another kind of knowing that goes deeper than facts and data, how-to and what-is, though. It's passionate, like "to know you is to love you"; personal, that makes "I know who you are" sound even scarier than "I know what you did last summer"; intuitive and imaginative, so a visionary can see the forest from the trees and Michelangelo can see the statue of David in a rock of marble.

The sense of awe, wonder and curiosity about the universe indeed play a crucial part in many great discoveries in human enlightenment history. As Isaac Newton put it: "I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

There is knowledge that humankind can never apprehend unless it is revealed from above through prophets or God-incarnate, say the religionists; through direct spiritual experience, say the mystics; none of the above, say the agnostics.

No amount of scripture reading or spiritual prancing, however, can beat the emphatic knowing of the man who says "I was blind, but now I can see," or the fact "He is risen" in the minds of numerous believers through millenniums. 

Happy Easter!