Putuo

My new Shanghai digs are in the northwest district of 普陀 Putuo (the last was in 杨浦 Yangpu, close to the border to 宝山 Baoshan, in the northeast). A publication of the district office (above) apprised us of the existence of a Yuan-Dynasty Buddhist temple not far from my friend's

place named 真如寺 Zhenru, so we headed off to have a look. Neighborhoods around have been entirely replaced by housing complexes and the nearest landmark is a vast fish market but Zhenru is alive and well. It boasts a 650-year old hall (along with an equally ancient ginkgo tree which has recently produced new branches.

Everything else is, predictably, new - like the ten-storey pagoda, erected in 1999, and the stacked Avalokitesvara and blubbery Maitreya (above right and left). But what a pleasure to visit a functioning Buddhist temple in a less famous part of Shanghai, and how impressive to see the long rosters of supporters. 

Virtually uncharted

My friend X's place, my base for the rest of my Shanghai sojourn, is new enough that it's off the map. Well, sort of. Baidu (below), the Chinese Google-substitute, has an up-to-date satellite picture: I've marked our building (number 8) with a red circle. But Baidu has circled where it thinks #99 should be at upper right - because it hasn't registered that the road was extended to the south, with new numbering in the opposite direction! Meanwhile Bing (above, like Google maps) has the street address but hasn't yet recognized there are buildings there...

Good bye, 文化花园！

My generous host, who has let me use her apartment lo these many months, has returned to Shanghai. I'm shifting my center of gravity westward to a newly developed area on the recently opened metro line 13, where I'll be living with my friend X. A new adventure! I'm quite looking forward to scoping out this new neighborhood, testing - consciously and unconsciously - what I think I've learned about how a Chinese city works; X has a bike at the ready for me to use! Though the rental complex near Qilianshannanlu 祁连山南路 is less posh than the slightly faded charm of where I've been saying near Jiangwanzhen 江湾镇, you might even say I'm moving up in the world: after 8 months on a 5th, my final 6 weeks will be on the 10th! I'll still be heading to the Fudan area most days - I suppose it marks me as a Shanghaier that the hour's commute (with two changes) doesn't faze me at all, or is that just New York shining through? (Btw, bought my tic: return to NYC July 1.)

Crabby

I've reached my target - finished volume 4 of New Practical Chinese! How disappointing that its final chapter has such dorky readings. One is about the Chinese space program, another about text messages (from the days when sending 30 a month was a lot). But the kicker is this, 公蟹，母蟹和鸡爪: He-crabs, she-crabs and chicken feet. It proceeds from contrasting Chinese and American crab preferences - Americans apparently prefer the male, where Chinese prefer the female - to a rhapsody on win-win international comity, by way of Americans' selling male and female crabs at different prices and exporting chicken feet to a grateful China. 美国人赚了钱很高兴；中国人吃到便宜的鸡爪，也很该醒。既然是大家都高兴的事儿，为什么不多做呢？Americans are happy to make money, Chinese are happy to be able to eat chicken feet cheaply; since everyone's so happy why not have more of this kind of thing? 

Is that the best they can do? And what's with the picture of a dove of peace／friendship／development 和平／友好／发展 with faces looking more or less Arab, Indian, European and African? Where's the Chinese? For that matter, where are the dove's feet?!

Upcoming lectures

My time in China is winding down - six more weeks or so? (I've still not bought my ticket home, procrastinating!) But I have three more gigs, at least. Most exciting: On June 11th I'll be lecturing in Yang Huilin's class at Renmin in Beijing (this is a picture someone sent me of his announcing it to his students). Grandest sounding is this one, in not quite a fortnight. The title wasn't my doing; I was told I could talk about whatever I wanted! (I think I'll build on what I talked about at HKU in December.) But the most fun talk, probably, will be this coming Monday, in a Fudan class on Eliade's Sacred and Profane. The students need to hear criticisms of Eliade, the instructor my friend R said, could you talk about that? Can I ever!

龙华古寺与烈士陵园

Took my American friends to 龙华 Longhua - to the Buddhist temple and the Communist Party Martyrs Cemetery and Memorial Museum. Since my friends happen to be a scholar of religion and a landscape architect interested in memorials, they were as happy, one told me, "as pigs in heaven.“

And yeti

Right at the start of my stay in China I happened on a used book market at the Confucius Temple in Shanghai. I've been kicking myself ever since for not picking up one of the Tintin volumes I found in a stack of illustrated booklets. The little booklets have been available in the several used bookstores I've since found, but never the Tintins. Until Luzhi, one of whose little stalls had what may have been a complete set - including the one I barely dared hope to find, Tintin in Tibet, translated here in 1984 as The mysterious 'snow man'. The original is appeared as a book in 1960, before the West had processed the Chinese invasion of Tibet. The story is about Tintin rescuing his Chinese friend Chang, who was in a plane which crashed in the Himalaya. Vital assistance is offered by yellow hat Tibetan monks. In case you haven't read it, I won't give away the story and tell you how the yeti figures in it. There's more than I could ever have imagined to this, Hergé's favorite of his Tintin volumes, as I learned (where else?) at Wikipedia, including Jungian analysis of Hergé's nightmares of white. But the Chinese, possibly pirated edition (it's clearly redrawn, and often poorly) isn't mentioned. And what to make of the fact that the covers of my two volumes are switched, and the paper inside a bright white - a fake of a fake, prepared precisely for the likes of me today?

Luzhi

Very pleasant weekend in an idyllic 1400-year-old water town (or canal town) between Shanghai and Suzhou called Luzhi 甪直. This whole region was long trafficked almost entirely by boat - you still see canals big and smal as you drive or train through - and it's nice to be reminded what life will have looked like then. Luzhi's not very touristic (yet, 

though it's trying to become so) and few people stay overnight. The more charming its canals and forty-one bridges after the tourist stalls were closed and children came out to play in the cobbled streets. I stayed with a friend in rooms on a courtyard (with a functioning well!) behind an old school converted into a museum dedicated to books and education (our courtyard is just out the window above) and it was enchanting, a voyage into the past! Today we bused to Suzhou to meet my visiting North American friends, and lost ourselves in the Master of the Nets' Garden. I've been to Suzhou only once before but was struck again by how different its energy is from Shanghai's...

画画儿

Black and pinto beans doing their magic en route to becoming chilli.

Where it all began

Some good friends from the US were in Shanghai for a super-short visit today (they'll be back very briefly next week). They're interested in religion, history and, especially, monuments and memory so I took them from their Hudek-designed hotel in the former French Concession past the HQ of the TSPM (Three Self Patriotic Movement) to the Bund, including the martrys' monument at its north end with its little museum. On then to Xintiandi, where we experienced the shock of going from the room where the Communist Party had its first meeting, in a museum of "relics," to the the high-end shopping and entertainment center, built of reclaimed shikumen bricks, which envelops them. It was my first time for both museums... the rest of Shanghai makes it hard not to gloss over the eventful 1930s-1980s - the Mao years. Next week we go to Longhua!

Fun house mirror

The Korean theologian visiting Fudan observed that Kant is placed above Confucius here, and he's right: where the bust of 孔子 greets people on the 24th floor, on 26 it's 康德.

Job in China

These last weeks have been quite Job-ful (the next too, details anon). After the undergraduate discussion came our faculty seminar, and then on Sunday a friend of mine presented his understanding of the Book of Job to a GLBT Christian group here. My friend's take, while making clever use (see below) of Socrates (苏格拉底 sugeladi!), came to the conventional conclusion that 我们需要学会：神能，在祂凡事都能，当我们信心动摇的时候，要把焦点重新放回到神的身上，留心看祂奇妙的创造，不要跟神争论 What we need to learn is: in God all things are possible, at times when our faith is shaken, we should put the focus back on God, behold his amazing creations, not argue with God.

When it came to choosing a passage for reading together he chose chapter 38, the start of the theophany. I was fresh from our seminar, which didn't touch on the divine speeches much at all - I'd emphasized that most of the book is taken up with the exchanges between Job and his friends, which, readers too quickly gloss over as insignificant. But the ensuing discussion didn't really engage the friends much, either. The force of the story of a man tested and then rewarded for his endurance (with or without explanation, depending how you read it) proved hard to resist. As I mentioned, it seemed that the Chinese church is more likely to see Job as representing a community enduring persecution rather than an individual suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

So, to protest or not to protest? A Chinese professor on Friday told of a Protestant church in Sichuan which appeals to Job in vindication of its own protest (against what she didn't say), as well as of a letter of encouragement from a cardinal to the Catholic bishop of Shanghai, who's been under house arrest for two years, citing (what do you know!) Job 38. A graduate student just returned from study in Germany said she was most taken by Job's "speaking from the bitterness of his soul" (23:1). But the Job in my friend's exposition on Sunday doesn't argue - except with his friends. As the summary of the story above says:

6. Then disaster suddenly befell Job, he lost his fortune and his children, and endured a serious skin disease. Three of his friends heard the news, they came to see him and an argument/debate 辩论 between them and Job ensued; then God in a whirlwind answered Job's questions, and humble Job and fell down before God and confessed his ignorance.

Would he say the friends made Job's ignorance clearer to him, or helped him articulate the questions God answers? I doubt it: his concern is pastoral, and the friends are just part of the set-up. It is from Job's encounter with God that we should learn. It's a little like something one of the Chinese Christian students who came Friday said, something which has stayed with me. Responding to the concern that Job's children are killed, and die without ever learning why, she said: Job is the main witness in the story, not the children. But this doesn't mean they are just props for Job's story. They might have their own book.

Pew

Meanwhile, back home...

Happening

In the Asian theology class (the first ever on this subject) at our Chinese University this morning, an amusing exchange about Karl Barth's mature thought, which is being related to the Neo-Confucian Yang Wang-Ming

FRENCH JESUIT

Can you tell the class why Barth's thought changed?

KOREAN PRESBYTERIAN

He was a good man!

made me feel a strange delight to be in on this strange conversation...

Haw haw haw

In my Mandarin text (I'm in the penultimate chapter, #49!) we're reading about Chinese medicine. One of the readings tells of a student (Korean) who is persuaded to see a traditional doctor when she gets a stomach upset. He heels her pulse, asks her a few questions, then tells her to pick up some 山楂 shanzha, Chinese hawthorn (or haw) at the market and eat some when she has a chance. She does this, and is soon on the mend, though she wonders that the doctor prescribed no medicine. Of course - you've guessed the punchline already - shanzha is medicine (someone told me early in my stay that I must understand that in China food is medicine), and happens to be just what the doctor ordered for digestion. So that's what that entire aisle of red things at the supermaket is about, where you can shanzha in rolls, disks, sheets, etc.

Suspended animation

At the East-West Art conference in Beijing last month, a young professor from Beijing University called for the use of new media to help Chinese culture throw its weight around culturally. (He he moved beyond the usual complaint that China's cultural influence doesn't measure up to its economic to give specific examples of the disproportionate reach of other East Asian cultures: Chinese men are "entrapped" by the bimbos of Japanese animation, while Chinese women are entrapped by the unnaturally romantic and loyal heroes of Korean television series!) As examples of ways to make Chinese culture compelling to young Chinese people, and presumably non-Chinese, too, he mentioned something in Shanghai I'd meant to go see - and today went to see (in the China Art Museum 中华艺术宫). It's the giant computer-animated presentation of what is sometimes described as China's most famous painting, a Song-dynasty scroll called "Along the River during the Qingming Festival."The original depicts about eight hundred people of all walks of life and in this giant animation, created for the Shanghai EXPO, almost as many walk the streets, work, play, talk... The Beida presenter's slide, which made it look like a giant aquarium, in fact shows (in distorted colors) a further animation: over a four-minute loop the entire scene switches from day to night. A little corny? I wasn't sure what to expect
but found I really liked what I saw, and more the more time I spent there. The nocturnal scene feels a bit like a video game and the whole thing has replaced a kind of poised energeticness for something more like the gentle flowing of a brook (there's a computer-animated stream between viewers and the screens) and four minutes is just long enough to suggest stories without actually letting them unfold: these streets aren't crowded, pulsing with life but sleepy, like a town in the off hours.But, especially after going back to look at the facsimile of the original scroll in the entry hall and then returning to the animated one to check up on details, it was just more and more fun. From the original it's clear that the boat struggling to get under the bridge in the scroll's center is not going to make it, and in the animated version the frantic efforts of sailors are similarly fruitless. On the other hand successes accumulate: camel trains arrive with pleasing regularity, making their way through the city gate before fading tantalizingly into the city as night falls.After watching it through many cycles my friend and I decided we like the opening rural scene best, a simple country house in front of which the animator had imagined three young children playing. (At night they were gone, presumably fast asleep.) So beguiling was this image that I imagined someone becoming so enchanted by this spectacle with its sweet rhythms that he fled the clamor of the contemporary world to live there. Is this, I wonder, what the Beida person wanted? Entrapped! It may not be so far from the effect of much classical Chinese art...

Dialogic spaces

The discussion around "The Book of Job in Dialogue: Chinese Perspectives" was great fun! In an engaging company of scholars and students from near and far, the four hours flew by. I opened things up with some general questions and Job specifics, then, after some refreshment, we worked through three discussions (with a break between second and third) on "The Book of Job," "Dialogue" and "China"; the last two discussions were initiated by others, with their own sets of questions. At the outset I'd said "I don't know where we will end up but that's why we're here" and was able to conclude "We have ended up in a fascinating place none of us could have predicted, which is why we are here."

What was that place? Job is, of course, endlessly fascinating. But what has it been/can it be in China? It seems, within the Chinese Christian churches, at least, to be seen as a guarantee of collective persistence rather than individual meaning (an interesting echo of the likely canonizing of the Book of Job during the Babylonian Exile, when Job's experience might have stood in for that of afflicted Israel). It had been suggested that Chinese people don't expect a meaning for suffering but accept it as "fortune," but another seminar participant wondered if no less than the figure of Confucius doesn't function as Job does in Chinese tradition, a virtuous man suffering unjustly. But does the Book of Job really speak about the meaning of suffering? Someone argued that the significance and horror of Job's story lies precisely in the fact that his suffering was meaningless, served no larger purpose (compared, say, to suffering servant, etc.).

The Korean visitor said he thought Job's story unappealing in East Asia because of Job's assumption that someone was responsible for his suffering, an assumption not shared in Dao-based traditions. Doesn't the Book of Job with its impressive interpretive tradition "romanticize the Judaeo-Christian tradition" when what's needed - and not just in East Asia - is something different? Not just in dialogue with Confucianism but in the face of structural evils and large-scale calamities like the Holocaust or the genocide of Native Americans, Christian theology needs to be willing to "set theism aside."

The phrase "romanticizing the Judaeo-Christian tradition" rang true to me as a description and critique of what I'd been doing in my opening remarks, commending the interpretations of Calvin, Aquinas and Maimonides for seeing Job as a kind of dialogue which fails but should never end. I'd made a circular motion with my hand defining a space for glimpses, for ineffable insights, for the  unarticulable depths of providence and individual experience, to be ensured by endless dialogue, but suddenly it seemed like a protective gesture, marking some things as off limits. Even if it often seems empty, a center is a center - meaning, and on a theistic model, surely!

But, again, is Job really about the redemption of everything by meaning? Job never (thank goodness) finds out that he was the object of a wager in heaven, and manages to live on without it. There's a way, I said, trying what it might mean to "set theism aside," in which the Book of Job suggests that theistic meaning and even an anthropomorphic God may not be needed after all to make human life worth living. We'd talked repeatedly about the fact that the divine speeches are all about nature (rather than the human world, or, for that matter, the divine). Might nature's way of being there without being responsible, of being indifferent without judging, not something whose spiritual significance the Book of Job highlights - a theistic text which points beyond theism?

Every discussion I have about Job is exciting, teaching me new things about Job as well as about the participants in the discussion.

The view Pudongward - the air cleared by rain - from the 25th-floor conference room of the School of Philosophy in the Guanghua Tower (West) where we had our symposium. How green it's become!

Xu-Ricci

 

Getting excited for tomorrow's seminar "The Book of Job and Dialogue."

Heuristic and protective

The Asian theology course is starting out fascinating - though I may well be enjoying the heavily methodological way it's begun more than the others in attendance. What we're getting is hard-won knowledge forged from the invaluable but frequently contrived and often frustrating experience of the (Western-based and -initiated) inter-religious dialogue, something understandably foreign to Chinese students!

Before the engagement of Yang Wang-Ming and Karl Barth which will be the main illustration of the possibility of Confucian-Christian dialogue, the instructor explained that he's trying to do which he calls "confuciology." Already Monday he argued that theology may be appropriate for logos-based Western Christianity but not East Asian societies (hence his proposal for a theo-dao). Today he argued that confuciology is a "heuristic device" to allow Dao-based traditions to hold their own in dialogue with the systematic blunderbusses of Christian theology - "heuristic" as Confucianism is no less suspicious than Daoism is of systems and systematizing. Nevertheless, he argues, in the absence of something like a grammar of Confucian tradition, discussion will inevitably be structured around Christian categories - fatal for dao-based forms of "radical humanization."

His "confuciology" is thus not only "heuristic" but "protective":

In terms of George Lindbeck, confuciology is "to give a normative explication of the meaning" which Confucianism has for East Asian people as their cultural-linguistic matrix. If theology is a thick description of the intratextuality of the Christian faith, confuciology is that of the Confucian faith. Confuciology describes intelligibly and thickly the stories of the Confucian ethico-religious persuasions within their own contexts. Analogous to theology (at least similar to Barthian-Reformed and liberation theologies), being secondary to the faith itself, confuciology explicates rule of the game for understanding the cultural-linguistic matrix. It prevents an eclectic and fragmentary reading whose dangerous decontexualization jeopardizes and violates the integrity and inner coherence of the Confucian intratextuality. Hence, confuciology is a protective device to tell Confucian stories authentically and thickly in their own structures.

I'm not sure that this can be done, or is done entirely successfully by our visitor, but I confess to being very taken by the Fragestellung. It seems more aware of the necessity as well as the necessary pitfalls of interreligious dialogue than much that I've encountered. I'm eager to see what he builds on this necessarily heuristic foundation - and to see how the ideas play with his Chinese (indeed, it emerges, his first "Asian") audience.

The New School A Poached Fish

There's a restaurant I've been going to a lot with a friend and one dish in particular has become my favorite, a version of 水煮鱼 shuizhuyu, Sichuan- style poached fish in hot chili oil. (You don't eat the chilis or Sichuan peppers, of course.) I like the name of the restaurant 青年公社 which they English as Youth Commune. But only today did I discover that the fish has an endearing name, too: 新派水煮鱼 xinpai shuizhuyu, which they render new school boiled fish!! My cell-phone dictionaries don't see the new school in 新派 but they're close: new faction and fashion leaders!

Dialogues

We're entering an exciting period of inter-religious exploration at Fudan. The Xu-Ricci Center for Dialogue has invited a Korean Protestant theologian engaged in Confucian-Christian dialogue to teach a course on "Asian theology" (above is one of the slides from his opening lecture, arguing for an East Asian theo-dao more appropriate than the theo-logy of the hellenized West) as well as a Jesuit from Paris to give some lectures on Aquinas. Both will be joining me Friday at a symposium I'm directing called "The Book of Job in Dialogue: Chinese Perspectives." Also present will be a German philosopher from Macau, who is currently teaching a course on Hegel's lectures on the history of religion, and a postdoc from Renmin who has recently completed a study of "Cultural Christians." The "Chinese perspectives" will, I trust, be provided by others coming...!

Freaky is good

Guess who went to a music festival at the EXPO Park today?

May

The view from Changu Narayan

On October 28, 2010 I went on one of the most lovely walks of my life. I’d just finished a five-day gathering for the first iteration of ERSEH in a town near Kathmandu, but had a few days before returning to the US. With an Australian colleague I went to the enchanting city of Bhaktapur, a UNESCO World Heritage site which I knew, as many do, from the film “Little Buddha.” The best part of the trip, however, was walking from Bhaktapur up to an ancient temple on a hill some ways beyond town called Changu Narayan – the site of the earliest attested human presence in the Kathmandu Valley. For countless centuries Changu Narayan has offered a spectacular view of the Valley, especially at sunset – which we were lucky enough to see. (Some pics near the end of this post.) We walked back the way we’d come as night fell, and fell ourselves into a dreamlike state. Lights were few. I remember seeing people clustered around the one shop in a little town which had light and, apparently, a television. The way we walked seemed empty until the light of an oncoming moped silhouetted all sorts of people sharing the road with us, old and young, in the distance and very close.

All this came back to me today as I read an article in the Guardian which began:

The road to the Changu Narayan temple winds through the outskirts of Kathmandu, past villages, wheat fields and up through leafy woods. There is a village, now partly ruined, and then a steep walk up a narrow alley between broken homes to the temple’s shattered remains. From the piles of rubble which surround the cracked central shrine, the view extends across the entire Kathmandu valley.

Below lies Bhaktapur’s Durbar Square and palace, a medieval township preserved almost intact for centuries but now in ruins. Further away are the palaces of Patan, which are cracked or collapsed. In the far distance are scores of other monuments, most listed by Unesco as being of global importance and almost all badly damaged.

These pictures are from that article, two from Bhaktapur, and one each from Patan and Swayambunath in Kathmandu - both places we'd been taken to see, as well. The temples we saw are in ruins. The villages we saw, too. And the lives of the villagers.

Land's end

For the Labor Day holiday, a friend had the bright idea of going to see the ocean. There's an ocean view 观海 park at the southeastern tip of the area where Shanghai sits, and you can go there by subway! Well, in fact it turns out that you can take the subway (3 to the 4 to the 2 to the just-completed 16, whose entire length we went) but after two hours and a bit it only gets you to the northwest edge of the circular ocean-water 滴水湖 Dishui Lake. From there it turns out to be about 7km to the park, and another 7 back. It made for a longer outing than I'd expected, and didn't quite offer an ocean view... but was enjoyable nonetheless. Wide open blue sky, sea air, and not very many people.

There are several camping areas along Dishui Lake, behind fences with few openings. Most people go in and out through gaps like this one.

Stands of reeds dancing in the brisk wind as we trudged seaward

The apparently whale-shaped construction at the ocean-view park.

The ocean view! Actually it's mudflats, though you can make out some ruffled brown in the distance. Perhaps you can see more ocean at high tide? It turns out to have been a brilliant idea of whomever reclaimed all this land (you can make out how much in the google map above) to leave Dishui Lake, which provides all the ocean view city people want, deep green and wavey. And convenient to the subway, too!