tang dynasty times

Being embodied with Master Wang (知行合一)

He doesn't know what he doesn't know, said my friend, the Brilliant Master Wang Yangming. He knows nothing about human nature and anyway, The Great Learning shows us what are genuine knowledge and genuine action. It asks us ‘to love the good as we love the beautiful color and to hate the evil as we hate the bad odor.’ Here seeing the beautiful color belongs to knowledge, while loving it belongs to action. However, at the very moment one sees the beautiful color one has already loved it; it is not the case that one decides to love it only after seeing it. Similarly, smelling the bad odor belongs to knowledge, while hating it belongs to action. However, at the very moment one smells the bad odor, one has already hated it; it is not the case that one decides to hate it only after smelling it.” All anyone can really know is the view out the window right in front of them. They may think they know more than that but they don't, do they?

My friend was indeed famous for his unusual epistemology. The unity of knowledge and action (知行合一says in a nutshell, “If you want to know bitterness, you have to eat a bitter melon yourself.” No other knowledge is possible. All we know is what we do. And what we do is all we can know. 

To approach the issue you would, I think, have to work well outside a Cartesian mind-body duality so that knowledge is always something *embodied* and therefore in this radical de-emphasis of the thinking-action divide, all knowledge is-- as embodied-- also an action. So, in this way, as the philosophers over at Warp, Weft and Way suggested, this pushes beyond Ryle's know-that versus the know-how dichotemy, to say that all Confucian knowing is a knowing-to.   

Hence, knowing affects or informs, influences. At the same time, though, this is saying that all we can know is what we do- or what we see. "Vision pours in through the eyes," says Dante, "straight into imagination." Even through our very breath, (or 気) we take inside (内）what is outside (外) and can thereby be affected by osmosis. In such an epistemology, what is then emphasized is a sensitivity or a receptive sensibility to the shared world around us.  

This is a partial rejection of knowledge ex nihilo with a strong emphasis on inter-relational and inter-subjective knowing. Knowing as doing. Doing as being.

Yes, the view out our window as we are in the act of looking.

It reminds me of the Renaissance idea of painting as a window on the world. As Leon Battista Alberti in the 15th century famously declared, painting should be like “a transparent window through which we look out into a section of the visible world.” Yes, the Venetians. In their exquisite subjective "eye-witness style chronicle of daily life," perhaps no one achieved this ideal like Bellini, Giorgione, Titian and Carpaccio. Really, no wonder Ottoman Miniaturist Master Effendi was stunned-- so different were these paintings from what he was accustomed to back home.

The Getty Center in LA has a gorgeous and endlessly fascinating work by Carpaccio, Hunting on the Lagoon.

Painted by Carpaccio at the very same moment that my friend, Master Yangming, was writing down his unusual theory of epstemology on the other side of the world, Hunting on the Lagoon had puzzled art historians for decades. The painting shimmers in atmosphereic effects. Painted in azurite, lead white, ultramarine, with touches of vermilion used for the red on the Moor's jacket, it is one of the great views out a window.  

Hunting on the Lagoon. But, hunting water birds with a bow and arrow?

It was the Ming dynasty and the art of cormorant fishing had already arrived in Venice by that time. In Japan, you can still see this traditional way of fishing, called ukai. We saw it years ago by lamplight at night on boats that ply the Inuyama River, in Gifu Prefecture. The birds are trained to catch fish and deliver them back to their owners, the fisherman on the boats. Looking at the painting, while I spotted the cormorants without any problem, the practice was altered beyond recognition. The most fabulous lagoon in the world, during the Renaissance it must have been jam-packed with fish and mussels and clams and birds and, well, it must have been a wonderful place to spend an afternoon. And, these guys with their bows are clearly no fishermen.

I mean, I almost hate to draw attention to the big white lilies portruding from the water in the foreground of the painting. It surely must have driven art historians nuts for generations.

And, it wasn't until 1962 that a tentative answer to the mystery of the lilies was offered either.

You guessed it. There is another painting that has an empty vase.

An even more famous painting by Carpaccio, it hangs in the Correr Museum in Venice. Two Venetian Ladies  was described by 19th century art collector John Ruskin as, "the best picture in the world." And, until 1962, with that bored look in their eyes and the high wooden clogs tossed in the corner, it was long assumed and insisted upon that these two ladies were courtesans.

But as Brilliant Master Yangming insisted, it is almost impossible to understand the view out the window unless you are the one doing the looking. All your knowledge will be based on rather shaky presuppositions otherwise.

Do you see the pretty majolica vase sitting on the railing of the balcony? Well, finally someone put two and two together. Someone looking at the empty vase surmissed --and then tests later confirmed-- that the lilies of Hunters fit right in that vase. Yes, the two paintings (paintings painted on wooden panels) fit together one on top of the other!

You can see here how it worked.

Talking about a window on the world, these paintings are believed to have been painted on a shutter or panels for a cabinet (the other painting facing this side being missing). Like pieces of a puzzle, looking at the paintings as a set, art historians now believe that these "ladies"-- rather then bored courtesan-- are probably the wives of the "fishermen," who are themselves no longer believed to be fishermen but rather aristocratic Venetians out hunting water fowl for sport on the lagoon.

The ladies, sitting on their elegant altane, are waiting-- waiting for the return of their men.

So this window on a world affords a view of two patrician ladies awaiting--finely clothed and surrounded in luxery, they look extraordinarily bored, don't they? They do not seem interested --though we certainly are-- in the view out their window of the most beautiful lagoon in the world. La Serenissima.

**

See Part 1: View from a Minaret

Highly recommended paper by Rebecca Norris: Hunting on the Lagoon and Two Venetian Ladies: A Vignette; and even better, Yvonne Szafran, 'Carpaccio's “Hunting on the lagoon”, a new perspective', Burlington Magazine, 1995

And "Is there something more than knowing-how and knowing-that?" by Yong Huang.  

Finally, this youtube video Carpaccio Vitorre 

♪♪♪♪♪♪  and if Venice is sinking, I'm going under   ♪♪♪♪♪♪

a poem to cross a desert with (採菊東籬下)

飲酒詩　　　　　陶淵明
結盧在人境　而無車馬喧
問君何能爾　心遠地自偏
採菊東籬下　悠然見南山
山氣日夕佳　飛鳥相與還
此還有真意　欲辨已忘言

Drinking Wine (#5)--Tao Yuanming
I’ve built my house where others dwell
And yet there is no clamor of carriages and horses
You ask me how this is possible-- (And so I say):
When the heart is far, one is transported
I pluck chrysanthemums under the eastern fence
And serenely I gaze at the southern mountains
At dusk, the mountain air is good
Flocks of flying birds are returning home
In this, there is a great truth
But wanting to explain it, I forget the words (牡丹訳）

 

A poem to cross a desert with?

He said, the poem is only interesting because the poet had passed the examination system (科挙) and had lived the life of a scholar--but only then, after achieving a high level of accomplishment and cultivation in the world had left it to live in seclusion. That is, it would not have been as interesting if the poet had been born and never left that hut--for this poem is infused with the journey that came before it. It reminded me of something the Japanese monk Yoshida Kenko had written-- that the goal of Zen is to swim out into deep waters with the only real purpose to be finding oneself back up in the shallows again. Back in the shallows but with new vision.

Scattering blossoms, fallen leaves 飛花落葉-- life is change but this idea of gaining new vision is something universally embraced in many cultures as part of the hero's journey, I think. Everything being a matter of the heart　→ 心持次第.

When I was a young "lady" (I use the term loosely) in Berkeley, I don't even know why-- but I scribbled a poem by Osip Mandelstam on a purple piece of handmade Nepali paper and thought, "this is a poem to cross a desert with."

Depriving me of sea, of a space to run and a space to fly,
And giving my footsteps the brace of a forced land,
What have you gained? The calculation dazzles
But you cannot seize the movements of my lips, their silent sound.
--Osip Mandelstam 1935

I have carred it with me ever since. Whenever I look at it now, I cannot help but wonder what in the world drew me to it when I was still so young and free-spirited...but in fact this poem, and others by the Mandelstams have sustained me in recent years.-- as a testament to the great strength that our inner lives have to sustain us...

In the days before email (!!) my handwriting was so pretty! But times have changed and last night, I scrawled on the back of the aged purple Nepali paper the famous line from Tao Yuanming's poem:  採菊東籬下-- Plucking chrysanthemums by the eastern fence. It is a popular subject for the seals of gentlemen retiring as the phrase alone, I think, sums up perfectly the serenity achieved by a life of cultivation and at the end of the hero's journey. Coming home.

I am re-reading Wei Djao's book about Li Qingzhao, A Blossom like No Other. One of China's greatest poets, I am a huge fan of Lady Li--and not surprisingly, Lady Li took her sobriquet (号:易安) from another line by Tao Yuanming → 倚南窗以寄傲， 审容膝之易安　(Leaning on the southern window, I surrender my pride to nature and in this room scarely big enough to contain my knees, I am easily contented). The line, which is very famous, was taken from an essay by Tao Yuanming (also known as, Tao Qian 陶潛) called "Homecoming" (歸去來兮辭). The essay, written in 404 CE is about the poet's leaving officialdom to "return home" and devote the rest of his life to self-cultivation and the simple life. The essay inspired countless philosophers and poets in China and Japan to turn inward and to never forget that "less is more." Lady Li and her husband Zhao Mingcheng named their own country home, The Return Home Hall 歸來堂 to signify their commitment to living a simple life in harmony with nature.

She also signed her works thus: 易安 "easily contented" and "the inhabitant who is easily contented" 易安居士.

I can really see why some women would want a tattoo. I guess for me, scribbling things on slips of paper that I carry around in my otherwise empty wallet serve the same function. I think the next twenty years, my poem to cross a desert with will be these lines about the simple life by good ol' Tao Yuanming.

Recommended: Andy Couturier's A Different Kind of Luxery. His book is wonderful. And, A Blossom Like No Other: Li Qingzhao.

易安室にて

Illustrations to Tao Qians Prose Poem Homecoming 歸去來辭書畫卷

imagining ithaka

 

As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

 

Odysseus in exile. The ultimate reluctant hero-- all he ever really wanted to do was return home.  But as everyone knows, exile and place is never a matter of location --but rather is a matter of meaning; for as the Poet Cavafy says above, "the Lestrygonians, the Cyclopes and the fierce Poseidon: these are all things we carry within our souls.

Robert Harrison, in a recent Entitled Opinions show about Heidegger, talked about Odysseus' Second Journey. The one that occured after he finally arrived back to Ithaka. Made to set out one more time; this time he was to carry an oar and walk as far as he could go until reaching a land where people didn't know salt or seafaring ships, and there, he was to plant his oar deeply into the ground and perform a sacrifice to Poseidon.

It's interesting, isn't it? The way a Hero must wander into exile/meaninglessness-- that is, he is required to go to a "place" where he is world-less, ground-less, and blindist. To walk to a place where the meaning of an "oar" is no longer meaningful, and there, to plant it in the ground to make new meaning.  

Is this not the existential journey par excellance? For as Harrison explains, those that do not undergo these journeys into foreign lands and instead stay at home without undergoing this kind of "estrangement" will forever remain estranged--estranged right there in their own homelands.

As a hero's journey, we are talking of imaginal journeys into authenticity; where a person journeys and comes to terms with their own existence/death. This is exile. It is a journey away from the inauthentic; which Heidegger characterized as "idle curosity, gossip and diversion/entertainment"-- sound familiar? However you define it, Kierkegaard was probably not far off when he defined the inauthentic as the lack of any passionate commitment. Hence, in Proustian terms:

 'The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes--Proust

So the Hero goes into exile. He goes Blind in order to get new eyes.  And only then does he return Home, in Aletheia (ἀλήθεια). And he does all of this in time. In Being and Time. In meaning.

 

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
 
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

  

 The Greeks and their destiny. In the end, though, is Cavafy not also suggesting this same idea that our destiny is probably nothing else but the inner journey of meaning itself, no matter "where" we find ourselves? For as many of you will recall, Cavafy, the great poet of foreign lands and times past, never in fact traveled to these places that he was writing about. Writing his epic historical and romantic poetry, he lived alone for 25 years, working as a clerk in the employment of the Ministry of Public Works of Egypt, in Alexandria. Indeed, when I think of him working by day in a government office and at night writing poetry of such passion, well, not unlike how I think of Mandelstam writing in prison, I am almost overhelmed by this triumph of the human spirit.

The foreign lands, the exotic goods, the unending oceans and the heroes of antiquity--these were all lands he visited in his exquisite imagination. Dreaming of Ithaka, I think it is true that what really matters is what happens in the breathing and seeing/blindist heart. 

 

Image above: Tullio deSantis' Imaginary World (心境）/Poem: C.P Cavafy/ Waiting for the Barbarians

 

 

         

Lady Rokujo (治大國、若烹小鮮)

 

He was not the first man to accuse me of engaging in curses, the evil eye or other forms of supernatural sabotage. It is true, I have been known to break dishes, send blinds crashing down and now it seems I have the power to zap a cell phone just by virtue of my angry feelings.

Riled to fury like Lady Rokujo. The world was once populated by Rulers, the Ruled and Vengeful Spirits. What is the other side of longing but a vengeful spirit?

Karyn Lai was recently discussing this passage on the philospher's Zone:

六十
 治大國、若烹小鮮。以道莅天下、其鬼不神。非其鬼不神、 其神不傷人。
非其神不傷人、聖人亦不傷人。夫兩不相傷。故徳交歸焉

The Sage governs a large kingdom as he cooks a small fish
By approaching (莅) the world by way of the Dao--
The spirits of our dead ancestors will not haunt (其鬼不神).
Even if these spirits do not stop haunting
Still, their haunting shall not harm the people (人民）.
The Sage of a large realm too (亦） shall not seek to harm the people
If neither sages nor spirits causes harm
Then so shall virtuous governing be achieved

In thinking and talking about translating this passage with Epicurus, we tried out a number of words for 鬼 （gui）-- demons, ghosts, spirits, the dead, "the ancient manes," bogeymen, "your inner demons"-- but we became increasingly frustrated: just what is it we were talking about here? What are these spirits exactly?

It was clear enough that the classical Chinese word 鬼 generally meant the spirits of the dead (however, there were exceptions, I was told). But what do these spirits do exactly? You see we were looking for the perfect phrase for 其鬼不神 ("these spirits won't x").

The similarity to traditional Japanese concepts of ghosts immediately comes to mind-- but so too is the similarity to the ancient Roman concept of "the manes"

Epicurus summarizes information gleaned from several online sources (including the usual place) thus:

The Manes are the spirits of the dead ancestors. When the deceased receives the due honours and rites, he is allowed to ascend from the Underworld to protect his family. This is in contrast with the Lemures or Larvae, evil ghosts which are the souls of the dead who the Dii Inferi refused to receive in the Underworld.

Mānēs, in Roman thought, the spirits of the dead, named euphemistically the ‘kindly ones’ (from the old Latin adjective mānus, ‘good’). From a sense of their collective divinity they were worshipped as the di manes (‘the divine dead’) at the festivals of the Feralia, Parentalia, and Lemuria. By extension the name manes was applied by the poets first to the realm of the dead, the Underworld, and secondly to the gods of the Underworld (di inferi), Dis, Orcus, Hecatē, and Persephonē. Later the di manes were individualized and identified with the di parentes, the dead of the family. The individual tomb led to the conception of each dead person having an individual spirit, and manes, although a plural noun, came to be used of a single spirit. Graves were originally dedicated to the dead collectively and were inscribed dis manibus sacrum (‘sacred to the divine dead’); under the empire it became customary to add the name of the dead person, as if the meaning was ‘sacred to the divine spirt of so-and-so’.

The Manes were offered blood sacrifices. The gladiatorial games, originally held at funerals, may have been instituted in the honor of the Manes.

Incidentally, James Legge, chooses this word "manes" for his translation, translating the above passage:

“Let the kingdom be governed according to the Dao, and the manes of the departed will not manifest their spiritual energy. It is not that those manes have not that spiritual energy, but it will not be employed to hurt men. It is not that it could not hurt men, but neither does the ruling sage hurt them. When these two do not injuriously affect each other, their good influences converge in the virtue (of the Dao).”

Why "Manes" (singular "manis), though, when he could have gone with Furies? Especially since Manes were thought of as being benevolent spirits.

The Furies, on the other hand, known intrigingly as both the "angry ones" and the "gracious ones," are often on my mind these days. There are two aspects about them that I think help illuminate our problem (ie, 其鬼不神):

First, as Dreyfus points out in his lectures on the Oresteia, while the Furies were all about intense emotions, like rage, jealousy and revenge-- he insists that "these were no kinky emotions of the kind people talk about with their psychologist."

What does he mean by that, you wonder?

Well, the emotions that are being displayed by the Furies are the kind of emotions that anyone would feel in that circumstance. This is important. And, I think Dreyfus is right. Modern people may have their neuroses, but these are profoundly different from the emotions expressed by the Furies-- which, while attached to individual people, the emotions themselves are not particular to that person's personality. For example, Clytemnestra's furies are not particular to her individual personality but are just the kind of fury that any woman in her experience would manifest (even though they are manifesting specifically by her, they are not intrinsic to her personality in the way a "kinky" neurotic fear of flying is, says Dreyfus).

So, they are attached to an individual but yet they are universal in their manifestation.

Dreyfus secondly explains that the Furies stand for personal vengeance-- as opposed to the Rule of Law, and  indeed, he sees this play as portraying the way societies transition from the rule of blood feuds to that of Law.

Even today, if a person is wronged, there are really two methods for justice open to him: punishment via law, or via personal vengence. (The Oresteia also displays the manner in which personal vengence turns into a cycle of violence as one blood murder begets the next blood murder. It takes two such extractions of justice to start a fued). Parag Khanna, in his book The Second World, talks about areas in Pakistan where tribal law (jirga) and blood feuds still reign. And, I think both forms are expressed to a larger or lesser degree no matter where we look today.

**

This is the world we are talking about in the Daodejing passage above. A world populated by 1) rulers, 2) the ruled and 3) vengeful spirits. And, if a ruler rules by way of the Dao, then this ruler--a sage ruler-- will  not do harm to the people nor the spirits; that is, his action will not rile the spirits to vengence. This does not mean that he performs some kind of magic which takes away the powers of the spirits but rather that by the virtue expressed in his actions, he will not rile them.

 **

Lady Aoi and Lady Rokujo--

Lady Aoi was Genji’s first wife in the Tale of Genji. The Noh play, which is based on one episode of the novel, is about Lady Aoi’s suffering at the hands of a spirit that possesses her body and causes her to fall ill. In order to try and identify who is tormenting her, Lady Aoi sends a Priestess to try and draw the spirit out by the sound of a bow made of Japanese cherry birch (azusa-yumi); thereby discovering it was the jealous spirit of the Lady Rokujo, who then appeared right there next to the pillow that Lady Aoi was resting on. After talking about the happy days she spent as Genji’s lover, the spirit of Lady Rokujo thereby becomes enraged and her fury results in Lady Aoi's death

Lady Rokujo. What is so stunningly unforgetable about her is that she actually did her "haunting" while still alive. You see, so consumed by jealously was she that her spirit actually left her body to do its haunting.

An elegant and clever but haughty older woman or a sweet and adorable younger woman?

Genji made his choice and the lady was not happy about it.
 

  

Our Man Utz (commedia dell'arte)

 
  

Our man Utz. It all started when he was a boy. Like most great love affairs, it had been love at first sight. Little Kaspar usually spent his summers at his grandmother's castle in the Czech countryside. It was a castle full of all kinds of random, dusty bric-a-brac and among the suits of armor and antique porcelain, little Kaspar Utz

found himself bewitched by a figurine of Harlequin that had been modeled by the greatest of Meissen modelers JJ Kaendler.

 

So, we know the exact time and place--the moment of possession, if you will.

And he begged his grandmother for the piece and receiving his heart's desire, little Kaspar,

pivoted the figurine in the flickering candlelight and ran his pudgy fingers, lovingly over the glaze and brilliant enamels.

He had found his vocation: he wanted to devote his life to collecting--'rescuing' as he came to call it--the porcelains of the Meissen factory.

So, we have the Fall (the passion and possession); then we have the commitment (and with all great commitments, it is "to the death") Utz then sets about acquiring the knowledge that will come in handy on his Quest-- a Quest, I am sure you will agree, no less great than that of the Holy Grail.

And so, our man next seeks knowledge as he begins to make his early purchases.

By the end, he had some 2000 pieces cram packed into a tiny Prague apartment. Space became the big issue but that wasn't the only problem either. There was a larger enemy--  The Government. This great beast tried greedily to take away Utz's collection, and-- indeed--  it took all his powers to hold them off. The dragon was hungry and devoured everything in its path-- to the extent of planting a listening device in his apartment. Those who could leave, did so. The dragon, never satisfied, took everything, leaving nothing but a "one-color world" behind in its wake. Utz, too, decided to leave but in leaving his collection behind, he knew he was taking a great chance of losing it to the Government forever.

Every year when life in the Czech capital became too much for him, he did leave. But a few months was all it took. The lure of his true love was too great. And back he walked into the lion's den. In France, he remained bored.

Maybe a different country?

Germany? Italy? France? Three possibilities/ None of them inviting. Germany? Never. The break had been final. England? Not after the Dresden raid. The United States? Impossible. The noise would depress him dreadfully. Prague, after all, was a city where you heard the snowflakes falling. Australia? He had never been attracted by the colonies. Argentina? He was too old to tango.

And his coup de gras: a complete Commedia dell arte series of figurines.

Of course, like all the world's greatest lovers, Utz has a philosophy. He tells us that "Leibniz-who believed this world was the best of all possible worlds-insisted that porcelain was its best material." After a lifetime of Jung, and Goethe, Christian alchemy and Chinese alchemy, Utz was convinced that porcelain functioned as a golem; born from the fires of hell (the heat of the kiln) it was none other than the philosopher's stone: white gold.

In the West, of course, the hallmark of porcelain is its translucency. In the East, like ancient jade, it is its ringing sound when struck. (You might remember how when buying porcelain at Mitsukoshi or Takashimaya, the sales lady will flick the rim of each and every piece to make sure it rings.)

**

This was my second time with Herr Utz. I had read UTZ years ago in Ubud. Re-reading it again after all these years-- something struck me, and that is, I have none of Utz in me. The passion of the collector is just not part of my personality as truly neither the thrill of the hunt nor possessing more than two of something appeals to me. And, yet it is not that I don't pine for things like Utz.

I suppose you could say I fall in love very differently from men like our man Utz. Not only that, but the entire time I was "with Utz" my heart was actually faraway-- spending time with one man, I was imagining myself faraway with another. All the way in Borneo, in fact.

I have long pined to own an Heirloom Jar from Borneo. The great jars of Southeast Asia are famous enough-- the peoples of Vietnam and Thailand to Borneo and the Philippines have long stored water and rice in large jars of Southern Chinese origin. A Japanese anthropologist once explained to me how the invention of the pot prolonged human life by at least a decade. Utsuwa, in Japanese, jars and vessels store our food and water-- they are therefore utterly intertwined with our lives. In parts of SE Asia, many are considered Sacred in fact.

In Borneo, for example, they are treated as Oracles that can tell the future, and are also known to be able to turn into deer and run away. Like the medicine jars held in the hands of Buddhas, these jars too stood at that same place of crossroads-between the sacred, the medicinal and the everyday.

Very high quality earthenware pots, they are used to bury the dead. Of all the ways to go, wouldn't you like to be stuffed, fetal position into a great jar and then put back into the side of a mountain or into the ground?

Just imagining owning one gives me the greatest thrill. I would like one in an earthy brown. My first choice would be to have a raised flower design of the same color around the rim, but even there, I am not picky. What I desire is a jar so simple that my imagination can fill in the blanks-- just like in an ink painting, where the white space is in fact the most pregnant part of the picture. 

The jars also became part of the brisk ceramics trade that existed within Asia from the 15th-18th century. Many of the finest pieces of this trade-- as is well known-- remain preserved today in Japan, where they have been prized by Japan's great aesthete tea practioners. Famous among the utilitarian ceramics prized in Japan are the famed teabowls from Korea, which have long been valued as objects of tremendous prestige. The teabowls are known as Korai (meaning Korea) chawan (teabowl). Shown left is the famed Kizaemon Teabowl, which is a designated National Treasure of Japan. Of the 26 registered meibutsu (famous) teabowls, the Kizaemon is considered to be the finest of all-- indeed, it is thought to display all the greatest qualities of a work of fine art: dignity, beauty, composure and pedigree.

In all probability, when it was "discovered," it was probably just an old rice bowl in a peasant's house. But Hideyoshi's soldiers had been given strict instructions: bring home anything of beauty you find in your ploundering. And so this teabowl made its way back to Japan-- changing hands for greater and greater sums of money until it became priceless- a treasure of the nation. 

Utz's alchemy.

And like with all alchemy, possession occurs via the colloboration between physical form and human imagination; for as the staff at Sothebys knows, without the narrative, the pots are nothing but lumps of clay.

Utz part two here

 

 
  

Our man Utz. It all started when he was a boy. Like most great love affairs, it had been love at first sight. Little Kaspar usually spent his summers at his grandmother's castle in the Czech countryside. It was a castle full of all kinds of random, dusty bric-a-brac and among the suits of armor and antique porcelain, little Kaspar Utz

 

So, we know the exact time and place--the moment of possession, if you will.

And he begged his grandmother for the piece and receiving his heart's desire, little Kaspar,

He had found his vocation: he wanted to devote his life to collecting--'rescuing' as he came to call it--the porcelains of the Meissen factory.

So, we have the Fall (the passion and possession); then we have the commitment (and with all great commitments, it is "to the death") Utz then sets about acquiring the knowledge that will come in handy on his Quest-- a Quest, I am sure you will agree, no less great than that of the Holy Grail.

And so, our man next seeks knowledge as he begins to make his early purchases.

By the end, he had some 2000 pieces cram packed into a tiny Prague apartment. Space became the big issue but that wasn't the only problem either. There was a larger enemy--  The Government. This great beast tried greedily to take away Utz's collection, and-- indeed--  it took all his powers to hold them off. The dragon was hungry and devoured everything in its path-- to the extent of planting a listening device in his apartment. Those who could leave, did so. The dragon, never satisfied, took everything, leaving nothing but a "one-color world" behind in its wake. Utz, too, decided to leave but in leaving his collection behind, he knew he was taking a great chance of losing it to the Government forever.

Every year when life in the Czech capital became too much for him, he did leave. But a few months was all it took. The lure of his true love was too great. And back he walked into the lion's den. In France, he remained bored.

Maybe a different country?

Germany? Italy? France? Three possibilities/ None of them inviting. Germany? Never. The break had been final. England? Not after the Dresden raid. The United States? Impossible. The noise would depress him dreadfully. Prague, after all, was a city where you heard the snowflakes falling. Australia? He had never been attracted by the colonies. Argentina? He was too old to tango.

And his coup de gras: a complete Commedia dell arte series of figurines.

Of course, like all the world's greatest lovers, Utz has a philosophy. He tells us that "Leibniz-who believed this world was the best of all possible worlds-insisted that porcelain was its best material." After a lifetime of Jung, and Goethe, Christian alchemy and Chinese alchemy, Utz was convinced that porcelain functioned as a golem; born from the fires of hell (the heat of the kiln) it was none other than the philosopher's stone: white gold.

In the West, of course, the hallmark of porcelain is its translucency. In the East, like ancient jade, it is its ringing sound when struck. (You might remember how when buying porcelain at Mitsukoshi or Takashimaya, the sales lady will flick the rim of each and every piece to make sure it rings.)

**

This was my second time with Herr Utz. I had read UTZ years ago in Ubud. Re-reading it again after all these years-- something struck me, and that is, I have none of Utz in me. The passion of the collector is just not part of my personality as truly neither the thrill of the hunt nor possessing more than two of something appeals to me. And, yet it is not that I don't pine for things like Utz.

I suppose you could say I fall in love very differently from men like our man Utz. Not only that, but the entire time I was "with Utz" my heart was actually faraway-- spending time with one man, I was imagining myself faraway with another. All the way in Borneo, in fact.

I have long pined to own an Heirloom Jar from Borneo. The great jars of Southeast Asia are famous enough-- the peoples of Vietnam and Thailand to Borneo and the Philippines have long stored water and rice in large jars of Southern Chinese origin. A Japanese anthropologist once explained to me how the invention of the pot prolonged human life by at least a decade. Utsuwa, in Japanese, jars and vessels store our food and water-- they are therefore utterly intertwined with our lives. In parts of SE Asia, many are considered Sacred in fact.

In Borneo, for example, they are treated as Oracles that can tell the future, and are also known to be able to turn into deer and run away. Like the medicine jars held in the hands of Buddhas, these jars too stood at that same place of crossroads-between the sacred, the medicinal and the everyday.

Very high quality earthenware pots, they are used to bury the dead. Of all the ways to go, wouldn't you like to be stuffed, fetal position into a great jar and then put back into the side of a mountain or into the ground?

Just imagining owning one gives me the greatest thrill. I would like one in an earthy brown. My first choice would be to have a raised flower design of the same color around the rim, but even there, I am not picky. What I desire is a jar so simple that my imagination can fill in the blanks-- just like in an ink painting, where the white space is in fact the most pregnant part of the picture. 

The jars also became part of the brisk ceramics trade that existed within Asia from the 15th-18th century. Many of the finest pieces of this trade-- as is well known-- remain preserved today in Japan, where they have been prized by Japan's great aesthete tea practioners. Famous among the utilitarian ceramics prized in Japan are the famed teabowls from Korea, which have long been valued as objects of tremendous prestige. The teabowls are known as Korai (meaning Korea) chawan (teabowl). Shown left is the famed Kizaemon Teabowl, which is a designated National Treasure of Japan. Of the 26 registered meibutsu (famous) teabowls, the Kizaemon is considered to be the finest of all-- indeed, it is thought to display all the greatest qualities of a work of fine art: dignity, beauty, composure and pedigree.

In all probability, when it was "discovered," it was probably just an old rice bowl in a peasant's house. But Hideyoshi's soldiers had been given strict instructions: bring home anything of beauty you find in your ploundering. And so this teabowl made its way back to Japan-- changing hands for greater and greater sums of money until it became priceless- a treasure of the nation. 

Utz's alchemy.

And like with all alchemy, possession occurs via the colloboration between physical form and human imagination; for as the staff at Sothebys knows, without the narrative, the pots are nothing but lumps of clay.

Utz part two here

 

shipwrecked (宜興紫砂壺)

As if violent storms and vicious pirates were not enough, European trade ships also had to worry about trouble from rival nations. Boarding their ships, stealing the cannon and the cargo, they would usually set fire and sink them, killing everyone on board. Anything to win more ground in the bid to rule the dazzlingly lucrative trade routes that existed between Europe and Southeast Asia and China. From Guangzhou to Malacca, the Desaru almost made her destination-- but alas she was ambushed very close to Malaysian shores.

Ambushed and shipwrecked.

The year was 1830 and the cargo was mostly ceramics. Mainly export-ware quality utility items fired in the kilns of Thailand and Vietnam. There were about 10 large dragon vases, lots of jars and pots-- and among the Chinese ceramics (which comprised 10% of the salvaged cargo), there were some stunning yixing teapots.

My man in Penang-- Lim Kean Siew had a very large collection of yixing teapots. As if the finest education and a lifetime of contribution wasn't enough, upon his retirement from law and politics, Lim set about to dash all the codified notions concerning teapots that had ruled Chinese tea drinking habits for over a thousand years.

Like all cultural practices, these codified rules concerning tea preparation are so taken for granted that-- like air- we don't even seem to notice them anymore. Red earthenware pots for oolong, darker pots for puerh, green tea in porcelain or glass teapots. Lim-sensei asked the obvious question, why? Was there some reason underlying these rules or does it just come down to preference? Setting out to uncover the answer, he went about his task by scientific experiment.

He first outlined his methodological principles:

 All of his pots would come from a government factory in Yixing itself, choosing the Yixing Zisha Factory #1 -- where quality and standards were tightly controlled. He could, in this way, be assured that we were talking of real yixing of a certain knowable standard. His pots ranged from works of art created by living national treasures to simpler, more humble pots-- but all were guaranteed Yixing "purple sand" clay.

In addition, all his teas would be of the highest quality. Water would be standardized. Non-hard tap water. Tea would always be prepared in the same manner and he, along with a variety of tea connoisseurs would observe-- which pots went with which teas.

**

Famous teapots are like movie stars. They have superstar status, and found along with the finest inkstones and jade objects on any scholar's desk, they are prized maybe even above jade. While the history of Yixing-ware can be traced back to 3000 BC, it was only in the Ming dynasty that Yixing teapots took center stage. Discovered by the literati-elite, who came in droves to Yixing (located not far from the legendary city of Suzhou) to enjoy the beautiful scenery and partake in the premium tea grown there, the Yixing teapot was held up as "the ultimate tea-making utensil;" -- the clay "more precious than gold, or even jade."

It is perhaps most reminiscent of the Medieval tea masters of Japan who paid huge sums of money for those large "Luzon ware" tea jars traded in the markets of Manila because they believed the volcanic properties of the clay worked to help preserve fresh tea leaves. So, too, do Chinese tea connoisseurs insist that the clay used to fire Yixing ware interacts with chemicals in the tea to produce the most delicious and fragrant pot of tea possible.

Alchemy, they might say.

My own opinion? I think most people once they use a fine yixing teapot will never go back to anything else.

Earthenware is like human skin. Soft and porous, handling unglazed pottery can be a very sensual experience; soft to the touch, it is warmer and more organic than porcelain or iron (tetsubin), for example. And, nothing is more delightful to the senses that yixing clay. A yixing teapot will also fit right in your hands, perfectly-- like a tiny kitten. I have certain preferences regarding clay color and potting (shape)-- but more pleasing to me perhaps than anything else is the way a handmade teapot's lid fits to the body. It is never a perfect fit like something machine made. But that ever-so-slight human-made gap is what gives a handmade teapot that certain comforting sound (clack!) when you fit the lid on.

**

All I wanted, I told him, was the perfect teapot. Just one, but it had to be perfect-- as if one perfect teapot could make everything right. A seemingly simple task, finding the perfect teapot was elusive as any great chase.

I first spent hours at the Teaware Museum in HongKong studying the teapots and narrowing down exactly what I wanted in my own "perfect pot." I was amazed to discover the way Yixing pots are hand-modeled (without a wheel) out of what is extremely hard clay. Like any great Literati art, one artist alone is traditionally in charge of the entire process from start to finish and therefore the artist's seal will be affixed to the bottom of the pot as it is in every way that artist's creation: one of a kind.

After looking at pots for weeks, I had decided on darker "purplish-brown" color clay of a geometric or square type (no applique, no color) I set out for days on end scouring the shops and galleries of Hollywood Road and Kowloon. I could spend the rest of my life in Hong Kong, and if I did, I would probably end up walking around Hollywood Road most of those days. In the end, I purchased 3 pots, 2 antique dishes shaped like fans, a set of rare yixing teacups and a little water container over the course of a year's wandering there. Looking at them when we were back in Japan , again I was struck how none of them-- save one-- was quite right. My little water container, with its chocolate color clay and delicately etched plum blossoms-- I adore it and think it perfection.

When something is "right" you just know it, don't you? Perfection  somehow fits perfectly in your hands. It is something you long to touch it the moment your eye rests upon it, and no matter how many times you see it, you always seem to find something new about it; something else to fall in love with. It never ceases to delight you, in fact. That is how I feel about the water container. To me, it is perfect and makes the other less-than perfect acquisitions also somehow seem worthwhile as well-- as if it wasn't for them, I might never have stumbled upon that little water container.

**

 So, what did Lim-sensei uncover in all his experiments? Well, first of all, that green tea can indeed be made using Yixing ware. And, puerh doesn't taste any better with black clay pots. Smaller pots are not a necessity for tie guanyin either. He tells us, "One must be reasonable," and urges us to look at the teapots themselves. For his experiments proved that just as tea connoisseurs have been telling us for a thousand years, the teapots themselves will inform us what tea should or should not be used. The wrong tea, a thousand years of tea teachers have instructed, will make a teapot turn pale and dry. And it will give us a less than perfect cup of tea. Earthenware-- like skin-- does react to heat and chemicals in the tea by changing tone or color-- it is visible to anyone using such a pot, and Lim-sensei urges us to stop and taking a deep breath, take a good hard look.

Yes: love=care=really looking.

********************

Recommended:
*This video, 葛陶中制壶全过程, is worth taking a look at to see how yixing pots are entiredly modeled by hand- from start to finish
*This video, the Deseru Shipwreck, is interesting to see the way the yixing teapots were stored inside large ceramic jars or pots
*Lim's experiments are described in his book, The Beauty of Chinese Yixing Teapots.

And Roland Barthes below on the perfection of perfection as being "adorable" whereby:  The object is loved in their entirety-- a state which no word can describe. For want of a better word, Barthes calls this adorable! I call it perfection which is to say, I love you because I love you-- "not for one or another of [their] qualities, but for everything!"

"By a singular logic, the amorous subject perceives the other as a Whole (in the fashion of Paris on an autumn afternoon), and, at the same time, it involves a remainder, which he cannot express. It is the other as a whole who produces in him an aesthetic vision: he praises the other for being perfect, he glorifies himself for having chosen this perfect other; he imagines that the other wants to be loves, as he himself wants to be loved, not for one or another of his qualities, but for everything, and this everything, he bestows upon the other in the form of a blank word: Adorable!"-- Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse

"Tulips, Roses, a Pink and White Carnation, Forgets-Me-Nots, Lilly of the Valley and other Flowers in a Vase" (Ambrosius Bosschaert)

The Quiet American (and the Blackened Canteen)

 

M. tells me he is lying on the couch with a stiff drink watching the movie, The Quiet American. He says, "It reminds me of you." Well, how can I resist? Unfortunately, I don't have a couch, but like many women the world over, I keep a bottle of booze under the sink. Warming up Sachiko's homemade plum wine, I recall the old US Embassy in Saigon. It had clearly seen better days, but as of 10 years ago, at least, it was still standing-- right up alongside the muddy Saigon River.

Yeah, The Quiet American.

Even after all the books I read before the trip, staring up into the glaring sunlight toward that famous flat rooftop, I wondered yet again, "Why on earth did America choose to go to war with Vietnam? What could it possibly have mattered?"

You see, all this talk about universalist and particularist theory has never been about me uncovering the various and sundry looming differences between East and West-- but rather it is a plain and simple distaste for ideology-led policy. For as I always like to repeat, much damage has been caused in the world by the perhaps good-intentioned wish to "share the good news." Whether its the universalist principles in Plato or Christian evangelical philosophies or whether its the kind seen in Marxism or even globalist economic policies, when states attempt to universally apply what are universalist philosophies the results can be oppressive-- especially when seen from the long view. For in the end, as a wise man once said, we cannot save each other, all we can do is inspire and stand witness.

A die-hard existentialist, I guess I stand with the Swiss. I believe that the function of the state is to provide for the people of that state first. Food, water, clean environment, education and social welfare. Humanitarian aid and free trade next. Other than that, when it comes to taking a stand or making an ideological commitment, I am just not sure that is something for nation-states to do-- as I think this is something that each individual person needs to take a stand on. It's bad enough when a state seeks to impose its ideology on its own people but to then export it?

This morning, the Good Professor sent me a copy of Roger Ames's translation of Sun Tzu: The Art of War. He mentions that it could be useful in roughly drawing out the distinctions between ancient Chinese and "Western" thinking, especially as the latter emerges from Greek and Christian thought. In particular, concerning my last post, Plato versus Mencius, I thought this below was pretty illuminating about what I believe is the significant difference between a universalism based on the concept of objective Truth versus a "Confucian sensibilty" based on shared dispositions.

In contrast with its classical Greek counterpart where "knowing" assumes a mirroring correspondance between an idea and an objective world, this Chinese "knowing" is resolutely participatory and creative-- "tracing" in both the sense of etching a pattern and following it . To know is "to realize," "to make real." The path is not a "given," but is made in the treading of it. Thus, one's own actions are always a significant factor in the shaping of one's world."

Is this not the existentialist political manifesto par excellance? A sensibility to shared values and a deep commitment to an embodied realization of subjective truth. Or in the words of Master Yangming, the unity of knowledge and action (知行合一) says in a nutshell, “If you want to know bitterness, you have to eat a bitter melon yourself.”

Human association, community, and personal freedom, stresses Camus. This is the existentilaist credo.

A friend in Japan, Robert Yellin tells me about his father, Jerry Yellin, a decorated soldier in the war against Japan who is now doing all he can for peace and reconciliation. His story as seen in the book video is so very moving and incredibly reminds me much of the small meetings between vets that I heard about or saw in Vietnam a decade ago, which happened on the same local level-- sometimes resulting from just one American vet going back there to find someone or something...Indeed, I will never forget the vets I met or spoke to in Vietnam. An army of amputees, and agent orange bare forests, I don't know how many times Vietnamese people would come up and ask me if I was American. Taking my hands in theirs they would say, it's time for friendship. That was a long time ago and I am sure everything has been utterly transformed. Personally, I will never forget some of the stories I heard from American and Vietnamese vets there. In Saigon, we were staying in a seedy hotel not far from the old embassy (pictured at top) and there was this older American gentlemen down slurping his pho every morning for breakfast. One morning, he suddenly struck up a conversation with me and hearing how he has returned to Vietnam over and over (not easy travel back then from the US)- I asked him why. And he said, "I cannot get the beauty of this place out of my mind." Interesting since he must have seen such horrors there.

Years later, I would meet the leader of a WWII veterans group in Japan through an introduction of my Aunt's who is active in an airforce widow's association in Honolulu. For years, this older gentleman and I corresponded--his Japanese was so formal and old fashion, it was pretty much impossible to decipher. But he always repeated how happy he was that now instead of war between our countries, there were weddings. This is not surprsingingly the title of Yellin's more recent book, Of war and Weddings.

**

Links:

Jerry Yellin's The Blackened Canteen (the video is very moving--I just ordered the book)
Carthage at war (I am re-listening to the Hannibal lectures) and always up to chatting about the Punic wars
The Iliad and What it Can Still Tell us About War
Coady's Just War on Philosopher's Zone

Also a link to a petition against a planned aquarium in Kyoto which goes against public sentiment (they are planning to build in where a public park now stands!)

On knowing as doing and doing as being, see Master Yang's unusual epistemology

1945 Outstanding Gun Camera Raw Footage from Japan

 

Carpaccio and the Getty (知行合一)

He doesn't know what he doesn't know,said my friend the Brilliant Master Wang Yang Ming. He knows nothing about human nature and anyway, it's like when you're driving a car. All you can see is what is out the windshield in front of you. All you really have is the view in front of you, right? How can anyone know about anything beyond that view? They think they know more than that. But they don't know, do they?

My friend was indeed famous for his unusual epistemology. The unity of knowledge and action (知行合一says in a nutshell, “If you want to know bitterness, you have to eat a bitter melon yourself.” No other knowledge is possible. All we know is what we do. And what we do is all we can know. 

For more, see Being Embodied with Master Wang.

**

Other posts that didn't show up in the feed: Dreaming of Carthage and Thermopylae

Hüzün (when Xerxes sat down to weep)

Xerxes, the king of kings and commander of the greatest army on earth, having led his men to the Hellespont in preparation to do battle against the Greeks, took a moment to look out over the water. He then sat down and wept. So described Herodotus in his Histories.

Even better than Herodotus, I think I prefer Monsieur Rodriguez's version of that moment when Xerxes sat down to cry:

Xerxes the Persian, king of kings, looked over his army of a million men, the greatest army the world had ever seen, absolutely loyal to him, he the greatest ruler the world had ever known—a million men aimed under his command to the ruin and conquest of obstreperous Greece. But as he sat and saw on his hillside throne, something gave way in his mind. Some inward support, rotted out with secret melancholy, broke and let him fall. Xerxes looked at a million strong, proud, fearless men; but Xerxes saw only time and decay and death. Xerxes (a poor calculator) thought that in a hundred years not one of these men would be alive; and thinking so, Xerxes, king of kings, before his army of a million men—Xerxes wept.

It is a somehow deeply touching image, is it not? This image of the great king crying as he gazes down upon the waters full of warships in the Hellespont below. The legendary straights made famous by Lord Byron's triumphant swim, are located, as everyone knows, on the other side of the Sea of Marmara from Istanbul.

**

Istanbul.

Such is his genius that the Great Orhan even manages to write a memoir not of the usual mold. An age of memoirs indeed-- reality TV etc., why is it that people seem so fascinated by other people's narcissism? And this idea of over-coming personal adversity. Who cares about her divorce anyway? But no so for the Great Orhan-- for even his memoir seems really more a view from a minaret.

But it is in part a memoir and Pamuk, writing about his youth, illuminates the way in which we really cannot separate self from surroundings. Yes, place is to us like cold ocean water is to a school of tuna.

Mood as place and mood as time.

One of the most written about themes of Pamuk's Istanbul is his concept of Turkish melencholy. Hüzün, writes Pamuk, is the overwhelming mood of Istanbul, and Pamuk spends hundreds of pages describing the way this mood washes over and stains people with its color(lessness) of black and white:

Hüzün does not just paralyze the inhabitants of Instanbul, it also gives them poetic license to be paralyzed.

It is something he says that all Istanbullis share; this "melancholy" of a people living among the ruins of a decayed civilization. Like Mann's Death in Venice or like sitting in a rooftop cafe in Kathmandu all afternoon and watching the great crowds of people in Durbur Square; people "dwelling" and living among the most splendid architectual riches imaginable. One is apt if there is snowfall, to fall into a kind of

hazy state of melancholy which denotes a melancholy that is communal rather than private. Offering no clarity, veiling reality instead, Hüzün brings us comfort, softening the view like the condensation on a window when the tea kettle has been spouting steam on a winter's day.

This really is reminiscent of Death in Venice. But also of Nietzsche's poem. You remember when -- as a man of many moods-- Nietzsche once sang the poem in the middle of the night on a train from Turin back to Germany in a state of madness:

At the bridge of late
I stood in the brown night.
From afar came a song:
as a golden drop it welled
over the quivering surface.
Gondolas, lights, and music--
drunken it swam out into the twilight.

My soul, a stringed instrument,
sang to itself, invisibly touched,
a secret gondola song,
quivering with iridescent happiness.
--Did anyone listen to it?

**

A brilliant thinker and friend of this blog, he is dubious, he says about my indulging in "collective" mood --in the mood with Heidegger. For concerning any such concept of moods in terms of time and place, he says:

I'm constitutionally sceptical of large groups or mental constructs (like, institutions, cities, States...) being attributed properties that are in the first instance held by individuals, at least in anything more than a metaphorical way. Is a "mood" here similar to an "ethos"? Perhaps like the ethos of fascism that Heidegger so shamelessly indulged in and endeavored to bestow philosophical blessings upon? I think there was an ethos of a kind peculiar to "Red Vienna" (1919-1934), intelligently and elegantly captured by Eve Blau and Elizabeth Ann Danto, and further evidenced in works by Austro-Marxists and on Austro-Marxism.

Yes, I think mood functions destructively in this way as well.I would however question (and this is indeed the interesting point) whether in fact such moods (whether it be fascism or melancholy) are in fact first held by individuals:

Like the sound of jade reverberating off the walls of the great hall, the Confucian scholar just feels it-- this thing called virtue or proper conduct is something to which he attunes himself as embodied know-how guided by mood. And as Robert Harrison's guest, Sepp Gumbrecht suggests, in the same way that a violin will internally reverberate when bowed, this mood is internalized in the sense that it becomes almost impossible to really differentiate between outer environment and inner self as they are indeed inter-dependent (from Being in the Mood with Heidegger).

All this being less obvious now because of TV. (See my 1st comment to POD)

**

Yesterday, I was listening to an interview with Pamuk that Robert Harrison did for Entitled Opinions in which Pamuk mentioned how younger readers in Turkey have been dismayed by his gloomy portrait of a "colorless city." It reminded me a bit of a recent chat I had on facebook about Che Guevara which also had me thinking how all this is intrinsically bound up in time. Monsieur Rodriguez calls this the Xerxes factor. Calculating his chronology in 35 year unites he says (and I agree) that:

Nothing happens only when it happens. Everything memorable recurs in memory until memory is extinguished. And when that memory is a shared one, like the memories enforced by disaster and strife, it establishes, among those who remember, a secret language of allusions and reminders with power beyond ordinary language. The consequences of this language, even at dark removes, are still in truth the consequences of that event. Thus in order to judge an event, we must look at it three times: first, contemporaneously, so we can judge what it means when everyone remembers it; second, from a half-xerxes, so we can judge what it means once most people no longer remember it; and third, from a xerxes, so we can judge what it means once no one remembers it. And until the third look all judgments remain provisional.

**

There are many views indeed and we probably do need at least a Xerxes to attempt anything other than the purely provisional.

View from a Xerxes
View from a Minaret

<

Kyoto Journal

Kyoto Journal #74

Cover Image by Oleg Novikov

Guest Editor: Leanne Ogasawara / Design: Kevin Foley (www.kfdesign.jp)

Leanne Ogasawara's blog, www.tangdynastytimes.com/, was the catalyst for this special themed issue of KJ.
In posts that read as dispatches from outposts on a journey of exploration deep into the history of relations between East and West, she reflects on aspects of what a truly global culture might encompass, presenting Tang multiculturalism and Silk Road cosmopolitanism (and much, much more) as reference points for our present times...

---

Metaphorically, silk speaks of brilliant threads weaving complex interfaces, intricate interplay of elaborate craft processes, subtle aesthetics and the erotic charge of luxury and wealth. In the West, it has since Roman times conjured an exotic, mysterious Orient. Ever pragmatic, China traded silk for the 'heavenly horses' of Central Asia, up to forty bolts of silk for each fleet mount, buying its military equal footing with the nomadic foes that harassed its borders.

In the East, the Road itself is the more powerful metaphor. Every path of personal development, in martial or aesthetic arts, is a Way. In the even bigger picture, the Dao — written with the same character as 'road' — signifies the true nature of the universe.

(From introduction by Ken Rodgers)

CONTENTS:

10,000 Miles Away: Chang'an and Nara
By the year 710, when Japan's imperial capital was moved to Nara (a city modeled on Chang'an, as was the later capital Kyoto), Tang China was booming. The Tang period — the only time when a woman, the fascinating Empress Wu, ruled China — was the most open era in that nation's history, giving rise to a rich multiethnic and multicultural empire, encompassing Turkestan, nine kingdoms around Samarkand and Tashkent, 16 kingdoms in present-day Kashmir, Afghanistan and Iran, Manchuria, and present-day Korea. The Tang era is widely considered to be the zenith in Chinese civilization, superior even to the great Han dynasty, by which time China was already connected by caravan routes to Rome and Persia, and by sea to Japan.

Of Bonds, 'the Word' and Trade – Jeff Fuchs
Geographies are given lifeblood by the peoples that inhabit them and it was the peoples that more often than not, defined the ‘success’ (or not) of both the caravans and more importantly, trade itself.  Relationships, bonds and that almost forgotten virtue, honor, were crucial along the almost mythical trade routes. Crucial enough for traders to refer to an oft quoted ‘mountain maxim’ and philosophy, when describing voyages: “Cooperate or perish.”



The Road to Oxiana – Leanne Ogasawara
A thousand years before the infamous “Great Game,” the name given to the intense rivalry that existed at the turn of the century between Czarist Russia and Victorian England for supremacy in Central Asia, there was another “Great Game.” This older rivalry occurred between the Chinese, the Arabs, the Tibetans, and the Turkish peoples. The region they were fighting for was the same old stretch of land — one that has somehow remained right smack in the middle of everything for a millenium.

The Great Kashgar Bus Convoy – Bill Porter
After ten hours on the road, all we could think of was a meal and a bed. As we checked into the bus station hotel, the girl at the desk told us the road ahead was still blocked by landslides. The slides, she said, were all on the Pakistan side, and we were still a hundred kilometers short of the border. The girl added that nothing bigger than a bicycle had made it through for the past forty days and that we would have to walk sixty kilometers to get through all the slides. She laughed at the idea of our convoy making it.

Along the Silk Road Today – Pico Iyer
To get to the Desert Rain coffee-house in central Leh, you have to walk off the crowded main street that leads to the mosque and slither through a passageway to a parallel back lane, barely paved, too narrow for more than three people to pass at a time, in the process forever of being completed, so it seems, with the ruins of Leh Palace above it on a hill.

The Kashgar Case – Mark Mordue
Some time ago at the Byron Bay Writers Festival I was invited to speak on a travel panel called “Evocative Images from Around the World.” We were asked to describe how we translated exotic images into stories, and what this meant for both the writer and the reader. Did something substantial occur, or was it just armchair travelling?

Observations from the Field: Space and Its Discontents in Kashgar – Isaac Blacksin
Toward the outskirts of Kashgar stands a new city, not yet completed, in which great white sentinels proudly display their right-angled concrete bulk, waiting. Closer to the melon orchards than the city center, these are the new homes — some ten stories high, many twenty — to which a sizable chunk of Kashgar's population, upwards of 13,000 families, will be moved in the months and years ahead.

Over Samarkand –Nicolas Chorier

Of the many common cultural practices found along the Silk Road, from Samarkand to Nara, kite-flying must be one of the most beloved. An avid kite-flyer since his boyhood, Chorier combines his childhood passion with his professional skills as a photographer. He uses three kites; the largest spans 12 square meters and can soar up to 1,000 feet, "though low altitudes often prove to be more interesting," he says.

 

Digital Bezeklik – Leanne Ogasawara
European explorers who roamed the deserts of Central Asia at the beginning of the 20th century were astonished to uncover dazzling paintings of figures with Persian, Indian, and Chinese features. In addition to Buddhism, the murals reveal some Christian Manichean and Nestorian characteristics. Japanese explorers were equally surprised to recognize the Persian-style flower motifs long associated with 8th-century Japanese temples in Nara.

On the Trail of Texts – Isaac Blacksin
There is a cultural of appreciation here in Japan for looking at words, experiencing words as a physical form. One reason for this is the nature of kanji itself; as an ideography, it carries a meaning and a story in its very form, as opposed to a [phonic] alphabet. Of course, there is some Roman art with letters, but the Japanese audience carries the culture in which looking at words, at letters, becomes a significant experience.

Alexander Csoma de Kõrösi, The Grandfather of Modern Day Tibetan Translation – Matteo Pistono
It was on 20 February 1819 that Csoma de Körösi set out afoot to China via Moscow, intending to enter East Turkistan from the north. Count Teleky met Csoma de Körösi on the road that morning and asked him where he was going. Pausing briefly, a truly beatific Csoma de Körösi replied unambiguously, “I am going to Asia in search of our relatives.”

Civilizations Never Clash, Ignorance Does – Hattori Eiji
What we are required to do now is to become truly civilized. A civilized person is the one who “knows oneself, and tries to learn from others”; the one who knows and respects the dif- ference of cultures; the one who seeks the transversal values of humanity found in all these cultures. Peace for mankind in the future should be constructed, not on the logic of power, but on the rediscovery of the spirit of mutual respect, on the very “wisdom” of knowing that “mutual respect” does mean “mutual benefit.”

Tibet and Xinjiang: the New Bamboo Curtain – Parag Khanna
Tibet and Xinjiang today set the stage for the rebirth of a multi-ethnic empire in ways that resemble nothing so much as America’s frontier expansion nearly two centuries ago.  Chinese think about their mission civilatrice today very much the way American settlers did: They are bringing development and modernity. Asiatic, Buddhist Tibetans and Turkic, Muslim Uyghurs are being lifted out of the third world, whether they like it or not. They are getting roads, telephone lines, hospitals, and jobs.

Beauty and Power on China's Silk Road – Sam Crane
The apsara of Mogao and the soldiers of Xian remind us of the disparate purposes of the Silk Road. Dunhuang is an oasis crossroads. A place where pilgrims stopped and stayed and were drawn to beauty, the spectacular possibilities of color and line and form. Cultures mixed freely and faith blossomed. The road brought people closer to nirvana. Conversely, Qin's soldiers are emblems of power. They stand, now frozen and mute and impotent, as symbols of the maneuver and noise and force of military assault.

Poetry: The Treasures of Dunhuang (1) 2000 Buddhas – Jerome Rothenburg



Gandhara– Leanne Ogasawara
The Japanese are the world's great antiquarians, and they above most people find it impossible to grasp why anyone would want to destroy those priceless statues which towered up against the sandstone cliffs for 1,300 years in what is called one of the world's most beautiful high-altitude valleys.

The Hollow Staff: Western Music and the Silk Road –Paul Rodriguez
The Silk Road would have been full of musicians, musicians living in hope and without plans, musicians from a dozen distinct traditions traveling in the same caravans, meeting around the same fires. What did they say to one another when they met, when they saw the telltale marks on lips and fingers, saw the shrouded awkward bulk, too precious to be parted with, heard a song drift in from out of sight and saw someone else sway a little too eagerly, swing arms and fingers a little too rapidly?

Silk Road Synchronicity – Preston Houser
The ancient pipa itself, a probable precursor to the Japanese biwa, was a four-string instrument, capable of producing twenty distinct notes. Played by virtuoso Ye Xu-ran, the pipa sounds like a banjo in the hands of a sedate Appalachian bodhisattva.

Collaboration in Harmony: An Interview with Miki Minoru – C.B.Liddell and Leanne Ogasawara
For me, the Silk Road is a symbol for East-West relations from recent times till today, as well as a symbol for contemporary North-South issues. In addition to my operas, I think my current life's work has come to be taken up with the production of work which harmoniously brings together the cultural developments of the West and the little-known but fascinating cultural riches of Southeast Asia, together with the musical traditions of East Asia, in order to create something completely new in terms of music.

IN TRANSLATION: Reflections on the Hagoromo Legend – Umewaka Yasunori
In China too, we find variations of the Hagoromo legend in almost every part of the country. While the oldest instance found in Japanese literature is said to be that in the Omi-no-kuni Fudoki (Stories of the Province of Omi) from the eighth century, a similar story is found in Chinese literature in the fourteenth volume of the Sou-shen chi, which was written some 400 years earlier.

Poetry: Pig's Heaven Inn – Arthur Sze

Journeys to the Western Realm – Jean Miyake Downey
The cultural influences that permeated early Japan weren't just from China – a diverse culture formed out of multicultural fusion over many millennia itself – but instead came from Silk Road interactions that connected the cultures of East and South Asia, Central Asia, ancient Greece and Rome, the Middle East, and Africa. [Erratum: In the print version of this essay, two quotes, by Basho and Hirayama Ikuo, appear if written by Jean Miyake Downey. We will post a full corrected version online].

Kuchean Dancers and the Sogdian Whirl – Leanne Ogasawara
Japan is, of course, one of the world's great civilizations, but, alas, it was a late bloomer. During Tang times, it was still more or less an illiterate, rather unsophisticated society. Therefore, most Japan scholars acknowledge that Japan must have had a lot of help from “"foreign advisors" during this period. For the most part, the Koreans are credited for the direction of the great surge in artistic and intellectual productivity of the Asuka and Nara periods. There are those, too, who say Iranians had a large (if indirect) part to play...  

Behind Glass: Japan's Silk Roads Memorabilia – Iaac Blacksin
The Silk Roads is not just a time or a place, neither an ideology nor an economic system; as a metaphor and a bridge, it is all of these things and more.  Accordingly, when it comes time to display Silk Roads artifacts {and manuscripts}, the weighty history of the subject often overwhelms the dim lighting and behind-the-glass isolation of museum presentation. That said, there are quite a few places in Japan that attempt to contextualize the Silk Roads continuum, to contain its materials remnants, allowing for an eager audience to glean something of its importance.

Japan's Birthplace Commemorates its Silk Roads Heritage – Shinno Haruka

Marco Polo's India--  Namit Arora
Returning home from China in 1292 CE, Marco Polo arrives on the Coromandel Coast of India in a typical merchant ship with over sixty cabins and up to 300 crewmen. He enters the kingdom of the Tamil Pandyas near modern day Tanjore, where, according to custom, “the king and his barons and everyone else all sit on the earth.” He asks the king why they “do not seat themselves more honorably.” The king replies, “To sit on the earth is honorable enough, because we were made from the earth and to the earth we must return.”

Rawak Stupa – Don Croner
On March 6, 1925, the Roerich Expedition led by mystic painter, occultist, alleged spy, Shambhalist, and all-around intriguer Nicholas Roerich left Darjeeling, India on what would be a three-year journey through Central Asia and Tibet, with stops in Kashmir in India, Xinjiang Province in China, the Russian Altai Mountains in Siberia, Ulaan Baatar and Amarbuyant Khiid in Mongolia, the Tibetan Plateau, and numerous places in between.

Bright Road – Robert Brady
The world is a mind, where there are traces, paths, trails, highways, expressways, leading to futures of mystery our ancestors long ago heard whispers of in dreams... And we here, standing where we are in this world to which the old road has led, do we know where we are, any more than those early travelers? 

 
All the Peonies of Chang'an – Leanne Ogasawara
Re-reading Yasushi Inoue's novel, Tun-Huang, I delight in the fact that the author wrote the entire story without ever having set foot in Western China. At that time (the late 1950s), no Japanese or European scholars were allowed to travel to the area. And yet, Tun-Huang remains to my mind the most vivid account of the Silk Road oasis city ever published.

Reviews

Shadow of the Silk Road, by Colin Thubron— James Dalglish (plus a short interview with the author, July 2008)
Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present, by Christopher I. Beckwith— Stephen Dodson
Did Marco Polo Go to China?, by Frances Wood; Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World, by John Larner; Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino— Ken Rodgers
Religions of the Silk Road: Overland Trade and Cultural Exchange from Antiquity to the Fifteenth Century, by Richard C. Foltz— Preston L. Houser
The Silk Road: Art and History, by Jonathon Tucker— Winnie Shiraishi
Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, by Paul Theroux— Rasoul Sorkhabi

ONLINE SPECIAL: Into Dasht-e-Kavir: Notes from the Great Salt Desert, by Steven Tizzard

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