Another marine layer-clouded afternoon at Torrey Pines, this time the beach. Several cliff falls on the better-known more colorful north part- the biggest the pink rock tumble above. Beyond Flat/Bathtub Rock a more monochrome scenery but not without its own beauty.
My 语伴 turns out to be one of forty-seven professors from China at UCSD for a half-year program in bilingual education. Originally from Inner Mongolia and trained in law in Chongqing and Guangzhou, he now teaches medical and bioethics in Guizhou, but his real love seems to be 哲学 zhexue, philosophy! Now I know the words for definition (定义 dingyi) and concept (概念 gainian) and even what the Frankfurt School is called in China: 法兰克福学派 falankefu xuepai. I hadn't considered that every name gets sinicized, including the names of philosophers. Like Locke, for instance (who came up in my unsuccessful attempt to explain why many American scholars think the modern category of "religion" problematic): 洛克, pron. luoke.
Finished two big books today - in fact, three. (The third is Evan Osnos' The Age of Ambition, which I read on kindle.) But this soundsmore impressive than it is, since I started these books a month ago!
a place which, perhaps surprisingly, is essentially new to me. (This is a different California from Southern!) K, P, J, S, S, D, A - I'll be back!
though for redwoods you need to return to the North American one.
Their exhibition starts with Buddhist South Asia - Gandhara, not Mohenjo Daro - and manages to present Hinduism as a sort of background phenomenon. Southeast Asia follows (after a single room on Persia, taking the place of all Muslim Asia), then Tibet. The China collection starts long before the arrival of Buddhism with splendid Shang bronzes, but has plenty of 
Buddhist statuary (including my fave, the Northern Wei); Daoist and popular religion are mentioned, Confucianism barely. Korea and finally Japan are beads strung on the Buddhist thread, too (Buddhism thriving again in Korea after Confucian repression). I'm not saying there's a better way to provide coherence to a museum of "Asia" than this, just noticing how effortlessly Asia's "world religion" lends itself to this quixotic task. I'm remembering the ringing words of my Singaporean friend L when a famous professor of liberation theology recommended Asian theology to him. "Professor Cone," L tells me he said, "Asia as such does not exist!"
I must be on vacation as I saw two tongue-in-cheek series-starting superhero blockbusters today: Marvel's "Guardians of the Galaxy" (in a cinema, in 3-D no less) and Stephen Chow's "Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons 西遊,降魔篇" (on a computer, and for the second time). I don't know for this sort of movie, but these were lots of fun to watch. Much of the time I knew that some convention of the genre was being cleverly mocked, but not what that convention was. But these films also make fun of themselves, and that I got. Also, I think, how the self-mockery allowed the story to affirm some values it started out treating as laughable - though I'm not sure if this wasn't the way they ultimately pay their dues to their genre. "GOTG" discovers the possibility of friendship and self-sacrifice, a familiar enough storyline to me; it's pretty conventional, too, that one of the characters already had a pure heart to start with though nobody noticed, the literally wooden Groot. "JTTW" redeems platitudes about humans' essential goodness, which start the film as children's fairy tales. But when the hapless hero's 
"300 Nursery Rhymes" gets torn up by a hot demon huntress enraged by his refusal to requite her love and then patched back together (though she's illiterate) it becomes a sutra and his enlightenment achieved. "We were all born pure, like children"! I'm already overthinking these confections, so let me stop here!
Berkeley is a very pretty place - everything seems not only to grow here but to be in bloom! - and turns out to be good place for hiking its steep hills, too. Roads wind along them, but the secret are the Berkeley Paths, older than most of the houses. With my North Berkeley hosts I spent a good three hours going up and up long narrow stairways between properties and then back down again - some quite beautiful. West-facing houses completely fill the rest of the roads so the only glimpses of the grand view across the bay were along the paths.
