I'm midway between my two parting lectures at Fudan. This morning's was in a survey class on religion anchored in Mircea Eliade 伊利亚德's
The Sacred and the Profane, taught by the same generous soul who invited me to speak to the Introduction to Religious Studies course
last Fall. My task was to discuss critiques of Eliade, which I did with relish. The class was again long - 100 minutes, so two 45-minute lectures with a break in between.
I spent the first half introducing perspectives on Eliade's life, including the concerns about his fascist sympathies and residues in this thought;
as when I teach this in the US I turned the finger of blame back on us - whatever the context for Eliade's activities of the 1930s may have ben in Romania, it's a more pressing question for Americans why his ideas were taken up with such gusto in the 1950s and 1960s. Of course "us" here wasn't Americans but I tried, gently, to suggest the students were entitled and perhaps obliged to ask themselves similar questions, to the extent that they found 伊利亚德's ideas compelling. I hope I didn't sound too much like those who think Chinese universities should avoid inimical
foreign ideas - I was after all putting the responsibility and privilege of critical discernment on the students. I did feel I was not that far from the territory of the anti-Rightist campaigns, though, of clearly exhibiting bourgeois forms of equivocation!
The second part was on sacred space, and introduced the criticisms and alternative understandings of space in J. Z. Smith and Sam Gill - familiar territory for me again, building on Gill's article "Territory" which I have used both in the
course on Aboriginal religion and, earlier,
the one on religious geography of New York. I think it may have gone a little over people's heads, but perhaps I planted some useful seeds. For understanding both China's
Dao-rich past and its hyper-modern present and future, idea of space as movement, performance, journey, encounter may be as congenial as the lore of the sacred center or even the politics of mapping and remapping territories of inclusion and exclusion. In the noble tradition of learning as you're teaching, I made those connections, however tentative, for the first time in putting this lecture together.
Tomorrow night I have to talk about the "International Image and Impact of Chinese Spiritual Traditions" - the picture above shows the poster up at Fudan last week. It's a title I was given and every part of which gives me the heebie-jeebies. But I think I've worked out a way to put it to good use... I'll let you know how I fare! The audience will be mostly international graduate students, unlike today's Chinese undergraduates, so more discussion is likely to ensue in any case.
To share the sense of discovery, and lessen the pressure to overnarrate, I offer you clusters of photos with no more than very brief summary captions at the end.
My travels are nearly over... but not quite. I'm spending the long weekend (Monday is the Dragon Boat Festival) at a queer Christian retreat at Sheshan, Shanghai's holy mount. And I hope to touch base again with Nanjing... I'd pledged to myself a return visit to its museum, and now that I've imbibed the north's ancient claims to true Chineseness it might be good to give a south older than Shanghai a chance to reply.
Back the slow way - well, what was the fast way before the building of China's vast high-speed rail system. Overnight train from Datong to Beijing West, arriving 4am... then hanging out waiting for subway to start running and Starbucks at Beijing South to open its doors...
Went south today to see one of the great sights, the Xuankongsi 悬空寺, variously rendered as the Hanging or Suspended or Floating Temple. Dating back to 491 CE it's all of these things! It nestles in the cliff on an old route (now dammed) to Henghsan 恒山, ancient sacred Daoist mountain. MORE
The Yungang Grottoes, carved 465-525 CE, are a marvel. On a rainy Monday, we found them practically deserted, and managed to dodge tour groups for much of an afternoon. The stillness in a cave after the jangling echo of guides' patter was each time like drinking purest water. Just four photos for now... MORE
Saw the thousand year-old wooden Pagoda at Yingxian 应县木塔 - one of the world's three great pagoda wonders 世纪三大奇塔 (along with those of Pisa and Eiffel!) - as well as China's oldest and world's tallest such wooden structure. There's nothing much else for miles (perhaps how it survived so long?), but a veritable forest of souvenir scale models. MORE
6.5 hours in a slow train took us through barren craggy mountains and plains to Datong, whose old city skyline impresses in its newly old way!
I'm becoming quite the fan of Wechat/ WeiXin/微信 (though I suppose other forms of instant messaging allow similar pleasures). For instance, you can cook for someone - the friend who's putting you up, for instance - remotely. Here are the images I sent him yesterday late morning as Moosewood's famous Armenian lentil soup came together, from fetching vegetables from the local market through final taste test (caption: 不错!). They were sent one by one in real time, perhaps slowing down the cooking process a little, but allowing him to savor what's become one of my signature dishes here from a distance!
My friend J has just landed. The flight - direct from Toronto - was long but not this long!
So my last official duty at Fudan is discharged: last night's talk on the impossible subject of The International Image and Impact of Chinese Spiritul Traditions. The subject was not of my choosing - a friend's rather over-the-top effort to avoid the word "religion," as I recall - but drew an interesting audience who let me distance myself from all the terms of the title and seemed happy enough to think together about what Chinese spiritual traditions might be, and how they have traveled or might travel beyond China.
foreign ideas - I was after all putting the responsibility and privilege of critical discernment on the students. I did feel I was not that far from the territory of the anti-Rightist campaigns, though, of clearly exhibiting bourgeois forms of equivocation!
