Were translations, summaries, an interpreter, anything provided for me? Nooo.But that doesn't mean I didn't have fun. Since the topic of the symposium was the utility of concepts from the theory of religion for the study of Chinese religion, there were many names and words I recognized (though rather more from Protestant theology than I expected). But I've no idea, really, what people were on about. Like a detective who's deaf to all but loanwords, I came up with some pretty out-there hypotheses about what people's papers were about. (Try it yourself: tell a story that can absorb - in this order: absolutes Nichts ... F: formless self; A: all mankind; S: suprahistorical ... dimension ... medium ... absolute Vermittlung ... phänomenologische Bedeutung ... Karl Barth ... metanoesis ... abstract equation ... samvrthu-satya ... paramartha-satya ... repentance ... priority ... superiority ... Ding an sich.)
With that caveat, let me say that I think it was a very interesting symposium! Some things I learned were that religious studies in the US is miles ahead of other places, and that the question "is Confucianism a religion?" still matters, though I didn't get just why. A few people seemed to like my suggestion that Chinese religion provided a good place for inquiring about the relationship of philosophy and ritual in religion,
especially in pursuing the problem of good. More might by the time the paper gets translated into Chinese (!) for the publication.The wonderful calligraphy at right (the character is 幽) has nothing to do with the conference. Except that it's by a Buddhist autodidact in mainland China named Yi-Liao to whose work I was introduced this morning by the American friend who got me invited here. It's exciting stuff, often ravishingly beautiful: conceptual art coming out of calligraphy traditions and leavened by Ch'an/Zen ideas about temporality and words. There's much more. (It's a big file but worth it; the characters are printed below each picture.)
