Introduction to Chinese Philosophy

All done with the book now. It was an entertaining read that gave me a broad understanding of the fundamentals of Chinese philosophy, and encouraged me to read some of the original sources on ctext.org.

Next, probably western philosophy.

Chapter 12: Later Chinese Thought

While all the philosophers from previous chapters were from the Zhou dynasty (1040-221 BCE), this one chapter covers everything after it.

• Qin Dynasty: Lasted 14 years, emperor burned books, worked on great wall, made terracotta army. Centralized authority made them successful, and legalism was the endorsed ideology.
• Han Dynasty: Opposed the excesses of the Qin, preserved and studied the classics. Most standard versions of the classics come from this era. Canonical Confucian texts were identified: The Odes, The History/Book of Documents, The Spring and Autumn Annals, The Changes, and The Rites (诗经，书经，春秋，易经，礼记). The imperial academy was created and a cosmology was being tied to Confucianism.
• Six Dynasties: Buddhism became mature.
• Sui Dynasty: Reunified China, rulers liked Buddhism.
• Tang Dynasty: Buddhism reached its height. Fazang was an influential philosopher during this period, who rationalized the teaching of the Huayan School for society. (“All is one, one is all”). Chan Buddhism also developed during this time.
  • “[Fazang] called for a candle and placed it surrounded by mirrors on every side. When lit, the candle was reflected in each mirror, and each of the reflections in every other mirror so that in any one mirror were the images of all the others.”
  • Chan Buddhism focused on practically how to achieve enlightenment, including zazen and koans.
  • Neoconfucianism began later, which suggested Mengzi was the best of the sages and that 大学 and 中庸 were important.
• Song Dynasty: Neoconfucianism came into maturity.
  • They began thinking of qi as a metaphysical element, the underlying “stuff” that everything emerges or condenses from.
  • Li (理) was thought of as any pattern that distinguishes one thing from another, in an interconnected fashion similar to Indra’s net.
  • Zhu Xi was influential during this time as he shifted study from the Five Classics (五经) to the Four Books (四书): The Great Learning, Doctrine of the Mean, Analects, and Mengzi. His commentary on the books was extremely influential.
• Qing Dynasty: Formed by Manchus who became sinicized over their reign. The opium wars happened during this time, the Treaty of Nanjing happened, and Hong Kong became Great Britain’s. The Taiping Rebellion happened, Confucian civil service exams were ended, and the Republic of China began.
• Republic of China: New Culture Movement with the New Youth journal, Confucianism is satirized and seen as useless, Japan invaded, and Communists won.
• People’s Republic of China: Old culture was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution. Mao Zedong’s Marxist philosophy did have some inspiration from old Chinese philosophy (yin and yang, daodejing) – see On Contradiction.
  • New Confucianism began during this time, which claimed that Chinese history is long and “unbroken” and gives legitimacy to a certain “One Chinese Way.” according to a seminal essay “A Manifesto for a Re-appraisal of Sinology and Reconstruction of Chinese Culture” or “为中国文化敬告世界人士宣言”.

The Name of the Wind (2006)

A friend gave me a hearty book recommendation, saying that Patrick Rothfuss’s “The Name of the Wind” was a captivating novel by an author born, raised, and thriving in Wisconsin. He said it was a combination of Forrest Gump and Harry Potter. With few exceptions if anyone gives me a recommendation and lends me their copy, I’ll give it a shot. In this case the novel really is as good if not better than my friend said it would be.

On first glance it looked like something my eyes would pass over in Goodwill’s 99¢ book section. The back-of-book synopsis is fantasy buzzwordy (“I burned down the town of Trebon. I have spent the night with Felurian…”) and the entire thing looks like every other pulp fantasy novel. But once the book was opened it pulled me in the way Harry Potter did when I was a kid.

The plot of this trilogy is the story of a man’s life, told over three days at an inn. It’s a story from his childhood to adulthood, and all the adventures he had. It’s nothing that can really be summarized, and like a good song can’t be described in a way that could give it justice. So I’ll just gush about what there is to like about the book.

It’s less about some grand quest to kill a dragon and more about the meanderings of a man through his life, what his goals are, who/what he encounters, and his thoughts and emotions during the situations. The author took his knowledge of the multicultural human experience and wrote a detailed observation of what it would be like for this character to live in the world. He illustrates how salt is valuable to the people of that time, the feelings of someone away from their instrument for too long of a time, the songwriting process, how people would hide wealth when banditry is commonplace and normalized, basic medieval chemistry, how currencies differ between regions, and a rational magic system. While it would be easy enough to write this up as a dungeons and dragons sourcebook describing his world, he communicates it by each character’s experience.

In conclusion: It’s Spice and Wolf + Forrest Gump + Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. If you like two or more of these, give it a shot! You can find the book for less than $10.

By the way, the author has a blog.

Things I’m Liking

• 996.ICU: “996” is a increasingly popular work schedule in China wherein workers work from 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week. A common joke/rhyme is that working 996 leads to going to the ICU (工作996，生病ICU). What’s interesting is that people are organizing on github since it’s not blocked by the firewall. With this and the workers protests in the last couple years, maybe we’ll see some change as the economy develops.