包饺子

At GoEast Language School today, a Finn, a Greek, an Italian, a Canadian and two Americans, under the able guidance of four Chinese instructors, assembled many dozen delicious jiaozi 饺子, a New Year's tradition. One dumpling in each batch had a coin in it, marking out the recipient for a fortunate year. By a coincidence so happy it seemed more like 缘分, my teacher S got the one with an American coin, and the one with a Chinese coin went to her American husband! Since they're planning to move to the US in May this seemed most auspicious. Jiaozi don't lie!

Three begot the ten thousand things

Had one of those wonderful serendipitous experiences which I guess we call yuanfen 缘分 over here. I was due to meet M, the French dancer-anthropologist researching qigong movements in Shanghai, in one of the parks where he conducts his fieldwork, but he had to attend a meeting at the Shanghai Municipal Qigong Research Institute 上海市气功研究所, so I got to see the Institute, and indeed meet the Director and Assistant Director. It was also my first chance to try to explain myself in Chinese. 我的专业是宗教哲学，可是我越来越看起来宗教不是哲学的事儿，比哲学人们得生活是重要，和运动，关系，跟人们意外的事儿的关系。I also said I was here looking for 研究朋友, research friends. I'm not sure it scans... but it seems to have been well-received, whatever it is I actually said. I got an invitation to attend a not-open-to-the-public day of presentations in March.

But that doesn't really describe the magic of what was going on. With M were his Catalunyan wife E (also a dancer) and their five-month-old daughter. E's Chinese is good, M's workable and beautifully accented, mine baby-steps. The Institute folks didn't speak English but the deputy, it suddenly emerged, is fluent in German - he spent two years at hospitals there, the first European country to take qigong seriously as medicine and even to include it in national health insurance. So our conversation swirled around in Chinese, English, occasional volleys of German - and the international language of baby love. At first E translated Chinese-English but eventually we realized we were getting by pretty well without it!

The Institute is 30 this year, and as I came in the Director was just unrolling some congratulatory calligraphy an 85-year-old retired professor had sent them. One was a text from the Zhuangzi, the other, in the glorious script of the most ancient Chinese inscriptions, the opening of chapter 42 of the Daodejing. We visitors marveled. It somehow completed the moment when, a little later, in a book M had been given by some researchers in Hong Kong, I found an English translation of Daodejing 42, and passed it to the Chinese, who puzzled through it with a kind of perplexed delight. It was something like this:

Tao begot one. 

One begot two. 

Two begot three. 

And three begot the Ten Thousand Things. 

The Ten Thousand Things carry yin and embrace yang.

 I have a feeling we're all going to be very good friends!

New year‘s revel

It's about to be new year's! I'm not prepared...! What to say?
Luckily one of my friends has shown a way. As described in her occasional blog (painstakingly and haltingly translated by yours truly), she was looking for a way to formulate her good wishes to her friends at new year's when our old friend 缘分 yuanfen (at one point she even calls it heaven-sent 天意缘分 yuanfen) stepped in. Visiting her daughter in Hong Kong she'd just stepped out to get some breakfast when she happened to see an old friend. Happy coincidence! Since it was just a fleeting visit she hadn't told him she was going to be there, and he was just on his way out of town, too! But they were able to have a quick chat in which who should come up but yours truly (the friend was my host for the HKU talk) and his enthusiasm for the concept of yuanfen in particular and how, enchanted by his study of Chinese, he changed his WeChat name to luo suiyuan 罗随缘?

I guess I forgot to report that here! Luo 罗's been part of my Chinese name through all its permutations, a standard phonetic rendering of la/ra/lo/ro, but the other part's new. I told you about how suiyuan 随缘 found me about a month ago but not how I decided to incorporate it in my WeChat nickname. (That actually only happened two weeks ago.) Well, it's come to seem that - in this year, if not more generally - I really am doing a sort of participant observation of the world of yuan, going where 缘/karma/fate/chance leads (随缘). So luo suiyuan it is!

These yuan 缘 terms have a busy cluster of meanings, from the metaphysical to the colloquial, earnest to ironic, and none more than suiyuan. When I put my friend's text into google translate (don't think it was just me and my Pleco dictionary!) it translated 罗随缘 back as Luo revel. May all have much to revel in in the new year! 祝咱们新年快乐！

Wittgenstein to the rescue!

Had another lovely conversation with a young Fudan student, this time one who's just finished his masters in Chinese philosophy and is hoping to pursue a PhD in Switzerland. We'd met briefly through a mutual friend a few weeks ago, but really spoke for the first time after a talk Wednesday afternoon, and continued our discussion today.

Wednesday's subject was, among other things, 缘分 yuanfen. This term (one of those which my host has suggested might be part of an indigenous Chinese sociology of religion) had found its way back to my consciousness because its cousin 随缘 suiyuan had found me earlier in the day. Nobody I've asked defines this new term in quite the same way but I think I like it. The person who introduced the term to me, a quite religious Taiwanese woman, described it as following where one's destiny leads - something she felt described both of our stumbling on Fudan for somewhat unstraightforward but ultimately compelling reasons. Another friend said it meant "happy-go-lucky." Someone else spoke of happenstance. As the MA student explained, 随缘 suiyuan builds on Buddhist ideas of karmic connection (缘) but in colloquial conversation can mean much lighter things - a carefree, playful spirit. I was happy to own all of these, since, as my first stint in Shanghai winds to a close, I feel reconnected with the Mark who's lived lots of places and gets cold feet if in the same place for too long, or even the same language...

Religious studies as I understand it hasn't happened here yet, constrained as it is by its place within departments of philosophy (especially departments anchored in Marxist philosophy), so it was fun to discuss the interdisciplinary venture of a field that attends to the complexities and charms of religion in all its guises. I suggested a philosophical bridge could be Wittgenstein's famous claim that in most cases "the meaning of a word is its use in the language." How are religious words actually used? (We discussed 缘分 as an example and I said, rather 随缘ly, that here in China I am trying to understand it as possibly real.) While we're at it, how about religious stories, images, narratives, rituals? The way religion does its thing may not be the way philosophy thinks it does (or should). But then, as Wittgenstein suggests, philosophy may not do its thing that way, either! Specious contrasts of religion and philosophical "rationality" mislead us about both.

He was intrigued by this, as an email he subsequently sent me attests:

It is just amazing yuanfen (缘分) that we meet in Fudan and share a lot of common interests! ... Although I have been studying medieval Chinese philosophy for three years, I am still struggling to find the best way of conceptualized it in a philosophically interesting way. ... The problem that medieval western philosophy faces is exactly that if we want to access it, we first have to invent it. The same goes also for Chinese philosophy. It's often the case that in reconstructing we bring with ourselves our hindsight and pre- occupation into the ancient thinkers and hence what we read out of the texts is exactly what we read into them. And it is also argued that if we study Chinese intellectual tradition "as philosophy", then we lose our indigenous understanding since philosophy is western. This kind of mind-set has plagued the study of Chinese philosophy for years, so I am trying to figure out in what sense can we have Chinese philosophy at all. 

Thoughtful guy, and eloquent too (not to mention in English)! These are the sorts of concerns I love - well, love reframing and moving beyond. So the worry that "what we read out of texts is exactly what we read into them" was the focus of today's conversation, along with the damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't bellyaching about "Chinese philosophy." I had a great time introducing him to Gadamer's critique of the Enlightenment's "prejudice against prejudice" (in fact we can't get anywhere if we don't ask some questions), and his idea that in order for an engagement with a text to be fruitful it has to be dialogic, allowing it to question us too. This led to discussion of dialogue more generally (I told him it seemed to me a miraculous thing, and he seemed to get what I meant), and eventually to the dialogue between religions. But the funnest moment involved another chestnut from Wittgenstein which he, putting me to shame, quoted in German:  

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen

 Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent

(What Wittgenstein has in mind is religion, ethics and aesthetics.) This is early Wittgenstein, not the Wittgenstein who taught us to describe language games since "Words have meaning only in the stream of life" (RPP II, §687), but instead of dismissing it I asked what it meant to be silent. He's not saying that we should only go where we can speak, surely! But being silent is a doing (this is clearer in other languages than in English), and there's not a single or obvious way to do it.

And suddenly we were back in the world of religious rituals! And of dialogue, which can't happen unless I stay silent to allow the other to speak. We'd started out talking about the problem of evil and the possibility that responses to it might be concerned to abide in the difficult question rather than to presume to answer it. Now we had a working understanding of philosophy not just open to religion but dialogically engaged in silence as well as speech, in listening and speaking - and perhaps also in forms of notspeaking. Medieval and Chinese philosophy seem quite legit approached this way.

It was kind of a wonderful conversation! And a pleasing recurrence of old Ludwig for me. Only a few days ago, with our French visitor, I'd been part of a conversation about what one can learn from a scholar's first publication, which s/he will often think of as a youthful indiscretion. Mine was on, tiens!, Wittgenstein.

Republic of letters

Had a really wonderful conver- sation this afternoon with one of the students from the Intro to Religious Studies class I guest lectured in on Monday. It was in a Miyazaki Hayao-themed coffee shop on Daxuelu 大学路 whose ground floor had what appeared to be a vast selection of postcards for sale. We talked for two and a half hours - from rational choice theory to Buddhist merit-making to Nietzsche to whether people can live without hope in something supernatural, and a good many points in between.

I think it was a bit of what Jeff Stout calls an experience of "the adolescent sublime" for both of us. He's never had a conversation in which a professor asks after his view of things, or talks about philosophy and Buddhism and sociology - not to mention the Church of Elvis and the

films of Miyazaki. Or admits there are things he doesn't know. And I've gone without the sustenance of intense conversation with young minds (that sounds creepy, I don't mean it that way) for a long time. We're going to organize a reading/discussion group in the Spring!

On the way out we noticed that the ground floor display was actually a calendar - 365 slots - and the contents were cards that people had written, together and to each other, for future delivery. Cheesy but charming, especially in the Miyazaki ambience. Giddy with having abided together in the big questions we decided to do it too. On 21 Nov 2015 a card will be sent to him from me (about 缘分), and another to me from him... I wonder what it will say! (I told him to write part of in Chinese.)

缘分

I learned a new Chinese word today, 缘分 (yuanfen). It means something like "fateful coincidence, blessed by Heaven." This explanation is from Fan Lizhu, a Chinese sociologist of religion, who in a 2011 essay included 缘分 among the terms which a religious studies rooted in Chinese rather than Western tradition might build on. But Prof. Fan mentioned it in an e-mail to me today as a term "which is commonly used by Chinese people to describe things such as are happening between us."

缘

What she's referring to is a string of serendipities which started with my looking up an American Sinologist in San Diego last month. He directed me to her, and she connected me to the director of the Religious Studies Program at Fudan University in Shanghai, where she teaches. Then things started to snowball in a 缘分y way. Within a day, I had emails from several Fudan people eager to host me next year; indeed, everyone seemed to assume that it was a fait accompli. 缘分!

分

Then I asked her if she might be passing through New York in the next months, and learned that she'd be giving a talk a few states away next month. I sent out an email to people at New School who might be interested, and within hours had got enthusiastic expressions of interest from several. With the help of the India China Institute, we are now officially hosting Fan Lizhu and her husband Chen Na (also a sociologist of religion) for a lunchtime roundtable in four weeks. 缘分!