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Rel. 116: Religion and philosophy in early imperial China “The universal, the circumstantial, the universal as circumstantial” Syllabus (Spring 2021) |
K.E. Brashier Office hours: T 12 noon-1.30 p.m.; Th 1-2.30 p.m. |
Use Buddhism to rule the mind, Daoism
to rule the body and Confucianism to rule the world.
– Emperor Xianzong (r. 1163-89)
While modern scholarship often focuses on China’s pre-imperial world of bronze vessels, of Confucius and Laozi, and of the First Emperor, it is only in the centuries immediately after unification in 221 BCE that Confucianism permanently transformed the imperial court, that Daoism evolved into a mass religion heeded by millions, and that Buddhism restructured China’s order of existence in this life and now ... in the next…. Pre-imperial China was the field in which the seeds of Chinese idea systems were first planted, but early and medieval China provided the environment for their taking root and growing to maturity.
People often ask me why I study religion, and while it took me years to figure out, it’s because I’m interested, not so much in the experiences of individual religious people, but instead in the grander history of religious ideas and Weltansichts or “world perspectives.” Religion is about how peoples locate the self on the biggest of maps. (Philosophy does this, too, but it’s limited to the thoughts of a few.) Religion is the foremost “ideo locator” – that is, the “You are here” arrow – on the mega-map, the sacred map. But consider this: what if the smaller profane map of our everyday lives experienced a radical change? How would that change then ripple into the bigger sacred map? Or to put it more relevantly…
· Did the unification of China that standardized weights, measures, coinage, written language, bureaucracy, service to the state, the law ... everything from the color of vestments to the width of the carriage axle ... did that in turn change how people also envisioned the invisible sacred realms beyond this now-unified profane empire?
· And when that empire later reached around the globe to encounter other empires (gasp!) such as India, did that again change its religious Weltansicht?
I don’t know, but I want to find out.
Rel. 116 is my grandiose way of formulating that question, and it’s a question I’m asking you to help me answer. Let me put it another way. I often wonder if the “American discourse” of capitalism, competition, and individualism gets reflected and projected into our own American gods. (Max Weber would say, “Absolutely! And vice versa!”, then writing several persuasive books about the subject.) If so, when China transitioned from pre-imperial to imperial history, did its own gods transition as well? We will investigate this question, collecting the clues and formulating the hypotheses necessary to tackle it.
This course is thus about how early imperial China – now a unified and self-aware entity in terms of its sanctioned history and administered territory – located its own ideo locator on the giant map via its philosophies and religions. Its philosophers endeavored to uncover cosmic patterns, define existence and sketch out the ethical life. Its religious specialists imposed structure on the ancestors, streamlined the state cult and set standards for achieving salvation. And if the creation of the imperial state religion alongside the first foundations of a Daoist mass church weren’t enough, then Buddhism finds its way onto this map. Now a new and highly developed foreign religion will challenge (and perhaps unexpectedly crystalize?) that grand imperial and religious unification. In the process, Mahayana Buddhism itself must adapt if it is to survive in China’s old, well-established cultural heritage.
In brief, this survey of imperial history’s first six hundred years will examine state religion, the foundations of the Daoist church and Buddhism’s entry from India. Devoted to primary texts in translation, it will explore Daoist theoretical musings (including the Liezi and three commentaries to the Daode jing), Confucian ceremonial guidelines (as justified in the Xunzi), and Buddhist texts (in particular the Buddhacarita and the Vimalakirti sutra). It will also study how particular individuals reacted to this environment, including Emperor Wang Mang who transformed his capital into a cosmic fulcrum and the cynic Wang Chong who dismissed religions that anthropomorphized the cosmos. This course will also draw upon contemporaneous literary, poetic and material cultures (including the Portland Art Museum collections which, while we can’t visit this semester for obvious reasons, await your future patronage).
I. Objectives and outcomes
I support this recent movement to crystallize our goals and objectives, but I hope we don’t think of our courses as purchased commodities in the form of “The teacher will sell X to the recipient student.” That downplays the student’s roll into being a mere consumer who eats the meal and pays the bill. I think education – and Reed education in particular – is about partners in search of knowledge, one guiding the hardworking other but at the same time benefiting from that hardworking other in a shared goal of learning. You teach me your ideas; you help me articulate my own. I don’t want you just in the dining room; I want you in the kitchen.
Course objectives
A.
You will become familiar with the
religious and philosophical idea systems arising from early and medieval
imperial China between the unification in 221 BCE and the sixth century CE.
This course is about ideas and the on-the-ground circumstances that shaped
them. As one text immediately before unification astutely observed, “Someone gazing eastward will not see the
western wall, and someone looking off toward the south will not notice the
north. Ideas depend on their location” (東面望者不見西牆，南鄉視者不睹北方，意有所在也).[1]
In this course, you will become conversant in how religious and philosophical
ideas change in tandem with their settings. For example, the Confucian
discourse assumed the existence of a stable universal pattern, and that meant
templates from the past could overlay circumstances of the present. Divination
and portents were legitimized because microcosm and macrocosm operated under
the same set of rules. This assumption of a universal pattern coincided
with a unified empire. Is that a coincidence? For a second example, Buddhism in
the early Common Era would then challenge this mindset by dissolving the
limited self spatially (e.g. in its famous doctrines of “no-self”) and
temporally (e.g. in its introduction of reincarnation). How does this fit a
contemporaneous Chinese empire that was learning more and more about the world
beyond, no longer able to assume itself to be the one-and-only “Middle
Kingdom”?
B.
In the process, you will come to realize
the situatedness of your own habits of mind by encountering another culture’s
very different habits of mind. Neither the modern West nor early China spells
out these habituations (because neither is aware of them); they only
dualistically crystallize through comparison and contrast.
C.
You will hone certain tools of analysis,
from close reading to clear writing, from the formation of original ideas to
the structuring of arguments. This objective is not intended generically
because the medium of learning resonates with the content of that learning. For
example, your early Chinese Confucian counterpart would have focused on
memorizing and reciting texts, and that fits the assumption of a universal
pattern and hence a need for preserving the templates of the past as accurately
as possible. Today we instead deconstruct and encourage lateral thinking by
recombining the bits, leading to innovation. Your early Confucian counterparts
explicitly denounced such innovation in their quest for excavating the stable
(and stabilizing) pattern.
Learning outcomes
B. Students
will then be able to devise new questions and develop original insights
regarding those primary-text arguments.
C. Finally,
students will demonstrate the ability to persuasively articulate the complex
ideas of early Chinese religion and philosophy through speaking and writing.
II. But how do we achieve those objectives and
outcomes … online?
On 6 June 2020, Peter Sagal on NPR’s news quiz “Wait, wait … don’t tell me” described how education will look this year because of the pandemic pause:
So school administrators are already thinking about rules for the fall. The LA school district has said that kids won't be eating lunch together in the cafeteria but alone in their seats in the classroom. Congratulations, nerds. You're not the only ones now eating with the teacher…. Every student at recess will be given their own ball and – think of the great games…. you can play when everyone has a ball. Like, everyone stares sadly at their ball…. Can you imagine the humiliation for the kids like me who are going to be picked last for holding their own ball?[2]
Even if you’re living on campus, it may feel like we’ll each be holding our own ball this semester, and I myself am not very coordinated when it comes to any sports, even just holding things. As for Zoom’s digital medium, my PhD thesis was on Chinese tombstone epigraphy from two thousand years ago, about as far away as you can get from Wi-Fi and ethernet. So I’m not an internet-first person (much to the chagrin of my husband who’s an Intel software engineer); I’ve long argued against screen-based learning because less is retained; and I idealize Reed’s conference system of education through direct contact because I like creating conditions in which students productively think on the spot. But … I’m simply not as young as I once was – I’m retiring at the end of this semester – and Reed needs to thin out its in-person campus space to reduce risk. So … here’s your bouncing ball.
Last semester’s online teaching made me feel like walking into an appliance store and facing a wall of separate televisions, the presenters all facing forward and not interacting with one another. Even in a large in-person conference, I could have at least turned toward the speaker and interacted in gesture and facial expression. Individual contact could still be made. Now no one knows when my attention is fully turned on them and I’m looking them straight in the eyes. It’s a bit lonely and unsatisfying, and I suspect that, for you as well, a typical class often ranked closer to watching TV rather than to actually engaging other humans. There were even embarrassing cases when, although I thought someone was engaged because they were looking at me through their Zoom window, I came to awkwardly realize they weren’t really “with” me at all.
There’s a learning curve, and we must adapt. For example, last semester I’d crafted nice PowerPoint-supported “starter” arguments, but despite the best of intentions, I managed to kill interactivity in the process because I was indeed starting class by making it feel more like a TV show than a meeting. This semester I’ll try to keep those PowerPoints to a minimum, but let me know if it ever gets too minimal. (Having authored many articles and a couple books on religion in early imperial China, there’s much I want to say, but I must edit myself to give you your chance.)
The student survey many of you filled out last summer gave me lots of useful insights about online teaching. You generally like synchronous learning on a regular schedule. You want smaller groups and shorter sessions for Zoom discussions. You don’t want group projects. If there are to be professorial video presentations, you like them recorded but not necessarily in long (i.e. boring) segments nor as voice-over PowerPoint presentations without seeing the teacher. You like handouts and outlines to go with the audio recordings. You want flexibility should the need arise.
I’ll try to do all of that. For example, I’ve voluntarily broken this course down into three separate sections of sixteen people each. (Please be gentle with me this semester because my days are going to be very long and I have almost fifty students just in this course alone!) For a second example, I’ll often resort to video and audio recordings and assign them as homework, thereby giving you more conference discussion time. For a third example, there won’t be my normal end-of-semester group projects, although you will instead be leading some of the conferences yourselves along with four or five of your colleagues. So when it comes to what the survey recommends, I’ll try to do all that.
“I’ll try to do all of that” … within reason. One thing I’m loathe to do is lower my standards, even if I’m willing to expand them a bit. That is, if you work hard, keep up with the readings and develop a sincere appreciation for learning this material, then you’ll get the full experience out of this material as you would in any normal year. Or at least I’ll try to make it so. I might “expand” my standards a bit by subjectively lowering the fail threshold a little if I see you legitimately struggling with the current situation, paying the very real costs of pandemic pressures. But before I lower that threshold, we’ll resort to making accommodations. For example, if it’s simply impossible to fully engage online for various reasons, we’ll find other ways for you to engage, such as through more writing assignments or even exams to ensure you’re up-to-speed and thinking about the material.[3] That is, I’ll be especially accommodating this year to get you to the finish line, but I still want everyone to cross the same finish line.
So …
some things I’ve been working on in this transition to online teaching:
·
As noted, there will sometimes be videos (Covid-eos?)
and audios – some long, some short – added to the Moodle listings for any
particular day, the latter usually accompanied by a handout. Please listen/view
them before the relevant conference.
·
Although my computers only crashed once during a
conference last semester (and then only for two or three minutes), I’m still
clunky when it comes to Zoom. For example, did you know the Zoom interface for
the presenter is different from that of the participants? If I show you a piece
of text via sharing my screen – something I’ll often do because I like close reading
– your own screen splits to show both the text and your conference colleagues
side-by-side. Mine won’t. But because I’m using multiple screens, I can drag
the window-in-a-window in which you all appear onto another screen and then
enlarge it by dragging, and that takes me a moment to do. Clunky clunky clunky.
·
I’ve compiled a set of ten online commandments that
I’d like you to review – they’re on our Moodle page – and I’d appreciate your
own input here. Since drafting that, I’d like to add a
couple more here (with all due apologies to the original drafter of
commandments who apparently thought they should come in tens):
o I’ve
had mixed results with break-out rooms and tend not to use them, but as I’ve
sectioned the course into smaller groups, that’s already replacing them to some
degree anyway. Yet on the days you and your colleagues are leading conferences,
you can by all means use them if you want, and I’ll transfer “host” controls
over to you.
o Please
don’t assume I’ll ever see the chat box. I have one eye on my screen and
another on my notes, and while I study Buddhism, I have yet to develop a third
eye.
o If
you’ve had me before, you already know that I never put people on the spot and
usually solicit input from the conference in general unless in our conference
preparations you’ve been explicitly asked to prep something in particular. Yet
there are times that you may need to have your camera off. That’s fine, but
please note that I’ll never call on anyone I can’t see unless you’ve
emailed me in advance to say “My camera must be off but I’m present and
participatory, happy to engage.” (Yet before you simply opt for always “camera
off,” please remember that, like most conferences at Reed, participation is
indeed an evaluated requirement – see below.)
·
Finally I’ve scheduled a “spring break” of two
sessions in the middle of the syllabus because I realize that constant focus
without some kind of pause will make zombies of all of us. (During that break
and the subsequent actual break in April, I’ll be working away on your paper
comments.)
This
year I’m just as much of a student as you are. I’ll try my best, and I’ll need
your help.
III. Resources
This course is rather heavy on reading – I do not treat introductory courses any easier than upper-division courses – and almost all of the readings are primary sources in translation.
Required texts (all in the bookstore)
I received the following note from the library: “We suggest that faculty advise students to obtain their own
copies of essential books if possible.” Even in normal years, I usually ask you
to get hardcopies and encourage you to mark them up, blazing a trail as you go
along – underscoring, writing marginalia observations, highlighting – instead
of taking notes. (I then recommend taking five minutes immediately before
conference to simply skim through those underscores and marginalia because it
will significantly improve your retention and conference participation.
Try it!) Ebooks are harder to use (although in one
case below, I’ve resorted to it because it’s free and legal) because you can’t
annotate them as easily and they’re really hard to quickly consult
during online conferencing. In sum … bite the bullet; buy the books.
· Gardner, Daniel K. The four books: The basic teachings of the later Confucian tradition (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007).
· Graham, A.C. The book of Lieh-tzu: A classic of Tao (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
·
Hawkes,
David. The Songs of the South: An
Anthology of Ancient Chinese Poems by Qu Yuan and Other Poets (London:
Penguin, 2011).
·
Hutton,
Eric L. Xunzi: The complete text (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2013).
·
Lopez,
Donald. The story of Buddhism. San
Francisco: Harper, 2002.
·
Lynn,
Richard John. The Classic of the Way and Virtue: A new translation of the Tao-te ching of Laozi as interpreted
by Wang Bi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
·
Watson,
Burton. The Vimalakirti
Sutra (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
Free download (although hardcopies available from Amazon, etc.)
· Charles Willemen’s translation of the Buddhacarita: In praise of the Buddha’s acts can be downloaded for free from the publisher as a pdf. See https://bdkamerica.org/product/buddhacarita-in-praise-of-buddhas-acts/.
If money is an issue, there’s a small number of copies in the Religion student lounge (2nd floor ETC, door code 256980) on a bottom shelf of the south wall labeled “Brashier’s books.” That shelf has copies of texts from both my pre-imperial and early imperial introductory courses. Please let students with significant financial need have first shot at them, but by the end of the first week, it’s open season for everyone. The books on that shelf are free, and I don’t need them back.
Moodle
There is an extensive Moodle site for this course, the “Ereserves” all in a folder at the top. I suggest saving this on your browser toolbar:
https://moodle.reed.edu/course/view.php?id=3424
The Moodle site will also include reading maps for all our texts that must be read before tackling the readings themselves. Sometimes I will give you background information and historical contexts; other times I suggest strategies for proactive (rather than passive) reading; still other times I will have specific assignments and required conference preparations relative to the readings.
Additional supplementary resources
A highly respected source of academic books, Brill has kindly made available a new online dictionary of authors and titles from early and medieval China. Please bookmark the following website:
http://chinesereferenceshelf.brillonline.com/ancient-literature
Each entry is no more than a page or two, but it will give you an accurate background for many of the authors and texts we will read.
And don’t forget to use your teacher as a resource. If you find particular materials of interest, I might be able to assist you in learning more about them. For many years, early imperial China has been the focus of all my research, and so if you have special interests that might benefit from a Han dimension, please let me know.
IV. Requirements
1.
Shorter
informal writing activities including at least four exploratories (1
page, single-spaced). In many weeks,
you will be asked to contribute an original exploration relevant to the
materials we are handling. In normal years, I wouldn’t set a question, leaving
it open for you to address the reading as you see fit, and in normal years, I’d
require them the night before so I could read them all and orchestrate the
conference with them in mind. “In normal years….” It’s not a normal year, and
we are nearly fifty in number for this course alone. Hence I’ve set particular
questions in the syllabus and won’t require the exploratories
until immediately before conference (embedded, not attached, in an email). In
conference, I’ll pose the general question – sufficiently “general” so as to
give you lots of freedom in thinking about it – and I hope the discussion will
evolve naturally as everyone will come prepared to answer that question. The
first one or two may seem daunting, but your predecessors have told me that
they got a lot out of the process, including much freedom for exploring
particular issues that interested them. Appended to this syllabus are
suggestions as to constructing an exploratory.
2.
Longer
formal papers including three short papers
(4-6 pages). Each annotated formal
paper will derive from a focal text, namely the biography of Wang Mang, the commentaries to the Daode jing and the Vimalakirti sutra. Closer to the time of each paper, I may pose a general
question, but if you find a particular issue in the text of interest, you can
pursue it if you clear it with me in advance. Please note the paper due dates
are all listed on the syllabus, namely 6 Mar for the Wang Mang
paper, 12 Apr for the paper on Daode jing commentaries and 7 May (alternatively 13 May if
you don’t seek comments) for the Vimalakirti sutra
paper. When submitting your paper, please use .doc/.docx (if possible) because I
can then use the MSWord “Review/Track changes” function for comments and can
also use the “Read aloud” function to keep me focused.
3.
Active and informed conference
participation. Please note that active
participation every day is intrinsic to this course, and please be fully
prepared for each conference, preparation consisting of both reading and
thinking about the materials. Your full preparation really helps me out a lot
in this year of online teaching and makes conference much more pleasant all
around. (I’ve noticed that “participation” really takes a hit in online
teaching, any silences deafening. I guess it’s because we don’t really talk to
our TVs, and it’s easier to think of Zoom screens as akin to TVs. DON’T!) Keep
in mind that it’s “participation” that leaves the biggest impression in your
teacher’s head because your participation – not your papers, not your group
projects, etc. – is what’s helping your teacher run the course. Appended
to this syllabus are some suggestions on conference dynamics, and if conference
isn’t going well, please talk to me. We will endeavor to remedy the situation
with concrete changes. At the very least, I recommend every day homing
in on a particular passage that “speaks” to you, that gives you insights and
leads us to good group discussions. I much value close reading, and I love it
when we jump from passage to passage, developing a conference theme that draws
on the textual and material evidence at hand. That’s an easy, simple way to
have something to contribute to conference.
4.
The Yu, Tang and Wen courts. To prevent me from
monopolizing the discussion – I’m the gregarious sort as this syllabus has
already demonstrated – I’ve intentionally punctuated the syllabus with days
when the conference is left entirely in your hands. As you will see below,
February is devoted to Confucianism, March to Daoism and April to Buddhism, and
at the end of each month, there’s an early text requiring a week’s worth of
close reading. You and four or five of your colleagues will thereby form a
court and actually lead the conference on those days, giving us questions in
advance to ponder and then discuss, leading us in pedagogical activities and
getting us to fully appreciate the text at hand. We’ll divvy up the groups in
the first week – Yu, Tang and Wen were the founders of the three
pre-imperial dynasties of Xia, Shang and Zhou – and in sum, your group will be leading a conference three
times this semester. You’ll want to get together with your court outside of
conference to brainstorm pedagogical strategies.
5.
Final group project. Because
the pandemic hampers in-person gatherings, there is no group project this year.
V.
Incompletes, absences, accommodations, extensions – the draconian stuff so
PLEASE READ
As the great early Chinese legalist Han Feizi
warned, indulgent parents have rowdy kids, and overly lenient rulers have
inefficient subjects. By extension, a permissive teacher can’t maximize a
student’s learning potential. By laying down the law now, we’ll also never need
to raise it again in the future, and I can pretend to be a kindly Confucian
rather than a draconian legalist.
“An
Incomplete [IN] is permitted in a course where the level of work done up to the
point of the [IN] is passing, but not all the work of a course has been
completed by the time of grade submission, for reasons of health or extreme
emergency, and for no other reason,” according to the Reed College Faculty Code
(V A). “The decision whether or not to grant an IN in a course is within the
purview of the faculty for that course.” Like many of my colleagues, I read
this as restricting incompletes to acute (not chronic), extreme emergencies and
health crises that have a clear beginning date and a relatively short duration
only, that are outside the control of the student, and that interrupt the work
of a student who was previously making good progress in a course. Needless to say, we’ll be a bit more tolerant during the
pandemic pause, but incompletes still aren’t automatic and must be justified.
Now more than ever, we all need things we can depend on, and in teaching, we
can benefit by maintaining our expectations regarding the timeliness and
quality of our work. You must stay in communication with me if there’s a
problem in participation, papers or presentations.
Regular,
prepared, and disciplined conferencing is intrinsic to this course, and so at a
certain point when too many conferences have been missed – specifically eight
which translates into a “fail” for the course – it would logically be advisable
to drop or withdraw.[4] There’s no shame in that. Longer-term
emergencies indeed happen, and you ought to make use of Student Services when they
do. In sum, I’ll help you out as much as I can to get you across the finish
line, but as already noted, it’s the same finish line for everyone and to be
fair to your colleagues I need to have you there in the race. To that end, I would ask that you please email me
whenever you are absent just to let me know you’re okay. (More and more
students seem to be doing this without prompting anyway, perhaps because we’ve
all become increasingly dependent upon virtual connectivity.)
I’m
happy to give paper extensions for medical problems and emergencies, and you
should take advantage of the Health and Counseling Center in such
circumstances. I’m well aware that, during the pandemic pause, we’ll need to be
more flexible, and as already noted, we can try to find accommodations to make
up for gaps that might occur. But out of fairness to everyone, “not doing the
work” can’t be one of those accommodations. Please note that here, too, the
honor principle provides a standard for expectations and behavior, meaning that
none of us (including myself) should resort to medical reasons when other
things are actually impeding our work. (Please just be honest. It’s as simple
as that.) In non-medical situations, late papers will still be considered
(except for the 13 May deadline), but the lateness will be taken into account
and no comments given. Ken’s Subjectivity Curve: The later it is, the more
subjective Ken becomes. It's a gamble. I’m not a legalist like Han Feizi, but even the Confucians resorted to hard law when
ritualized conduct and exemplary leadership failed.
|
|
Karmic retribution for poor participation in conference…. (from Ken’s hellscrolls.org) |
(Full citations are in the bibliography at the end.)
|
25 Jan |
The self aligns with the pattern? Disappears into its circumstances?
Is the universe…? Course introduction |
|
|
27 Jan |
Our historical skeleton for early imperial China |
· Hansen, Valerie. “The creation of empire” and “China’s religious landscape.” (Moodle.) |
Part I: The
Confucian self aligns with the universal pattern
|
29 Jan |
Xunzi 1: The nature of self |
· “An introduction to Buddhism, selfhood and dolls” (part one only) (Moodle.) · Chap 23: “Human nature is bad.” · Chap 22: “Correct naming.” · Chap 21: “Undoing fixation.” · Chap 10: “Enriching the state.” · Chap 4: “On honor and disgrace.” (Book.) |
|
1 Feb |
Xunzi 2: The nature of the universal pattern |
· “The great learning,” The four books, 3-8. · Chap 3: “Nothing improper.” · Chap 9: “The rule of a true king.” · Chap 12: “The way to be a lord.” · Chap 13: “The way to be a minister.” · Chap 17: “Discourse on heaven.” (Books.) |
|
3 Feb |
Xunzi 3: How the self aligns with that pattern |
· “Han ritual: The grand dance” (audio) (Moodle.) · Chap 1: “An exhortation on learning.” · Chap 2: ‘Cultivating oneself.” · Chap 14: “On attracting men of worth.” · Chap 19: “Discourse on ritual.” · Chap 20: “Discourse on music.” (Book.) |
|
5 Feb |
Xunzi 4: A history of aligning with the pattern |
· Chap 5: “Against physiognomy.” · Chap 6: “Against the twelve masters.” · Chap 8: “The achievements of the ru.” · Chap 16: “The strong state.” · Chap 18: “Correct judgments.” (Book.) · “Xunzi’s options for the self-to-pattern relationship” (audio) (Moodle.) |
|
8 Feb |
Confucius |
· “The Analects,” The four books, xiii-xxx, 11-49. (Book.) Exploratory 1: How would Confucius have you align with a universal pattern? |
|
10 Feb |
Mencius |
· “The Mencius,” The four books, 53-103. (Book.) |
|
12 Feb |
The spatial pattern: Aligning with the heavens |
·
Henderson, “Correlative thought in early
China,” 1-25. ·
Queen and Major, “Yin-yang principles,”
in Luxuriant gems of the Spring and
autumn,
371-440. · “Early Chinese cosmology and the search for a theory of everything” (three-part video). (Moodle.) |
|
15 Feb |
The temporal pattern: Aligning with the seasons |
·
Liu
An, “Seasonal rules,” 182-200. ·
Rickett,
“Qing Zhong ji,” 509-516. · Hsu Cho-yun, Selections from “The farmer’s livelihood,” 215-228. · Unschuld and Tessenow, Huang di nei jing su wen, 105-111. (Moodle.) |
|
17 Feb |
Wang Mang aligns 1 |
· Pan Ku (Ban Gu), “The memoir of Wang Mang, part A,” 125-259. (Moodle.) Conference led by the Yu Court |
|
19 Feb |
Wang Mang aligns 2 |
· Pan Ku (Ban Gu), “The memoir of Wang Mang, part B,” 260-366. (Moodle.) Conference led by the Tang Court |
|
22 Feb |
Wang Mang aligns 3 |
· Pan Ku (Ban Gu), “The memoir of Wang Mang, part C,” 367-474. (Moodle.) Conference led by the Wen Court |
|
24 Feb |
“Moving house” from life to death 1 |
· Guo, The mingqi pottery buildings of Han dynasty China, 1-33. · Mingqi image database. · “A spectrum of interpretations on afterlife existence” (audio). (Moodle.) |
|
26 Feb |
“Moving house” from life to death 2 |
· “Different audiences, different agendas: Why context matters when thinking about mingqi in early China” (three-part video). · Portland Art Museum image database. (Moodle.) Exploratory 2: What new research question or insight can you develop through comparing grave goods? |
Part II: The Daoist self
merges with the immanently circumstantial
|
1 Mar |
The unaligned: Chuci 1 |
· Sukhu, “Introduction,” xi-xliv. (Moodle.) · Hawkes, Songs of the South, 67-95 (“Lisao”). (Book.) |
|
3 Mar |
The unaligned: Chuci 2 |
· Hawkes, Songs of the South, 95-191. (Book.) |
|
5 Mar |
The unaligned: Chuci 3 |
· Hawkes, Songs of the South, 191-238. (Book.) |
|
|
First paper due 6 Mar @ 11.59 p.m. |
|
|
8 Mar |
Laozi (a.k.a. the Daode jing) |
· Lynn, The Classic of the Way and Virtue (main text only, not the commentary). (Book.) * * * · “Laozi’s argument, where it came from, and where it’s going” (three-part video). (Moodle – please access only after conference.) · “From Laozi to Zhuangzi: The circumstanced self” (audio). (Moodle – please access only after conference.) |
|
10 Mar |
No conference. |
|
|
12 Mar |
No conference. |
|
|
15 Mar |
Liezi and immediate circumstance 1 |
· Graham, Liezi, 1-91. (Book.) |
|
17 Mar |
Liezi and immediate circumstance 2 |
· Graham, Liezi, 92-181. (Book.) Exploratory 3: “Resolved: Liezi (et al) is right in that we are circumstanced beings, not pattern-aligned beings.” |
|
19 Mar |
Reifying the Dao 1: Xi Kang and the Daoist body |
· Hsi K’ang (Xi Kang) & Henricks, Philosophy and argumentation in third-century China: The essays of Hsi K’ang, 3-70. (Moodle.) |
|
22 Mar |
Reifying the Dao 2: The Dao’s churchification |
· Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures, 1-28 (“General introduction”), 149-185 (“Commands and admonitions for the families of the Great Dao”). (Moodle.) |
|
24 Mar |
The Daode jing 1: A religious Daoist interpretation |
· Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures, 29-148 (“The Xiang’er commentary to the Laozi”). (Moodle.) Conference led by the Wen Court |
|
26 Mar |
The Daode jing 2: A Confucian interpretation |
·
Lynn,
The Classic of the Way and Virtue. (Book.) Conference led by the Yu Court |
|
29 Mar |
The Daode jing 3: A philosophical Daoist interpretation |
· Erkes, Ho-shang-kung’s commentary on Lao-tse. (Moodle.) Conference led by the Tang Court |
Part III: The
Buddhist self is the universe
|
31 Mar |
The Buddha jewel |
· Lopez, The story of Buddhism, chaps. 1 & 2. (Book.) · “An introduction to Buddhism, selfhood and dolls” (three-part video). (Moodle.) |
|
2 Apr |
The Dharma jewel |
· Lopez, The story of Buddhism, chaps. 3 & 6. (Book.) |
|
5 Apr |
The Sangha jewel |
· Lopez, The story of Buddhism, chaps. 4 & 5. (Book.) Exploratory 4: Based on Lopez, what question needs to be addressed (before we move on to the primary sources)? |
|
7 Apr |
The Buddha’s life story: Act 1 |
· Buddhacarita: In praise of Buddha’s acts, chaps. 1-9. (Book download.) |
|
9 Apr |
The Buddha’s life story: Act 2 |
· Buddhacarita: In praise of Buddha’s acts, chaps. 10-18. (Book download.) |
|
|
Second paper due 12 Apr @ 11.59 p.m. |
|
|
19 Apr |
The Buddha’s life story: Act 3 |
· Buddhacarita: In praise of Buddha’s acts, chaps. 19-28. (Book download.) |
|
21 Apr |
Some Chinese Buddhists’ lives stories |
· Campany, Robert Ford. Signs from the unseen realm, 63-124, 145-154. (Moodle.) |
|
23 Apr |
The approaching thunderous silence 1 |
· Watson, The Vimalakirti Sutra, 1-63. (Book.) Conference led by the Tang Court |
|
26 Apr |
The approaching thunderous silence 2 |
· Watson, The Vimalakirti Sutra, 64-103. (Book.) ·
Yu Chunfang, Chinese Buddhism, 46-59. (Moodle.) Conference led by the Wen Court |
|
28 Apr |
The approaching thunderous silence 3 |
· Watson, The Vimalakirti Sutra, 104-146. (Book.) · Vimalakirti image database. (Moodle.) Conference led by the Yu Court |
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30 Apr |
The thunderous silence arrives…. |
|
|
7 May |
Final paper due @ 5 p.m. (for comments). |
|
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13 May |
Final paper due @ 5 p.m. (without comments). No work accepted after 5 p.m. |
|
A winged and
feathered bronze immortal
from the Han
Dynasty excavated near Xian
VII. Consciousness of conference technique
Much
of our educational system seems designed to discourage any attempt at finding
things out for oneself, but makes learning things others have found out, or
think they have, the major goal. – Anne Roe (American clinical psychologist),
1953.
At times it is useful to step back and discuss conference dynamics, to lay bare the bones of conference communication. Why? Because some Reed conferences succeed; others do not. After each conference, I ask myself how it went and why it progressed in that fashion. If just one conference goes badly or only so-so, a small storm cloud forms over my head for the rest of the day. Many students with whom I have discussed conference strategies tell me that most Reed conferences don't achieve that sensation of educational nirvana, that usually students do not leave the room punching the air in intellectual excitement. I agree. A conference is a much riskier educational tool than a lecture, and this tool requires a sharpness of materials, of the conferees and of the conference leader. It can fail if there is a dullness in any of the three. Yet whereas lectures merely impart information (with a “sage on the stage”), conferences train us how to think about and interact with that information (with a “guide on the side”). So when it does work....
The content of what you say in conference obviously counts most of all, and so how do you determine in advance whether you’ve got something worthwhile to say? First, read proactively rather than passively – the reading maps are intended to encourage the former – and don’t just quickly read the assigned materials. Mark up the text as you go and then take a couple minutes to analyze it after you’re done reading and marking. But how do you analyze it? A colleague and friend at Harvard, Michael Puett, writes, “the goal of the analyst should be to reconstruct the debate within which such claims were made and to explicate why the claims were made and what their implications were at the time.” A religious or philosophical idea doesn’t get written down if everyone already buys it; it’s written down because it’s news. As new, we can speculate about what was old, about what stimulated this reaction. Think of these texts as arguments and not descriptions, and as arguments, your job is to play the detective, looking for contextual clues and speculating on implications. I will give you plenty of historical background, and if you look at these texts as arguments, you will get a truer picture.
In addition to content, there are certain conference dynamics that can serve as a catalyst to fully developed content. I look for the following five features when evaluating a conference:
1. Divide the allotted time by the number of conference participants. That resulting time should equal the leader's ideal speaking limits. I know I talk too much in conference, but when I say this to some students, they sometimes tell me that instructors should feel free to talk more because the students are here to acquire that expertise in the field. So the amount one speaks is always a judgment call, but regardless, verbal monopolies never work. I honestly feel bad after a “crickets” conference – when after soliciting everyone’s input I only hear crickets – and while I might be able to regale everyone with lots of data and insights, it’s not the “conferring” of conferencing.
2. Watch the non-verbal dynamism. Are the students leaning forward, engaging in eye contact and gesturing to drive home a point such that understanding is in fact taking on a physical dimension? Or are they silently sitting back in their chairs staring at anything other than another human being? As a conference leader or participant, it's a physical message you should always keep in mind. Leaning forward and engaging eye contact is not mere appearance; it indeed helps to keep one focused if tired. In online teaching, the cues are harder to discern but still present. Usually it’s the absence of cues – the always-off-camera “participant,” the on-camera sleeping participant, the on-camera participant who clearly fails to react to something when everyone else did. (All these happened last semester.)
3. Determine whether the discourse is being directed through one person (usually the conference leader) or is non-point specific. If you diagram the flow of discussion and it looks like a wagon wheel with the conference leader in the middle, the conference hasn’t worked well. If you diagram the flow and it looks like a jumbled, all-inclusive net, the conference is more likely to have succeeded.
4. Determine whether a new idea has been achieved. By the end of the conference, was an idea created that was new to everyone, including the conference leader? Did several people contribute a Lego to build a new thought that the conferees would not have been able to construct on their own? This evaluation is trickier because sometimes a conference may not have gone well on first glance but a new idea indeed evolved nonetheless. The leader must be sure to highlight that evolution at conference end.
5. Watch for simple politeness. “Politeness” means giving each other an opportunity to speak, rescuing a colleague hanging out on a limb, asking useful questions as well as complimenting a new idea, a well-said phrase, a funny joke. (Politeness is not allowing an endless silence with no one jumping in, the crickets quietly chirping away. Total silence tells me I totally screwed up in guiding that part of the discussion.)
If you ever feel
a conference only went so-so, then instead of simply moving on to the next one,
I would urge you, too, to evaluate the conference using
your own criteria and figuring out how you (and I) can make the next one a more
meaningful experience. As noted, preparation
is not just reading the assigned pages; it’s reading
and then thinking through something in that reading, developing a thought and
getting it ready to communicate to someone else. (As you know, I’ve voluntarily sectioned this
course precisely because I want to maximize your opportunity to participate. There’s a downside to that for you as well: every day I’ll
inevitably be comparing your conference against the other two, and so
please don’t let me use the labels “crickety,” “crickety-er” or “crickety-ist”!)
At the very least, habituate yourself to having a passage you’d like us to discuss or a relevant question you think might foster a meaningful meeting of minds. In the end, as long as you are prepared and feel passionate about your work, you should do well, and if passion ever fails, grim determination counts for something.
VIII. The exploratory
Sometimes conferences sing. Yet just when I would like them to sing glorious opera, they might merely hum a bit of country-western. After my first year of teaching at Reed, I reflected upon my conference performance and toyed with various ideas as to how to induce more of the ecstatic arias and lively crescendos (and have everyone join in the chorus), and I came up with something I call an “exploratory.”
Simply put, an exploratory is a one-page, single-spaced piece in which you highlight one thought-provoking issue that caught your attention in the materials we are considering. This brief analysis must show thorough reading and must show your own thoughtful extension –
· Your own informed, constructive criticism of the author (and not just a bash-and-trash rant);
· Your own developed, thoughtful question (perhaps even inspired by readings from other classes) that raises interesting issues when seen in the light of the author's text;
· Your own application of theory and method to the primary source;
· Your own personal conjecture as to how this data can be made useful; or (best of all)
· Your own autonomous problem that you devised using the same data under discussion.
I am not here looking for polished prose or copious (or any) footnotes – save all that for our formal papers. These are lower-stakes writing assignments intended to foster conference quality rather than to be submitted to the Pulitzer commission. (I don’t even return exploratories with comments unless a special request is made.) In medicine, an exploratory is not full, open-heart surgery performed on the text. Instead, exploratories tend to be somewhat informal but focused probes on one particular aspect in which you yourself can interact with the text and can enter into the conversation. While I’m actually setting a question for each exploratory this semester, it’s still sufficiently broad so as to entertain lots of ways of approaching it. You still need to make a point.
What is not an exploratory? It is not merely a topic supported by evidence from the book, nor is it a descriptive piece on someone else's ideas, nor is it a general book report in which you can wander to-and-fro without direction. Bringing in outside materials is allowed, but the exploratory is not a forum for ideas outside that day's expressed focus. (Such pieces cannot be used in our conference discussions.) Also, don’t give into the temptation of just reading the first few pages of a text and then writing your exploratory. (If you were the teacher, what would you conclude if you received a lot of exploratories that all coincidentally tackled an issue that came up within the first five or six pages of the reading?) It is instead a problematique, an issue with attitude.
The
best advice that I can give here is simply to encourage you to consider why I am requesting these exploratories from you: I want to see what ignites your
interest in the text so I can set the
conference agenda based on your interests. In the past, I’d require them the evening
before so I could read them all, and they were to be on any topic relevant to
the reading. In this pandemic year and with roughly fifty students in three
sections, that’s not possible, which is why I’ve set a
general question to address in each case. As I can’t
physically read fifty exploratories in one night, I
won’t require them the evening before, although they must be sent to me
(embedded in an email, not as an attachment) before conference begins. Thus you get the advantage of more time to write them. The
disadvantage is, I’ll be relying upon you to make your
point without prompting during the conference discussion itself. (That should
be easy as you’ll all be addressing the same general
question but no doubt from different perspectives and using different
evidence.)
Late exploratories are of no use. (Being handed a late exploratory is like being handed your salad after you've eaten dessert and are already leaving the restaurant.) I will use your contributions to draw you in, parry your perspective against that of another, and build up the discussion based on your views. Exploratories help me turn the conference to perspectives that directly interest you. They often lead us off on important tangents, and they often return us to the core of the problem under discussion. So if you are struggling with finding “something to say,” simply recall why I ask for these exploratories in the first place. Is there something in the text you think worthy of conference time? Do you have an idea you want to take this opportunity to explore? Can you interpret the posed question in interesting ways? Here is your chance to draw our attention to something in the text the rest of us might not have noticed. Your perspectives are important, and if you have them crystallized on paper in advance, they will be easier to articulate in conference.
Since I began using exploratories, most students have responded very favorably. Students like the fact that it is a different form of writing, a bit more informal and more frequent, somewhat akin to thinking aloud. It forces one not just to read a text but to be looking for something in that text, to engage that text actively. And it increases the likelihood that everyone will leave the conference singing Puccini.
Worshipping a tomb mound (Eastern Han stone
relief)
IX. Course
bibliography
(Note that Chinese surnames always come first.)
· Bokenkamp, Stephen R. Early Daoist scriptures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 1-28 (“General introduction”).
· Bokenkamp, Stephen R. Early Daoist scriptures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 149-185 (“Commands and admonitions for the families of the Great Dao”).
· Bokenkamp, Stephen R. Early Daoist scriptures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 29-148 (“The Xiang’er commentary to the Laozi”).
· Brashier, K.E. Ancestral memory in early China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011), 184-228.
· Brashier, K.E. Public memory in early China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2014), 263-316.
· Campany, Robert Ford. Signs from the unseen realm: Buddhist miracle tales from early medieval China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2012), 63-124, 145-154.
· Erkes, Eduard. Ho-shang-kung’s commentary on Lao-tse. (Ascona, Switzerland: Artibus Asiae, 1958), 8-135.
· Gardner, Daniel K. The four books: The basic teachings of the later Confucian tradition (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007).
· Graham, A.C. The book of Lieh-tzu: A classic of Tao (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
· Guo, Qinghua. The mingqi pottery buildings of Han dynasty China (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2010), 1-33.
· Hansen, Valerie. The open empire: A history of China to 1800, 2nd edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 2015), 91-171.
·
Hawkes, David. The Songs of the South: An Anthology of
Ancient Chinese Poems by Qu Yuan and Other Poets (London: Penguin, 2011).
· Henderson, John B. “Correlative thought in early China,” The development and decline of Chinese cosmology (Taipei: Windstone Press, 2011), 1-25.
· Henricks, Robert G. Philosophy and argumentation in third-century China: The essays of Hsi K’ang (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 3-70.
· Hsu, Cho-yun. Han agriculture: The formation of early Chinese agrarian economy (206 B.C. – A.D. 220) (in the series Han Dynasty China, Vol. II) (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1980), 215-228.
·
Hutton,
Eric L. Xunzi: The complete text (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2013).
· Liu, An. The Huainanzi: A guide to the theory and practice of government in early Han China, John S. Major, Sarah A. Queen, Andrew Seth Meyer and Harold D. Roth, trans. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 182-200.
·
Lopez,
Donald. The story of Buddhism. San
Francisco: Harper, 2002.
·
Lynn,
Richard John. The Classic of the Way and Virtue: A new translation of the Tao-te ching of Laozi as interpreted
by Wang Bi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
· Pan, Ku (Ban Gu). History of the Former Han Dynasty, vol. III, Homer H. Dubs, trans. (Baltimore: Waverly Press, 1955), 125-259.
· Pan, Ku (Ban Gu). History of the Former Han Dynasty, vol. III, Homer H. Dubs, trans. (Baltimore: Waverly Press, 1955), 260-366.
· Pan, Ku (Ban Gu). History of the Former Han Dynasty, vol. III, Homer H. Dubs, trans. (Baltimore: Waverly Press, 1955), 367-474.
· Paul Unschuld and Hermann Tessenow, Huang di nei jing su wen: An annotated translation of Huang Di’s Inner Classic – Basic Questions vol. 1 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011), 105-111 (portion of “Chapter 5: Comprehensive discourse on phenomena corresponding to yin and yang”).
· Queen, Sarah A. and John S. Major, “Yin-yang principles,” in Luxuriant gems of the Spring and autumn (New York: Columbia University press, 2016), 371-440.
· Rickett, W. Allyn. Guanzi: Political, economic, and philosophical essays from early China, vol. II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 509-516.
· Sukhu, Gopal, “Introduction,” in The songs of Chu: An anthology of ancient Chinese poetry by Qu Yuan and others (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), xi-xliv.
·
Watson,
Burton. The Vimalakirti
Sutra (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
· Willemen, Charles (trans.). Buddhacarita: In praise of Buddha’s acts (Berkeley, CA: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 2009).
· Yu Chunfang, Chinese Buddhism: A thematic history (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2020), 46-59.
The
bodhisattva Manjusri visits Vimalakirti
(Sui Dynasty, Dunhuang)