Story-Thinking: Cultural Meditations (World Philosophy)

WORLD PHILOSOPHY SERIES

STORY-THINKING: CULTURAL MEDITATIONS No part of this digital document may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means. The publisher has taken reasonable care in the preparation of this digital document, but makes no expressed or implied warranty of any kind and assumes no responsibility for any errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for incidental or consequential damages in connection with or arising out of information contained herein. This digital document is sold with the clear understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, medical or any other professional services.

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WORLD PHILOSOPHY SERIES

STORY-THINKING: CULTURAL MEDITATIONS

KUANG-MING WU

Nova Science Publishers, Inc. New York

Copyright © 2011 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means: electronic, electrostatic, magnetic, tape, mechanical photocopying, recording or otherwise without the written permission of the Publisher. For permission to use material from this book please contact us: Telephone 631-231-7269; Fax 631-231-8175 Web Site: http://www.novapublishers.com NOTICE TO THE READER The Publisher has taken reasonable care in the preparation of this book, but makes no expressed or implied warranty of any kind and assumes no responsibility for any errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for incidental or consequential damages in connection with or arising out of information contained in this book. The Publisher shall not be liable for any special, consequential, or exemplary damages resulting, in whole or in part, from the readers‘ use of, or reliance upon, this material. Independent verification should be sought for any data, advice or recommendations contained in this book. In addition, no responsibility is assumed by the publisher for any injury and/or damage to persons or property arising from any methods, products, instructions, ideas or otherwise contained in this publication. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information with regard to the subject matter covered herein. It is sold with the clear understanding that the Publisher is not engaged in rendering legal or any other professional services. If legal or any other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent person should be sought. FROM A DECLARATION OF PARTICIPANTS JOINTLY ADOPTED BY A COMMITTEE OF THE AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION AND A COMMITTEE OF PUBLISHERS. Additional color graphics may be available in the e-book version of this book. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Wu, Kuang-ming. Story-thinking : cultural meditations / Kuang-ming Wu. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-1-61761-258-9 (eBook) 1. Life. 2. Storytelling--Philosophy. 3. Thought and thinking. 4. East and West. I. Title. BD435.W78 2010 128--dc22 2010026178

Published by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. New York

This humble trial at global interculture is dedicated to My dear Father 吳永授(1907-1951) Who gave me Taiwan, China, Confucius, Japan, music, and much more, and My dear Teacher, the Rev. Boris Anderson, MA (Oxon), MA (Cantab) Who gave me the Bible, Greek, Shakespeare, poetry, and How to be simple, deep, and alive, in Deepest reverence, gratitude, and appreciation.

CONTENTS Preface

vii

Prelude:

Life as Story and Storytelling

1

Chapter 1

Storytelling

13

Chapter 2

History

59

Chapter 3

Science: Story Factual and Fictive

87

Chapter 4

Interculture, Relativism

113

Chapter 5

Milieu Our Lifeworld

177

Chapter 6

Pain

195

Chapter 7

Akrasia, Interpersonal and Personal

235

Chapter 8

Selflessness, Silence

269

Chapter 9

From Oneself to the Music Together

293

Conclusion

353

Coda: Story-Thinking China

362

Index

447

PREFACE Story-thinking is direct actuality-thinking; actuality is active and alive, never set or formal but free and reasonable. Actuality is things as they are alive, actively actualizing themselves, birthing unceasing. They sound forth to resound, vibrate to inter-vibrate, tell to retell it, to reveal-R to express-E it. This ―R to E‖ is not logically inferential, free of inferential error. Such R-to-E process dialogically transmits across an instant as ―storythinking.‖ Story-thinking primordially hears of actuality to story-express it. Thus, actuality sounds itself—tells its story—to a sensitive hearer who retells the story-actual in her own resonance, and her vibration is ―storytelling.‖ Actuality tells and is heard, and storytelling comes about. Story-thinking begins at storytelling to continue storytelling, this way.

PRELUDE: LIFE AS STORY AND STORYTELLING A. STORY AND STORYTELLING AS ESSENTIAL TO LIFE Story-thinking is direct actuality-thinking; actuality is active and alive, never set or formal but free and reasonable. Actuality is things as they are alive, actively actualizing themselves, birthing unceasing. They sound forth to resound, vibrate to inter-vibrate, tell to retell it, to reveal-R to express-E it. This ―R to E‖ is not logically inferential, free of inferential error. Such R-to-E process dialogically transmits across an instant as ―story-thinking.‖ Storythinking primordially hears of actuality to story-express it. Thus, actuality sounds itself—tells its story—to a sensitive hearer who retells the story-actual in her own resonance, and her vibration is ―storytelling.‖ Actuality tells and is heard, and storytelling comes about. Storythinking begins at storytelling to continue storytelling, this way. Actuality tells its hearer to tell its story, and so storyteller is the primal story-hearer of actuality. This storytelling is then heard by other story-hearers, who retell the story, and adjust and add to the story heard, and new stories are born. Actuality telling-hearing is ―storytelling,‖ to retell in story-hearing to story-add, to tell new stories; story co-vibrates, reenacts, re-performing the primal music of actuality vibrating, from storyteller to story-hearers, as things birthing unceasing. All this is story-thinking, hearing actuality to tell it forth, hearing to story-tell of things, to be heard by another to retell their story to add on, to retell it. Such is things‘ creative rehearsal, resonating from actuality birthing to storyteller, from storyteller to story-hearer who adds to tell her story her own way. This creative birthing-transfer is ―story-thinking‖ where storytelling begins the story-rounds. So story-thinking is often expressed as ―storytelling,‖ a shorthand for storytelling-hearing-adding resonating across an instant here now, and then across time into history. Story-thinking is thus story-communication, which is oral-aural, direct and primal, in story-thinking as real actuality-thinking, true without editing. The process is interpersonal reel-to-reel transfer from me spontaneous to me aware, from me aware to hearer, or often 1 onto paper, and from paper-record to heartfelt reader in time, from heart to heart through history. Story-thinking is thus historical, this way. 1

Reading a story on paper forgets reading and paper to hear and co-respond. On the importance of writing down stories, see Kuang-ming Wu, ―World Interculturalism: China Written in English,‖ Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies, June 2005, pp. 1-42.

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Telling and hearing reel off a series of echoes called ―history,‖ whispering in silence at the heart of being, making a musical poetry of actuality. Telling is heard instantly, and silence nods echoing, caught intimately, through time. Story-thinking thus distinguishes itself as the actual, the natural, and the human without pretension, directly interpersonal, nothing objectively impersonal. I do not emit sounds but tell a story word-echoing ear to ear as music, orally or on paper, deep to deep. Did I repeat myself? How could I resist this story-thinking, life-thinking? This fact is more than intimated in Feyerabend‘s spirited attack on the one seamless robe, 2 as it were, of Western natural science. His attack is odd, betraying something story-important unawares. His consistent logic demolishes the all-ruling logic of one imperial science; his logic the familiar argues for scientific development the novel unfamiliar. All this is existential contradiction of a logical sort. He pulls off the stunt by historically showing how illogical concrete cases are. This is a matter of course. The ―belligerent plurality‖ (p. xiii) of fierce independents 3 would have pulverized and silenced everyone, unless some connection is made among them; 4 the connection is ―logic‖ in a wide sense, a ―gathering.‖ He yet tells of ―settlement of controversies‖ (x), ―negotiations between different parties‖ (xi), without telling us their how, their logic. His is story-thinking that accepts clashes, contradictions, and paradoxes logical and actual. While vaunting ―anarchism‖ (chapter 1), Feyerabend also notes, ―The stories they (Indians, Chinese) told and (their) activities enriched their lives, protected them and gave them meaning‖ (3); theirs is story-thinking that has story-rhythm of historical actuality; it is 5 poetic and dramatic, as he himself intimates that poetry and drama complement scientific research, to conclude his volume (267). The way a story goes—the way we talk, our grammar, and our writing-system—shapes the way our world goes. We all live many my-story-shaped worlds. ―Culture shock‖ is world shock, as a result of going from my globe to an alien moon and other stars. Poetry is a grain of sand among many to make a world among many, a compressed storytelling to sing a specific world thus made among many. Poetry shapes science, and so science is a plural, 6 spewing out diverse sorts of ontology, as Feyerabend correctly said. What Feyerabend did not say is that, therefore, our story should shape according as we are shaped by our milieu in which we breathe and move naturally, never to force our storyway onto nature-milieu to violate it. Our story-ontology should conform to nature-ontology surrounding us, breathing us, even while we breathe to shape nature, as nature and we intershape breath to breath. 2

Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (1988), London: Verso, 1993. Cf. Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics: 25th Anniversary Edition, Shambhala, 2000, and The Turning Point, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1982; China features in both books prominently. Also see Douglas R. Hofstadter‘s convoluted Gödel, Escher, Bach, 1979, and I am A Strange Loop, 2007, both by Cambridge, MA: Basic Books. Spontaneous inter-involvement should be delightfully simple. 3 ―Connection‖ is his favorite word. We wish he devoted a chapter telling us what it means and implies. 4 On ―logic‖ as gathering, see Wu, On the “Logic” of Togetherness: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 1998, pp. 162 and note 41, 334 and note 181, Calvin O. Schrag, The Resources of Rationality, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992, p. 93, and Merriam-Webster‟s Collegiate Dictionary, 2008, pp. 144 (on ―analects‖) and 710 (on ―legend‖). 5 See Feyerabend, op. cit., p. 273, index on ―art.‖ 6 Ibid., esp. Chapter 16. Wu said as much in Togetherness, op. cit., pp. 27-87.

Prelude: Life as Story and Storytelling

3

Thus the way we talk and the way we write shape the way we think to shape the way our world works, either for or against our nature-milieu. So, our grammar and our syllabary had better be shaped by our life-milieu to naturally shape our world most natural. So far in human speech-world, Chinese ideographs, aurally resonating with the sense of things, have shaped 7 the only story-ontology that creates its world most natural and its long history, albeit quite tragic. Story-thinking uses stories to think and thinks story-way. Such thinking begins at storytelling, around which story-reading, story-hearing, story-adding, and story-revising revolve—to story-think. And so, we begin with storytelling and keep telling stories of storytelling, knowing all this while that all this story-telling on ―storytelling‖ represents storythinking in a cosmic-comprehensive sense quite irresistible. All human enterprises political, sociological, economic, commercial, etc., tell stories of recent past to make a flowchart of the trends, to scheme steps into the projected future. Stories are told of the past to chart our actions to project tomorrow, and past, chart, and project are 8 stories. Story-thinking patterns life; we live stories. All journals and writings are storybooks. We live in stories to live out stories. We must then solidify life by telling stories of storythinking. Story, not logical argument, moves people. After all, few people dislike stories. On a few people who prefer paintings, sculpture, movies, music, and news to stories, we 9 can say that paintings and the like are so many ways to tell stories, and these people‘s preferences also tell interesting stories of disliking stories. Besides, painting and sculpture tell stories more often and more naturally than stories are painted and sculpted, for aesthetic appeal, factual punches, and logical coherence feature storytelling, more than beauty, facts, and logic feature painting or sculpture per se, to fascinate us and teach us about life. ―The purpose of a short story is, I believe, that the reader shall come away with the satisfactory feeling that a particular insight into human character has been gained, or that his knowledge of life has been deepened, or that pity, love, or sympathy for a human being has been awakened. . . . The instinct to listen to a good story is as old as humanity itself,‖ said 10 Lin. It would be less usual to claim for painting or sculpture what is claimed here for storytelling. All this is because every life has a story on which it lives. In fact, our life is an ongoing 11 story; life itself tells stories. No wonder, one loses oneself who loses one‘s story. Storytelling extends far into history, when myth is reenacted in ritual that myth explains, and myth is ancient story that ritual actualizes. Life acts out parables in stories that express our acts since time immemorial. Our life is rooted in history; history is story-in-time to sensesolidify life. Our lifeworld is packed with stories and shaped by stories, as daily news shows. 7

Feyerabend also noted something like it (op. cit., pp. 36-37, 163) in the specific area of Chinese medicine. Interestingly, two well-known magazines kicked off 2010 with articles on China and Taiwan, ―The Great Leap: New China Enters Its Third Act,‖ The Nation (the oldest weekly in USA), January 11-18, 2010, pp. 10-17, and ―Taiwan‘s Love Affair With Beijing,‖ Foreign Affairs, January/February 2010, pp. 44-60. Their quality is beside the point here. 9 Movies are dramatized stories; news is today‘s story. Music is our primal language, our painting and sculpture in time, and so considering language, painting and sculpture considers music. This is because painting and sculpture tell stories to dance music, as China has been foot-tapping poetry musical for millennia. I am preparing a book, Chinese Thinking That Dances, a delightful musical. 10 Lin Yutang, Famous Chinese Short Stories, NY: John Day Company and Pocket Books, 1948, 1951, 1952, p. xi. 11 Neuropsychologist Oliver Sacks dramatically brings out this stunning truth in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, NY: Summit Books, 1970, though he did not put it our way here. 8

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And so, all conscientious scholars cannot help but study storytelling, but so far they all treat it as ―narration‖—naming storytelling activity as noun is significant—objectively analyzing it as ―narratology,‖ one discipline among many others. Some astute scholars did sense the importance of narrative and study time-and-history (Ricoeur) and primal culture 12 (Frey) in terms of storytelling, but neither probes storytelling as storytelling. All august scholars I know of have thus missed ―storytelling,‖ for such life-activity is the primal matrix of humanity; it is the dynamo in which and by which all our thinking operates. Storytelling is culture told, words and intellect crystallized, awareness total and human, unawares. To understand storytelling we must undergo it as a physiognomy of living, and then we will see how storytelling illuminates all disciplines, and see that it puts the cart before the horse to study storytelling with methods of these disciplines derived from storytelling. Scholarship kills stories. Thus, instead, the pages below touch and probe religions, history, myths, words, politics, psychology, music, poetry, science, philosophy, pain, ethics, idleness, kids, logic, milieu, fanaticism, devotion, translation, and so on, to show how storytelling as pan-method enlivens all these diverse ways of living human. Storytelling is the torch that enlightens all our activities conscious, intellectual, and cultural, and since the torch is minded, self-aware spontaneous, its vast generality does not trivialize its importance or eliminate its luminous centrality in life. Thus few things are more significant than stories to shape us and lifeworld. Story13 thinking is the air we breathe, flowing through us to sustain us. So nothing is more common than stories, and nothing is harder to capture. These pages may appear too diffuse to grasp, for what enables coherence cannot capture coherently, except by showing how, by telling stories of storytelling. Still, it is to do X to explain X the unknown. There is no other way to elucidate story-thinking than telling stories of it; it is to be caught, not explained, for explaining is also a storytelling. Story-thinking is at work as storytelling, story-hearing, and story-adding. From now on, ―storytelling‖ is often used to stand for all three activities to show story-thinking in action. ―If storytelling can only be story-told to appear, and if life tells its stories, then why do you exercise in such futility of telling stories of storytelling?‖ This important query answers itself. If life‘s past is non-present till appearing in its story, history, so as to show us how to live better now, then our life elusive as past must show itself-as-storytelling telling its stories, so we can turn self-aware to self-grasp, to self-examine to live better. ―Telling stories that are living‖ is cathartic of us to solidify us; it is our indispensable task of living-as-human, as we live story-way. The pages below do not consider story as an object of study and analysis, but tell of what story is story-way—as storytelling and story-hearing in story-thinking—as we actually think story-way and argue story-way.

12

Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. I (1984), Vol. II (1985), and Vol. III (1988), University of Chicago Press. Rodney Frey, ed. Stories That Make the World: Oral Literature of the Indian Peoples of the Inland Northwest, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. 13 Roland Barthes also says something similar about the universality of narratives as ―life itself,‖ but curiously describes narratives as ―transhistorical, transcultural.‖ See A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag, NY: Barnes and Noble, 2009, p. 212. Stories and story-thinking are the very sense and essence of history and culture—as life is, not beyond it.

Prelude: Life as Story and Storytelling

5

B. THREE NOTIONS IN OUR TITLE 14

The pages below consider story-thinking by telling its stories, and our title, ―StoryThinking: Cultural Meditations,‖ tells in these three terms of how we tell stories of storytelling, that is, what our story-thinking consideration consists in. Our story-consideration is stories told in and as ―meditation,‖ ―culture,‖ and ―story-thinking‖ itself. (1) Meditation: We here ponder over story-thinking. As meta-philosophy that considers philosophy is itself a philosophy, so to consider story-thinking we tell stories of telling stories, to show how impossible it is to live without story-thinking. ―Meta-philosophy‖ is not thinking but quietly pondering over things and thinking, what can be nicknamed ―meditation‖ that our title indicates. Meditation undergoes the situation as it is to understand it, and to undergo is to go along with its story of the situation as the story goes on, a storytellinghearing, a story-thinking. (2) Culture: Storytelling reveals and elucidates culture as nothing else does. Culture is our life-habit and cultivates it, habituates us into a lifestyle, a habitat of life. Family and society cultivate our certain way of seeing, thinking and doing, to make our habit of life; we now have our life-habit (―habit‖ and ―have‖ are etymological siblings) as our living style, our culture, thanks to our storytelling routine and spontaneous. This life-cultivation is a cultural activity; civilization is its deposit. Our culture cultivates and explains our logical thinking; logic does not explain culture. Children have no ―universal validity‖ of logic, but show ubiquitous coherence, primal-logic, in storytelling, and then ―mature‖ into logical validity to settle as part of our adult world. It takes a genius to come back to the child to break out of such accustomed routine of thinking, to see things otherwise, afresh. Lewis Carroll was a mathematician at Oxford, genius enough to break out of logic into ―Wonderland‖ for ―Alice‖ his favorite child-friend. M. C. Escher was genius enough to etch out a world of his imagination that defies our accustomed ―logic of actuality,‖ playing with the ―illogical world,‖ reveling in it to catch mathematicians‘ attention, to delight ―kids of all ages.‖15 Why are we so happy if not eager to revolt against ―cultural trivial logic‖ to go back to the child‘s ―useless‖ world defying it? Its answer is significant. All things flow (Heraclitus) and change (Chuang Tzu), and our en-cultured lifestyle and habitat must change, by selfexamining to re-turn to our primal nimble childhood, back to where our life begins from scratch, as we do every dawn, to rejuvenate and re-start life. Our child-dawn is the primal vigor to adapt to change to ride on its crest. This answer has three significant spin-offs. First, we must return to the dawn of our culture at regular intervals to self-rejuvenate, as we must sleep every 12 hours to re-begin at 14

15

I sadly rejected the title ―cultural metaphilosophical reflections on storytelling,‖ or even ―cultural narratology,‖ for its anti-storytelling stuffiness and cultural-philosophical parochialism in the word, ―metaphilosophy,‖ typified by the journal of that name, or ―narratology‖ that represents a genre of analytical studies of narratives as object. Lewis Carroll is too well known to require citation. On Escher, see F. H. Bool, et al., ed. J. L. Locher, M. C. Escher: His Life and Complete Graphic Work (1892), NY: H. N. Abrams, 1992, for moving essays on his life, his mathematical interests, and graphics. He wrote, ―My subjects are also often playful; I cannot refrain from demonstrating the nonsensicalness of some of what we take to be irrefutable certainties. It is, for example, a pleasure to deliberately mix together objects of two and of three dimensions, surface and spatial relationships, and to make fun of gravity.‖ Douglas R. Hofstadter comes to mind who is much less than delightful.

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dawn, reborn as baby. Then we see things for the first time, stunningly strange and beautiful. We run around with kids gazing at things and touching them around as the first dawn of creation, with birds chirping so beautifully afresh. Secondly, refreshing is coming home to where things actually are, to reshape the lifeworld of culture made of ―names‖ as called in ancient China. ―Righting names 正名‖ rights the world, and righting names requires returning to things‘ primal freshness. Name Scholars 名家 insist—tell stories—that ―white horse, no horse,‖ i.e., distinct from ―horse‖ in general, and ―take off today, arrive tomorrow,‖ so as to jolt us into an awareness of our takenfor-granted common sense, to reshuffle our culture,16 to renovate to remold our lifeworld. Thirdly, culture as life-habit is habituated, and habituation takes time; it is a historical process. Culture is historical, and history tells stories of life to elucidate life.17 We must then repeatedly listen to our stories-of-the-past, to enable us properly to tell our new story of today and prepare for storytelling tomorrow. In short, culture is our home where we are born to do its house-cleaning with storytelling. Storytelling makes culture to re-make culture, and so meditation on storytelling, i.e., story-thinking, is indispensable, in the following pages. (3) Story-Thinking: What is story-thinking, however? Asking this question touches the core of these pages. Story-thinking is a sort of ―mediation‖ that is also a distinct thinking with a story-logic that is not symbolic logic. Or rather, symbolic logic is one sort of language of story-thinking to express an impassioned story, as did Aristotle, Spinoza, J. S. Bach, Lewis Carroll, Pablo Picasso, and M. C. Escher.18 Wright said that China has no ―philosophy‖ but ―thought‖ between philosophy and 19 common folks‘ common sense. We reply that China has a grammar that includes the 16

This is Name School‘s version of ―righting names.‖ Confucius grabs another version of ―righting names,‖ to ―right‖ our life-praxis to the ―names‖ we profess in society, fathers must behave as ―father,‖ children behave as ―filial,‖ etc. 17 Even our notion of ―universal gravity‖ has undergone from Newton‘s to Einstein‘s, and then is changing to whatever sense only our future knows. This notion is the story-in-time of physics that explains the shift of physics in the shift of culture, from the absolute space-time to the relativity of the universe, so far. Thomas S. Kuhn tells its story as The Structure of Scientific Revolution (1962), University of Chicago Press, 1996. We came then to have inexpensive nuclear energy and horrendous nuclear weaponry, both spreading today very rapidly throughout the world. Another example of culture as story-in-time is China. Its autocracy persisted for millennia to collapse in the Opium War and the May Fourth Movement. It has since been searching for an alternative sociopolitical system. Mao‘s ―Cultural Revolution‖ adapted from alien Marxist ideology is still on, looking all over for a viable alternative to centralized autocracy. The West has undergone a similar revolution in the Renaissance but China‘s is more tragic, poignant, and no less worldwide in its impact of ongoing nationwide upheaval, still waiting to rise from the ashes. And why did all people have to begin with autocracy? Why did they have to change it later? China is an enigma, for it has no one-God to set up theocracy as the West did, where why people had to rally to one-God and then revolt against him requires explanation. All this is a story-in-time of China and the world to elucidate them. 18 See J. L. Ackrill, Aristotle the Philosopher, NY: Oxford University Press, 1981; Kuang-ming Wu, The Butterfly as Companion: Meditations on the First Three Chapters of the Chuang Tzu, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990, pp. 366-368, 394. H. A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza: Unfolding the Latent Processes of His Reasoning, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934, 1983; Marjorie Grene, ed., Spinoza: A Collection of Critical Essays, Anchor Books, 1973. F. H. Bool, et al., On M. C. Escher, see Impossible Worlds, Köln: Taschen, 2002. Carsten-Peter Warncke and Ingo F. Walther, Pablo Picasso, 18811973, Köln: Taschen, 2002. Martin Gardner, The Annotated Alice by Lewis Carroll: the Definitive Edition (1960), NY: W. W. Norton, 2000; Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, NY: Columbia University Press, 1990 (on Lewis Carroll). Bach needs no documentation. 19 Arthur Wright was correct in saying (H. G. Creel, ed., Chinese Civilization in Liberal Education, University of Chicago Press, 1959, pp. 144, 135, 154, 159) that China has no Stanford philosophy of logical analysis where he was. David S. Nivison in the same milieu agreed. Henry Rosemont, Jr. said (1983) that China has no ethics

Prelude: Life as Story and Storytelling

7 20

Western kind of philosophy and common-sense wisdom. This is Chinese wisdom, the so21 called ―Chinese philosophy.‖ Western philosophy pursues consistency and necessity ; Chinese wisdom flexes with coherence that goes on as actuality does historically, that is, in a story-net, vast and coarse-meshed, nothing leaked, as Lao Tzu said of Heaven Web (73). Chinese wisdom has the grammar of actuality, both historical and rhetorical. The grammar does not logically legislate on actuality but follows it to express our rhetorical activity that flows with and within the world, as the inter-flow of actuality around us and our expressive actuality right here throughout Heaven and Earth. This is the ―logic‖ of storytelling, story-thinking. Storytelling is thus worded expression, wording that has an order. Ordered wording is usually called ―logic‖ that is part of ―rhetoric,‖ the logic of flowing persuasion of words. The logic of words is ―grammar,‖ ―the grammar of persuasion‖ that is the logic of deliveryrhetoric, and the ―grammar of assent‖ that is the logic of reception-rhetoric, and both tell stories as forms of story-thinking. ―How can we rhetorically tell truth, not do demagoguery that misleads? How do we steer rhetoric from capricious demagoguery toward solid guide?‖ Well, an agitator fans up hearers‘ fascination to channel it into his preset goal. Truth-rhetoric is based on actuality to ―argue‖ from it, flowing from it to follow wherever it leads. After all, more rhetoric cures rhetoric, for adding falsehood on falsehood exposes them as ―false,‖ by and by, as history. In history, actuality sounds and resounds over and over, and sooner than later demagoguery emerges to sound hollow. Afterthoughts are better as aftersights, reviews, are, because they thus turn truer, more actual. The ―Aha!‖ time will come, and history judges in the end. In all, history reveals what sort of rhetoric we hear. All this sounds spooky until we realize that we are history, as these seven points explain. (1) I breathe Homer‘s Odysseus, Plato‘s Socrates, Confucius‘ Analects, all of whose presence I feel in my bones. (2) My felt presence of the past changes the past as the past directs how I breathe and feel now. It is history. (3) To provoke such breathing and feeling is selfcultivation; it is education. (4) Thus history and education are one, living in me, in you; we die without history-education. We are alive creating because of history-education. What does ―creation‖ mean here? (5) We naturally react to reading as we breathe responding to air, and putting down our reactions is called ―criticism.‖ Reading is history; criticism enlivens it. Criticism is our own, so it is creation, our life, thanks to history, as we breathe our own way thanks to the air. (6) Now, all this is my own critical reaction to Eliot,22 but he would not have recognized himself in it, being so much altered out of his shape. I thus practice history that becomes me as I become history, creating it.

of an Aristotelian systematic sort. H. G. Creel criticized Wright and Nivison, and Wing-tsit Chan criticized Rosemont, yet none said what ―Chinese philosophy‖ is, not just as convention or thought in China. I reacted to them all in ―中國哲學的共相問題,‖ 哲學論評, 臺大哲學系, 八十年一月, pp. 1-23, On Chinese Body Thinking: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 1997, pp. 207-208, On the “Logic” of Togetherness, op. cit., pp. 304, 305, 435. Here I continue my reply. 20 K. Wu, Chinese Wisdom Alive, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2010. 21 ―Consistency‖ turns deconstructively complex, while ―necessity‖ turns sinuously analytical, in the West today. 22 ―T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays: New Edition,‖ in Modern Poetics, ed. James Scully, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1965, pp. 61-64.

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(7) As breathing made conscious turns self-conscious and unnatural,23 so history cannot be objectified as the self is systematically elusive. Criticism in history is ―past‖ and ―now‖ mutually measuring, confessional, autobiographical. Thus China has no criticism of history, no philosophy of history; all criticisms by Grand Historians are history. History cannot be objectified; it can only be presented as stories. Let us put the same point and same content another way. ―What is history?‖ can be asked from outside history and from inside history. Collingwood asked the question from outside, by fighting objectivism (scientism, scissors-and-paste approach), saying, ―history is ideas reenacted in question-and-answer.‖ Dilthey also asked it from outside as he fought objectivistic scientism, when he said knowing can undergo personal ―understanding.‖ And then ―What is history?‖ can be asked from inside history, where we realize that ―asking‖ is itself part of history to make up history, for our asking results in recording our living through time as history. Our asking makes ―us‖ to realize; asking makes us aware that our living composes history, that our living is history. We are history, and history is bigger than any one of us. This is why China‘s two volumes on historical criticism, History All-Through 史通 and Literary History, Comprehensive Meaning文史通義, are not on history but on how to be a good historian. As we cannot ―we,‖ so history cannot ―history‖24; as we cannot stand outside our ―self,‖ so history cannot be objectified as ―history,‖ while history keeps mirroring us in time. Thus we breathe Homer, Plato, Einstein, Hitler, as our parents breathe us now. We call our breathing-in-time ―history.‖ Pull off history, and we humans die into animals; realizing we are history, we come alive as human. To make one another among us realize all this is ―education.‖ And then we see Dilthey and Collingwood are our history teaching us history. Education is how history works; history is what education does. History teaches history, at one as story-thinking. 23 24

Breathing exercises, in religions and health disciplines, purposely make breathing self-conscious to adjust it correctly, so as to turn it non-self-conscious by and by. 章學誠 said, ―六經不言經，三傳不言傳，猶人各有我而不容我其我也,‖ (文史通義校注, 經解上, 北京中華書局, 2005, p. 93); 經 and 傳 are history. His volume is one of the only two on historical criticism in China that are not on history but on how to become a good historian, for history is ―systematically elusive‖ as we. Gilbert Ryle (The Concept of Mind, London: Hutchinson, 1949, pp. 195-198) and Ian Ramsey (Christian Empiricism, Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1974, pp. 17-31) noted ―the systematic elusiveness of the ‗I‘.‖ Neither Ryle nor Ramsey took the elusive I as historical, as part of history. Let us go slower here. ―不容我其我‖ says that ―the I has no room to ‗I‘ its I.‖ I can ―I,‖ not actual I, as Tao can ―tao,‖ not Always Tao. As classic ―classic‖-ed is not actual classic, so history ―history‖-ed is not actual history. No actual sage claims himself a sage; no actual history claims itself as history. The reason is simple; no I obtrusively declare I, as no Tao declare itself Tao, as God is ever a hidden God. This is to oppose Socrates. Self-examination manifests the self that does not self-describe-manifest; the self‘s meta-act shows the self but does not describe or analyze the self. Pragmatism can only be the spirit of pragmatism that is the pragmatic spirit; no ―pragmatism‖ is here. Art criticism (詩品，書譜，文心雕龍) must be itself art (see my ―Chinese Art Criticism as Art,‖ Chinese Wisdom Alive, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2010, p. 137); criticizing historians is itself history. No art or history describes its analyses of them, for praxis is praxis, and ―pragmatism,‖ thinking about praxis, is praxis. Thus no praxis, classic, history, or art can be objectified, for they are activities of the self that ceases to be the self once objectified as the ―self.‖ Subjectivity objectified is no ―subject,‖ for subject is no object. When I say ―I,‖ I exhibit I or display I, yet I do not produce an object, ―I‖; I-as-object does not exist. So, writing that transposes onto paper as sincere conversation, that is, letter-writing and journals, is most natural and powerful. They tend to mention dots of points, open-ended, to move people, and evoke the participants–writers, readers—to freely develop the themes and the points mentioned. Cf. William H. Shannon and Christine M. Bochen, eds., Thomas Merton: A Life in Letters, HarperCollins, 2008, pp. x-xiii.

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Story-thinking shows in literature that tells stories about persons and events, what happened and to whom. ―What happened to whom‖ is biography, ―what happened‖ is history that includes biographies, all ―factual‖ that includes fictive stories with factual impact. We tell our ideas, factual or fictive, to us and others in stories, and the telling is a fact, what happens to make things happen. ―History fictive‖ may raise some literalist eyebrows. This is ―fancy history‖ that has no fact, yet no unreal impact, as a statue of Andrew Jackson on horseback, to bear on actuality to stir us up today. This ―fiction‖ is then ―actual beyond fact.‖ This is history-at-meta-level. ―Meta level‖ is of two sorts, observing not-participating, and catalysis to make things happen. Fancied history is a meta-level catalyst to real-ize things. This whole volume is itself a metalevel catalyst to China-West interculture in a story-thinking milieu, to facilitate interenrichments among world cultures. 25 Thus persons and characters embody ideas that events show. Ideas are ―demonstrated,‖ that is, proven and shown, not logically but factually-rhetorically in history, for logic tolerates nothing illogical that constantly happens, while rhetorical storytelling includes whatever happens; in fact, that is what ―history‖ is, telling stories about whatever happened, to discover what they mean, their ―ideas.‖ In short, all ideas are expressed concretely in storytelling. 26 Story-thinking tells stories; it is a ―concrete logic‖ to demonstrate ideas in history, factual and fictive. 27 Let us take a concrete example. On reading Fischer‘s Liberty and Freedom on America‘s ideas, we cannot help but ask two sets of questions, each with four sub-questions. One set are on ideas; another are on our struggles to actualize them. The first set ask wherefrom those ideas, how many, how related they are, and how they developed. We know where the two ideas came from. To him, liberty is independence; freedom is belonging. The two are distinct in America due to its root in individualism; China has no such distinction. Fischer must answer other three questions. The second set ask how much has been achieved, how our struggles have changed the ideas, how the idea-changes have changed our struggles, and where we (should) go from here. So we ask, and the book must answer on those eight themes that are our latecomers‘ retrospective roundup, objective and intersubjective. ―Fischer has no obligation to bother with your questions, does he?‖ He is obligated to clearly elucidate the themes of his book‘s title, and the elucidation answers eight questions of mine entailed by the title. I doubt if his book has answered well any of my questions, and thus his book is a defective history. Or else, answers must be extrapolated from the book, and how easy we can extrapolate shows how good is his book, which cannot be a random lump of scattered data. We call such probing dialogues ―history of ideas.‖ It is ―history.‖ 25

See on how the 19th century English writers eschewed bloodless abstraction of logical proof to express their ideas in persons and events, in John Holloway‘s slightly soft The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument (1953), NY: W. W. Norton, 1965, pp. 12-13, 292, et passim. His ―plot‖ is our storytelling; his ―sage‖ reminds us of Chinese sagely mode of ―argument.‖ Sadly, those writers—Carlyle, Disraeli, Eliot, Arnold and Hardy—labored under the shadow of the context of ―logic,‖ and few philosophers pay attention to them. Chinese sages happily have no such sad shackles; they are cumbered instead with soft sentimental muck in need of logical clearing and cleansing. 26 ―Demonstrate‖ side-glances at ―demonstrative‖ that shifts meaning with shift of user and of situation. This point fits the dynamic character of rhetoric that shifts with concrete situational shift. This is headache to staid logic. 27 David Hackett Fischer, Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America‟s Founding Ideas, Oxford University Press, 2005.

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C. STORY ABOUT STORYTELLING Story-thinking operates in storytelling. We are here, then, to tell a story about storytelling told to all people in ancient days and today, to kids and adults alike. We must note that storytelling is no dissecting of story, though analysis is one peculiar sort of storytelling. Analysis de-scribes to flatten and enervate things, while telling a story presents things as they actually are, alive. Analysis constructs an abstract system with dissected bits, while telling a story is systematic as pre-sented matters, as revealed in the very process of storytelling. Story is a circle irresistibly expanding, with ―everywhere‖-center and ―who‖-edge all 28 over, bits and pieces everywhere, every one reflecting all others, as Leibniz saw in monads, as Blake saw in grains of sand that see many worlds. Our pages follow these bits of sandgrains as ―sections,‖ as they spontaneously arise to exhibit structures structure-less, i.e., systematic and coherent without a formal system. We tell coherent stories of storytelling scattered all over life. Various academic muscles—ethnology, typology, historiography, cultural anthropology, and the list goes on—have been greatly flexed to analyze stories and storytelling, only to 29 dissect them to death. To understand what ―story‖ is, we must tell stories, and to ―correct‖ a specific story, we must tell more stories, simply because storytelling is one supreme indispensable way to let things cohere and present themselves to us as they are. Academic 30 analyses themselves are one mode of storytelling, a less good one than usual storytelling we are daily accustomed to. So, storytelling is the best way to undergo to understand—tell a story of—storytelling. To tell a story about storytelling, we must tell it as it is, that is, we must just tell a story about storytelling. Storytelling is the best, flexuous, open-ended, and at the same time most rigorous way to present things, as stories of all sorts do, gossip, fables, news, history, myths, speeches, letters, conventions, sciences, celebrations, memos, gifting, ideologies, and the list goes on. The reason is simple: We cannot open our mouths without telling stories. This is why few people dislike stories; in fact, no human can live on without storytelling. To ―prove‖ so we must, without further ado, begin telling stories about storytelling. So, we here tell stories of storytelling that meanders coherently in the river of life, shooting breeze where it wishes with winds of nature.

D. NINE SECTIONS IN THIS VOLUME We have nine sections called ―chapters,‖ on story-thinking as storytelling. Since storytelling is indefinable as life, Chapter 1 reminds us with ―storytelling‖ in general by telling of its origin, its how, its magical power, and how we meta-story-tell. Chapter 2 tells of the story of life, ―history.‖ It begins with translation in time as transposition of our forefather 28

Our later section, ―Various Ponds Alive,‖ will ponder on this strange circle, to tell its story. E.g., Pierre Maranda, ed., Mythology: Selected Readings (Penguin Books, 1972) congeals the blood of storytelling. 30 I also shiver at scientific analysis of myths by Elizabeth Wayland Barber and Paul T. Barber, in When They Severed Earth From Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth, Princeton University Press, 2004. 29

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in our historical reenactment, then goes into specific stories of politics and history of ideas, then surprises ourselves to realize how history makes no mistakes as the I Ching its story in mathematical poetry does not. This Chapter concludes with a look at how history relates to mathematics, a part of culture, under three themes, science, culture, and milieu. Stories tell of our knowledge, ―science,‖ and our ―culture,‖ both amounting to our ―milieu.‖ So we have Chapter 3: Science, to show that storytelling not science comprehends random events, which now appear with story-sense, and science itself is part of mythmaking. Then we see how Japan‘s Shinto naturelove story makes agrarian technology and ―idleness‖ that nurtures the self, but psychology as science cannot. Chapter 4: Culture, follows to tell of its two themes, vital relativism that is a dynamic ―circle‖ of China-West interculture, and, naturally, Chapter 5: Milieu, rounds up both science and culture as our life-milieu. It begins intimately with kids, and then spreads to logic, time and space, and our ―self‖ in relation to our milieu. After this, we turn personal to Chapter: Pain, which is not evil, in pleasure-involvement that leads to the biblical love of enemies, charity, against capital punishment, and global ethics. Pain is shown as strangely unintelligible in Chapter 7: Akrasia, violence and depression. Finally, storytelling climaxes in Chapter 8: Silence, and Chapter 9: Music, where storytelling and hearing join in nature. In short, as time heals, history resolves matters to enable life to go on. Reflecting history, storytelling and story-reading put us at ease, to make sense of all things, and fulfill life. The following pages tell stories of all this story-thinking, reflexively and spontaneously. This is the only apt and natural way to deal with life as it is naturally told in stories.

Chapter 1

STORYTELLING WHEREFROM STORYTELLING Stories such as Homer‘s Odyssey develop over a vast period of time; it has been a popular hit, recited, read, and quoted repeatedly by a vast number of people, all over the world, for millennia. Besides, kids and students love to talk, talk, and talk, making teachers insane and making cell phone companies thrive. This fact of ubiquitous storytelling raises fascinating questions on why, what, and how we tell and hear stories.

Why Tell and Hear Stories? Why, to begin with, do we love to tell and hear stories, as if we had nothing else to do? Odysseus‘ slave the swineherd, who played host, gave us an answer, when he invited his guest, beggar stranger Odysseus (actually his master), saying, ―But we two, sitting here in the shelter, . . . shall entertain each other remembering and retelling our sad sorrows. For 1 afterwards a man who suffered much and wandered much has pleasure out of his sorrows.‖ That was the world‘s earliest psychotherapy. Story-therapy is an excellent counseling; counselor is simply a hearty skillful listener who requests to hear a story told her, ―Now, tell me about yourself. . . . Please, tell me more.‖ We love to tell and hear stories because, among others, storytelling heals. Why does it heal to tell and hear stories, however? Well, what is a ―story‖? Story is 2 3 intimately related to ―history,‖ not only etymologically but also in life, as Sartre said, (A) man is always a teller of stories. . . he sees everything which happens to him through these stories; and he tries to live his life as if it were a story he was telling. . . . While you live, nothing happens. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that‘s all. There are no beginnings . . . an interminable and monotonous addition. . . . But when you tell about a life, everything changes; . . . events take place in one direction, and we tell about them in the 1 The Odyssey of Homer, XV.398-401, tr. Richmond Lattimore (1967), NY: HarperCollins, 1999, p. 235. 2 See Oxford English Dictionary, 2001, VII:261 (―history‖), XVI:797 (―story‖). 3 Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, NY: New Directions, 1964, pp. 56-59. Cf. Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being, Chicago: Regnery/Gateway, 1960, I: 192-194. We appreciate storytelling here in opposition to their view that it is a self-deception. Cf. my The Butterfly as Companion, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990, pp. 7-8.

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Kuang-ming Wu opposite direction. . . I wanted the moments of my life to follow each other and order themselves like those of a life remembered. I might as well try to catch time by the tail.

Storytelling weaves together scattered meaningless bits of life-events into a coherent sense, to make a meaningful ―history‖ out of life events, to make sense of life, and meaningfulness makes life whole—and to make whole is to heal. We can now smile at our 4 pain. To tell is already to shape life‘s chaotic pieces into a story. The story is now a coherent life, a complex whole, all of a piece; and to heal is literally to make whole. Therefore, to tell a story is to heal. Storytelling is unfinished without being heard, however. Telling implies listening; storytelling expects to be heard; such is story-thinking. A story needs a listener to support, 5 6 interfuse, and complete, as Siddhartha felt when he met that humble ferryman Vasudeva. Vasudeva listened with great attention; he heard all about his origin and childhood, about his studies, his seekings, his pleasures and needs. It was one of the ferryman‘s greatest virtues that, like few people, he knew how to listen. Without his saying a word, the speaker felt that Vasudeva took in every word, quietly, expectantly, that he missed nothing. He did not await anything with impatience and gave neither praise nor blame—he only listened. Siddhartha felt how wonderful it was to have such a listener who could be absorbed in another persons‘ life, his strivings, his sorrows. (Then) the ferryman listened with doubled attention, completely absorbed, his eyes closed.

It is clear, then, that ―listening‖ is quite an active involvement. The activity of the listener turns crucial as one‘s story makes an intolerable whole of sorrows, for then the listener would gently nudge the storyteller to retell, re-describe, and rewrite a new story, and thereby turn the painful negative whole into a prideful joyous one. The gentle turning takes time, listening to which amounts to ―psychotherapy.‖ It happened when Siddhartha was unable to face the prospect of letting go of his son, the young rebellious Siddhartha, quite spoiled. Vasudeva had to gently nudge him to attend to the only hope for his son, to let his son leave him to face the world alone by the son himself. 7 Siddhartha remained hesitant, until finally a tragic breakup erupted. The (father) told him to gather some twigs. But . . . he stood there, defiant and angry . . . ―Bring your own twigs,‖ he shouted, foaming. ―I am not your servant. I know that you do not beat me; you dare not! . . . I hate you; you are not my father even if you have been my mother‘s lover a dozen times!‖ . . . The following morning he had disappeared.

All this while, Vasudeva was silent, waiting, waiting, and waiting, watching Siddhartha‘s fatherly pain, and followed him wherever he went in search for his son. Vasudeva listened well with his quiet behavior and followed Siddhartha‘s life-story with his life until it is complete.8

4 This is the whole point of Viktor Frankl‘s meaning-therapy, logotherapy, in Man‟s Search for Meaning, Boston: Beacon Press, 2004. 5 The listener can be oneself listening to oneself, of course. 6 Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha, tr. Hilda Rosner, NY: Bantam Books, 1971, p. 104. 7 Ibid., pp. 123f. 8 Ibid., pp. 136f.

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As Vasudeva rose from the seat on the river bank, when he looked into Siddhartha‘s eyes and saw the serenity of knowledge shining in them, he touched his shoulder gently in his kind protective way and said: ―I have waited for this hour, my friend. Now that is has arrived, let me go. I have been Vasudeva, the ferryman, for a long time. Now it is over. Farewell hut, farewell river, farewell Siddhartha. . . . I am going into the unity of all things.‖

As we see it happened, the events cooperated with the waiting, or rather, the waiting went along with the events. Waiting could do so because waiting takes time, and taking time gives room to go along with the events. Waiting is thus synonymous with listening, listening to events as we listen to the one suffering. Listening waits on the sufferer as listening waits on time to transpire. I walk out (of myself) into nature, and I am in raw contact. Green trees keep telling me of their green stories, with birds chirping, all by just being themselves in casual breeze. Flowers are not beautiful enough without birds chanting them, for birds are flowers of the air and the sky, and flowers are birds on the roadside singing beauty; they match and echo. We call them ―stories.‖ Hearing their stories, I feel so good, put together wholesome.

How to Listen How did he listen to the life-story of Siddhartha‘s as it developed? Anthropologist 9 Rodney Frey, in his objective ethnographic project, told us that he once bombarded a Crow Indian Chief Alan Old Horn with ―naïve‖ questions. In the end, Alan‘s patience ran out. He held up his hand and pointed to a tin shed some fifty yards away. ―You see that tin shed?‖ Alan asked. ―It‘s like my culture. You can sit back here and describe it, but it‘s not ‗til you go inside, listen, feel it, see from the inside looking out, that you really know what it‘s all about. You‘ve ‘gotta go inside!‖ The lessons of the ―tin shed‖ were taken to heart. Twenty years have passed since they sat under that cottonwood. What does Alan‘s talk mean? When I am just alone, not lonely, I am just I am; I do not listen to me, not deal with me, but I am just I am, alone; I am that tin shed. And then I hear this, see that, and they are just as they are, alone. We are alone, together. That is togetherness, in a tin shed. Thus togetherness has the quiet shed-depth of being alone, as the unknown bird just chirps, and the bare branch just stretched there, against the blue sky, as I trudge on, while in me my tin shed. Togetherness trudges on, alone. All this trudging makes it hard to imagine a year has just passed, and I cannot believe I am ―this old‖ now. I am what I am, and nothing is ever different from what I am. ―Difference‖ is not me but someone else talking outside the tin shed. I am I while someone else talks to make a difference, to make togetherness, alone and different. That is Alan talking, from his tin shed to invite us in.

9 Rodney Frey, ed., Stories That Make the World: Oral Literature of the Indian Peoples of the Inland Northwest As Told by . . . Elders, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995, p. 5. Alan‘s lesson shapes this book that tells this story and their stories.

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All talks are oral literature. All talks are a storytelling that is a ―confession,‖ what 10 11 literally speaks-out from inside a culture my tin shed and inside myself; such a talk links things together and yarns, weaves, and makes the world, my world, and thereby makes things whole—whole ciphers alone—and heals them all, the storyteller and the listener. To listen to such talks is to ―go inside, listen, feel it, see from the inside looking out,‖ and share the new creation of the world that puts us at home our tin shed. And that was what happened to Siddhartha as he, with Vasudeva, listened intently to the river, the Nature in which they both lived, intently. Such listening together made a new creation, in a new story of life, told, confessed, and intently listened to. In creation something brand new begins to be; it is the first step to initiate something new, and ―something new‖ is a fresh coherence of things, a making ―whole‖ against previous disintegration into chaos, into bits and pieces. Disintegration describes discomfort and disease in disarray; creation is fresh integration and coherence, where things fit together whole. Creation makes things emerge fit and whole, something wholesome. Now where does such creative beginning of all things begin? It begins at the self; creation is first and foremost an initiation of self-creation, to wit, making my self whole. Creation makes the self fit, whole, and thus wholesome. Creation in its very initial step is 12 self-healing. Creation makes whole to heal. Therefore, scientist Rodney Frey must have felt fit and wholesome as he told us the story of how Chief Alan Horn told him how to understand his tribal stories that compose their tin shed, their culture. This scientific storytelling of storytelling tells us a variety of sorts of storytelling and story-hearing. We can see five ways of seeing such variety of storytelling— story-thinking.

Five Sorts of Storytelling We see five points here about diverse sorts of storytelling. First, we have an originative storytelling from inside me and inside my culture, my tin shed my stories. It is overpowering; ―So he spoke, and all of them stayed stricken to silence, 13 held in thrall by the story all through the shadowy chambers.‖ Here I see everything alive, 14 ocean (Poseidon), dangerous high cliffs (Skylla), whirlpool on the coastline (Charybdis),

10 See Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, 1989, 2001, ―confess,‖ III.702. All words are alive with their unique biographical-etymological stories to tell-confess to us their users. All our talks are made of these living words that comprise our culture; to talk is to tell stories cultural and confessional. 11 I have been untiringly telling everyone that Chinese people think by telling stories, in all my books and articles. 12 This reflection answers the question of why Jesus heals. Jesus who claimed to be the Son of the Creator, came to habitually heal us in every sense, and often on the Sabbath, the Day exclusively of Creator God. Jesus the healer also tells stories, for stories heal; Jesus the healer and Jess the storyteller are one. As for story that heals, see Rollo May‘s interesting explanation of how storytelling—he calls it ―symbolism‖—heals in Symbolism in Religion and Literature, edited with an Introduction by Rollo May, NY: George Braziller, 1961, pp. 11-49. 13 Odyssey, op. cit., XIII.1-2 (p. 198). 14 As are well known, these are divinities who sorely troubled Odysseus in ibid., XII.85 (p. 187), XII.104 (p. 188), as explained in Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon (With revised supplement), Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996, p. 1617 (Σκύλλα) and pp. 1980-1 (Χάρσαδις).

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and even Dawn and necessity (Anankē). Nature is ―natura naturans and natura naturata,‖ 16 nature naturing, the birthing-power birthing things, and nature natured, things thus born. Nature is forever nascent physis, in constant process of growth, ―birthing, birthing, 17 without ceasing.‖ This sentiment of things alive, all in their own right, naturally breeds awesome polytheism, often condescendingly taken as ―anthropomorphic,‖ while we today continually recognize Nature‘s awesome power by naming hurricanes as Hurricane Agnes (1972), Hurricane Andrew (1992), Hurricane Mitch (1998), etc. ―Nature‖ is a correlative term, i.e., alive with us. Then, in reaction to the above inside storytelling, there arises storytelling from outside, an objective one. Here things are seen as mechanical blind stuff and processes, and today‘s 18 physics is born. Mechanism is the story taken for granted today; mechanics of technē, handcontrol, governs all things in the world and the world itself now. In opposition to anthropomorphism, this is ―mechano-morphism‖ today covering literally all, including ourselves in physiology, psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology, cultures, and everything in life in the universe. Thirdly, there is a storytelling from both inside and out. In fact, looking back, we realize that we have been telling stories about storytelling this way. To realize how naturally we see things from inside (how Mother Nature forever natures), and to see us today seeing things from outside (objectively, mechanically), we must ―catch time by the tail‖ (Sartre) to see time spatially and see space in time, as divinities do. We are ―created in divine images,‖ ―godintoxicated.‖ This is again a polytheistic way of telling stories. Here we hear the stories of things in the world in time/space from the past through now to the future, as told by Muse (and the dead 19 people beyond space/time) in the Odyssey. It is significant that Muse is the goddess of musing, that is, pondering and meditative thinking, as Oxford English Dictionary X:121 tells us. Etymology tells the story in the word. She oversees and surveys the entire story of anything; in fact, the Odyssey begins with appealing to goddess Muse for the hearing of the whole story of Odysseus. This comprehensive frame contains the confessional and autobiographical stories of Odysseus‘ adventures in Books VI through XII, and beyond. Fourth, the above three sorts of stories can be told in three ways. First, stories are told by life-behavior called ―ritual,‖ sacrifices and hecatombs with much invocation to change the course of events to our benefit and gratitude afterward, in ancient days, and today‘s science and technology to change the world without gratitude.

15 Quite often goddess Dawn appears in Odyssey to initiate new stage in Odysseus‘ adventures. 16 For ―natura‖ see P. G. W. Glare, ed., Oxford Latin Dictionary, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1982, 2002, pp. 1158-1159. For ―natura naturans and natura naturata‖ see William L. Reese, Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion, Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1996, p. 509. 17 See ―ananke‖ and ―physis‖ in F. E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon, New York University Press, 1967, pp. 18, 158-160. I combined this meaning of ―nature‖ as the constantly growing Urstoff with the famous Chinese phrase, ―生生不息.‖ Martin Heidegger was obsessed with physis as eruptiveactive, Introduction to Metaphysics, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 252 (index on ―phusis‖). 18 Ibid., p. 190. 19 The Odyssey begins with a request to Muse to ―tell me of the man of many ways‖ (I.1 [Lattimore, op. cit., p. 27]). The great Dead are as divine as nymphs, freely going in and beyond the confines of space/time (XI, pp.168-184).

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Stories can also be told by words of mouth, which is alive, rhythmic, rhymed-repetitious, and constantly in flux, as do today‘s political speeches inherited from such oral tradition. That was the oral tradition of epic poems and of today‘s political campaigns. Finally, stories can be told by hand into written mythologies, classical and contemporary, and volumes of pages. Fifth and finally, all explanations tell stories. We see two ways of telling such stories. (1) To begin, Aristotle summed up our explanations in ―four causes,‖ formal, material, final, and efficient; obviously, they tell four sorts of stories of how things are shaped, made, for, and work. Why does it rain? We humans say, because there is a tilt in the earth‘s revolution, the Dragon Up There sheds tears, I am hungry, or it just happens. We say they are ―whybecause,‖ so they are ―reasoning,‖ the first scientific, the second mythological, the third zodiacal, and the final fatalistic. We can equally say that these four sorts of reasoning sum up these sorts of storytelling. ―Is ‗science‘ a story?‖ Well, ancient people told their scientific stories that we call ―mythologies‖; we can equally say that science today continues to tell mythologies of the future, for today‘s science is a ―mythology‖ of tomorrow as ancient ―science‖ is today‘s mythology. Such science-mythology inter-transfer is story-thinking communicating itself across time.

Lessons from Stories (2) Besides, each storytelling breeds more stories of significance, lessons for our living. For example, the Odyssey stirs our meditations on four matters of consequence to life: (a) how important death and dead people are, (b) how Odysseus is strikingly compared with Agamemnon, (c) how this comparison illustrates an innocent joining of fate with freedom, and (d) how Greek polytheism, which graphically tells stories of this joining, echoes Christian triune monotheism. (a) The Odyssey has two elaborate episodes of dead people and Odysseus‘ visit with them—one is in the middle of Odyssey, just before Odysseus‘ straight journey home (Book 11); another is at the end, just before he visited his father Laertes (Book 24). These episodes‘ positions, the dead people first appear to Odysseus just at the crucial juncture of homecoming to give him a vista of his life-course, and then appear again at its conclusion to render their final judgment. Dead people have such an uncanny power, almost divine, because death is history, the retrospective finality of all; world history is indeed world judgment. History is the final arbiter because, as all Chinese history-writings show and tell us, history exhibits as nothing else does how nature works; history embodies the law of nature that natural science instinctively tries to discern by ―experiments,‖ contrived history. This—history in nature, nature in history—is the standard whereby all historians judge historical incidents. Let us go slower here, for the point is crucial. Incidents straightly story-told judge, and their historical judgments are most serious. A bare word of praise exceeds highest honors, and bare half-blame cuts deeper than axes and 20 galleys, for historical praises and blames stay forever incorruptible. History does not say but 20 My English trailed, barely from afar, 劉勰‘s incomparable 「褒見一字， 貴踰軒冕；貶在片言， 誅深斧鉞。」in 史傳第十六, 文心雕龍, 臺北市三民書局，民83, p. 156.

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shows, intimating its two judgment-criteria, wisdom and law, by straightly telling of both as another bunch of stories. The historians‘ criteria to judge incidents are historical wisdom and historical laws of cosmos. The first one is historical wisdom. Ssu-ma Ch‘ien judged Hsiang Yü‘s tragic arrogant 21 demise as due to his ―refusal to learn of ‗old‘ 不師古‖ ; Ssu-ma could judge Hsiang by learning of old 師古. Thus historical incidents are judged by accumulated wisdom of history, hammered out by long periods of repeated critiques of the ages, during which all various dross of ―mistakes‖ is found and cleansed. History as process of critical judgments thus makes no mistake; history is wise without qualification, for history-process includes all qualifications; it has gone through it all. The second criterion of historical judgment is the Laws of Nature-going ascertained by history. They are cosmology in cosmogony manifesting the Yin-Yang Five-Goings 陰陽五行, obtained by the long periods of repeated observations of various happenings perpetrated in history. Laws of nature are those by which ―mistakes‖ appear, and ―mistake‖ is inapplicable to the laws. Such natural laws are sought after by today‘s scientific experimentation, i.e., contrived history, and amassing observed data by sociology and natural sciences, i.e., historical data. Thus, these two standards of historical judgments are themselves ―history.‖ In short, history is judged by history. Uncannily, however, history betokens dead past. ―Cover the coffin, (we) finally judge 蓋棺論定,‖ China says. As we can now step back from the dead to look back at all matters about them, so can the dead now afford to give us their definitive vista, guide, and judgment over our past, present, and future. We make history out of dead people to critically learn from them about our own lives now into future. Now the last statement above is itself un-cannier than we can imagine. It amounts to saying that we ourselves make dead people uncanny, for the statement amounts to saying that it is we ourselves now who cover the coffin to the dead past, to make the dead come alive, make ―history‖ out of dead people, and have them tell us, judge us, and guide us, as we modify their instruction. We latecomers are the ―dead people,‖ as it were, to those who are dead, to make dead people come alive, to judge us as we judge them! ―Only dead people talk; we the living just chatter,‖ say we. Well then, if we want to really ―talk,‖ we had better be ―dead,‖ dead serious, to dead people and listen carefully to them. How? We do so by telling their stories with loving care. The Odyssey is in fact such a ―history‖ that renders the final judgment over our ideal hero Odysseus. He suffers so much as to be given an epithet, ―hated of gods and men‖ as his name 22 shows, yet he ―stubbornly‖ persisted in love of his no less ―stubbornly‖ devoted wife 23 Penelope until he was ―allowed‖ to succeed to come home to join Penelope. (b) As part of the final picture in retrospect, Homer skillfully placed throughout the story the dead Agamemnon side by side with the living Odysseus. The contrast is striking, serving as a striking foil to the breathtaking magnificence of Odysseus‘ life-adventure. How closely 21 This is Ssu-ma‘s 司馬遷 concluding remark in 項羽本紀第七, 史記，臺北市三民書局，2008, I: 457. 22 The mythic origin of the name ‘Οδσζζεύς is ―hated by gods and men,‖ ―Why, Zeus, are you now so harsh with him? ηί νύ ηόζον ώδύζαο, Σεΰ;‖ (Odyssey 1:62, Lattimore, p. 28; cf. pp. 99, 219, 242, 286, 289, 291, 292) See ‘οδύζομαι in Liddell and R. Scott, Greek-English Lexicon, op. cit., pp. 1199-1200. 23 Both Odysseus and Penelope described themselves as ―stubborn‖ (Lattimore, pp. 94, 299, 337, 339, 341).

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similar one life was to the other, and yet in how radically divergent they ended their respective lives! Both Agamemnon and Odysseus were rulers, friends to each other, fought together, loved their wives, and even made it home after much suffering. They both loved and were so grateful to be back and met their wives. Incredibly, however, Agamemnon was then murdered by his own wife and her paramour, while Odysseus came back and methodically murdered his devoted wife‘s arrogant suitors! Nothing is more shocking and poignant than this contrast. 24 This contrast is the climax in the final Story of the Dead People that concluded the final judgment on the life of Odysseus. Their contrast climaxed in having the dead former bless the 25 living latter, and the admiring judgment was delivered by none other than Agamemnon who freely admitted to his tragic fate before his friend, that incredibly fortunate Odysseus. What a 26 devoted friend Odysseus had in Agamemnon! (c) We cannot help but sigh, ―But poor Agamemnon! Why did their lives go so similar yet so different?‖ The Odyssey nonchalantly tells their stories, however, on how they were both free and fated. ―How could fate and freedom join in so naïve a manner?‖ In response to this query, the Odyssey simply keeps on telling their stories, as if to say, ―It just happened that way.‖ If we are disappointed, it is we who are naïve, for we are blind to how significant this ―It just happened that way‖ is. We don‘t see that if it just happens, it is beyond us, to wit, something divinities ordain, and so it is fated; at the same time, if it just happens, we can just enter the way things happen and freely do something about it. It is precisely in such an actual storytelling as this, of what just actually happens, that fate and freedom ―naively,‖ i.e., naturally, join. (d) This is what makes polytheism so appealing, what makes our lives alive, colorful, and variegated. ―It just happens‖ in polytheism relieves us from theodicy—to reconcile evil with one almighty all-loving God—while we can freely struggle to adjust what ―just happens.‖ Such ―simple‖ interactive union of divine fate and human freedom was vividly brought out by a straight telling of gods and goddess‘ love/assistance and hate/torment, diverse divine interventions, in Odysseus‘ persistent suffering struggles. Athene, the goddess of love, wisdom, war, and power, constantly came in to help Odysseus, even to the extreme of operating like ―deus ex machina.‖ Besides, her assistance was under the aegis of Zeus her supreme father god, who even appeared to Odysseus with the 27 portent of thunder. The theophany of both divinities binds the story, to begin and end the Odyssey. Now, this lively Greek polytheism echoes Christian monotheism. It takes two different matters and situations, far apart one from the other, to echo one against the other. Nothing is farther apart than Greek polytheism and Christian monotheism. Precisely because of their distance in every sense, we hear their echo, such as the Christ of love, fight, wisdom, and 24 Lattimore (p. 5) calls our attention to how often Athene exhorted Odysseus‘ son Telemachos to follow admirable Orestes‘ example to avenge on the suitors as Orestes avenged his father Agamemnon‘s death by murdering his father‘s murderer. It may well be so, but this insight fades in importance before the striking AgamemnonOdysseus contrast. 25 Ibid., p. 350. 26 China has some stories of moving friendship, but not as dramatic. We admire Agamemnon‘s generous friendship. 27 Lattimore, pp. 301, 319.

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power as the Son of God the Father who sponsors Christ‘s mission. Atheists accuse such acts of ―deus ex machina.‖ God the Father thunders ―for your sake,‖ said Christ (John 12:29). Homer foreshadows Christ. ―Now, are we sure of lessons of consequence today in dated classical mythologies? What 28 about ‗immortality‘?‖ Let us look at the world‘s oldest epic, Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh the heroic king of Uruk was jolted by his bosom friend Enkidu‘s death into an intense passionate search for immortality. Against four warnings by immortals to enjoy his present moments of mortal life, Gilgamesh kept up his wearisome search. Gilgamesh finally met an extraordinary mortal, Utnapushtim who, blessed by immortals, lives on undying. At his wife‘s urging, Utnapushtim gave Gilgamesh a plant that restores youth, which Gilgamesh sadly lost to a snake before he came home. He ―engraved on a stone the whole story,‖ and died happily ever after. Now, Gilgamesh must be happy that his story indicates at least five sorts of immortality. First, what immortals told him must be immortally valid, namely, we mortals can and must at any moment enjoy the present moment to the hilt, for ―now‖ is eternal. This insight is picked up later by Zen masters, ―Day after day, it is a good day 日日是好日.‖ Secondly, Gilgamesh found Utnapushtim forever idle in a rocking-chair; this is one sort of living undying. Do we want such life? Thirdly, he gave Gilgamesh the plant of renewal of youth, as the snake shedding its skin. Fourth, the immortality Gilgamesh wanted was his heroic exploits that forever win recognition. Fifth, this was why his whole story was ―carved on a stone‖; storytelling itself often achieves immortality as a ―classic.‖ The above five sorts of immortality remind us of four more sorts. Sixth, a person‘s ―character‖ or ―virtue‖ can often attain immortal renown, what Chinese people yearn as the first of ―Three Incorruptibles 三不朽,‖ the other two being Exploits and Words, also mentioned above by the Epic of Gilgamesh. Seventh, Indian people believe that human lives keep on dying and rebirthing (transmigration of souls) unless, eighth, some manage to reach and unite with the Eternal One and can afford never to return (Nirvana in later Buddhism). In response, ninth, Christianity looks forward to God‘s Kingdom after the Final Judgment. We hardly need to remind us that all these ―immortalities‖ are informed by ancient mythologies, and we today barely pursue only two of them, the second easy idleness and the 29 third youth-renewal, neither with much success. ―But then, what about the proposal that the present moment as eternal? Doesn‘t it sound incredible, if not too good to be true?‖ This query leads us to considering ―historical particularity.‖

THE CHRISTIAN SCANDAL OF HISTORICAL PARTICULARITY To show how the above explanation—storytelling—of storytelling is no idle talk but has practical bearing on the now as eternal, let us take the Christian scandal of historical

28 Among many versions, the following strikes the balance between literal truncated verses and a wholesale embellished story. N. K. Sandars, The Epic of Gilgamesh, London: Penguin Books, 1972. 29 These two sorts are what we usually mean by ―immortality,‖ as told by the editors of Time-Life Books in Search for Immortality, Alexandria, Virginia: Time-Life Books, 1992.

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particularity, supposedly30 unique to the Christian faith. With all respect to much sophisticated reflections in theology and comparative religion since Kittel coined that notorious phrase, ―the scandal of particularity,‖31 the problems enshrined in it32 refuse to leave us. In fact, today‘s global shrinking intensifies the problems.33 Here story-thinking handles the problem better than logical analysis. The problem is created by the impact of the beyond. Suppose we list incidents of the beyond, the non-actual, just for fun. We can think of going faster than the speed of light, a dragon a hotchpotch of actual features, a monster un-paint-able, forefathers and future plans, ideals unreachable, logical operation non-actual, mythical beings, gods and goblins, the imaginable, the unimaginable, UFO, parapsychology, fiction, utopias, the absurd, contradictions, paradoxes. We can go on listing them indefinitely. Kids are good at compiling them. These incidents happen without rhyme or reason. Storytelling can yarn it out, even yarning out logic and illogic. Scientific technology actualizes some of them, and metal can now fly and float to go to the moon, and smash and fuse atoms. Geniuses pleasantly, and insane people unpleasantly, expand our prosaic mundane mind, and they are beyond us to tell apart. Under the impact of the Ultimate Beyond, our usual world of concrete particulars now turns strange and awkward. Things no longer fit together as expected, but appear as oddly out of joint as described by Chinese Name Scholars, British Lewis Carroll, and Dutch M. C. Escher, though none of them seems to be aware of the impact from the Beyond on them (unless their inspiration is taken as the Beyond‘s impact). To us humans, religious ultimacy is universally particular, a strange one. Days going and dawns coming are beyond logic as religions are, yet as the Beyond-us, past events and future plans capture us as awesome gods and goddesses do, all vigorously come alive to enthrall us, in the irresistible power of storytelling as history, as visions, and as otherworldly might, to impinge on us here now to alter our world for ever. Story brings us the impact from Beyond us. Story and religion are twin sisters as the Muses and Hermes are siblings of mighty mythology, another name for storytelling. But ultimacy is one; religions are many. Historical Christianity is in a bind, in history. Jesus said, ―One who is not against us is with us,‖ such as Buddha, and ―One who is not with me is against me,‖ 34 such as Buddha. What does Jesus want of Buddha? Jesus said to Peter, ―You will be this and that‖; Peter 30 ―Supposedly‖ unique, because the Christian faith is often taken to uniquely typify this scandal, but as we see later, this ―scandal‖ is just a part of human daily living in naming specifics that spreads to universals. 31 Gerhard Kittel coined that notorious phrase, ―the scandal of particularity‖ (in Mysterium Christi, 1930), tacitly assuming Lessing‘s unbridgeable ―ugly broad ditch‖ between eternal logical necessity and ephemeral historical contingency (Lessing‟s Theological Writings [1886-1924], tr. Henry Chadwick, London: Adam and Charles Black, 1956, p. 55). This ―difficulty‖ is concocted out of radically separating the logical from the actual, with a Western penchant of logic-rationality. The scandal has another problem, however, as mentioned in the main text. 32 Obviously a cluster of issues, all ―tough cookies,‖ are related to this ―scandal‖—the uniqueness of Christianity, its truth, its mission, its relation to other religions, agnostics, atheists, deists, anti-Christians, non-Christians, other religionists, and the list goes on. Christ‘s atonement is not considered here, for it falls under ―uniqueness‖ as Buddha‘s Nirvana does to Buddhism. These issues are best raised naturally, as we will do some of them, while considering the concrete ―scandal‖ of a historical universal, Jesus as the Christ. 33 Notable are Christianity and the Wider Ecumenism, ed. Peter Phan, New York: Paragon House, 1990, and Jacques Dupuis, Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002; both volumes have extensive bibliographies. 34 Luke 9:50, 11:23. Amazingly, these two statements that seem tautological are actually incompatible!

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responded, ―How about him?‖ He said, ―What is he to you? You just follow me.‖35 Be not concerned with others but follow Jesus; but love is concerned with others. We should spread his love, to clash with other religions, but love does not compete (with other religions). Historical specifics gnaw. The resolution (not solution, for we cannot solve eternal problems beyond our logic) must be our common sense, that all religious, historical or not, are beyond us humans. The Beyond both intensifies the above problems and resolves them, in a storytelling way. We first consider the problem before its resolution.

How Problematic the Scandal is The scandal is that of the historical particularity of trans-historical ultimacy (not historical contingency involved in logical necessity as Lessing thought36). One form of the scandal is the ultimacy allowing no religious plurality, yet manifested as religious plurality in fact. Here are two concrete examples to show how problematic this scandal is, (a) whether the Confucian classics can serve as an Old Testament to Chinese (Christians), and (b) how we believe in historical Jesus as the Christ at all. (a) The first issue is, Can the Confucian Classics be the ―Old Testament to the Chinese‖? Can Chinese people take Christ to fulfill the ―Chinese OT‖ as he does the Jewish Bible? This is a two-edged dilemma, for Christianity as the Incarnation of ultimacy is historical and missionary, two features pulling in opposite directions. The historicity of Christianity entails its historical spread, i.e., Christian mission its life. So historicity and missionary spread interimply, and yet they pull apart, as follows. On one hand, as the historical faith, Christianity must be incarnated in the historical context of Judaism; Jesus was a Jew, and cannot forego his Jewish heritage—cut OT, and NT turns unintelligible. So, Bultmann37 is wrong in trying to extract the universal Christian ―essence‖ out of its historical ―mythological husk‖ that includes Judaism. On the other hand, the Christian faith is a missionary faith. It must be spread among nonJews to incarnate in non-Jewish cultures, and giving non-Jews the ―alien‖ Jewish OT gives 38 them a burden. Is this burden indispensable? Is this ―historical particularity‖ of having the Jewish OT an essential part of the ―Gospel scandal,‖ or is it an excess ―yoke‖ (cf. Acts 15:10,

35 John 18-22. 36 Gotthold E. Lessing said, ―That is: accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason.‖ (―On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power‖ [Lessings Werke, ed. Lachmann-Muncker, xiii, pp. 1-8], in Lessing‟s Theological Writings, tr. Henry Chadwick, London: Adam and Charles Black, 1956, pp. 54-55) 37 I considered Bultmann‘s ―demythologization‖ in On Metaphoring: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 2001, pp. 283-310. He is today‘s Marcion of Pontus (c85-c160 AD) who cut OT for the ―pure‖ Gospel in NT, ―pure‖ in terms of his unhistorical principles of Gnosticism, as Bultmann‘s ―pure kerygma‖ today is Heidegger‘s existenz. On Marcion, see Henry Chadwick, The Early Church (1967), London: Penguin Books, 1980, pp. 3840, 77, 80-81, 107, Paul Edwards, ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1967, V.155-156 (note its Bibliography), and Paul Lagassé, ed., The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, NY: Columbia University Press, 2000, pp. 1752-1753. 38 Those ―Christians‖ such as T. Merton, W. Johnson, and others, who try to ―welcome‖ Buddhism into their Christian faith, are strange/―funny,‖ as if advancing to someone else‘s wife. Cf. Sylvia Boorstein, That‟s Funny, You Don‟t Look Buddhist: On Being a Faithful Jew and a Passionate Buddhist, HarperSanFrancisco, 1997.

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19)? In short, can we substitute the Confucian Classics—equally historical —for the Jewish OT, to the Chinese? The crux of the problem is the very notion of ―incarnation.‖ It is ―Word made flesh,‖ Ultimacy made into history, Ultimacy historicizing in two senses. It can mean ―once and for all,‖ ―at last,‖ in the past; Jesus of Nazareth was and is the Christ, and no other. This is the historicity of Christianity. Incarnation as historicizing can also mean Jesus become Christ continually in history in all places and times; Jesus is Christ for Africans, Indians, Chinese, and so on, today, tomorrow, and always. This is the Christian mission spread; no spread, no Christianity. Historicizing Christianity thus means both ―once‖ and ―continuous.‖ The Jewish Bible as Christian OT belongs to the historical aspect; asking if Confucian classics can be OT to the Chinese belongs to the missionary aspect. We want both, but ―once‖ and ―continuing‖ cannot join. Such is the problem we have of Christianity as historical incarnation of the ultimate. (b) This Incarnation-problem cuts deep into the second scandal, a more radical Gospel 41 scandal. What does historical Jesus as ultimate Christ mean? Concretely, what does it mean for us today to believe in historical Jesus crucified under Pontius Pilate, as the ultimate Christ our eternal Savior of the whole world in all its history? Two extreme positions are possible. (i) Does it mean that the Christians of the twenty-first century must speak Aramaic of Jesus‟ day, go in pilgrimage to Golgotha, and be in quest of Jesus‘ skull? Do we embrace the historical fetish of Jesus in all his historical smells and details? We shrink from saying/doing so. At the same time, we are uneasy about the other extreme as well. 42 (ii) Jesus told us that we love him when we love the least of our brethren, so Jesus is a mere tag for loving God and brotherly men in general (Harnack). We now have no historical Jesus (Schweitzer), as Zen Buddhists kill historical Buddha and burn specific bibles standing in our way of universal love. In other words, accepting the Gospel-historicity wholesale would be historicism-fundamentalism, but picking-choosing from the Gospel as Marcion and Bultmann did would be judging the Gospel from (today‘s) general extra-historical principles. If neither of them is the Christian faith, what is? We can say that accepting historical Jesus does no blind historicism or intellectual judgment, but what does saying so mean? What is accepting the ―Christ crucified‖? Put Jesus‘ historical particularity this analytical way, and 43 we are impaled in a logical dilemmas, cornered in an analytical cul-de-sac. We must realize that such a logical way of analyzing history always lands us in insoluble troubles. Why? Logic misses the flesh and blood of history by analyzing and chopping it in two, ―on the one hand, on the other hand.‖ Logical either-or has cleaved up a living organism of history into two irreconcilable poles. Lived history is now nowhere, for history is neither anachronistic fetish nor ghostly principle that logic demands. Historical particularity is thus a ―scandal‖ to logic that analyzes, 39 Another problem: taking the Chinese Classics as an OT to Christianity may smack of a Christian knowledge of the Elephant (a favorite image among Indians) after which other religions only grope. 40 Taoism or Buddhism in China is not mentioned because they are less historical than Confucianism. 41 Mind you, Jesus Christ was crucified by the power that executed criminals, and all this happened by God‘s agency, for Paul. That is the Gospel scandal. Historical understanding as a part of the Christian faith, however, is not a scandal, much less Gospel scandal. We consider the latter, not the former. 42 Matthew 25:40. 43 Christianity and the Wider Ecumenism, ed. Peter Phan, NY: Paragon House, 1990, bravely walks this analytical route to harvest some impressive fruits, none of which is wholly satisfactory. We go a storytelling way.

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while history is as it actually is; it is a time-woven montage of events and situations. History alive, as flesh-and-blood, cannot be torn up into bits lifeless and unintelligible.

Resolving Historically—Storytelling Way—The Problem of Historicity Luckily, if logic chops, story joins. Analysis divides the forest of the world into its trees 44 to miss the world-forest; story-thinking joins trees to perceive the forest, for storytelling is not cognition of things but recognition of their whole pattern. Storytelling is alive as life. Any event that happens into life sticks together one after another into stories, into history, to tell of life to make sense of life. The Bible is made up primarily of stories of histories. Cobb said, ―Where have I learned these things? . . . I must come back to the fact that it is from the 45 Christian story that I have learned them, primarily from the Bible.‖ Story is yoked to history, and both are joined to understand lived particular events. History comes alive as stories because history is a story of living humanity. Historical 46 47 particularity can only be historically understood, to wit, by storytelling (not by logical analysis into generalities). E.g., the horrendous description in Judges 19 is less enlightening 48 than David‘s tragic ―O Absalom, my son, my son!‖ How can we think so? We do so historically, taking that fullness-of-time Incident, Jesus of Nazareth, as fulfiller of David‘s wishes, not of Judges 19. 49 50 Historical Jesus thus completes historical OT that explains him. History makes more history to make history intelligible, storytelling way, to understand how historical particularities, Christian and non-Christian, join toward intelligibility. ―How does such historical understanding go?‖ We can only tell stories, one after another, to show how. (a) Thus the dilemma of what comprises our belief in historical Jesus originates in unnatural logical analysis, and can be resolved in natural story-way, somewhat as follows. We see how the mother tenderly tenders her child‘s physical wellbeing by washing him, feeding him, and clothing him. Seeing her serving his physiological needs, we say, ―Aha, Mom loves her child.‖ Spiritual love invisible is shown in physical service all too visible to all. 44 This forest-perception is what Bernard J. F. Lonergan calls ―insight‖ in Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, NY: Philosophical Library, 1958. Gestalt psychology calls it ―pattern recognition.‖ 45 John Cobb, Jr. in Toward a Universal Theology of Religion, ed. Leonard Swidler, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1987, p. 92. Sadly, Cobb has his own problem he does not even perceive and falls into universalism of a sort with John Hick. 46 Contrary to Gordon Kaufman‘s claim that history is a quagmire of relative human limitations (The Myth of Christian Uniqueness: Toward a Pluralistic Theology of Religions, eds., John Hick and Paul F. Knitter, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1987, pp. 3-15), we must assert that history is the final judge of things, as many antiuniqueness scholars judge Christianity by its historical effectiveness, as Jews and Jesus constantly appealed to OT‘s events and sayings, and as Chinese people meant by ―immortality‖ as historical continuation of virtue, feats, and words. Chinese historians continue to appeal to history to judge the past and the present. We continue to admire/learn from Socrates throughout history. See also ―§ History and the I Ching Make No Mistakes‖ below. 47 C. S. Lewis (Reflections on the Psalms, 1958) confesses that he cannot be proud of some passages in the Psalms (e.g., 137:9), for he takes the Bible as a collection of eternal ahistorical truths. We can take such passages historically, and see how lovingly God the Father has collected all his children‘s inner feelings and outer behaviors, mostly embarrassingly ugly. Our ugliness manifests God‘s parental love cherishing it. 48 2 Samuel 18:33. 49 ―Ye have heard that A. But I say unto you that not-A‖ to ―fulfill‖ ―the law and the prophets.‖ 50 ―And the scripture was fulfilled, which saith. . .‖ (Mark 15:28)

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This is by the nature of the case. As Peter lost sight of Jesus to fall into the turbulent waters on which he was walking, he instinctively called to Jesus for help. Jesus‘ stretch of hand was instant. That physical pullout provoked the disciples‘ worshipful awe and belief in 51 Jesus as the Son of God. Here is the nick of time unity of pulling and believing, as dialing ―911‖ call for help that has no split between physical cares and personal attention. Similarly, as we claim we believe in historical Jesus, we know how to do so without bothering with the logical dilemma of whether our belief is to take him as our logical principle or to take his concrete details, cultural, historical, and physiological, as our idols and fetish. The principle is the concrete that incarnates the principle. What nature and history join, let no logical analysis put asunder. (b) The problem of whether the Confucian classics can serve as an OT to Chinese Christians is more complex to resolve, though it is in the same line as above. Let us begin by again telling a story. Suppose Mr. and Mrs. Smith went to a show of ―West Side Story.‖ As Tony was murdered, Mrs. Smith wailed aloud, ―O, poor Tony! My poor Tony!‖ Whereupon Mr. Smith was so enraged he dragged her out to accuse her of infidelity. She wiped tears and said, ―My dear, how could you miss me so miserably? How could I love you so if I were unable to cry over Tony?‖ This answer completely baffled Mr. Smith, but we see what she means. Her love of husband enabled Tony‘s tragic death to unbearably incarnate in her, as the incarnation in turn fortified her love of the husband. Two separate historical particularities, one actual, another 52 fictive, mutually echoed and fortified her spousal love. This story deeply moved me. Mrs. Smith‘s pain for Tony reenacts Jesus‘ praises of the Roman centurions, the Good 53 Samaritan, and the Samaritan leper. ―Bring your husband,‖ Jesus lovingly told the Samaritan woman before elucidating how to worship God in spirit. To love my neighbor, the one close to me, as myself now, all this is to worship God with all my heart and soul. Neighbor-love here now deepens God-love, while neighbor is no God, as shedding tears over Tony deepens Mrs. Smith‘s love of Mr. Smith, though Tony is no Mr. Smith. Love knows such oddity. Let us repeat this important point. Jesus said our spontaneous service to the needy here now is to serve Jesus himself always; it is what really counts at the Last Judgment. His story of the Good Samaritan, a Gentile‘s concrete assistance of someone nameless, upon seeing him half dead on the roadside, and all such Gentiles he cherished, elucidate the very inner sanctum of the Christian faith in God as ―loving my neighbor as myself,‖ all too inter-human love here now. He did not cite Abraham‘s love of Lot or Moses‘ love of his people. We cannot cleanse our house first, and then go out to spread the Christ to the infidels, for the Bible is itself suffused with ―mission‖ praxis that composes and spreads the Bible. To love and learn from my unbeliever-neighbor—as Jonah was forced to learn from Assyrians so atrocious an enemy superstitious and pagan, the Jonah Jesus cited as the only miracle for us—is to spread-serve

51 Matthew 14:28-33. 52 This story differs from the view that belief in Christ is like spousal commitment that allows others‘ similar lovecommitment to other religions. Mutual evocation and strengthening differs from allowing. 53 All these common Gentiles, great in Jesus‘ eyes, will be mentioned soon to understand the Christian faith.

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Christ, who told his disciples he had food they did not know, for sharing divine love with 54 infidels feeds our faith. But we have overshot ourselves. We must go slowly, beginning from scratch, to show how going out cherishing the human Gentile outsiders deepens our own divine faith inside. Let us begin at the Bible itself, on how it is formed by surrounding superstitious religions, which are not targeted as objects of conversion by our ―mission‖ if not of abolition.

Rejection Cum Assimilation as Self-Assertion and Enrichment The weak small Israelites had to assert their unique monotheistic faith against surrounding overwhelming religions of the mighty Assyrians and Babylonians, for religious ―faith‖ is the essential force that unifies and fortifies ethnic integrity against absorption.55 This situation yielded a paradox, however. On one hand, Israel must reject the surrounding polytheistic myths, and yet, on the other, in the very process of rejection, could not help but assimilate them, in a changed form, into the Israelite canon. Rejection and assimilation strangely went hand in hand to enrich the Israelite religion. The Bible itself shows some examples. Our first example is Genesis 1. Reworked assimilation of Mesopotamian myths resulted in an austere poetry of world-creation. In Genesis 1, the Hebrew tehom the Deep replaces Akkadian Tiamat, conquered in a messy cosmogonic battle by the god Marduk, and the majestic divine call resounded over the primordial waters, ―Let there be light!‖ and there was light primordial before the sun and the moon came about. And then, over six ―days‖ were issued six clarion calls of ―Let there be . . . !‖ and the orderly world came about in an orderly way, to be blessed with ―Very good!‖ before climaxing on the Sabbath Day of cosmic Rest. Adapting from the polytheistic myths produced these magisterial poetic lines. Such rejection cum assimilation makes up the Israelite‘s pattern of asserting their unique monotheism, of which they so weak were unsure at the time, over against their surrounding 56 religions. Niditch said, Our God is one, while theirs are multiple. Our God need only speak and the world becomes, theirs need to fight. . . . Genesis 1 points to Israelite insecurity at a time when her people, holy city, and temple have been conquered by the Babylonians, the people of Marduk. In fact, many people feared that Yahweh was weak, no longer able to protect his people, no longer God. Genesis 1 answers boldly, as does Isaiah 40, that God is the sole creator and is all-powerful. No tension grips the reader of Genesis 1, for chaos has no power. Rather, one approaches the account in awe, in the mode of the experiential.

54 Matthew 12:39-41, John 4:31-34. 55 Speiser strongly asserts this view, E. A. Speiser, Genesis, The Anchor Bible, 1962, pp. xlvii-lii. 56 Susan Niditch, Ancient Israelite Religion, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 53. Speiser strongly insists on both the entire OT‘s extensive textual alignment with the Mesopotamian ―scientific‖ tradition and sharp divergence in over-all approach from it (Genesis, op. cit., pp. liv-lviii, 8-13). Cf. Genesis: As It Is Written, ed. David Rosenberg, HarperSanFrancisco, 1996, pp. 15-34. Neither probed what all this means, however.

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Besides, significantly, to repeat, such daring and awesome self-assertion of monotheistic faith is accomplished by adopting and adapting the religious languages of those against whom the assertion was made. The second example is vividly typified in the story above of Mrs. Smith that captures the logical paradox of historical love: Mrs. Smith deepens her love of Mr. Smith by wailing over Tony‘s death. Two instances in OT reminiscent of Mrs. Smith elucidate the paradox of love that seeps into our hearts and souls. The first is divine love. Yahweh-love vehemently rejected Baal-love while accepting the 57 Baalism-image of god-as-husband, by which to condemn Baal-idolatry as Yahweh-adultery. 58 The condemnation is legitimate in Judaism of the law of severe love. This love-paradox is a part of the paradox of Judaism rejecting other surrounding religions, and then avidly taking them into Judaism. Baal-love is vehemently rejected, only to enter Judaism as Yahweh59 husband pledging his absolute fidelity to the wayward Israel-wife. The second Bible instance of Mrs. Smith is the pagan gruesome offering of firstborns to 60 61 appease gods that Yahweh forbade, yet Yahweh ―tempted‖ Abraham with this horrid trial 62 itself. And then, incredibly, these two abominable instances, sex-worship and infanticide, joined in the Bible to make up the core of Christianity! How did the joining happen? 63 Both Isaiah and Ezekiel vehemently condemned sex-worship and fiery infanticide 64 routinely practiced among the surrounding neighbors. However, the twofold prohibition later somehow transmuted into God offering to himself his own Son on the gruesome Cross to 65 atone for our sins, ―for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.‖ Thus the two pagan abominations turned into two foci of the oval, the ―olive‖ of Good News that, 57 This sentiment climaxed in Hosea. See Francis J. Anderson, Hosea, The Anchor Bible, NY: Doubleday, 1980. H. D. Beeby, Grace Abounding: A Commentary on the Book of Hosea, Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1989. Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, eds. Karel van der Toorn, et al., Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995. Niditch, Ancient Israelite Religion, op cit. And the list goes on. 58 Judaism is not a missionary religion and only slowly proselytized pagans almost by default, and so the paradox exists only by default. This is my opinion contrary to most OT scholars. 59 Biblical theologians are almost all obsessed with the closest intimacy between the Judeo-Christian tradition and its surrounding cultures and religions. Niditch‘s Ancient Israelite Religion, op. cit., chronicles intimacies of the Israelites with religions surrounding them. John H. Marks and Robert M. Good, eds., Love and Death in the Ancient Near East, Guilford, CT: Four Quartet Publishing Company, 1987, has essays on death, love, sex, kings, and human mortality in cultures surrounding the biblical tradition. John T. Fitzgerald, Cracks in An Earthen Vessel: An Examination of the Catalogues of Hardships in the Corinthian Correspondence, Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1988, sees parallels between Seneca‘s proud catalogue of sufferings and Paul‘s. Dale B. Martin, Slavery as Salvation: The Metaphor of Slavery in Pauline Christianity, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990, sees how the Christian community adopted the Greco-Roman notion of ―slavery‖ to express their pride in being ―Christ‘s slave,‖ saved by their Lord Christ and absolutely belonging to him. Aristotle‘s words, ―some are fit to rule, some fit to be ruled,‖ could also have been picked by Paul—Christ fit to rule, Christians fit to be ruled, not by talents but by His self-giving love. Even Norman H. Snaith‘s The Distinctive Ideas of the Old Testament (1944), London: The Epworth Press, 1957, appeals to parallels to surrounding cultures to bring out the distinct Christian tradition. None, however, notices the paradoxical character of unique exclusive Judeo-Christian sentiment and its close parallels with surrounding cultures it vehemently rejects. 60 Whether or not this custom is related to the offering ―of the first of all the fruit of the earth‖ (Exodus 23:19, Deuteronomy 26:1-10, etc.) awaits investigation. 61 See Jeremiah 7:31, 19:5, Ezekiel 16:21. 62 See its terse gripping story in Genesis 22. 63 Isaiah 57:5, Ezekiel 23:37. 64 See II Kings 3:27, 16:3, 17:31, 21:6, 23:10. 65 This is the famous John 3:16. Seldom do people notice its paradoxical joining!

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incredibly, the Son to be offered announced as divine Love wooing his unworthy wife of humanity! Here is the paradox of rejecting two pagan abominations—sex, infanticide—only to take them, transformed, into the core of Christianity, as God‘s persistent atoning compassion, and then into our redeeming imperative of divine compassion to spread vigorously as LoveIncarnation among various peoples of alien cultures. The spread thrills our souls. 66 The shepherd leaves 99 sheep in the wild to go after the one lost ―until he finds it.‖ Compassion is intensely particular. OT is full of God‘s ―arrogant‖ declaration, ―Mr. A I love! Mr. B I hate!‖ It is a fierce partiality of love, and it strangely spreads all over. This is because, paradoxically, this partiality of empathy eventually, inevitably, spreads throughout every particular act, as Mrs. Smith‘s love of Mr. Smith spreads to her compassion with Tony‘s disaster, only to redound back to Mr. Smith. The Red Cross and medical personnel heal enemies. Historians‘ empathy on each event makes ―history.‖ The parents love each child as if they had no other, and their partiality spells 67 their impartiality. Yehudi Menuhin vowed never to play the Beethoven Violin Concerto with any other conductor—such musical empathy he had with Furtwängler his conductor!— and then played it 25 times a year with every other conductor. Compassion in enthusiasm is relentlessly particular to spread to all, without confusion. All this happens here now. If this spread of particularity sounds incredible, think of our love of many biographies. We love to read biographies of all sorts, of various heroes, heroines, and scandalous people, each unique and different from all others, yet we do not confuse them, much less losing our own lives in them. On the contrary, we devour biographies of others to learn how to live our life, not in their ways but in our respective ways. In fact, not only do we not mind reading biographies of different times and cultures; we positively relish such differences, transporting ourselves to those days and cultures as we enjoy traveling to foreign lands and meet exotic peoples. In fact, it is not too much to claim that all short stories and long novels, and even essays, casual or theoretical, are disguised biographies and autobiographies. They tell of themselves and we listen intently as Odysseus‘ swineherd and Siddhartha‘s friend, ferryman Vasudeva, do. Events and things appear; their phenomenon shows their autobiographies telling of whereon they depend, wherefrom they spring, and wherein they rest, and nothing is hid as they tell of their self-stories. Things appear always confessing to their stories, and their phenomenal appearance is their phenomenology their appearance-logos, showing their stories. To watch, observe, and ponder on their telling, confessing to their dependence, origins, and home understand them.68 Such is ―story-thinking‖ on things‘ ―phenomenology.‖ 66 Divine Love‘s search is persistent (Luke 15). [a] Love goes after the lost sheep in the wilderness of iniquity among ―all the [captivated] publicans and sinners‖ ―until he finds it/him/her—dead, and is alive again.‖ It seeks the lost coin in the house of orthodoxy among ―the [murmuring] Pharisees and scribes‖ ―till she finds it—lost, and is found.‖ [a‘] Love thus leaves the 99 sheep (for one sinner), sweeps the house (for his elder brother Pharisee); love revolutionizes the entire establishment (Luke 15:1-10). [b] The first two parables focus on the Son of God as shepherd searching, as lady sweeping, until finding the precious lost; the third describes how all this while Father God intensely, patiently, awaits the beloved home. [b‘] The parable climaxed in the lost sinner-son joined with his Father (17, 20-24); sadly, Father‘s pleading with elder brother to harvest his homecoming (28, 31-32) is yet to realize. Jesus‘ three love-parables are tightly knit, heartrending. 67 Less dramatically but no less concretely and crucially, a little sister insists on having her birthday party on the big brother‘s that day, or else it is ―Not fair!‖ Their parents comply, smiling; what else could they have done? Equality (of love) is no sameness (of treatment). 68 I rifled Confucius‘ sigh (2/10), ―視其所以，觀其所由，察其所安。人焉廋哉! 人焉廋哉!‖

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It is thus that we love biographies, stories-of-life, in history that is time-biography, in culture that is race-biography, and in the current news that is today-biography. Informed about stories-of-life out there to resonate with them, our life here now grows enriched. We join with them naturally to inter-thrive, yet without confusion. The point is clear. We should accept historical Jewish Jesus with his OT, and accept our respective cultural-historical traditions, to see Moses and Jesus among us. By the same token, Britons should study their Churchill, Americans study their Washington, and Chinese their Confucius, to appreciate Jewish Moses. Churchill is not Moses any more than he is Washington or Confucius, but studying them in our respective cultures inspires our lives in our respective ways, as the Moses does us as he does Jews. This realization leads to a maxim of Christian mission.

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Inter-learning to inter-deepen various respective faiths is what ―conversation‖ means. 70 After all, a dialogue assumes and requires differences among its partners. Mountain climbing conquers our inner-mountain, and chopping a tree chops the chopper, they say, but obviously our self remains the human self, not mountain or tree. Remaining disparately themselves, these events coincide as co-incidents co-happening. As the exclusive faith of Judeo-Christianity rejects pagan abominations only to absorb them to self-deepen, so its life in mission-spread consists in saving other faiths and cultures into themselves. The Christians must not level down other faiths; such our human move plays god, a prime crime against the Christian First Commandment. Instead, the Christians should admit that they are as human as other religionists, and humbly learn from them to enrich their own Christian faith, and invite others to learn from Christianity, and help them deepen their own non-Christian faiths. Religions are concrete cases of coincidence of counterparts. This existential drama manifests clearly in our handshake, which requires both parties to stand facing each other, mutually opposed, to stretch hands from opposite ends. Dialogue among religions is a religious handshake, a conversation inter-versing among empathetic minds, independent, diverse, and opposed. The handshake occurs at the Mountaintop of Salvation for the Hindus, the Elephant of Reality for the Buddhists, the Heaven Above All Over for the Chinese, and the Logos of Truth for the Christians. For the Christians the Christ is Logos Incarnate, for the Chinese the 69 I explained how Christians can learn from Zen and Taoism in On the ―Logic‖ of Togetherness: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 1998, pp. 240-253, etc. Yagi Sei-ichi has breathtakingly deepened the Christian truths in subterranean Oriental mindlessness (無心) and naturalness (自然) in 八木誠一 and 秋月龍泯著, 無心と神の國: 宗教における, 東京青土社, 1996. My stand agrees with Jacques Dupuis‘s quite wordy Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002, pp. 7, 11, 17f, 23, 198-201, etc., John B. Cobb, Jr.‘s Whiteheadian Beyond Dialogue: Toward a Mutual Transformation of Christianity and Buddhism, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982, and H. D. Beeby‘s devotional Canon and Mission, Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1999. But none effectively relate inter-learning (relatedness) to its rejection (ultimacy). 70 Dupuis also stressed the differences among dialogue partners, and stressed both faith-commitment and otheropenness. Sadly, he simply wordily repeated his assertions without rationale or explanation (op. cit., pp. 379380, etc.).

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Heaven is what they best understand, for the Buddhists the Buddha is the Elephant, for the Hindus, many gods and goddesses are the Mountaintop. To the Christian description of self-sacrificial love toward neighbors (Good Samaritan) and friends and foes (Christ on the cross), the Buddhists would nod as selfless ―mercy,‖ and the Confucians would nod as self-sacrificial devotion to societal ―justice.‖ The Christians would in turn deepen their faith by realizing the Buddhist dimension of mercy, and the Confucian filial devotion to justice, in Christ‘s love. Thus in the dialogue of handshake each party learns from others to know better about their own Mountaintop, Elephant, Heaven, Logos, and Compassion. All partners honestly affirm their respective stands and viewpoints for genuine meaningful dialogues to occur in inter-versals, to attain a universal in the religious multi71 verse. Such is the ―Christian mission to nonbelievers,‖ the mission of mutuality of deepening. ―Mission‖ is inter-mission dialogical, as Jesus was ―fed‖ by a Samaritan woman and urged us to learn from Roman centurions and soldiers, the Good Samaritan, a SyroPhoenician woman, and the list goes on. ―How about Christian ‗redemption‘ in this inter-learning context?‖ Well, Jesus told us to learn from them all, for learning is one mode of loving them, and redemption is an act of dying for the beloved, whoever they are. Jesus told us not to tell about him while roaming everywhere; he commissioned us the task of ―mission‖ only after he died for us all, for all Romans, all Syro-Phoenicians, all Samaritans. He performed loving them, dying for them (=redeeming them) one by one, in silence, and then asked us to love them, one by one, likewise, in silence, incognito, now. To redeem people is to restore them into themselves as they really are. Christian medical and psychiatric missions of Schweitzer and countless others restore people‘s health, physical and mental, and Christian literacy campaigns enrich and deepen indigenous cultures. Christian hospitals in Taiwan turn so many people vibrantly healthy, and Taiwanese language written and spoken was promoted-deepened by many vernacular dictionaries that are 72 unwitting torchbearers of Taiwan culture. Redemption is restoration to pristine spiritual selves, physical and cultural.

71 To the query whether honest non-Christian believers, or even honest humanist atheists, can be saved, the Christians can answer, ―We humans do not know, but we do know Christ died for them, and the God of Christ is all-compassion. So our God will take very good care of them.‖ 72 Charles R. Joy, ed. Albert Schweitzer: An Anthology, Boston: Beacon Press, 1947. 潘稀祺編著，

新樓情，舊相簿：全台第一間西醫病院，歷史腳跡, A Pictorial History of the First Western Hospital in Taiwan: The Sin-Lâu Christian Hospital, 1998, and 臺灣醫療宣教之父—馬雅各醫生傳，2004, both

published by 台灣基督長老教會新樓醫院. Rev. Carstairs Douglas, suppl. By Rev. Thomas Barclay, ChineseEnglish Dictionary of the Vernacular or Spoken Language of Amoy (1873), Taipei: SMC Publishing Inc., 2009. Rev. Dr. William Campbell, The Dictionary of the Amoy Vernacular (1913), Taiwan Church Press, 廈門音新字典, 臺灣基督長老教會公報社出版, 2009, continuing to be in press. The last volume begins by citing how conversion to the Christian faith turned all illiterate catechumens literate, from Report of the Centenary Missionary Conference at Shanghai. All medical-cultural missions and publications in other lands and by Catholicism are omitted.

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The Divine One beyond Human Reason ―Where is the Divine One in these bewildering inter-learning dialogues?‖ Their final rationale lies precisely in this Divine One as beyond ours. In ―God is One‖ the One is a 73 74 Mystery ; it is beyond and includes human numerical ―one.‖ God‘s One is beyond and 75 includes both the West‘s either-or exclusivity and Asia‘s inclusive both-and; the Divine 76 One includes both the West and Asia and is neither, for the Divine is beyond us all. ―How does it obtain?‖ Look at the child, to whom the Kingdom of God belongs, says Jesus. His saying so stunned people at the time that all three Gospels record the saying almost verbatim.77 ―But the child is still growing up to adulthood, how could it be where Perfection belongs? Kids are so imperfect; how could Perfection belongs to imperfection?‖ Well, such adult chauvinism is precisely what angered Jesus, provoking him to make the statement that Perfection belongs to imperfection on the go. ―What can we learn from the imperfect child, then?‖ What about its constant learning attitude? We must learn their constant learning; anyone who ceases to learn is dead. Let‘s see how kids learn. To a child, the fascinating adult world has every sort of things, a, b, c, . . . and so the adult world is a+b+c+ . . . But a is not b and often cannot be joined to b, so a+b+c+ . . . is a contradiction, an impossibility. This is because the adult world includes the child‘s world and it is not the child‘s. We are children in the adult world of the Beyond. Moreover, we humans know only a, b, c, and do not know ― . . . ,‖ nor do we know what ―+‖ means. ―A single grain of sand‖ is enough for us to ―see a whole world,‖ and, worse, we do not know if we tend to take ―enough‖ as ―no other savior‖ or not. Finally, we must refuse to ―draw implications‖ of agnosticism, universalism, inclusivism, etc., out of our ignorance, for such ―logical drawing‖ does not hold in the realm of the Beyond, as if we could apply our human notion of ―cause‖ to the creation of the world to reach its Almighty Creator as its ―Cause.‖ These negatives warn us about our human finitude before the Beyond. So many various schools in Chinese Buddhism, Catholic scholasticism, and the 78 hopelessly cluttered history of Western philosophy, show how impossibly mind-boggling 73 Often mentioning the word ―mystery,‖ Dupuis never reverently and seriously considers what it means. 74 Paul Tillich develops this theme in an interesting way, saying that the ubiquitous criterion of the divine is selfnegation as self-affirmation, as Christ on the cross did. F. M. Jelly summed it well in Christianity and Wider Ecumenism, ed. Peter C. Phan, NY: Paragon House, 1990, p. 195. 75 Tillich says, ―Religion is the depth-dimension of culture . . . Unity does not exclude definitory distinction. . . . [T]he dimension of ‗depth‘ shines through [that of] cognition.‖ This is said on the ―unity‖ of religion and culture. This saying fits our view if ―religion‖ is our ―mystery‖ and ―culture,‖ many actual religions. (The Theology of Paul Tillich, eds., C. W. Kegley and R. W. Bretall, NY: The Macmillan Company, 1961, p. 337. See its elaboration in his Systematic Theology, Volume Three, University of Chicago Press, 1963, p. 158.) 76 This is a short gist of my On Nonsense: Cultural Meditations on the Beyond, yet to publish. 77 Matthew 19:14=Mark 10:14=Luke 18:16. ―Such as these‖ means ―kids of all ages.‖ Derived from kids‘ learning openness is of course their honest translucency; ―Mom, grandpa gave me a candy, and told me not to tell you.‖ This is pure innocence, lost among Adam and Eve hiding from God in the primal Kingdom the Garden of Eden. Adam‘s posterity, scholar Nicodemus, furtively visited Jesus at night; so Jesus had to shock him by advising him to be born again in wind and water of open translucency (John 3:3-8). Openness goes with translucency, so open as to be a secret closed to Nicodemus‘ scholarship; this is kids‘ Kingdom of Perfection, revealed to infants alone in joy, hid to the wise (Luke 10:21, cf. Matthew 11: 25). It is kids‟ Gateless Gate 無門關that Zen misses. 78 Sorensen said, ―Mathematicians characterize prime numbers as their atoms because all numbers can be analyzed as products of the primes. I regard paradoxes as the atoms of philosophy because they constitute the basic points of departure for disciplined speculation.‖ (Roy Sorensen, A Brief History of the Paradox, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. xi) The quip that begins his book on the history—story—of paradox can be understood by taking paradox as an embarrassing cipher of logical mess (reason‘s ―dox‖ ―para‖-ed) at the

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these logical kaleidoscopes are, and even each school is beyond our understanding on what it has and why it goes that specific way and not any other. All this ―makes sense‖ if we take it as manifesting the human confronted with the Beyond. In fact, every religion, every history, even daily happening now, is as spectacularly 79 mind-boggling, without rhyme or reason. The historical scandal of the Christian faith just honestly exhibits this fact of the Beyond made flesh in human actuality.

Inclusive and Irrelevant This realization enables us to reject both Hick flattening all religions including Christianity, and the fundamentalists totally rejecting non-Christian religions—and include 80 both approaches. We now understand why Jesus tells us to go nowhere except the houses of the Israel, and to go learn from all non-Christians on how to worship God and love our neighbors—Roman centurion, the Good Samaritan, the Samaritan leper, the Syro-Phoenician 81 mother, and other Gentiles. ―What does it mean to claim the Beyond to include both fundamentalists and liberals, yet has nothing to do with them?‖ Let us be concrete. Fundamentalists are right in taking the Bible as God‘s message, but are wrong in claiming that therefore the Bible is wholly inerrant and divine. The liberals are correct in saying that the Bible is written by men, but wrong in saying that therefore the Bible is wholly human, expressing only human awareness of the holy. The truth is made by combining what are right in both parties, that the Bible is God‘s message ―seen darkly‖ through fallible human perception. For example, Psalm 137:9, Judges 19, and many other embarrassing records of ugly deeds and emotions are wholly human (liberals), and God‘s love in horrendous sorrow recorded all of them, as human parents collect all their beloved children‘s words and deeds, mostly so embarrassing and horrendous (fundamentalists). Thus the records of human ugliness reflect and exhibit God‘s extraordinary parental love. The key is parental love that goes beyond and includes all children‘s ugly emotions and deeds. The Kingdom of Perfection belongs to kids-of-all-ages opening out learning unlimited, forever refreshing.

From Parental Love to Christian Mission as Interreligious Dialogues Parental love hits three points. One, parental love is a concrete universal joining particular and general, one and many, concrete and ultimate. Two, generalizing parental love into a family of the world is a pivotal move in the Christian faith and every human culture. Three, the Heaven and Earth as a triune Family of Father Heaven, Mother Nature, and heart of Western philosophy; it is philosophical reason self-bankrupt, Socratic self-examination of reason pushed to the ultimate. 79 See the later section, ―§ How to Manage Things Happening Without Rhyme or Reason.‖ 80 This point counters the anti-uniqueness thinkers‘ dogmatic appeal to ―mystery‖ to claim that no religion or theology can therefore adequately comprehend God (The Myth of Christian Uniqueness: Toward a Pluralistic Theology of Religions, eds. John Hick and Paul F. Knitter, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1987, pp. 53-88). 81 Matthew 10:5-6, 8:10, 15:24, 15:28, Mark 15:39, Luke 10:37, 17:15-16. It is thus that we depart from Dupuis, Hick, Cobb, etc., as we include them.

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Humanity-their-Child is heartfelt and central in the entire Chinese tradition. ―Heavenly Father‖ in the Bible is the soul notion to China, and is apt and natural to Chinese folks, Christian or no. This reflection helps us understand the goal of the Christian mission to bring all peoples into Christ‘s fold. 1John 4:12 (cf. 2:5) gives us a quiet bombshell, saying in essence, ―The love of God is perfected by our loving one another.‖ It is paradoxical as ―My strength is made 82 perfect in weakness,‖ ―because the weakness of God is stronger than men.‖ To see how paradoxical such a thought is, we look at the ―love of God‖; it can mean ―our love of God‖ or ―love of God.‖ ―The love of God‖ as ―our love of God‖ would mean that the First Commandment of loving God with all our souls is performed by the Second, loving our neighbors as ourselves here now. Our love of God depends on our love of neighbors to manifest; it is a surprise that God depends on us. No less surprising is ―The love of God‖ as ―God‟s love‖; it would mean that our love of neighbors is part of God‘s love, and our neighborly love completes and perfects God who is Love! Both these points are quite incredible and extraordinary, literally ―turns the world 83 upside down‖! Perfect Love perfectly depends on the beloved‘s mutual love to be perfected! All this graphically expresses how God‘s parental love thrives in our acceptance and spread of it. In fact, its acceptance is measured by its spread, and its spread so completes the love that the love does not need to be touted as such in its spread. God‘s love spreads in our loving neighbors, so much so that we need not tout ―love‖ as His as we love one another heartily. Love is its spread, from God to us and through us all to God, here now. In other words, the ―essence‖ of Christ is love, and love fulfills the integrity of each beloved individual. Helping to fulfill the integrity of each non-Christian religion fulfills the 84 mission of Christ‘s love. ―Hidden Christ‖ is poignantly true here. Young Jesus quoted an OT passage as his mission, as God‘s ―servant, . . . chosen (and) beloved,‖ to ―proclaim justice to the Gentiles.‖ How? ―He will not wrangle or cry aloud, nor will anyone hear his voice in the street. He 85 will not break a bruised reed or quench a smoldering wick until he brings justice to victory.‖ Clearly, ―justice‖ here heals and acts to right wrongs; it is not judgment. It is thus 86 that in the end ―in his name the Gentiles will hope‖ ; it is thus that his mission is accomplished in silence, right here and now. This quiet righting-healing justice goes quite a long radical way. Jesus highly praised a Roman centurion‘s deep awareness of the divine authority, and told all his followers to learn from this Gentile‘s ―faith,‖ which might not have been the Israelites‘ faith in exclusive monotheism. During the discussion with the Jewish lawyer about the two central Commandments, loving God and loving neighbors, Jesus told the lawyer the know-it-all to 82 2 Corinthians 12:9, 1 Corinthians 1:25. Implications here (is it possessive genitive? Is it subjective genitive?) are again so staggering and bottomless that both passages have to be left alone. 83 Acts 17:6. 84 ―Hidden Christ‖ means not Christ all over in other religion. Instead, it assumes no error in other religions as Karl Rahner‘s ―anonymous Christians‖ does. 85 Curiously, he may allow reeds to bruise or wicks to smolder but never allows them to break or quench, i.e., be destroyed totally. Reeds stand on their own; wicks shine around. He heals, fulfills, and enhances our reedintegrity and our wick-flame for others; his is such ―justice‖-in-action. 86 Matthew 12:18-21. (NRSV)

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learn from a Good Samaritan, a despised non-Israelite who could not have cared less about abstruse Judaic doctrines. Jesus told us to learn from the Samaritan despite the fact that the Samaritan village refused to receive Jesus. Whereupon Jesus and his disciples quietly ―went on to another 88 village,‖ for he ―has not come to destroy lives but to save them.‖ Jesus healed the Gentile centurion‘s servant and bound the wounds of many unknown others wherever he saw, as did the Good Samaritan. He silently healed Gentiles‘ hurts and helped them. That is how he fulfilled his mission, to unobtrusively ―proclaim justice to the Gentiles.‖ (Christ‘s) love is fulfilled in fulfilling the beloved needy, including nonbelievers; all the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick, and the 89 imprisoned are the least in Christ‘s family, helping whom helps Christ himself. All this is what it means to have an inter-religious inter-learning dialogue among many religions. Such inter-learning should not compromise, much less ―correct,‖ but enrich the absolute integrity of each religion, to mutually deepen the self-understanding of each 90 religion that is by nature incorrigibly ultimate. 91 The ―fruit‖ of Christian mission is less conversion than mutual cherishing ; we are all ―converted‖ to mutual appreciation toward God beyond us all, an appreciation of insights of 92 other religions for ―deeper openness to God . . . through the other,‖ and an appreciation by other religions for the enrichment of their own deeper self-understanding due to the Christian considerate love of neighbors, that is, whoever we meet here now. Such mutual enrichment, not correction, results in the final ultimate rejoicing together in 93 the Final Judgment Day of Divine Love all around. Here is no room for quibbling about whether this Final Day is Buddhist or Christian or any other. Our shared joys drown all our quibbles in the Ultimacy of the Beyond.

Storytelling through it All Thus, we should rejoice in historical Jesus loving us and see him in every brother we love here now. Such a logical paradox can be captured, understood, and lived, only in storytelling. No wonder both OT and NT are collections of stories of living love, lived in love. Christian 94 theology is narrative theology, and Zen Buddhists talk about killing Buddha, burning 87 Cf. John 4:9, ―Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.‖ 88 Luke 10:25-37, 9:51-56. 89 Matthew 25:35-40. (NRSV) 90 This stance is not mutual corrections but mutual deepening of religions (Dupuis, op. cit., pp. 381-382). 91 Saying, ―[The dialogue] tends to . . . conversion of each to [the same] God‖ to risk pantheism, Dupuis suddenly identifies this ―same God‖ as Christian God (p. 383; this is the key place where he betrays his ―Christian bias‖)! 92 Dupuis, p. 383, though I hesitate to claim with him that ―[exchange and encounter] are an end in themselves." 93 ―Is this Divine Love the God of Christ or the Mercy of Buddha or . . . ?‖ The question remains in the realm of Mystery. One thing is certain. Here in this Ultimate Realm, every religion is satisfied and fulfilled, beyond our human understanding. In the Beyond all quibbles are dissolved without dissolving respective integrities. 94 George A. Kennedy, New Testament Interpretation through Rhetorical Criticism, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1984, Robert A. Oden, Jr., The Bible Without Theology: The theological tradition and alternatives to it, Harper and Row, 1987. Cf. Raymond E. Brown, The Death of the Messiah, NY: Doubleday, 1993, p. 1573 (―Passion Narratives,‖ Index). See also Frank Kermode‘s interesting ―New Ways with Bible Stories‖ in Poetry, Narrative, History, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990, pp.29-48, and the bibliography there. I

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scriptures, and then go ahead to expound on Buddha‘s teaching —and thrive in such telling of their stories as this.

Confucian Classis as OT to Chinese Christians Saying so above raises two interesting issues. One, how do the Confucian classics serve as an OT to the Chinese Christians? Two, how does the Confucian classics fit in with the OTNT scheme already there in the Christian dispensation? Our clue to answer is how the Jewish OT used its ―OT,‖ the mythologies of their surrounding cultures such as the Babylonian mythology, and how Jesus used his OT and how Paul used both the Jewish OT and Athenian mythologies. Such ―OT‖ of Christian OT forever surrounds Christian OT as its humus out of which Christian NT grows. One: ―How do the Confucian classics serve as an OT to the Chinese Christians?‖ An answer is: In the same way as ancient mythologies served as an OT to the Jewish OT, and as the Jewish OT served to Jesus. It is well known that mythologies and beliefs of other religions surrounding Israelites entered Jewish OT, reshaped, refashioned to fit OT‘s pattern of beliefs to let the remolded stories tell and proclaim OT. This is a ―sacramental‖ use of the ―bread‖ of 96 existing materials, i.e., mythologies of other religions, around the Israelites. 97 A dramatic example is Baalism, as mentioned a while ago. The prophets violently opposed it yet Hosea adopted its central notion of Baal as ―husband‖ to the believers, and proclaimed Yahweh as the jealous Husband of Israel; Ezekiel followed suit. Similarly, Jesus used the OT to proclaim his Good News, by pouring his new wine into his refashioned OT as a new wineskin, his mode of expression; ―you heard it said A, but I tell you B.‖ He called this operation a ―fulfillment of the laws and the prophets.‖ Thus, what mythologies of other religions are to OT is what OT is to NT. Thus again, for the Christian believers, as NT is the interpretive principle of OT, so OT is the interpretive principle of mythologies of other religions. OT is a sacramental symbol to NT, and so religious mythologies are ―OT‖ to OT. Paul must have used OT this way when he said that ―according to the scriptures‖ Jesus died and rose to life for us. His well-known hymn of Jesus Christ, who with his similitude with God obeyed God the Father to most miserable death, and was raised to the heights of glories, and we must have Christ‘s heart as ours, must have been taken from OT or other religious myths and adapted to the Christian faith So must his ―hymn‖ to Christian lovebe out 98 of ―pagan‖ hymns. hesitate, however, to estimate how many among them genuinely appreciate how pivotal narrative understanding is for NT, not taking it as just one tool among others of understanding the Bible. 95 Cf. Y. Kashiwahara and K. Sonoda, eds., Shapers of Japanese Buddhism, Tokyo: Kōsei Publishing Co., 1994. 96 See Donald M. Baillie, The Theology of the Sacraments, NY: Charles Scribners, 1957, Susan Niditch, Ancient Israelite Religion, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997; Norman H. Snaith, The Distinctive Ideas of the Old Testament, London: The Epworth Press, 1944; Brevard S. Childs, Myth and Reality in the Old Testament, London: SCM Press, 1960; Henri Frankfort, et al., Before Philosophy (1946), Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1946, esp. pp. 266 (index on ―chaos‖), 270 (index on ―Marduk‖), et passim. 97 The same applies to the Christian adaptation of Molech/Baalim fiery infanticide. 98 1 Corinthians 15:3-4, Philippians 2:5-18. Many scholars too numerous to cite, noticed the poetic hymn-like feature of Paul‘s intoned praise, and attribute its origin to some hymns of former times, either in the OT or elsewhere.

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The fact remains, however—and this is important—that it was not Babylonian myths or Baalism that served as OT; it was OT that made intelligible those myths and NT. Conversely, it was not OT that explains NT but NT, and its Center, Jesus, who explains and ―fulfills‖ OT, as in Matthew 5 and Luke 24:25-27. We must then go to Jesus to render intelligible Babylonian stories, Baalism, and Confucius—as to their meaning and significance—to us-as-Christians, whether we are Chinese Christians or Babylonian Christians, or Israelite Christians, etc. Jesus is the hermeneutic Principle for all those non-Christian scriptures and wisdom, for the Christians. We now know the principle of taking the Chinese Confucianism as Chinese OT for the Chinese Christians. Two: ―Concretely, how would the Confucian classics fit in with the Christian OT-NT scheme?‖ Let us take two specific examples. The first example is this. Confucius took the notion of ―princely one (chün tzu 君子),‖ originally meaning man of princely blood, and changed it into man of princely virtue. This ―princely one‖ could help us understand Jesus as the Christ and Messiah, an OT notion baptized into NT‘s divine Savior-King. As royal prince is of blood, Confucian prince is of virtue. Likewise, as Messiah is of OT, Christ is of NT. Our second example is the Golden Rule, justly popular everywhere for being situated between Kant‘s abstract Categorical Imperative and Mencius‘ (1A7) concrete ―‗Old-ing‘ my old folks to reach others‘ old folks; ‗young-ing‘ my young folks to reach other‘s youngs.‖ Jesus‘ formulation of the Golden Rule is logically identical with Confucius‘, yet they differ in 99 praxis, and storytelling alone can bring out their difference. Let us see how they differ. Confucius said (12/2), ―What oneself desires not, give not to people.‖ Rabbi Hillel said (Shab. 31), ―What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your fellow man. This is the whole of Torah and the remainder is but commentary.‖ This is a negative version of Jesus‘ Golden Rule, ―Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to 100 them: for this is the law and the prophets.‖ We could see, though need not,101 that Confucius and Torah see eye to eye to serve as OT to prepare for Jesus. How does it happen? First, the Confucian classics parallel OT. The human situation tends to agree more on what is hateful than what is loved, so prohibitions of hurtful acts and hateful matters, what not to do, urgently spring up to order society, to publicly declare ―laws and statutes‖ against harm. These laws publicly express our inner considerate spirit for others: ―Do no harm.‖ This is a natural negative version of the Golden Rule. The whole OT is built on this principle of ―Do no harm,‖ whose detail applications all prophets zestfully proclaim. Likewise with the Confucians, such as Mencius (2A2) who nudges us to see how ―helping (things and people) grow‖ kills them. The road to hell is paved by goodwill that imposes, not letting be. Never meddle with things, in proud ―goodwill,‖ for do-gooding sours, stunts, and slays. Sadly, perhaps later Confucian traditionalism has 102 neglected Mencius, and imposed yokes onto free breathing of life.

99 Interestingly, Mencius‘ insistence could be taken as Kant‘s imperative concretized in story form. H. G. Creel‘s Chinese Thought from Confucius to Mao Tse-tung, NY: Mentor Books, 1953, interprets China in Kant‘s way. 100 Matthew 7:12. 101 This way would be for Jesus to fulfill them as he fulfills OT. Another way is to see them fulfilled by Jesus redeeming them. We go the first way, in line with our viewing of Chinese classics as Chinese OT. 102 See a shocking confession to choking Confucianism by Donald J. Munro‘s ―Afterword‖ to Tsai Chih Chung, Zhuangzi Speaks: The Music of Nature, tr. Brian Bruya, Princeton University Press, 1992, pp. 127-142. Cf. a

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Secondly, the Confucian classics could thus prepare China for NT, as OT does Israel for NT that in turn fulfills the true intentions of OT. NT‘s basis is this OT, Confucian or Jewish. To love people means to restore them to their original health, if needed, as the Good Samaritan did, but otherwise to let them be freely themselves without disturbing them; it is the Golden Rule in negative praxis, here now. Remember how Jesus led his disciples in silence to go to ―another village,‖ when ―a 103 village of the Samaritans‖ ―did not receive him.‖ To love neighbors as ourselves and to 104 love enemies are all in this spirit of non-interference, to support all people to grow of themselves into themselves, and that is the spirit of the Golden Rule Jesus incarnated in his 105 life and his death. Jesus is the Golden Rule fulfilling OT.

Christian Mission Again ―What would you say on ‗mission‘ at the heart of Christian faith, however?‖ Christians are supposed to preach Jesus as Christ and convert people. Mission is the cornerstone that the theory-builders reject, only to crush them to pieces; it is the ―stone of offense,‖ ―the rock of 106 stumbling,‖ to abstract theorization on Christian-non-Christian relationship. Let us then meditate on this most difficult theme in the context of religious dialogue, to clinch the entire matter. Four points can be raised out of Jesus‘ dialogue with a Samaritan Woman (John 4:3-43), as he ―left Judæa‖ his religious turf on his way to Galilee. This is his journey of mission; to meditate on this journey mediates on the Christian mission. One, the Bible-words are less logical than confessional, as Kierkegaard, Marcel, and 107 Stendahl said. Confession is made not to assert and point to metaphysical truths, logical, objective, and bloodless, but to ex-press from the bottom of the very existence of the experienced subject, ―in spirit and in truth.‖ Two, confession involves the hearers to move them. Jesus asks for water. The lady responds. Then he confesses, ―Woman, believe me, the hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor at Jerusalem, worship the Father. . . . (T)he hour cometh, and now is, when . . . worshippers shall worship . . . in spirit and in truth . . .‖ (John 4:21, 23) Three, confession unwittingly reaches out to help, to fulfill others; it is ―love language.‖ Jesus‘ request of water begins his giving of Living Water (4:10-15), to begin his death on the

grain of truth in the misguided essay, ―Five Things We Can Learn from China,‖ in Time, November 23, 2009, pp. 34-41, saying China is oppressed under the weight of its history. 103 Luke 9:51-56, 10:25-37, especially verses 35 and 42 saying ―leave them alone.‖ 104 These precious matters will be detailed later in ―§ Love thy neighbor as thyself‖ and ―§ The Bible as Stories of Loving the Enemy.‖ 105 Luke 6:31-32 takes this Golden Rule to go beyond ―sinners‖ i.e., to love enemies to climax Matthew 5. So Jesus means by this Rule Jesus‘ radical love of enemies he lived and died for. 106 All this is extrapolated from Luke 20:18 and Isaiah 8:14-15. All theoretical considerations of Christian-nonChristian relation that I know of either bypass the ―Christian mission‖ (Monika K. Hellwig, in Christianity and the Wider Ecumenism, op. cit., pp. 82-83) or dismiss it as leftover of Christian arrogance (John Hick). 107 Kierkegaard stresses Subjectivity as Truth. Marcel has Mystery that involves the subject of the inquirer. For Kristen Stendahl, the Bible assertions are confessional ―love language, caressing language.‖ (quoted by Phan in Christianity and the Wider Ecumenism, ed. Peter Phan, NY: Paragon House, 1990, p. 173) For R. P. Scharlemann, confessional statement has free personal response as its base, not logical implication or perception. (ibid., pp. 38-40)

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cross, which is his self-negation without self-loss (Tillich ), i.e., self-affirmation within other-affirmation, in other words, selfless love-creation of others that spreads. Four, all this give-and-take pleased Jesus immensely. He told his disciples that he was fed (4:31-35); the lady did respond to Jesus‘ request and gave him a drink, after all. Thus to 109 share the Good News with non-believers is to be fed by them. This it is that feeds Jesus, enriches him, and authenticates him, and this it is that spreads (4:16, 21, 25-29, 39-40) to fulfill his ―work,‖ his mission, to ―rejoice together‖ (4:34, 36). Before generalizing the Christian paradox of universal divinity incarnated in historical 110 specificity, we here distinguish our position from John Hick‘s inclusivism, for our position and his appear inclusive, identically, indifferently. That we mutually differ can be shown as follows, however. This is crucial. Hick sees religions as indifferently ―many human awarenesses‖ of one divinity, and blots out all specificities as contingent irrelevance. How does he, being human, know that religions are human awarenesses only, unless he takes his ―one‖ as a logical one confidently divine, though actually human? As a result, he ends up downgrading the exclusive specificity of particular historical religions as dated superstitions. Hick‘s ―universal one‖ is thus, ironically, one of ―exclusive religions‖ he opposes, not truly ―inclusive‖ as he claims his is. His ―inclusivism‖ plays god to exclude all contingent historical religions, as the fundamentalist ―exclusivism‖ excludes all non-Christian religions but his own. Hick idolizes Platonic eternity as the fundamentalist idolizes Biblicist eternity. Both forget they are human, to arrogate themselves as divine. Our position, in contrast, takes the ―divine one‖ seriously as divine, that is, beyond human ―one.‖ As a result, historical exclusivity of historical religions, such as ―fundamentalism,‖ are included. At the same time, being human, we would never play god, and the religious claim of ―the historical Jesus as the divine Christ‖ we can only humanly respect with reverent reticence, as Confucius‘ reverence expressed in his reticence. All we humans can and should do is never to facilely judge among those supra-human claims that are beyond our understanding, but to humbly facilitate their inter-learning and inter-enrichment. Much less would we brush aside, as Hick would do, those different beyondhuman claims as so ―many different human awarenesses‖ of the indifferent divine one. This fact and imperative, that we are human, not gods, and must behave as human, cannot be overstressed. This is what is great about Jesus, that he knew and lived precisely as human, as a mere obscure servant, to obey God till death on the cross; being human he lived as human. Thus his powerful cry, ―He that believeth on me, believeth (not on me but) on him that sent me,‖ originates in his utterly human confession, ―he that believeth on me, believeth 108 See Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology Volume 1, The University of Chicago Press, 1951, p. 136, among others. Significantly, missionaries to China (James Legge, Courtenay H. Fenn, R. H. Mathews, Carstairs Douglas, Thomas Barclay, William Campbell, etc.) are often Sinologists and dictionary-compilers, contributing to the advancement of literacy in China. Many missionaries are also medical doctors. These humane endeavors could be taken as Love‘s healing and enlightening power gradually incarnated among us. Love enhances itself in enhancing the beloved. 109 This is a direct clinching description of Christian-non-believer relation, not Scharlemann‘s (op. cit., pp. 35-46) who is incoherent. He has no ―mission,‖ a core problem; he denies application of intra-Christian matters to extra-Christian realm (36), yet he applies Peter-Judas relation to Christian-non-Christian relation (43); Yes-No in freedom is not Christian-non-Christian; his position (40) is not Barth‘s (38). 110 Of so many publications of John Hick‘s, the most recent, clearest, and shortest I know of is his ―Is Christianity the Only True Religion?‖ in World Faiths Encounter, Number 28, March 2001, pp. 3-11. My brief response appeared in its next issue, ―Religious Togetherness,‖ pp. 22-24, Number 29, July 2001.

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not on me.‖ This it was that resulted in his being ―highly exalted‖ to the name above all names. We should also behave likewise. Being human, we should never play gods, casually mov112 ing divine pawns on human intellectual chessboard. Only by consistently stubbornly behaving as human, all too human, can our thinking begin to devoutly discern what passes all understanding. Fear of the Lord is the alpha and omega of religious wisdom.

F. The Paradox and the Power of Naming, of Universals It is time to take stock. We have considered the here now as eternal by considering historical particularity under the beyond-human eternal. We now generalize our storyreflection so far, to realize that our religious paradox of divine one and actual many is (a) really the paradox of our ordinary daily life, typified in particular naming/wording as universals, and (b) enlighten our basic issue: How did religious ultimacy—the divine One— turn out so many actual religions? How is the singular religious ultimate related to many religions in our actual world? (a) The paradoxical combination of one and many in religion may well have come from our daily situation in this world.113 ―Religion‖ means what is beyond the human world within the human world; it is our problem of the Beyond. The ―beyond‖ means that when A is beyond B, A is not B but enwraps B. These two contrary features between A and B, A unrelated and related to B, describe how we note the relation of ―beyond.‖ This noting composes the above paradox, and noting is manifested in ―naming‖ that indicates our knowing and wording. Thus, our religious paradox of one and many is really the paradox of our ordinary daily life, captured in particular naming and wording to result in universals. We now describe how noting as naming and wording produces the paradox. Mind you; the description here thinks story-way, via logical parsing, about the problem of paradox. Naming produces the notorious problem of ―universals‖; a name names many things into an identical group, say, ―leg,‖ to two legs of a chicken that we call ―two legs.‖ We take ―legness‖ as somewhat synonymous with ―leg,‖ that is, as leg-universal. Hui Tzu the namelogician says, therefore, the chicken has ―three legs‖ when we see two legs.114 Is there now one more leg added to the chicken‘s two legs? Do we have two in three and three in two? If Yes, then we must call the previous ―legness‖ we just named with a new name, ―legness1,‖ for the same reason as we had to add ―legness‖ to the two ―legs.‖ But then, we 111 Philippians 2:7-9, John 12:44. 112 We remember how, when Paul and Barnabas were about to be apotheosized as Mercury and Jupiter, both rent their clothes and ran in among the people, crying, ―Sirs, why do ye these things? We also are men of like passions with you . . . !‖ (Acts 14:11-18) They resolutely, consistently, kept to their being human. 113 [a] is here; [b] is far ahead later, where we say, ―Let us now return to religions and their stories.‖ In all this, we must keep in mind that this is the problem in our world, not in the World Beyond us. This is the so-called onto-theo-logical principle, the categorical rule of considering things beyond us and God beyond us. We must remember that we can never know thing in itself or God in himself. Neglecting this rule plunges us into Kant‘s antinomies (our paradoxes here) and a Hick-fundamentalist arrogance that plays god to violate the First Commandment, not knowing what we talk about. Cf. Mark 9:6, 10:38. I treated this problem of one-and-many in religion in On Nonsense: Cultural Meditations (556 pp.), yet to publish. I treat it here in a fresh way, for the Beyond always begins afresh here now. 114 Chuang Tzu 33/75. Chuang Tzu reported Hui Tzu‘s paradoxes, many originating in names/universals. Chuang Tzu gave all these paradoxes to illustrate the wonder of actuality beyond our understanding.

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now have to keep adding more and more legnesses without end, for we must keep naming ―legness‖ over the legness we have just named, ad infinitum. If No, why did we add ―legness‖ in the first place? What is this not-leg ―leg‖ that we call ―legness‖? In short, does this legness stand side by side with other ordinary legs, or not? Chuang 115 Tzu goes the Yes-way and tells us to simply stop, and this ―stop‖ indicates the ineffability of the unspeakable concreteness of things, where our wording goes bankrupt, wiping out the effectiveness of words, to wonder at actuality beyond understanding. Western philosophers go the No-way to produce conundrums of realism, nominalism, etc., to make up ―answers to the problem of universals.‖ We are hardly satisfied with this route, either. If this question is answered neither Yes nor No, what is this legness, this strange ―not-leg leg‖? Should we stop naming legs? But we cannot live without naming things. No wonder, Lao Tzu honestly says that ―a name nameable is not the always-name,‖ and then goes on to name things important in life in Tao Te Ching. This act is a paradox over word-paradox, quite unsolvable, and Lao Tzu simply lets it stand, as a meaningful paradox. Just think, just naming a thing generates such insoluble paradoxes! Russell‘s paradox, etc., are ―self-referential inconsistency‖ and their amendments, e.g., that restrict applying ―all,‖ is a copout from applying the words, not to resolve the paradox. When we get stuck in a naming cul-de-sac like this, what we should do is to retreat and look on concrete things all over again. We then realize that the whole problem begins at naming itself. Naming something indicates our noting/recognizing/knowing it, to fixate it with word as such-and-such, but fixating things, always in flux, is an exercise in futility. Remember. Words just label things, having nothing to do with things themselves. No wonder, things out there slip through our words/names, and people resent being ―called names.‖ Words are ours, the thing is not, and capturing not-ours with ours would surely fail. But we cannot help but wording/naming things, for without names we cannot identify things to live with them; even things unknown must be identified as Unidentified Flying Objects so we can live with them. So, here is the tragedy. We cannot help but identify things with labels, but labeling would slip into identifying things as labels, and we miss things themselves; we end up taking the worded as the words, falling into the ―fallacy of misplaced concreteness‖ (Whitehead116). It is thus that the paradox of naming and universals comes about. Lao Tzu had to say (1, 25), ―Name can name, not Always Name,‖ and the Unnamable had to be ―nicknamed ‗Tao,‘ ‗Great.‘‖ Words go over and accompany all thinking, all expressing, as words hover beside things and try clumsily to enwrap them in vain, and the very failures cipher the existence of things beyond naming. Paradox insinuates; namebankruptcy intimates. In sum, the ―problem‖ of universals comes from words labeling no-word things, and then misidentifying names with named. Chuang Tzu parodies it by counting ―one‖ to reach an unmanageable infinity.117 India‘s ―third eye‖ Siva is ―philosophy‖ of reflection,118 to pile up 115

Shakespeare is England, Goethe is Germany, Pyshkin is Russia, and Cervantes is Spain. So people say. Who is China, then? We are hard put to answer, for China is full of so many literary beauties. Is Chuang Tzu China? We suspect so because, more than Ch‘ü Yüan 屈原，Chuang Tzu 莊子began all beauties in China. This point answers the question as to why I often quote Chuang Tzu. 116 For ―fallacy of misplaced concreteness,‖ see Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925), NY: Free Press, 1953, pp. 51, 58, etc. This is the fallacy of reification. 117 Chuang Tzu 2/10-40, 51-55. They are profound entanglements indeed, and he tells us to stop.

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unmanageable examples, rambling, going nowhere.119 Wording is Nicholas of Cusa‘s ―circle,‖ edge-less (universal) with centers everywhere (things), a paradox. Tillich‘s God is ―God beyond God,‖ an enigma. Religion beyond us is the ultimate of universals where, naturally, the absolute enwraps the relative, and the universal embraces the concrete, as the form/name does the actual. This is where the many includes the one, the one implies the many, while the many rejects the one and the one rejects the many, for the ultimate unspeakable is both one-and-many and neither one nor many. We see here the Chinese Yin and Yang internecine while inter-nascent. This is because ―one‖ and ―many‖ are our words, and religion beyond us is beyond our words. We now know about all this ignorance of ours about religion. Religion is Nicholas of Cusa‘s ―docta ignorantia‖ (learned ignorance), knowledge of our ignorance. Religion beyond us acts out the ignorance of our human self-recursive self-examination; isn‘t Socrates pious! Still, Socrates lived in vain in assiduity in good conscience, we sadly realize. Keeping up with ―self-examination‖ supposedly keeps life worth living less and less imperfect, and never perfect. This continual life praxis shows life unfinished, ever not-real, inauthentic, and such self-honesty shows such living as worth living, as authentic—and so futile. Thus being honest about inauthenticity is authenticity; life is an earthen vessel cracked in two. Life worth living is fatally cracked in two, revealed by self-examination. The integral self is nowhere, for we are either in unexamined pretense, or in examined imperfection ever cracked. We sigh at Socrates‘ exercise in futility, at our living ever futile. All is vanity. ―Let‘s put the cracks in time,‖ King T‘ang says. Socrates‘ self-examination sifts off dross to reshape me; my crack is now the crack of dawn. The self now cracks on to tomorrow. Selfexamination ushers in ―day to day new, again today new‖ since millennia. Countless dawns, ever beginning, tell the story of ―history.‖ Perhaps Socrates indicates it in retrospective selfexamination, perhaps unwittingly if not wrongly. (b) Let us now return to religions and their stories. Here we see how the paradox of naming universals turns into the power of life. This turning can be accomplished by storytelling. Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo‘s Les Miserables was a sinner converted into a powerful hero of irresistible compassion, and has moved countless readers to tears throughout many cultures and incarnated himself in countless incidents. Does Mr. Jean Valjean exist or does he not? He is an ideal type Hugo created, a name that exists only as a universal in Hugo‘s novel, to get concretized in real lives. The Idiot is another universal Dostoevsky invented, too good for our scheming world where he always stirs up troubles, and Botchan, a universal of green lovable boy Natsume Sōseki invented, manages to clumsily ―right wrongs‖ of the society. These three characters are too good for this world, and are all reenacted repeatedly in this world. Do these characters actually exist or not? Our question persists. Both, we would say. Being mere fictive characters, ―existing‖ in name alone, they all yet exerted profound impacts in the actual world in countless different and concrete ways. So, without existing physically, they exist quite powerfully with powerful impacts on so many persons through so many days; they do exist more convincingly than most of us dragging on physically in this routine world. 118 The first scientific eye of knowledge looks out, the second religious eye of discernment looks in, and the third philosophic eye of reflection looks at the looking. (cf. Troy Wilson Organ, Third Eye Philosophy: Essays in East-West Thought, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987, Preface) 119 Organ‘s book (ibid.) has an incredible wealth of citations and examples, limitless bits here and bits there in just 162 pages, to revel in the paradox of one and many inter-involving, as the universal enwrapping the concrete.

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What about those who have actually existed in history, say, Confucius, Socrates, Buddha, and Jesus, who are not here now but continue to exert influences today? What should we say about the historical universals continuing on through history? Jesus is peculiar to the Christians. He was a fictive criminal the Jews invented out of historical Jesus, who then turned into the divine Savior Christ for Christians till today. This peculiarity is the Christian ―scandal of historical particularity.‖ Now, each character above is unique120 and irreplaceable; each is irresistibly powerful over our lives to inspire us on. Thus all of them are both many individuals and one in personal impact, both existent and non-existent, and neither. That is the paradox, and as such, they wield their ever captivating power over us. Being paradoxical as above, they are specific names and general universals, inspiring inter-versals, and continue to live on in us. That is the paradoxical power of the name, the ideal and the universal that inter-verses. Storytelling alone can do justice to such strange power of the paradox of specific naming/wording to generate general universal inter-versals. The point of all this is clear, on two counts. One, the so-called Christian ―scandal of particularity‖ may be a logical one but never a ―scandal‖ in actuality. On the contrary, it is a most natural phenomenon of how our understanding takes place, how a name makes a universal notion that enables our life to go on. Two, from our reflection on naming as producing universals, we can envisage a hope of resolution—not quite a solution yet—of our difficulties understanding the Christian ―mission‖ among world religions, as follows. In naming a particular thing or event as such and such, the name bleeds out into universal intelligibility of things. In naming an ethical notion such as honor, grace, kindness, or the Golden Rule, the notion, while staying as a particular name, spreads to naturally cover widely different occasions and actions, cultural, historical, and actual. In our historical world, events such as ―conquests‖ or ―sages‖ appear and disappear to show how they do not repeat but rhyme in human time. When the matter comes to the Beyond, the particular and the universal join in extreme intimacy in this world, literally ―out of this world beyond worldly understanding.‖ Here is ample room for both ―mission‖ as a spread of a historical particular and religious ―dialogues‖ of inter-learning, inter-influencing, and inter-pervading, as religions shake hands by standing apart, opposed, facing one another, to mutually clasp their hands, hearts, and souls. The Confucian classics can now serve as an OT to the Chinese Christians, with the Jewish Torah as an OT to the Christians in the West. The particular here now is now immortalized in religion.

120 Incredibly, some feminists accused the Christian claim to uniqueness as sexist arrogance, as if asserting ―2+2=4‖ were sexism, as if the Christian claim to uniqueness did not mean the unsurpassable and worshipful, as if the claim were not a confession to the religious beyond-human to remove all arrogance, and as if religion could be judged by human criterion of the efficacy of effecting justice in the world. See The Myth of Christian Uniqueness: Toward a Pluralistic Theology of Religions, eds. John Hick and Paul F. Knitter, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1987, pp. 137-161, and Christianity and The Wider Ecumenism, ed. Peter C. Phan, NY: Paragon House, 1990, pp. 169, 173, 175, 180.

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Storytelling as Life-Imperative One final point we make to conclude all: All this takes place in story-thinking. We have just told a story about how stories of Confucianism, OT, and Jesus come together without confusion. In this way, all ―classics,‖ cultural and religious, are stories that continue to evoke more stories, powerfully breeding lessons of consequence in life. Besides, we may not always realize that all sorts of stories mentioned—scientific, mythological, zodiacal, fatalistic, Buddhist, Confucian, and Christian—are all classics that evoke and captivate us into action. We may not realize that each life-story, as classics, intimates significant lessons for our lives now, in what ―this specific story‖ amounts to and thereby what it can mean for us today. Storytelling, ancient and today, is our life-imperative. Thus, every story well told, to wit, told from our hearts, is a ―classic‖ worth paying close attention to, for it shakes us at the core and basis of everything in us and around. Psychology, psychiatry, counseling,121 and theology operate, live, and thrive on a realization that storytelling integrates, makes sense, and makes whole in this classical heartfelt way, to set us on our new life‘s way. The Christian paradox of historical particularity is an extraordinary story-―scandal‖ that heals and shapes our life praxis. How? Well, let us focus on the ―scandal‖ itself to wrap up all this meditation. It all begins with our words that name things. This fact amounts to three points. One, things out there, particulars here and there, are more than our naming, our words. Two, things express themselves in/via our words. Concrete particulars overflow to slip through our sieve of naming words, through which they express themselves. Three, the name, ―religion,‖ expresses one thing in the world beyond it. Religion overflows words to appear through them as ―religion‖ and ―religions.‖ That is the way actuality is, nothing scandalous about it. To take all this as a ―scandal‖ is our scandal, we the scandal. Our taking all this as a ―scandal‖ expresses our wonder at all this that goes beyond our words our expression and our expectation. This fact expresses itself via breaking through our expectation/expression. This wonder at the Beyond is of course what ―religion‖ means, and such religion inevitably beckons us to living a radically new life. Religion beyond us is the categorical imperative to live beyond our routines. All this is beyond words conveyed by storytelling words.

Words as Logos Words are expression, expectation, intention, and all this is packed in an ancient Greek word, ―logos.‖ We have taken words as ours so far, but words are more than ours. Suppose we take things out there as actuality beckoning us to express them. That beckoning is their originative primal expression, a primal logos originating in the Beyond, Its self-expression beyond us. The Beyond is; it is beyond what it expresses to us, the Logos that creates/expresses to be expressed by being ―made flesh‖ in history,122 in the human that expresses in words what all this is out there beyond human expression. It is the Beyond, the ―more,‖ that is divine, the 121 For similar reasons, Rollo May urged all pre-counselors to major in literature, in Symbolism, op. cit., pp. 11-49. 122 John 1:1-14.

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wonder that scandalizes our expectation. All this is ―good,‖ in fact, creative novelty ―very good‖123 beyond words, through words. Words just told us all this, in a story that tells of this ―scandal‖ that is our ―wonder,‖ our religious devotion. Now wonder is our access, our homecoming, to the originating primal Source of things, and our homing makes us whole as we originally are. Healing is making whole; making us whole as we originally are heals us at our roots. We go home to where everything is fresh and full as kids, and is ―very good,‖ at the dawn of creation of each day. Now, how does all this immortalize every moment here now? We had better learn the secret from kids. After all, to teach is to show why and how I love the subject-matter. I share my enthusiasm and learn with students. Students teach me as I learn from students. Education is an reenactment of learning, learning redoubled reincarnate. If we think we teach children, we had better learn from them first. Andrew aged five wanted to change his birthday, to get birthday gifts anytime he wants; his dad said he cannot change it, but he persisted. O, how refreshing his demand is! None but kids alone can stunningly demand it! I his ―Gumpa Akong‖ was drawn in; I told him how to do it. This is how. He can forget his birthday to begin all, all over again. Even if his Mom told him of his birthday (he whispered, ―February 26!‖), he can not-believe it, and ask her to ―prove it!‖124 Mom cannot prove it, for proving a fact must repeat it as science does, and birthday cannot repeat. Forgetting as Taoist and demanding proof as Hume, change his birthday, you see. Now he can change his birthday, any day every time he demands it, for his official ―birthday‖ is only as good as what Mom tells him, and after all, this is his birthday he is handling. He nodded in silence, in a strange sort of composure only he understands. I was about to tell his Mom how he can change his birthday, when he shouted me down, ―Don‘t tell! It‘s a secret!‖ I asked, ―Do you have secrets?‖ ―No,‖ he said. So this is his secret of no secret—his birthday change! Why is it a secret to Mom? The reason is simple; divulging secrets de-magicizes the magic. O, how cute, how deep is his secret Magic Land of no secret! And here is the crunch. Andrew may not realize this, much less do I, that ―today‖ begins the rest of his life and mine, and his incredible demand to change his birthday activates this truth, to make me and make him realize this every today as every birthday of his and mine. So, his asking to change his birthday has already changed it; in the very asking, right now, his birthday of everything comes about, for his demand makes his today sparkle with the beginning of the rest of his life, for kid‘s demand sparkles things afresh, as he the kid is forever fresh, making everything afresh. He-asking-demanding is the delightful scandal of every particularity of ―birthday‖creation of everything, immortalizing today into the future. I cannot help but sing,125 Future comes 123 See Genesis 1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31. 124 David Hume is the kid here; he dares to disbelieve in any birthday! His so-called ―skepticism‖ is really kidasking in wonder, refusing to settle anywhere; it is kin to relativism. This is where the world is born. Skepticism, relativism, and birthday are sisters in the creation-family of kids, and this is a secret! 125 Kuang Wu, ―Future Comes One Day at a Time,‖ Timeless Voices, ed. Howard Ely, Owings Mills, MD: The International Library of Poetry, 2006, p. 1. Apropos of its theme, this poem is the first one to begin all in this book of collection of poems.

Kuang-ming Wu

46 One day at a time. My future is here, I must walk out to it. Morning fresh, Evening calm; Every day is a new day, The first day of my life. The squirrels are here Hopping with me.

My future is my birthday today, one today at a time hopping with my Andrew hopping, hopping ahead with our squirrels, for no squirrel hops back, no Andrew hops back. This is the morning where/when I can do anything, as kids can do anything. Andrew is the first morning of creation of all, inside and out!126 Now, doesn‘t this story give all of us a smile? Even I laughed as I told this fabulous story! Such open secret of Andrew‘s, such breathtaking smile he evokes! He is the immortal here now. ―Here now‖ the unrepeatable, the despair of Mom unable to prove Andrew‘s birthday, now repeats itself as unrepeatable, as each unique moment keeps coming again and again. Creation is continual re-creation, thanks to Andrew‘s incredible demand to change his birthday. ―Thus‖ to embrace our scandal of particularity in kid‘s asking-wonder heals us at our roots, reborn afresh. It is our redemptive ―salvation‖ here now. This ―thus‖ is the story— haven‘t I told you this Andrew-story?—that makes us whole, smiling. The world is birthdaystorytelling and more storytelling unceasing; we all live storytelling, rebirth in it, to have our beings in historic storytelling, and to be healed to begin all over, thereby to spread the healing to heal others, making them whole, whoever wherever they are—the new Heaven and new Earth is thus birthday-created. Oddly enough, this kid-story is told to us adults, for Andrew could not care less about this story. How does all this incredible morning of all come about in our adult-world today? How is our ―storytelling‖ born? Unlike kids‘ world of storytelling, ours is born slowly. Storytelling takes time as time-narrative; time brews stories. It takes time to produce our adult stories. Stories are spread in time so that we adults can see history the time-spread, and live in it as time comes alive in storytelling, to consciously make ―birthday‖ of all things possible, one morning at a time, as we look around at one thing at a time. Our world is born this morning in storytelling, and shaped by the telling of these specific morning-stories. Birthday-story immortalizes here now. ―But what is storytelling?‖ Now, ―what is‖ is tricky, tending to imply that we can survey and look at ―what it is‖ from outside it, seeing it from nowhere in the Platonic sky. But story is story-told, and telling takes time in a story-organized way, to shape us in storytelling126 Andrew outshines Henry Bugbee‘s The Inward Morning: A Philosophical Exploration in Journal Form, State College, Penna.: Bald Eagle Press, 1958.

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hearing. To understand a story we must listen and go through the story as it goes along, as we live on along our storytelling. Here in story, to understand is literally to undergo life.

STORYTELLING AS TELLING WHERE A STORY IS BORN Story goes on. Story is its telling-hearing that goes on, never standing still. Story stood still is no story; a storybook waits for us to go in to go through. To understand storytelling on the go, we must understand music on the move, for story is music worded as coherent dance of life in intelligible music. We had better go into music to understand story that sings life. (1) I once wished I could ―get‖ a whole piece of music in an instant, for I had no time for the long time it takes to undergo the music. My impatience jolted me to see me so hurried to survey things visually. I thought thinking is to schematize, systematize spatially, skipping time. In contrast, music is art in time; we cannot deal with it spatially. We can only meet, enter, and take time to undergo to understand it. Understanding music cannot stand still outside music and survey it in an instant; I can only go-with the flow of music to become 127 music itself. (2) Music is no random noises but an artistic sonic ensemble to undergo and appreciate. Music develops, evolves as it envelops us along. The ―harmony‖ of many musical elements is made by elements interpenetrating in time to pervade everywhere, and we must undergo each element to ―get‖ it as it transpires as an element. The ―rhythm‖ of music throbs, varying itself. Harmony and rhythm compose melody, patterning itself spontaneously, as an art-in-time distinct from paintings and sculptures. (3) Music is thus alive to seep into our life, intelligible beyond analytical dissection of logical spatial reason. Music is life-reason pulsating itself as life. No wonder both Confucius and Plato touted music as education to shape us, and in Chinese common sense an ideal government is government by music, spontaneously organized, harmonious in melodies of 128 communal concord. Music bespeaks the lived orderly evolving of the telling of stories and the dialogue, in neither of which we know beforehand how the telling-talking would develop, conspire, and consummate. Realizing thus enables us to envisage ―history‖ as grand composition of storytelling and event-dialogues, a diversely and unpredictably developing story-music of the lifeworld. 129 (4) Here we may notice that spontaneous ―telling‖ recorded on paper is world apart from carefully contrived theoretical treatise on paper. History is the former writing. Chuang Tzu‘s (26/49) yearning after a word-forgotten one to word with may intimate yearning after the former records-of-telling. Chinese literary tradition is such, in Confucius‘ Analects, thinkers‘ journals, short essays, prose poems, as well as sayings of Buddha, of Homer, Socrates‘ dialogues, Shakespeare‘s dramas and poetry, and the list goes on. 127 Sadly, Mikel Dufrenne whom I deeply respect analyzes music in spatial terms; he schematizes and systematizes musical harmony, rhythm, and melody as if they were things out there to be handled. He explicitly said so in The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trs. Edward S. Casey, et al., Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973, pp. 239-273. 128 This theme is elaborated in my Chinese Wisdom Alive, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2010. 129 Rodney Frey carefully, delightfully, recorded Indian oral literature, Stories That Make the World, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. Pp. 141-153 is particularly moving.

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(5) Besides, our understanding in ―reading a page‖ proceeds musically, seeing point A, then B, then C, then putting them together, and everyone comes to have their own personal pattern of going through those points and gathering them. So, every thinker—and we all are, being human—has a music-logic making one‘s own music of stories. So does every community, every nation, every culture, and history is a loose collective storytelling of so diverse a musical telling of stories through time. Reading of every sort could be taken as a counterpoint to writing, as listening is to musical performance. Reading is a being-told, a going-through of the author‘s excitement of telling-on-paper, an understanding that cannot stand still but undergoes to obtain, a musical happening of historical process. Receiving and responding, receiving and responding, the reader joins the musical rhythm and melody of the writer, dances with the writing, and in the meantime strikes out in the reader‘s own direction, creating with the writer an inspired dialogical music. It is thus that the music of ideas goes on this dialogical way, weaving a tapestry of history and a kaleidoscope of culture. Thus, it is the process of storytelling that originates stories and their hearing. We undergo to understand, trailing the same process of storytelling yet ever so slightly differing from the storyteller as we undergo our way to understand. All this parallels performance and enjoyment of music. Storytelling is a time-art as music is; both are the music of life. How does this music come to be? It makes a ―system‖ of reality. What does story as a system mean?

HOW STORYTELLING William Trevor (born 1928) the famed short-story writer said130 that everyone has a book in them, to enjoy being outside it, not belonging anywhere, that short stories are life-glimpses from outside. Our life is our story that is in us to get outside us—and that is our world in us outside us. In this way our life describes how we write stories, naturally; in fact, we cannot help telling stories as long as we are humanly alive. We see three implications here. One, everyone has a storybook in them because to be human is to carry a story of one‘s life; we all have memories that weave our life into a living coherent whole that yarns and spins forward as we live on. Life is not human without such ongoing open-ended coherence called ―a story.‖ Two, storytelling-as-living catches glimpses of life to understand it as we undergo it; undergoing from inside enables catching a glimpse of life from outside. Finally, for us to have a glimpse of life, we must be outside our life-milieu to tell of it, and we must be outside what we write about to be fair and comprehensive. But the story of our life is ours, and we must be inside us to write it to undergo to understand it. So storytelling is an act of being in and out of ourselves at once. To consider how we manage to do so is an exciting storytelling task of living itself.

130 This is his off-the-cuff talk in ―All Things Considered,‖ Morning Edition, October 21, 2002.

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STORY AS ORAL, AS TOLD We must carefully pick our way as we watch our steps here. Stories are basically told and lived, even as they are written down, for writing stories is for the sake of being read as told, and storytelling has an unexpected dilemma. Worse, storytelling in the end comes to forgetting words. Let us take an example. Chuang Tzu the great sensible storyteller sighs forth a story (26/48-49), ―The rabbit-trap is for the rabbit; once we get the rabbit we forget the trap. Words are for the intendedmeaning (意); once we get the meaning-intended, we forget the words. Where/how can I get the one who has forgotten words to word with?‖ At these colorful words, we are quite nonplussed. We twist and turn to ponder on what they could mean at all. Our five points in story come quite spontaneously. (1) Our immediate reaction is, of course, to wonder how someone word-forgotten can have words at all. (2) On second reading, we find the saying quite logical in this context. To have a word with someone is for the sake of getting the intended meaning, the one who has got the meaning forgets the word that has trapped the meaning, and so we want to have words with the one who has forgotten words, having got the meaning. (3) For all this, however, our initial shock and bewilderment remains, that is, the wordforgotten one has no words, and can have no word to word with. ―One who knows, words not,‖ quips Lao Tzu (56, cf. 81). The one deserving to word with has no words to word 131 with. How do we get out of this strange dilemma? (4) Here another of Chuang Tzu‘s quip comes to mind, ―Ultimate words leave words (as) ultimate deeds leave doing 至言去言, 至為去為‖ (22/84). As real deeds leave ―much ado about nothing,‖ so ―true words‖ cannot quite logically word out, for usual words are often roundabout and contrived, if not chatty. Logic is often chatty and redundant. True words are instead apt, direct, and simple. Kids are good at it; ―It‘s quiet when birdies sing,‖ they whisper, and then they shout, ―Look, a same different care!‖ ―I‘m OK, you‘re no-K!,‖ and they make perfect sense, not logically (being superficially contradictory) but truly, straightly, deeply. One really understands who is in tune with them and with the situation. One understands who is insider ready to perceive and receive. ―But understand what?‖ Good question you raised, my pal. Kids are in tune with nature; they are nature. Nature always has plenty of time; it is never in a hurry. Yet it is always changing without our knowing its change, as flowers open while we cannot see them opening. Nature changes without changing; it never frets as I do, racing against time. Nature is always same different at each moment. We follow along, day in and day out, and we won‘t be harassed. Birds sing their same songs to quiet me down. Kids shout and play as usual, to please me. Nature is always same, always different at every moment, as plants are. That is why I love nature, admire nature, and try to follow it, for it is stable and fresh, for I am part of nature. I am also same different at every moment. I am just not aware of this fact. I need to gaze at nature to realize it. Realizing it fulfills me. I am same different as kids are, in nature, as nature. It is beyond adult logic. Thus only the one who has forgotten words, logical, roundabout, can truly utter ultimate words that perfectly fit to ex-press what is actually the case. Those words often sound 131 Is this situation similar to one where only those who need no repentance can truly repent?

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unusual, even illogical; they are directly to the point, a straight talk directly connected to what actually is to express it; this is an immediate communication from and to those in tune with the situation. (5) These ultimate words of no usual words can be crisp; ―Great debate words not 大辯 132 不言,‖ says Chuang Tzu (2/59). They can also be quite involved, often attended with stories and parables. Jesus has many a story to tell, many a parable to share, only with those who have ears to hear and no other. Those stories and parables themselves can seem illogical and can be taken variously, and, for all that, they can be understood only directly, for they are confession from heart to heart, straight from the heart of the matter to the speaker‘s soul, to the listener‘s heart. Perhaps our situation is like this. Ezra Pound said that poems are the most meaning in the least words. The saying sets me thinking. Meaning here overflows words, which float in the misty ocean of meaning, and whenever words are caught meaning appears, overflows words, and we disappear in them, word-forgotten; we say we are word-forgotten in poems. We have words and silence; their echo hugs them both, and their echo itself is neither 133 word nor silence. Echo is penumbra talking with umbra shadowing forth its thing. Echo is silent as a baby embraced, while the cuddled violin, the violinist‘s soul, is just touched. The violinist never pounds but just touches her violin only at three spots, chinrest, bow, and strings on fingerboard. Touching to hug the violin, the violinist vanishes into it vibrating tunes in midair; there the violin and the violinist vanish as echoes to the tune. You pound on the piano before you, big, majestic; you hug your violin as part of you so 134 fragile, intimate. Pianist plays on any piano ; violinist carries and plays her soul-violin. 135 Piano is orchestral, dot-symphonic, and sonorous; violin sighs one voice soul-penetrating 136 long, quite personal. Piano is balanced, comprehensive, and public even when soft 137 Piano was appealing. Violin intoxicates, inundates, even insinuates to transmute all over. not invented in China, whose music is unthinkable without strings. Piano choruses the West; 138 violin intones China. The West pounds the piano sonorous to cover the world; all this while China touches the violin in music to hug silence, free, soaring, as its music in silence soaks the world. As silence vibrates the world, all people in it come alive, musical echoing to sing and hug the world, both aloud and silent, both in ode and in elegy. Every touch hugs, to each inter-echo to sing the world in silence of music all over. Every thing hugs itself to sing the world—in silent music so self-attractive. This decrepit car on the roadside sings the world, with this stone that no one cares if it is big or tiny. One is blessed who hears rhythms of silent echoes of things in the world‘s music. I am silent wile I am feeding, for silence feeds as in Buddhists‘ gathering and Quakers‘ gathering. Only birds chirp 132 ―Pien 辯‖ can mean ―discrimination‖ (Watson, Graham), ―disputation‖ (Mair), ―argument‖ (Legge, Giles), and the list goes on. This is itself a case of straight talk grasped and told variously. 133 Chuang Tzu 2/92-94, 11/63-65, 25/81 are combined here. 134 Horowitz shipped his piano to Russia for his recital, but no other pianist I know of does so. 135 At most, violin strains out two or three voices but no more, and they are so personal. 136 Someone told Accardo that she heard Francescatti as his violin was played by Accado. 137 We are transfixed by those who play piano like violin (Artur Schnabel, Clara Haskil, Ingrid Haebler), and shrink from those who pound on violin like piano, as so many violinists do today. 138 See long article, ―China,‖ Harvard Dictionary of Music, Willi Apel, Harvard University Press, 1977, pp. 151157. Sadly, this entire article vanished in later editions.

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among silent clouds, over the grass; and now all is quieter deeper as all is as it is. Do you hear Debussy‘s silence in all this? I am fed here. That is how music echoes silence to hug the world, and we are hugged, trembling in the joy of living. We call all this renovation of the world in us, and ours echoing the world, ―music alive,‖ as if nothing were the matter. Menuhin‘s music hugs silence, the louder the music, the louder the silence, and the silence hugs the music. My Professor Clare Anderson 139 has this poem, ―Hear,‖ that binds and sums up the rest in her book of poems: Here on this pebbled shore how music and silence meet, As the wind cries through the waves And the song hangs in the air And the rush of the spirit is one. Looking through long far-off times how the waters come and go, And the rocks break into stones 140 And the seats enfold and release And the gathering and scattering are one. Agate and forest amber and many-moulded flint Lie here in balanced motion Like violin bow suspended, And the movement and stillness are one. 141

This is poetry of the world, and this is how we come to word with the word-forgotten one, in the silent story, in poetry. Many stories, essays, and analects among the great ancients, religious sages, and those in China and in Japan, are of this expressive sort in and of the world; that is why and how they come down to us today echoing in us as ―Classics.‖ Stories are told, lives are lived, and each life-story means differently to different people at different times as they live and understand variously. Stories can be complex, various parables can be told; they can be understood variously, and all remain straight talks, directly connected to the actual situation and to the hearers and speakers. Story remains the stuff of which life is made and the frame in which life is lived, and storytelling is the way life goes on and grows in silence. Everyday is fresh, full of stories straightly told and lived, and variously received and lived. While strictly forbidding idolatry taking earthly things as God‘s images, the Bible says that humans are God‘s image, and the Son of Man God Incarnate is God‘s true Image that keeps giving us many earthly things as images, likeness, and parables of God‘s Kingdom. Jesus tells parables to form images of God‘s Kingdom in us, to show us God in things alive 142 here. Perhaps directly ―telling‖ to ―show‖ (as children‘s ―show and tell‖?) directly shakes us and shapes us, allowing no detached survey or visual examination, and idolatry is a matter of 139 Clare Anderson, Sad, Mad, Good, Bad, North Yorkshire, UK: Tradewinds Design and Printing, 1999, p. 2. 140 This is ―§ Why the I Ching Makes No Mistakes.‖ 141 This world-poetic sentiment is echoed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty‘s The Prose of the World (1969, ed. Claude Lefort), tr. John O‘Neill, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. 142 Cf. Matthew 13 except vv. 44-46.

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visual images detached from our hearts for us to survey with our inspecting minds. Storytelling is luckily not idolatrous but basically oral; stories can be written down as records of what they tell, while stories by nature tell. Stories are told and we hear them as parables; all stories are parables that straightly show us novel unnoticed truth innocent, straight. What does telling-and-hearing involve? Frey savored and sensitively catalogued how telling-hearing differ from writing-reading; 144 Telling/hearing is auditory, surrounding the hearers with Smith pondered on ―orality.‖ impacts that cannot be shut off at hearers‘ will, the impacts that often shape the hearers beyond their control. Hearers are thereby linked via storytelling to the storyteller and the story, which in turn is shaped by hearers‘ reactions, to shape the storyteller shaped by actuality, to shape the world story-told-heard-and-shaped. Their shared world is thus shaped and revealed to them all as interactively changing, shaping, and becoming, ever in process. The process includes the action of telling that overflows spoken words, for storytelling often goes by nods and intoned gestures to point to the surrounding stones, trees, rivers, and mountains now echoed with story-significance to shape their shared world. Storytellers and story-hearers experience these stories shaped directly, personally; stories are the lived and living stuff of which their lives are made to 145 create the world. Such a story-dynamic life-phenomenon reminds us of confession, a story told from one‘s heart to someone. A story is really a confession about what is the case to the listeners. Is such a confessional story really a truthful one? Well, it is if it is told long enough in time, to become a part of history. Nothing is hid in such a story in time called ―history.‖ Things are told as they are, leaking nothing, in this time-net as Heavenly Net (Lao Tzu 73), true stories told as true, lies often told as things interesting if not as straight lies. Stories told are recorded often, and read often. Such a reading is repeated, not for new information as our usual reading is for, but to reenact it and participate in it and be shaped by it, thereby shape it further. We live in/by/on such constant reenactment, which is redescriptive reliving that inevitably pro-duces something fresh, drawing forth something nonexistent before yet patterned after that ―before‖ that is thus reenacted and relived. This is human creation by stories. So to reenact is to re-create, to inherit the past is to create the now and the future, and in order to create we must reenact the past. To live through this creative process is history; we live in/by/on history and, in fact, we are reincarnations, again and again, of history itself. In this sense, reading religious scriptures (such as Buddhist Sutras, Islamic Koran, and Christian Bible) is a life-recital, a recitation of life lived and living as it was lived in the great past stories told, to be enriched by them and incarnated in them. What does all this amount to? We inherit the tradition by kicking it. Anti-traditionalism is the true tradition. This is because tradition is something worth handing down, something excellent/distinguished/outstanding, and things outstanding are things that stand out of what has been, distinguished from the past, differing from past excellence, and such differing kicks 143 Moses unwittingly went (―turn‖) to the burning bush to ―to see‖ (Exodus 3:3-4). 144 Rodney Frey, ed., Stories That Make the World: Oral Literature of the Indian Peoples of the Inland Northwest, Norman: the University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. Huston Smith, The World‟s Religions (1958), NY: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991, pp. 368-372. 145 I have freely rifled Frey and added my own thoughts. There are some more but this is enough to show how vibrantly alive to communal life storytelling and story-hearing are. See Frey, op. cit., pp. 141-158, et passim.

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the past excellence, kicks the tradition, to be ―more‖ excellent than past excellence. So I used 146 to say; that was my past claim. Now, suppose I now disagree with this claim, then my disagreement amounts to kicking this claim, and I thereby inherit this claim that insists on kicking the inheritance. Suppose I agree with this claim, then I must follow this claim by kicking it. Thus, while agreeing or disagreeing with this claim, I end up following it, in the same manner as the belief in criticism embraces both agreeing and disagreeing with this belief. In other words, this claim is universally valid in all cases, whether we agree or disagree with this claim. Such is how history—storytelling in time, in life, throughout the ages—works. We end up being in history, while following or refusing to follow history. World judgment is world history, for our judgment of history is/becomes part of history. So history turns Hegel‘s dictum (―World history is world judgment‖) upside down, and justifies Hegel himself as part of history; history thus overflows and embraces its critiques, all our fuss about it. Story is thus powerful through time. We will have much more to say about the power of storytelling and story-thinking through time soon enough but we had better shed now our prejudice against storytelling and story-thinking as kid-stuff, beneath the dignity of ―adult mature thinking.‖

HOW STORYTELLING WORKS WONDERS Sartre said that drab daily ongoing, once told as a story, gains a life of its own, as if 147 catching time by its tail. This is how we make history, to become historical. We sigh and say, ―This is the wonder of storytelling.‖ Now, our question is how so, how storytelling, why/how just retelling what has happened or what is the case (nothing was the matter there), could work such a wonder. The situation is complex, perhaps tri-plexed. A child from inside the car shouts, ―Dad, look, a same different car!‖ and we instantly understand what he means, yet we who know ―logic‖ laugh and marvel; nothing can be both same and different, the child is logically wrong, yet how straightly apt the expression is! So, we have here in this situation (a) the child‘s innocence, honestly reporting the fact of ―a same different car,‖ (b) an adult the logician who judges it to be incorrect, (c) yet marvels at its peculiar aptness, and is jolted into laughter by the clash between unassailable situational aptness and logical incorrect-ness. Telling this mini-story brings this ordinary event into a complex wonder. ―Kids say the 148 darnedest things‖ only from Mr. Linkletter‘s adult viewpoint, for kids are just kids, to be marveled at only by the adults, to be told to by Linkletter. It takes Mencius (4B12) to say, ―The Great One is one who has not lost one‘s own ‗infant‘s heart‘‖ for us to marvel, while the infant is no ―great one‖ himself. Let us stay here for a while. The child is both original and originative, primal-root (Li Chih) and primitive-growing (Piaget), and its mysterious depth lies in this ―and,‖ the natural blend of its opposites. Here 146 The Butterfly as Companion, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990, p. 9. 147 Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, NY: New Directions, 1964, pp. 56-59. This novel was his first storytelling, an instant bestseller. Cf. Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being, tr. G. S. Fraser, Chicago: Regnery/Gateway, 1960, I: 192-194. 148 Art Linkletter, Kids Say the Darnedest Things! Berkeley, CA: Celestial Arts, 2005.

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are what kindergarten kids say about ―peace,‖ as my daughter with the heart of the child emailed me in mid-January 2010. Peace is trying to help everyone feel like they belong. Peace is a feeling you have inside your heart when you help people. Peace is like basketball—it‘s not about who is winning but how much fun we are having playing! Peace is happiness for everyone. Peace is taking care of our earth and everyone on it. Peace is caring for everybody. Peace is making friends with someone who looks like they are being left out of a game. Peace is making friends with our world, the people, the animals, the whole earth. Peace is playing with someone no matter what they look like. Peace taking care of each other. Peace is giving people a second chance even if they hurt your feelings before. Peace is smiling at someone you don‘t know yet.

In their refreshing immaturity these tiny kids teach us mature adults that ―peace‖ is felt acts of peacemaking interpersonal, never quiet, and never kept inside. ―Peace‖ vanishes otherwise, set, staid, dead. ―Toward the close of his life, Black Elk, a shaman of the Oglala Sioux, often fell to all fours to play with toddlers. ‗We have much in common,‘ he said, ‗They have just come from the Great Mysterious and I am about to return to it.‘‖149 Here is the mysterious unity of sagely maturity and toddler‘s immaturity, both gather to play on all fours. Such deep fun together! The wonder of wonders is that this ―mysterious unity‖ is never mystical, esoteric, or exotic, but starkly concrete beyond adult understanding. The child primitive disarms us into its primal depth, its surprising originality. This is the origin of the ordinary as the extraordinary, the simple as the spectacular, the origin of simple things around as they are present in depth. Things here now are the active child. The hills are just hills, and then appear as more than just hills, and then show themselves as hills truly, spectacularly, as poets, painters, musicians, and scientists perceive them. But all such stages of ―progress‖ tell of us adults progressing (Zen progress, we say) toward the children, who just clap their hands and stamp their feet ―dancing the hills‖ out there, for nothing, for joy of hills just there. The child thus charms us, disarming us, and so it is deep—because it is primitively concrete present so clearly, so completely; nothing is hid, and so all is dizzyingly deep beyond all fathoming. The child is an open secret so starkly present, singing in unison with all things so starkly concrete. We adults must simplify our engagements to go back home to the child‘s original depth of the simple concrete, solidly concrete. To put it another way, the reason why grandparents have no generation-gap with grandchildren is because grandparents are twice removed from the children. The parents scrape with children, while the grandparents sit back, clap hands, and enjoy them, and we who are neither parents nor grandparents tell their stories and smile. Only then can we marvel at the splendor of the kid-simple in daily life. What is simple is what is clear, out there for all to see, as a baby crying to show she is wet, tired, hungry, or sick, nothing else. Such charming simplicity is yet bottomless, for we cannot stop gazing at her in sleep or in smile, and her tears draw ours. She has no dull 149 Li Chih, ―On Child‘s Heart 童心說,‖ in 李贄文集，北京社會科學文獻出版社, 2000, I: 91-93. See Jean Piaget, The Origins of Intelligence in Children, NY: W. W. Norton, 1963, The Moral Judgment of the Child, NY: The Free Press, 1966, and many other volumes studying the child‘s development into adulthood. Huston Smith, The World‟s Religions, HarperSanFrancisco, 1986, p. 374.

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moments, for we wish she were awake when she sleeps, and wish she sleeps when awake. She keeps us busy. Simplicity keeps us busy, bottomless; each moment is eternal, and each eternity lasts but a moment. Traditional Chinese calendar loads each day with tons of instructions on what to do and what not to do. Each day is loaded with meanings. Western calendar has simple blank, vacancy, for each day. Both calendars are correct; simple blank is loaded with meanings. We call it being alive. Simplicity is alive, deep, and endless. Simplicity is deep, for it has nothing in itself, and so simplicity is roomy, nestling us; we are deepened inexpressibly, as much as we can do and be filled, and more, much more than we can, endlessly. Simplicity is thus irresistible, disarmingly charming people. Kids, Haydn, and Bruckner are all simple in all their different depths, drawing us all. But ―we all‖ here are no kids, and Haydn or Bruckner is no kid, either. We learn from kids to whom nothing is the matter and nothing matters, for to kids things are just as they are to play with, as kids are just as they are, ―naughty, unmanageable,‖ full of pep overflowing each moment. Thus it would be misguided to extol the child as a genius just because the genius has the 150 child‘s soul and perspective ; it is not the child‘s simple innocence but the adult‘s second innocence that is precious. Being a child and having the child in an adult‘s heart are two completely different worlds, and to bring out the difference (a) we must tell stories about both (b) the child and (c) the adult. To put it yet another way, daily life is simple as it is, nothing special. It takes (a) Chuang Tzu to notice its splendor to describe it in beguilingly simple mini-stories, (b) name-logician Hui Tzu to challenge Chuang Tzu, and (c) Chuang Tzu to ―rebut‖ Hui Tzu. It takes all these three to compose Taoism‘s various marvels at the splendor of the simple, and thereby thrive 151 in such stunning simplicity of this world. An example (17/87-91) gloriously exhibits the wonder tripled. Chuang Tzu and Hui Tzu (the name-logician) were strolling (yu) above the Hao River. Chuang Tzu said, ―Minnows are out in a leisurely wandering (yu); such is the joy of the fish!‖ Hui Tzu said, ―You are no fish; how (could you) know the fish‘s joy?‖ Chuang Tzu said, ―You are not me; how (could you) know I don‘t know the fish‘s joy?‖ Hui Tzu said, ―I am not you; of course I don‘t know you. (But) you are of course not the fish, (so it) completes (the case) of your not knowing the fish‘s joy.‖ Chuang Tzu said, ―Let‘s trace (back to) your original (question). Your asking ‗How (could you) know the fish‘s joy?‘ (shows) you already knew I knew it and asked me. I know it above the Hao.‖

(a) Being in situ, on the spot—above the Hao—enabled Chuang Tzu to understand the fish‘s joy. At the same time, this spot is where two friends enjoyed (b) creating problems and bantering around on it to understand the cause of knowing the fish‘s joy. As they on the bridge enjoyed darting back and forth arguing, so the fish under the bridge enjoyed darting back and forth. 150 王國維 risks committing this error when he said, ―自某方面觀之, 凡赤子皆天才也.; 又凡天才自某方面觀之, 皆赤子也. Seen from a certain aspect, all infants are geniuses, and all geniuses, seen from a certain aspect, are infants.‖ (in , quoted by 馬自毅 in his 導讀 in 新譯人間詞話, 臺北: 三民書局1994, 2001, p. 19) 151 Chuang Tzu has stories out of this world as well, to say that things out of this world are part of this world, to say that this world is ―out of the world.‖ It limit is the sky, which recedes as you think you have reached it. We realize that the sky is limitless only by reaching to it as our limit. The sky is this world out of this world.

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(c) Finally, Hui Tzu‘s questionings manifested this joy, this way. ―I know fish-enjoying on the Hao.‖ This knowledge has two inconsistencies; each has a No in Yes. One, Chuang‘s knowing contains his not fish, difference is ignorance, so his knowing contains not-knowing. Two, difference as ignorance contains its denial, as Hui not Chuang yet knowing Chuang not fish. Both Nos compose Chuang knowing fish‘s joy here now, containing two Nos. Yes exists by containing No; negative is part of affirmative as room‘s vacancy makes it roomy and useful. Hui Tzu was thus indispensable to Chuang Tzu‘s enjoyment as No is essential to Yes. No wonder, Chuang Tzu sorely missed Hui Tzu‘s death (24/48-51). Chuang Tzu was accompanying a funeral when he passed by Hui Tzu‘s grave. Turning to his attendant, he said, ―There was a man of Ying who, when smeared with plaster on his nosetip as (thin as) a fly‘s wing, let carpenter Shih to slice-it-off. Carpenter Shih raised the wind wheeling the hatchet, following152 (the wind), sliced off every plaster bit, and the nose was not hurt (while) the Ying man stood (there) unperturbed. Lord Yüan of Sung, hearing of it, summoned carpenter Shih and said, ‗Try do it for me.‘ Carpenter Shih said, ‗Your servant did use to be able to slice it off (like that). However, my material-partner has long been dead.‘ Since your death, Mister (Hui), I have no one for my material-partner any longer. I have no one to talk with any more.

We can see that, after such a dazzling display of enjoyment in arguing with his friend Hui Tzu, Chuang Tzu then looked down at the ground in silence; he did not drum on an empty bowl and sing as he did when his wife died (18/15). Such touching storytelling is what constitutes the ―classic‖ out of the Book of Chuang Tzu. Telling stories like this, and telling about all this, bring out all this poignancy of life to make us ponder. In short, it is thus that storytelling works wonders—of life. Now, have we noticed it? We have just told stories about how stories work wonders; we have done metastorytelling on storytelling. What is meta-storytelling? Is it just another storytelling? Or is it something special? We must look into this fascinating territory.

META-STORYTELLING Look at how incessantly stories pour out in magazines, journals, and as bestsellers and long-sellers. ―Why do we keep telling stories of life?‖ we ask, and we tell stories about why/how we tell stories. ―What are good stories and bad ones? How do we tell stories to tell ‗good‘ stories from ‗bad‘ ones?‖ ―Are we not supposed to tell stories sometimes? When would that ‗sometime‘ be?‖ ―Is there an unethical storytelling?‖ We ask and ask, and we tell stories about narrative ethics to decide on the ethics of storytelling.153 One thing is clear. We never can get out of storytelling, for we never can get out of living, and storytelling is (part of) our living; we live on it. Cut storytelling, and we die. Answers to all above good questions matter little. We are simply awed and impressed by how 152 ―Listening 聽 [to the wind]‖ in the original. 153 Rita Charon and Martha Montello eds., Stories Matter: The Role of Narrative in Medical Ethics, NY: Routledge, 2002, is just that, telling stories about how storytelling helps medical ethics, not reflecting about how to judge what sort of storytelling is unethical and why.

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persistent and inescapable storytelling is, even here at the meta-level. It is simply awesome indeed, this storytelling. To think of it, though, storytellers themselves do not in fact raise the above questions, which lie outside storytelling itself; these questions make no sense. Now, the I Ching (Classic of Changes) and religions are made of stories and poetic storybits, and poetry opens out to its sense, to the future of its open-out sense, by opening out to its readers. For example, Aesop154 tells of a tree accusing two men of ingratitude who complain how useless the tree is, while the tree is sheltering them from the scorching heat. Chuang Tzu would softly mumble, ―It‘s tall tree‘s silence that speaks with jittery chitchatting magpies.‖155 Now, it is up to us its readers to see what this Aesop-Chuang story means. For example, ―trees‖ sheltering us from life‘s scorching heat are often natural, free, unnoticed, and even complained to their faces. It takes a sensitive Aesop to tell us this amazing truth/fact, and takes a no less sensitive Chuang Tzu to nudge us to note that such sheltering trees are silent, silently accepting our ungrateful complaints, as they continue to shelter us, in silence. We had better then be sensitive enough to be grateful. Gratitude takes sensitivity to pull off. Our further reading could see/hear the trees‘ accusation in silence very soon turn lethally loud as many species die one by one; remember ―silent spring‖! Even frogs cease to be around, before we humans vanish. Gratitude is due us and nourishing to us and to everything around whose inter-survival depends on gratitude. In the end, we realize that gratitude is the message of sensitive Aesop and Chuang Tzu. These are two among many meanings we their readers could see, sensitively, thanks to evocation by their sensitivity. Such evocation of sensitivity of storytelling is what makes life worth living, and Socrates‘ urging of self-examination could amount to an urging of evocation of life-sensitivity. This volume tells stories that evoke as story-thinking. The I Ching and religions are divinatory-future-telling and ontological now-telling, and so they cannot answer ontological questions about storytelling itself (Why tell stories at all?) and normative ones (Are we not supposed to tell sometimes? Is there an unethical storytelling?). We cannot ask which fortune-telling is correct to a fortune-teller, or which religion is right to a religion. ―Histories have no word ‗history,‘ as no self allows self to ‗self‘‖ (Chang).156 As the self is silent on the self, so history-storytelling is silent on itself. ―Does all this point make nonsense out of storytelling, fortune-telling, religions, and history that tells of all this?‖ Well, it may well do, but if they are nonsense, life is, for life is storytelling, and fortune-telling is concerned with future life and religions concern with ultimate matters of life—in the mode of storytelling as history. Life is at the rock bottom of normative and meta-reflections and storytelling exhibits to expand life. So, storytelling cannot be subject to normative or meta-reflections storytelling initiates, enables, and exhibits. Now, ―Is such reflection in this section itself a story?‖ Yes, indeed. We have told a story about storytelling, this time in the mode of meta-storytelling. ―Is meta-storytelling itself a 154

Themes of Aesop‘s fables overflow our daily lives to overflow every age and every place. Aesop‘s fables produce an unending flow of books. Here are just two of them. Aesop: The Complete Fables, NY: Penguin Books, 1998. Simon Stern, ed., The Life and Fables of Æsop, NY: Taplinger Publishing Co., 1970. Still, what we said above may be the first to think about Aesop, as Deleuzi was about Lewis Carroll (The Logic of Sense), and Wu about Chuang Tzu (World Philosopher at Play, Butterfly as Companion). 155 Chuang Tzu 2/73, 75. ―長梧子 ch‘ang wu tzu, Mr. Tall Dryandra,‖ could be a homonym to ―長悟子, ch‘ang wu tzu, Mr. Long (deep) Enlightenment.‖ This is one more example of how one Chinese character can be a compact story mutely appealing to our understanding. See my Chinese Wisdom Alive: Vignettes of Life-Thinking, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2010. 156 」 says 章學誠 in 文史通義校注，葉瑛校注，北京中華書局，2005 p. 93 (經解上).

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storytelling?‖ Most definitely yes; we often tell stories about stories that tell about other stories, and this is one of such occasions. ―But then, haven‘t we done meta-reflection on storytelling that we said we should not do?‖ Well, Yes we have, for we did meta-storytelling indeed, yet No, for we did it not in reflection different from storytelling but as storytelling, albeit of reflective sort. ―But then aren‘t all reflections a storytelling, or at least a meta-storytelling?‖ We must admit that it is the case. We must take reflection as itself a storytelling, not as not-story. This is the point of this section. Life with its reflection is all storytelling that makes all generations of human lives a history of the world. What then is ―history‖? How does it come about?

Chapter 2

HISTORY To understand history, we begin with ―translation.‖ Translation is our labor to transfer us from the past to the future. We are transferred by imitating and learning of our forefathers who wait for us in the future. People in the past appear in (the historical context of) continual critical dialogues with us latecomers, by continual reenactment. One sad story of history is that of politics full of dictatorial disasters precisely in the name of ―people,‖ or of democracy. History makes no mistakes, however, for it continually exposes all things, and also exposes mistakes, and what exposes mistakes makes no mistake; if it does make mistake, then what exposes mistakes in that ―exposer‖ would make no mistake. The Classic of Change, I Ching, captures this powerful nisus of history for us and our future. The I Ching was numberstructured. We are prompted to see how numbers, humanly understood, were in the history of China. Here we must go beyond human numbers to consider translation as such.

TRANSLATION, TRANSPOSITION, STORYTELLING In order to see how history takes place, we must consider translation as transposition from one situation to another. We call it ―description,‖ more prevalent than we suspect. Whenever we spot something noteworthy we describe it. Description is ubiquitous; we are hard put to find things non-descriptive, for things appear only by recognizing their names, to recite their stories. Philosophy, unlikely as it may seem, is full of descriptions. Phenomenology is a description of things that appear as they are. Metaphysics describes basic stuff behind things, cosmology describes the world, ontology describes what it is to be, critical philosophy describes how we know, logical analysis describes the coherence of our knowing, and the list goes on. Name packs description, and description tells stories. Description tells a story, philosophy thinks, and so thinking is storytelling. Thoughtfully to tell stories gathers things into a coherent whole to make sense1; to gather to make sense is logic to make whole.2 In other words, we think by/in storytelling; telling stories, we think to make whole. We repeat: to think is to tell various stories, to variously make each life of a 1 Martin Heidegger, among many thinkers, thrives on this simple but spectacular realization, called ―logos.‖ 2 To ―heal‖ is to something ―whole,‖ to make it all of a piece.

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thing whole as this thing, each in its own way. Name packs such storytelling that makes whole each existence told of. Life continues to tell various stories to make whole various lives and things; thus history is continually made. Stories of lives then translate into other different lives, other cultures, and other times—by transposing themselves in more stories of more sorts and more cultures. Translation makes history to go around in time and in space. What is ―translation,‖ then? It is understanding that is quite complex. Let us put it this way. We have two ways of understanding a school of thought, from outsider and from inside. Outside understanding can be historical or philosophical. China‘s historical understanding is often from a specific standpoint albeit unawares. Western philosophical understanding is taken as itself above criticism, high up in Platonic heaven of eternity. One who understands from inside, in contrast, lives in that idea-climate, in which to look at everything around us. The person is incarnated by that idea-air, to bring all things breathing alive. Ch‘en Ku-ying‘s external approach, typical of all objective historical studies of ideas, has definitive enunciations, as if the historian were smarter than the sages commented on; here is no internal going-through. Munro and Ch‘en stand off from China, observe it from above, from nowhere, to render definitive (if not final) pronouncements on an exotic (if not barbarous, for Munro) culture, ―China‖; they are quite confident that they know-it-all above all things, seeing all things Chinese from nowhere.3 ―Know-it-all‖ sadly ciphers ―know nothing‖ unawares. Moreover, to complicate the matter further, China has ―I commenting on Six Classics 我注六經‖ and ―Six Classics commenting on me 六經注我.‖ ―I commenting Six Classics‖ can understand the Classics from inside and outside in my ―commentaries 注‖; ―Six Classics commenting me‖ uses the Classics to express myself. They thus seem to be in contrast, but more is involved than this contrast. Inside understanding involves I-development, not Classics, while ―involvement‖ in ―I commenting‖ is concerned with ―Classics,‖ and ―Classics commenting‖ is concerned with ―me.‖ So ―I commenting‖ and ―Classics commenting‖ have both internal understanding and external one; the relation of commenting with understanding is then quite complex, and leads to somewhere unexpected. Let‘s take an example. Tai Chen 戴震 advertised his ―objective/external‖ commentary on the Mencius,4 but actually he intended it to passionately correct scholarship of his day, i.e., his commentary was his inside understanding; he made Mencius as commentary to him. But of course he would be the first to deny such underhanded arrogance, and would insist that in his commentary he vanished in Mencius, who vanished in him. Here the inside and the outside fused in one. To all such happening, later commentators, advertising as objectively/externally commenting on Tai‘s commentary on Mencius, continue to do likewise, to the extent that the external vanishes into the internal to finally inter-vanish into one. All this provokes even later thinkers to do likewise. Such is what China cherishes as its ―commentarial tradition,‖ never to 3 To the same Chuang Tzu, Ch‘en Ku-ying and Donald J. Munro adopt external approach; I do internal. See 陳鼓應著，老莊新論，臺北市五南圖書公司，民84. Donal J. Munro‘s ―Afterword‖ to Tsai Chih Chung, Zhuangzi Speaks, Princeton University Press, 1992, pp. 127-142. Kuang-ming Wu, The Butterfly as Companion, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990. 4 戴震 (1724-1777) 著，孟子字義疏證。 Ann-ping Chin and Mansfield Freeman, trs., Tai Chen on Mencius: Explorations in Words and Meaning, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990.

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be mocked. Western interpreters neglect all this historical commentarial complexity at their own peril, as with Richards, Fingarette, Graham, Yearley, Hansen, etc., in their external observation. We will have occasion later to go into them all. Such is the Chinese ―intellectual history,‖ the story-in-time of the Chinese mind. This sort of inter-internal-external understanding had already begun in ancient days as transcription and translation of ―history‖ in the Tso Chuan 左傳 that often raises the Western eyebrows of objective and external historiography-scholars as ―arbitrarily subjective.‖5 In short, ―translation‖ is idea-transposition complexly inter-transforming, never a straight wordfor-word transference. We are surprised to find translation full of trials and errors, and going through this process, this history, is part and parcel of ―translation.‖ In the end, we will realize that this going-through is translation that is what history is about. But this is to anticipate. Let us cite another specific example. Here is a story of my long letter to an avid translator of Lao Tzu‘s Tao Te Ching. Dear John: Lao Tzu is translator‘s nightmare; I see four difficulties here, plus fifth and sixth points that are two unwitting and strange breakthroughs. One, Lao Tzu is ―ambi-guous‖ ―going-around‖ among a word‘s several meanings. When Lao Tzu uses it to mean, other meanings are ready at hand, quite inter-involved. In mutual meaning-resonance, the sentence rings powerfully convincing, subtly ineffable. Translator must negotiate the difference between Chinese meaning-cluster and English one. ―Tao can Tao, not always-Tao‖ that begins the Tao Te Ching is typical. The second ―tao‖ has been an enigma. Its usual interpretation, ―tell, say, talk 言, 云, 談‖6 may have emerged later than sixth century BCE when Tao Te Ching was written. Fukunaga inexplicably took it as ―stipulate 規 定.‖ Cleary took it as ―guide 導‖ to make of the whole sentence as ―A way can be a guide, but not a fixed path,‖7 taking ―always 常‖ as ―fixed.‖ This rendering flattens the sentence to trivial sense, violating Lao Tzu‘s second mystery, ―always.‖ ―Always 常‖ you rendered as ―common‖ has three meaning-involvements. One, ―common‖ means ―well trodden‖ and ―well-known,‖ but, two, in Lao Tzu, what is well trodden is not well known among us. However, three, what is well trodden is also that with which we are familiar or know well as our daily routine—we just don‘t realize it. Now, how can we pack all these meaning-involvements into one neat English sentence as Lao Tzu did in his Chinese? Two, Lao Tzu is so paradoxical as to self-defeat. He declared, ―Tao as Tao is no Tao,‖ yet the entire Tao Te Ching that follows talks about ―Tao as Tao.‖ His point is precisely to tout in our face such self-contradiction. To say, ―Ways we know are not the Way,‖ is so clear it dispels Lao Tzu‘s mystery, and leaving it as unintelligible gibberish doesn‘t help. We are damned if we make it intelligible, and damned if we don‘t. We have the worst of both worlds. 5 Both Wu and Watson cite such examples. See K. Wu, ―Distinctive Features of Chinese Hermeneutics,‖ Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies, June 2004, pp. 233-247. Burton Watson, tr., The Tso chuan: Selections from China‟s Oldest Narrative History, NY: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 80, cf. p. 217, index on ―Confucius.‖. 6 Stephen Addiss and Stanley Lombardo rendered the whole sentence as ―TAO called TAO is not TAO‖ and appended their explanation on it that seems quite unconvincing (pp. xviii-xix) in their Tao Te Ching, Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing Company, 1993. 7 Fukunaga took ―stipulate‖ to mean ―捉える, 定義 grasp, define.‖ 福永光司著, 老子, 上, 東京朝日文庫, 1978, 1992, pp. 31-33. Thomas Cleary, The Essential Tao, NY: HarperCollins, 1992, p. 9.

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Three, Tao Te Ching has the world‘s most numerous translations, second only to the Christian Bible. Why do you want to add one more? Yours will be as one-sided as they, and add to the cacophonous confusion out there, unless yours somehow, by some impossibility, pulls off a perfect English mirror of the Chinese original ambiguity. Four, we must go another way, for, as Chuang Tzu said, ―The Way walks it and forms.‖8 We are, then, to explain and paraphrase, not straightly translate. Sadly, as jokes explained are jokes no more, Lao Tzu interpreted kills him. But if we don‘t, Lao Tzu is left unapproachable. Again, we are damned if we do, damned if we don‘t. All in all, one thing is clear; the translator‘s task is not to translate but to transpose. How? Well, we see two ways. One way is to do indirection, as Tao Te Ching itself has done, to purposely contradicts itself, and throw the enigma at the reader. He contradicts himself with a wink at us. Kierkegaard retold us Christ by way of using pseudonyms, evoking Subjectivity, jotting down parables and short stories in journals, all against straight objectivity and systematic exposition. Nietzsche9 and many others do likewise. Another way is to propose contemporary sentences and stories parallel to Lao Tzu‘s, as pungent and poignant as Lao Tzu‘s. It requires a Lao Tzu of today. Where can we find such a Lao Tzu poet? Well, the Taoists other than Lao Tzu, and those later than he, did pull off precisely such stunt. Chuang Tzu packed ―Tao as Tao is no Tao‖ into ―Great Tao declares not 大 道 不 稱‖ and then elaborated on it.10 Then the entire book of Chuang Tzu has three genres of story-writings we call the Inner, the Outer rewording, and the Miscellaneous, rewording the reworded. Lieh Tzu and Huai Nan Tzu the other Taoists ―translated‖ Lao Tzu by stories transposing Lao Tzu. Huai Nan Tzu‘s story of ―Uncle Fort losing a horse 塞 翁 失 馬,‖ presents and illuminates Lao Tzu‘s (58) ―O, woe where weal leans! O, weal where woe lurks! 禍 兮 福 之 所 倚, 福 兮 禍 之 所 伏.‖ Similarly, Hermann Hesse wrote a novel, Siddhartha (1922), a new story to convey to us today ancient Buddha‘s timeless story; Leonard Bernstein produced a musical, ―West Side Story‖ in 1957, to deliver us today Shakespeare‘s unbearable poignancy in ―Romeo and Juliet‖ performed in 1594-1595 and published in 1597. Thus, clearly, the translator‘s task cannot be straight word-for-word transfer; it must be a sensitive transposition of the felt sense, intention, and various implications involved in the original. For this purpose, storytelling is an indispensable vehicle age after age, generation after generation, without ceasing. Five, now, here is a bombshell that smashes all above four hesitations, to redeem them all. Here it is. Lao Tzu himself says, ―Tao tao-able is no common constant Tao,‖ and then goes on to present all tao-ables—toward an exercise in self-wiping futility. Doesn‘t this very futility show how un-tao-able the Tao is, thereby negatively presents the common constant Tao? How beautiful this self-defeating performance is in all its roundabout way, its ambiguity! Isn‘t it ―wu-wei, no-do‖ and no not do 無為而無不為, neither do nor not-do in effective action all around! And isn‘t this ―all around‖ another way of putting ―ambi-guity,‖ driving 8 Chuang Tzu, 2/33. Line 112 in my Butterfly, op. cit., p. 141. 9 Besides his usual volumes, see Søren Kierkegaard Papers and Journals: A Selection, translated, etc., by Alastair Hannay, London: Penguin Books, 1996, and Parables of Kierkegaard, ed. Thomas C. Oden, Princeton University Press, 1978. Cf. A Nietzsche Reader, selected, etc., by R. J. Hollingdale, Penguin Books, 1977. Both volumes are packed with aphorisms and quotables. 10 Chuang Tzu 2/68f. Lines 183f, op. cit., p. 146.

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around all over, if not fooling around,11 to intimate? ―Have gun, will travel‖ used to describe the lifestyle of ―the wild, wild West.‖ Isn‘t this ―no-do driving-around‖ in ambiguity our only almighty ―gun‖ with which to travel the wild, wild lifeworld? It is how such a no-do and no not-do fares in translation of the untranslatable. Can‘t we, shouldn‘t we, follow this ―way‖ by laboring on ―an accurate rendering of the original‖ and fail? Irresponsible muddled mis-translations will not do in this wink at circuitous ambi-guity; we must strive, the best we can, at an ―accurate‖ rendering, and then confess to our failures. Can‘t our struggled translation, succeeding in one-sided clarity, likewise present in all its clarity at least one tao-able Tao, another not-Tao, to miss the Tao, to negatively intimate the common constant Tao? If we must tell a story and not directly translate, we must tell a story that does not tell, by way of straightly struggling clumsy telling. Isn‘t a clear telling—translating—of not-clear truth, itself one clumsy way of telling? Isn‘t the Way tacitly present here, with a wink, unsuspected, unawares, in our clear one-sided translation, which is a clumsy one after all? Six, here is another bombshell. Someone may wonder why we bother to translate at all. Well, to ―translate‖ means to ―transfer,‖12 and so translating an ancient story transfers it to our world today. Translating an ancient story re-describes it, thereby transposes it to us here now. Why do we do so? Because transposition of a story enables us to learn from it, act it out, thereby relive it our own way in our daily lives. We are then transformed by the great ancient. All this operation is an historical reenactment that is quite significant. How is it so? The Zen master kicks words away, and yet he is often most wordy with the koans handed down from the past. He kicks away words because he is intent on doing, not talking, and yet he is quite wordy because he word-does word-kicking. He does history, telling stories to reenact. To reenact the past is to act it out, act it forward in our lives our way, to live a new life inspired, breathed-in, by it.13 Space can repeat; ―here and there, funny things are everywhere,‖ said Dr. Seuss. Time cannot repeat, but can and does return rhymed, in writing and reading. Each time I write and read, the unique moments come back uniquely in me, rhymed to these moments. Writing keeps memories; reading visits and revives them. We say that ―history rhymes‖ in literature to make Chinese culture. I write/read history to live my ―same different‖ life here now. Their history rhymes forward into my future life. Thus Thucydides, the great ancient Greek historian, says,14

11 Thus, Chuang Tzu is frivolous when profound, profound when frivolous, as Lin Yutang said, though he did not say why. We supply one reason here. 12 Colossians 1:13, Hebrews 11:5. NRSV and Moffatt say ―transfer, take,‖ Phillips says ―reestablish, promote,‖ Revised English Bible says ―bring us into, take up to.‖ These are all significant renderings. 13 Despite his insight that history is a re-enactment, Collingwood shrank from such strange thought of unstable ―rhyming‖ and got stuck in reenactment as a mechanical repetition of thought—in political constitution, in mathematics. The Republican constitution of Rome he cited is the same then as it is now, in our mind. The Pythagorean Theorem in Pythagoras‘ mind then is same as the Theorem in our minds here now. See R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, Oxford, 1946, 1993, pp. 217-218. Such a mechanical repetition loses all the vitality of history pulsating/rhyming, reflecting/mirroring, in our collective life in time. 14 The History of the Peloponnesian War (431-413 BCE), Book 1, Section 22. Thucydides was defeated in the War he conducted. In exile as its punishment, he wisely wrote this magnum opus on the War. Later (85 BCE), his punishment paralleled Ssu-ma Ch‘ien 司馬遷 who wrote his magnum opus, ―Historical Records 史記,‖ and set a pattern for later historians. So, history rhymes/reflects itself even among the historians. Interrhyming/reflecting in time also enables their historical ―re-enactment.‖ Still, all this is our latecomers‘ aftervision; the two historians must not have thought so.

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Time goes to inter-resemble, inter-rhyming, inter-reflecting, and so knowing our past aids us to interpret our future, to know ourselves better, to plan our future better, and to live our life better and more confident. It is thus that reading a biography heals us,15 and keeping a journal makes an autobiography that also heals, to wit, makes us whole, integrated. Therefore, ―graphotherapy‖—reading and writing therapy—is an important therapeutic strategy, for to read life and write life is to shape life and put it together, whole. Now, the importance of writing/reading life as life-shaping goes beyond personal living. Thurlow said that myth is a tale of the supernatural, to reveal the divine in terms of this life, describing other-worldly matters in this-worldly concepts.16 Myth is the Beyond-us told for our understanding here now. Why do we bother to do so? We do so in order for life here now to partake in the Beyond, in what is beyond in the future. That is why the Christian myths, say, are constantly retold every Sunday. We usually say the primitive people reenact the cosmic events in rituals, and explain their meanings by telling myths. We do not realize that the primitive people perform rituals and tell myths for us today to pattern our lives after theirs, and that to tell in this context is already to do. We with them make myths to enact rituals; no, our mythmaking is itself ritual-enacting. To tell and recite is to act; we act-telling (ritual) and tell-acting (mythmaking). Performing acting-telling, we shape the world into a ―cosmos,‖ an all-beautiful orderly whole, to integrate and renew life. Thus to translate an ancient story is to re-describe it to transpose it here now, so as for us to imitate it (not repeat it), learn from it, and relive it in our lives in our own ways, refreshened and invigorated in the primal vitality of the ancient story. Here to learn is to imitate to reenact; that is what ritual performance is all about, i.e., reenacted in mythmaking, in storytelling our way. Translation of stories, again and again, is history-making and historyreading that is a sacred performance of mythical life-ritual, powerful, rejuvenating us and our lifeworld. The key here is to imitate to learn; to imitate is to learn and follow an example—in action, in life.17 ―Monkey see, monkey do‖—children are experts in learning by imitating, and Mencius assures us that the Great Ones lose no heart of their own baby (4B12) who constantly imitates and learns. Learning does not prepare for life; learning is life itself. They say that every portion of Shakespeare can be traced to his predecessors; it is imitation that made Shakespeare what he is, with the greatness all his own. Furthermore, imitation is no repetition. Japan imitates other cultures differently from the way USA imitates. No single imitation is identical with any other; each subtly differs from all others, including the original that appears to each distinct imitator. No two students grow alike under the same teacher, nor do they achieve alike. Imitation implies some subtle 15 Reading Eisenhower American Hero: The Historical Record of His Life (American Heritage Publishing Co., 1969) stirs our hearts. Four stories of Jesus‘ life are bequeathed to us in the New Testament, and there has been endless outpouring of the ―life of Jesus‖ since then. 16 Thus begins Gilbert Thurlow, Biblical Myths and Mysteries, NY: Crown Publishers, 1974. 17 A well-known classic in this context is Thomas à Kempis‘ (1380-1471) Imitatio Christi that is no imitation.

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incongruity from the original.18 It is because imitation is a controlled creation—controlled both by the original (so it is an imitation) and by the imitator (so it is a creation). Ironically, the imitator may have to deny that his imitation is his. In imitating A, A appears in the imitator, not the imitator appears, as praising A promotes A, not the one who praises.19 An openly admitted imitation, as ―mine,‖ is a contradiction; or perhaps, once admitted, it is no longer imitation but learning, for all learning begins with silent imitation to end in creation that is by definition beyond the original. No wonder, in his passionate exhortation to learning with which he began his writings, Hsün Tzu 荀 子 says, ―The blue issues from indigo and is bluer than indigo‖—bluer, purer, and more brilliant than the original indigo. A learner goes as the teacher points to, and soon goes beyond the teacher whom she leaves behind. Thus the true teacher is a dead one, to wit, a dated one.20 Teacher is a history, a story to start, to take off into our own stories. This is as it should be. Imitation staying imitation stunts originality; it is learning stunted, stopped. Imitation must be ingenious and creative to be enjoyable. All comedians and cartoonists in high creative IQs are imitators openly touted to evoke laughs, and great painters, calligraphers, and storytellers (novelists, journalists) imitate the situation to reveal and evoke learning. Exact repetition is a fiction cranked out of machines; no human is capable of ―imitating‖ machine. To ―imitate nature (天 倣)‖ is unintelligible unless it means ―nature let go of (天 放).‖21 But how could we imitate nature, how could we let nature go, and how could ―imitating‖ be ―letting go‖ when it comes to imitating nature? Aren‘t we duplicating nonsense with nonsense? Well, the impossibility disappears if we note that we have in us an urge to imitate what is there in nature, in us or outside, and to satisfy that urge, we let go of nature, both within us and without. This is the origin of art as imitation,22 children‘s especialty—―monkey see, monkey do,‖ and monkeys are everywhere, for ―here and there, funny things are everywhere,‖ as Dr. Seuss wisely said for kids. We are profound when we return to this kids‘ primal urge. Exposition, exegesis, history, they are all imitations of actuality. Phenomenology is descriptive metaphysics, a re-description as they appear; it is an imitation of the nature of things. Each description differs from every other, uniquely revealing the world. Creation imitates as imitation creates. We have just described and traced imitation, and we feel good; to live is to imitate, creatively. All this human creation-imitation constitutes a continuous story. Now, here is a storytelling about life-stories of imitation description in ―history.‖ What is history? In a way, 18 So says Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, 2001, VII: 677. 19 In In Praise of What Persists (NY: Harper and Row, 1983), its ―editor‖ Stephen Berg disappears. 20 Jesus began his ministry at John the Baptist, who pointed his disciples to Jesus and in joy yielded them all to Jesus. No wonder, Jesus said John was the greatest among men. Jesus died and rose for us, and vanished, leaving us to do the Acts of the Apostles. 21 I considered this play on words, a pseudo-homonym, from a different perspective in ―Learning as a Master from a Master: ‗Chuang Tzu‘ in University General Education,‖ Journal of Humanities East/West, December 1998, p. 178. 22 Aristotle is the first person to claim art as imitation, but he is not responsible for this insight in this context in this manner. For a magisterial albeit wordy study of Aristotle on art, see S. H. Butcher, Aristotle‟s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art with a Critical Text and Translation of The Poetics (1894, 1897, 1911), Fourth Edition, NY: Dover Publications, 1951, pp. 116, 122, 150, 198, et passim. Jones saw how rhythm relates to imitation and praxis, but he is more provocative and controversial than elucidating, much less enlightening (John Jones, On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy, Oxford University Press, 1962, 1968).

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we have been rehearsing history, reshaping history, by telling stories about history, for history is storytelling in human time. To this thrilling query we turn, where our ―forefathers‖ appear.

OUR FOREFATHERS What is history? Our expressions of it tell us a strange paradox. On the one hand, as the phrases ―before the common era‖ and Chinese ―i ch‟ien 以前‖ say, the past is before us, in front of us. On the other hand, the past is what is already passed-and-gone, ―kuo ch‘ü 過去,‖ what is gone-on, ―i wang 以往.‖ As what is passed away, the past is dead, nowhere; as what is before us, the past continues to lead us on into the future, what-is-to-come. Combined both points above, history amounts to being our ―forefathers,‖ our past (―father‖) in front of us (―fore-‖), showing us what would happen if we do A, not B or C. The true teacher is a dead one. As ―dead,‖ the past does not obstruct our prospective vision of the future. We can freely decide to act in whatever way we wish, for the past is dead, and yet history is a ―teacher‖ to admonish us not to act in a certain way. Socrates‘ Daimon that admonished him must have been the daimonic power of history. Thus the past, the history, has a strange power over us at present. The past does not control us, yet we are strangely drawn to it by our own adoration and reverence to it. The past at the back leads us on in front by attraction, not by oppressive control. History is an excitement without obstruction. An example at hand—no need to go to ancient Sisyphus yet—shows how exciting history is. We all have our forefathers who have passed on. Recently my brother Jung-ming brought our father‘s ashes from Taiwan to rest with our mother in Long Island. Here is what I confessed to everyone in our family on that glorious day of celebrative memorial. Thanks to Uncle Jung-ming and Auntie Norma‘s historic struggles of love, we all see today this momentous Joy of A-kong joined with A-má in the USA. To understand this Joy, we must gaze at our Lord Jesus Christ‘s Resurrection from the dead. Three things show the Joy through the young man: (a) Jesus is going ahead of us to (b) Galilee where he made us (c) the children of God‘s family. (a) The dazzlingly white young man23 told us that ―He is going ahead of‖ us with our Akong and A-má (Grandpa and Grandma), who want us to go see them. They are ahead of us in time! Today begins tomorrows; every today we die into new tomorrow. (b) Today is our empty tomb showing that they are ahead in the Galilee of tomorrow. Its ―linen cloths‖ are what ―wrap‖ our today‘s ―body‖ of plans, pleasures and sorrows, to be left with A-kong and A-má‘s precious ashes, all testifying to tomorrow, and another fresh tomorrow. (c) Galilee is where we are forever the children of God and of our A-kong and A-má. Kids are fresh, living for tomorrows. We are kids to A-kong and A-má who are with Jesus 23 The person, who brings us from past Jesus we remember to the resurrected Christ ahead of us, is a ―young man.‖ The One who translates our life to the future, where our forefathers are waiting for us, is forever ―young‖ because the future is young. That Young Man is Jesus himself resurrected, and our A-kong and A-má are with Him.

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ahead of us, waiting for us as we live today, one at a time, for the Galilee of tomorrows with A-kong and A-má, with Jesus. That is why we are so glad here today hugging A-kong and A-má‘s ―linen cloths,‖ testifying to the joy of tomorrows. All these words are our conviction, expressing my actual daily experience. I am sure they are of yours also.

A-kong and A-má our grandparents, who have passed on, beckon to us to pull us ahead toward tomorrow. Their ―linen cloths‖ of stories that wrap them in our remembrances do so. Those linen cloths are our historic dawn today toward our tomorrow. To make a long story short, in Sisyphus‘ dark pit, at the bottom of the hill, is our dawn with Sisyphus‘. The childhood dawn in life everyday—especially the dawn of every today— is a given, a historical boulder. We would always gladly carry it with us as long as we always push the boulder as the day grows, today, for the boulder is ―us‖ given us by our A-kong and A-má. The rest is history, unending. Thus to live along in history enriches the history endlessly. How could the story of our history be endless? One reason is that the very telling of the story of history is itself history, as a telling of history-storytelling makes its own story. Unlike Gödel who said that any system—a stand-together of ideas—is incomplete, provable only by other system(s), no problem we have here to show that the telling of history is history itself, for we are proved by those beyond-us, our A-kong and A-má. Gödel is wrong (history self-proves) because he is right (we are proved by forefathers). Three explanations can be given of above. One, the dawn is nothing and everything; it is self-creative. Storytelling describes the dawn of things. It invokes, via description, to establish the Thou (as Buber proposed) of things, not flatly describing them to destroy the Thou into an It (as Marcel cautioned). Two, story is both coherent and open, ready to go on out in any direction, ready to take in anything described as a part of the story, and anytime a story is told, things whatever gather to come out coherent and meaningful. Three, painting snow-shadows paints snow un-paintable; story paints things, and their milieu shows. We cannot point at a milieu in which we point at things. Story induces a milieu by describing things that are in the milieu yet not the milieu. Story describes things that then naturally manifest their milieu; thing-description indirectly creates milieu. ―Story‖ is thus a portmanteau word-world to mirror a protean milieu-world, thereby the lifeworld; mirroring is indirection of storytelling. All three points indicate that storytelling is a loose coherence; we tell story to make some sense (coherence) out of whatever things that come, often senselessly, and yet the story-sense we make is flexible (loose), a coarse-meshed net ready to change to accommodate whatever changes that come. How could insane Neroes and Hitlers make history? But that is what they do; that is the only ―sense‖ they make. Gödel was correct in the spatial things-standingtogether, systems; his theorem works in the world of time, history in storytelling, only indirectly, one story linking to another, each changing into and by the other. This is because the sort of system he had in mind stays put and does not change, while story-in-time, history, is a system on the go that keeps changing. As time goes, our history gets more things in, and its perspective on things and on itself keeps evolving, changing, turning wider. The later history is the same as and differs from the previous one.

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History is the ―same different system,‖ which is possible only in time. Because the previous history and the later history are the same history, the later history knows enough about the previous one to judge it; because they differ, the later one has a different wider perspective with which to judge the previous one. At the same time, the pre-vious history is ever before (以前, 前世, as the Chinese say) the later one for it to learn from. We learn from our ―forefathers,‖ who serve as our pristine vision and direction, if not our ideal to follow, yet attended with our loving modifications with our hindsight wisdom. After all, Charlie the young lad and Charlie the grown-up are a ―same different person,‖ and so he can correct himself. At the same time, ―Great Ones lose no baby heart of theirs‖ (Mencius); all religions teach us to learn from the child in us and in front of us. All religions say the child is our Beyond. By ever accommodating those events without rhyme or reason, wherever they come from, storytelling weave them into a coherent rhyme called ―history.‖ Thrillingly, we the storytellers and story-hearers become part of this rhyme, this history. We can show this point by two themes, how we together identify a historical personage, and how we continue history by reenactment. We first go to our identification of a historical person. We would be surprised to find that in history, identifying a person amounts to identifying an idea, or idea-trend, or ideology as it comes out and matures, that is, history of a person is a history of ideas. Ideas are alive in history and its persons.

HISTORY OF IDEAS AND STORYTELLING Of course, there are stories and there are stories. Wrong stories of ―war on terrorism‖ can be cured only by right stories of ―compassionate conservatism‖ of ―war on poverty.‖ Stories can be corrected by telling more and different sorts of stories. An example—a story—of this telling of different stories is the task of history of ideas, and history of ideas amounts to history of persons who incarnate these ideas. Studying these ideas amounts to dialoguing with persons incarnating these ideas, and dialoguing with the person is important, not (just) ―finding the person as he is.‖ We usually think that to study history is to ascertain a ―real thinker,‖ ―a past thinker exactly as he was in his own historical setting‖ by ―textual criticism,‖ and so on. My professor, Dr. John Wild, rejects this approach—―antiquarian‖ storytelling—for ―living dialogue . . . with the past in (our) own point of view,‖ another sort of storytelling. Wild says that the ―real Plato‖ is nowhere after he is gone. Each Plato reconstructed later is different from all others and we vainly fight for one against all others. Our fight mistakenly takes Plato as ―an isolated individual,‖ not ―a communicating agent who spoke to many persons . . . , stirring them to living dialogue . . . throughout history to further reflections and questions. (We must not) make an arbitrary cleavage between all this and the real Plato . . . who initiate(d) this ever expanding flow of thought and meaning . . .‖ To an objection that ―other men, not Plato, carried it on,‖ Wild replies that ―dialogue is precisely a fusion—a confusion—of the two. . . . a living tissue (that) belongs to both of us. . . The real Plato, in his essential being, is to be found precisely in the ongoing history of

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Platonic criticism and commentary,‖ and Platonic criticism and commentary are dialogues with Plato. Plato is unintelligible without these later critics as they are without him. ―Objective‖ investigation of the meaning of Plato as if it were facts about Plato (dates/places of birth/death) neglects its own historicity, with new horizons of interests/questions. To try to be ―objective‖ about Plato reduces him to an object, bypassing his subjectivity. Criticism of the text and factual study of its time prepare Plato studies; they are not their center/goal. 24 To bring out Wild‘s contention and substantiate him, here is a proposal,25 to see an individual as a story or a series of stories. Two stories about an individual would help us understand this proposal: a ―tree‖ as different showings-to-beholders, and a ―child‖ as a constantly growing/changing dynamics. Story One: When two persons, A and B, look at a tree and talk about it, ―this tree‖ is the tree-as-shown-to-A in contrast to the tree-as-shown-to-B. Both A and B recognize these showings, in all their differences, as veritably ―the same real tree,‖ and yet in fact there exists no ―real tree‖ separate from these showings. Their common observation of and discussion on ―this tree‖ is impossible otherwise. At the same time, both persons also realize that these showings, for all their differences, are sufficiently coherent and distinctive as to make ―this tree,‖ not ―that tree.‖ This tree is the same-different tree, for ―to be is to be perceived.‖ Story Two: A child is a newborn, a three year old, a teenager, and a husband, a father, and then a grandfather, all of these different persons. He still remains, however, this same dear child to his parents and this same dear friend to his friends who know him through his lifechanges. ―This real he‖ is nowhere to his friends apart from these different persons at different times. There is no ―real child‖ to his parents apart from all these different growth stages. This person is a same-different person. Combining these two stories, we now realize that ―Confucius‖ is the record of his conversations by his disciples called The Analects of Confucius, and Chu Hsi‘s impressions of Confucius that differ from those of Wang Yang-ming and many others in the history of Chinese thought. ―Confucius‖ is none other than (Story One) what appears, and how ―he‖ appears, throughout the ages, (Story Two) growing and changing as ―our Confucius,‖ as (One and Two) we ourselves in later ages grow and change with him.26 In all these changes we can distinctly recognize Confucius as ―Confucius,‖ not any other person such as Socrates. In all this, further, the distortions or misunderstandings are so labeled because of wide (not just slight) deviations from a broad (not narrow) consensus among later historical impressions of ―Confucius,‖ including the consensus on the texts. Furthermore, a defense of a new view is conducted by appealing to the same broad consensus on subsequent impressions of Confucius throughout history. It is thus that storytelling of history is refined and corrected by more and different storytelling. As part of Confucius, his ideas grow and shift as he does, with later interpretations of those ideas of his.

24 Sydney and Beatrice Rome, eds, Philosophical Interrogations, NY: Harper Torchbook, 1964, pp. 121-123. 25 This proposal continues my reflection on ―correspondence‖ and ―objectivity‖ in On Metaphoring: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 2001, pp. 84-89. 26 Michael Nylan & Thomas Wilson catalogue many images of ―Confucius‖ in Lives of Confucius, Doubleday, 2010. Raynmond Dawson also sees Confucius‘ images as ―vague and shadowy‖ (Confucius, Oxford University Press, 1981). It is an interesting chase after a will-o‘-the-wisp, unless we have other purposes in mind, as here.

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Mind you, we the latecomers are an integral part of this process. Confucius thus shaped the whole China, as Wing-tsit Chan correctly said.27

HISTORY THE HUMAN DRAMA OF REENACTMENT History is a story, humanly lived, ever continuous. Its dramatic significance is never more illuminated than by a single word of Collingwood, ―re-enactment.‖ History is the human drama of reenacted understanding. Sadly, however, his belabored explication of this notion risks distortion. Eager to show how the dead past can and does reappear now, he appealed to our mental capture of Rome‘s Republican Constitution and Pythagorean theorem, exactly as ancient Romans and Pythagoras entertained them in their minds.28 Here Collingwood committed an overkill to collapse human reenactment into repetition, cognitively legal-logical and mathematical. We must nudge him to be wary; reenactment is no repetition. We must now explain how they differ. Argument goes in self-replication that describes how we come to understand to rehearse a complex logical argument; this process of subjective growth in understanding and rehearsing belongs to history.29 Still, logical argument as such objectively remains unchanged out there, ready to repeat itself indifferently in many minds across time and space. In contrast, interpersonal understanding goes by reenactment, subject-subject coresonance. History is a river whose water of each moment, one experience, differs from the water of any other experience. Co-resonance of human experiences, diverse, interrelated, is a peculiar river that flows on self-recursively.30 Experiences inter-reflect, co-resound (影 響) ―breath to breath‖ (息 息 相 關), birthing unceasing (生生不息), day after day ever novel (日日新又日新), to reenact into ―history.‖31 Two examples may help to concretize the matter. My reading of fatherhood logically infers what fatherly love is, but I perceive what it really means as I hold my own baby in my arms. I now say, ―Aha, this is fatherly love. I now understand how my dad loves me,‖ yet I know my love to my baby is not my father‘s love of me; they differ in character, in circumstances. Their interaction of similarity and difference makes the history of fatherhood to tell its story deep in our souls. Again, I go visit my dear friend to weep with him whose wife has just been declared to live for six more months. I weep because he is my dear friend, and in my love of my wife I do understand his sorrow in his deep love of his wife. I know I do not love his wife and his

27

Wing-tsit Chan said so in A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 1963, p. 14. 28 Collingwood, Idea of History, op. cit., pp. 217-218. 29 We have a ―history‖ of the development of logic and mathematics, to be sure, but it is a story different from the one we are considering. The history of logic-development is a part of human history, and its consideration should be reserved until we have ascertained the nature of history itself as dramatic reenactment, not automatic repetition. We will consider repetition in science at the end of this section. 30 That the world is a river is a familiar perception of ancient Heraclitus and Aristotle (Metaph. 987a32, Meteor. 357b30) and ancient Chinese Confucius and Mencius. Heraclitus said that one cannot step into the same river twice, and the river itself is ―change‖ produced by strife (The Pre-Socratics, ed. Alexander P. D. Mourelatos, Anchor Books, 1974, pp. 189-213 [G.S. Kirk and W.K.C. Guthrie]). Confucius and Mencius stood in awe at the riverbank (Analects 9/17, Mencius 4A18). 31 These Chinese phrases are cited because Chinese people are deeply history-conscious.

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spousal love differs from mine. My weeping historically reenacts experiences; history is human drama of reenactment, not bland logical self-repetition. China is historical in reenactment. Three Confucian examples suffice. One is Confucius‘ three sighs that begin his Analects. He sighs, ―Oh isn‘t it rather pleasant to learn and practice it time and again!‖ Learning follows the teacher to grow beyond him in daily practice. Isn‘t this process an historical reenactment so pleasant? Then he sighs, ―Oh isn‘t it rather delightful that classmates come from afar (to interlearn)?‖ Friends give-and-take in inter-sympathetic differences. Confucius finally sighs, ―Oh isn‘t it rather princely of a person whom people ignore, and never sours?‖ Doesn‘t Confucius personally reenact his own princely composure as a climax of learning from teacher and friends? The entire Analects go on in such historical reenactment. Two, later Mencius (2B13) yearned impatiently after the reappearance of legendary princely rulers such as T‘ang and Wen, for the customary 500 year cycle for the return of princely rulers had long been reached and gone. Still, he could not have imagined that the new emerging princely rulers to be identical with rulers T‘ang and Wen. Three, Mencius (1A7) urged Duke Hsüan‘s heart unable to bear the sight of a bull, in mortal jitters being dragged to a sacrificial slaughter, to apply to people; the unbearable heart at the non-human bull is reenacted into the unbearable heart at the human. History is a threefold verb; it reenacts, rhymes, and develops. The Duke‘s act to a bull reenacts it on people. His-act-to-a-bull rhymes with his-act-to-people, to develop princely rulership, to become historic. In contrast, science treasures exact repeatability of its discovery as its proof and confirmation. Logic allows no deviation from the strictly prescribed steps. Still, logical repetition has its place in the historical dynamics of reenactment. Geometrical proof is historical performance that goes from this point to the next; the necessity of 7+5=12 is not analytical, for ―12‖ cannot obtain by analyzing, ―7,‖ ―+,‖ ―5,‖ and ―=,‖ but by adding 7 to 5, historically.32 Kuhn also describes ―scientific revolution in paradigm shift,‖33 history in scientific reenactment. It is time to take stock. All the above Chinese examples have been paradigms rekindled again and again in the souls of subsequent generations—till today. No less exciting is the history of scientific revolution rehearsed by Kuhn, whose slender volume is justly hailed as one of ―The Hundred Most influential Books Since the Second world War‖ by The Times Literary Supplement.34

32 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976, pp. 384-286. See my On Chinese Body Thinking, Leiden: Brill, 1997, pp. 300-302. The same historical-bodily performance is seen in the synthetic a priori calculation of 7+5=12 in Kant‘s Critique of Pure Reason, B15-17, as I explained in History, Thinking, and Literature in Chinese Philosophy, Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1991, pp. 1617. 33 Newton‘s absolute space/time gave way to Einstein‘s relativistic warps in time, and then to self-recursive superstring theory and beyond. On today‘s physics, see Michio Kaku‘s popular Hyperspace, Oxford University Press and NY: Doubleday, 1994. The book adopts a fashionable title ―hyperspace,‖ perhaps showing the science as spatial, as if to say that our going-beyond in ―hyper-― is not historical. We have no ―physics of history‖ but a history of physics, as here, showing that history goes beyond physics. 34 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Third Edition, The University of Chicago Press, 1996. The quotation from The Times Literary Supplement appears in its back cover. We won‘t be surprised if someone claims that the root cause of our continuing attraction to the notion of ―evolution‖ lies here; evolution is reenactment marching on in history.

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―Rekindling‖ and ―excitement‖ here are reenactments that make history. History is our collective melodious performance of the life-music of human nature, each life-performance of which differs from all others.35 History is the human drama of rhymed reenactment, never bland self-identical replication, although reenactment includes repetition as its part, as rhythm and rhyme. Rhythmic rhyme composes ―reason‖ in logical thinking. Reenactment is presented in one life-story after another—in history, as history. To tell countless stories of human experiences is itself to relive and reenact them to continue history. We live to tell stories of life-experiences, to reenact them to relive them, to perform and create an exciting music of history, and thereby to become history. The music of history is humanly, socio-culturally orchestrated in ―politics.‖ Human history is typified by political history. Thus we cannot help but at least peep into the history of politics.

HISTORY OF POLITICS Mind you. The purpose of this section is not to present an exhaustive scholarly treatise on political theory but to tell stories of politics to tell of the power of storytelling, its cash value in communal living. By its nature, this section is an impressionistic overview, a rough story, of the sad stories of human politics. It is likewise with all other sections on all other themes of life. Stories are told of them, to tell stories of storytelling, not of those themes told of. Let us take a look at a concrete story of mankind, as to how powerfully storytelling governs the world. One of humanity‘s most complex and depressing stories is that of politics, and no politics is without an ideology, that is adherence to a myth, a story. Politics as government entails two parties, ruler and ruled, and stories weave their interactions, wrapped in stories called ―ideologies‖ that govern the community‘s constitution, convention, and common sense. Why do we need governance in the first place? Answering this question rehearses familiar stories of human nature, in China and the West. China appeals to natal ―family‖ ruled by the father with parental care and guidance. Rulership must be insistently, consistently fatherly, caring for all family members of the state, especially the injured and the helpless, and such parental care originates in the human heart that cannot bear people suffering. So, the inherent necessity of political governance originates in our human nature of family tenderness, to dictate how government should proceed. World politics is thus home economics of all under heaven. This is politics 政 rightly 正 handling ㄆ res publica, affairs of the public realm. Departing from this norm of humane natural law of politics departs from orderly cultivation of the human world, and everyone is destroyed, the ruler with the ruled, in bloody revolution after revolution.36 Sadly, the ideal of ―(all) under heaven, one family 天下一家‖ all too soon turns into the desire, ―(my) family (over) all under heaven 家天下‖; attention now shifts to how the ruler can effectively govern to effectively benefit the ruler alone. ―Family politics‖ now turned a 35 All religions have musical scores for humanity to reenact and to play repeatedly, but perhaps Buddha‘s is the clearest and best known—―birth, senescence, sickness, and death.‖ 36 Confucian political ideals have just been quickly rehearsed. Taoist revolts are unintelligible without this common understanding of Chinese politics.

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clever political campaign to dupe people into blindly obeying him as their ―father,‖ no matter what.37 As a result, devastating dictatorship dominates Chinese history. In the West, Plato also had a natural necessity of politics with the three parts that constitute a person, the rational governing the voluntary and the nutritive; ―body politic‖ is and is to be similarly constituted by rational ruler, military guardians, and productive farmers and sustaining artisans. Public ―health‖-under-reason was ―justice‖; administering public justice is healthy politics.38 Sadly, the ―rational necessity‖ of the ruler soon turned into ruler‘s rationalization to devise to benefit him alone, and propaganda tricked his people into following his dictates, as the Machiavellian prince. Disasters ensued.39 Interestingly, the above quick survey shows that all dictators had to persuade their governed populace; government depends on the governed to work. An unabashed promoter of rulership if not dictatorship, Hobbes, placed its origin in people who consent to yield part of their individual sovereignty to their common ruler.40 The public monster ―Leviathan‖ is people‘s creation, and an absolute monarchy is ironically based on democratic principle. All politics is people-supreme. Naturally democracy flourishes, yet ―people government‖ is a contradiction of the ruled as the ruler. So Plato condemned democracy as mob-rule of chaotic desires. No wonder, odd as it may sound, John Locke‘s classical rationale for democracy has to continue the rulerruled framework, on the then common idea that our Ruler is God in natural law that includes reason, to equally rule people. Human ruler is viceroy of Supreme Ruler, heaven and nature.41 Oddly, democracy is rationalized by the divine right of kings, God and natural reason. Interestingly, China parallels Locke by taking people to be under ―Father Heaven‖ whose viceroy is the ruler the ―Son of Heaven‖ to administer the heavenly responsibility of nurturing, protecting, and caring for people the Heaven‘s children 天民. The state is centered in the ruler who is responsible for people‘s welfare, as the family is centered in the father who is responsible for children‘s welfare. God and nature are one as ―Heaven.‖ What do we say to all this? Democracy literally means people-power, not people-rule, for the people means the ruled (Plato42). God and Heaven are invisible, so natural reason must be that under which people are to be ruled. Concretely, Americans are under the law and statutes. Their ruler the president is chosen by the people by the principle of—what? It must be ―by natural reason,‖ which does not come naturally,43 but must be taught. Hobbes‘ people prudently give up some of their sovereignty to be ruled under a ruler, but their prudence must come from education. 37 Arthur Waley has a handy description of the sad affairs in Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China (1939), Stanford University Press, 1982, pp. 151-196. 38 See the Republic 434d-445b. Francis MacDonald Cornford‘s translation is perhaps the clearest (Oxford University Press, 1941, pp. 129-144). 39 Why violent disharmony erupts against rational natural necessity of political harmony belongs to the mystery called ―akrasia.‖ Violence is everywhere, interpersonally (violence) and individually (misfortune, depression). Various sections in the present volume describe this mystery. 40 Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan (1651), edited with an introduction by C. B. Macpherson, London: Penguin Books, 1985. Laslett devoted a considerable space (pp. 67-93) to denying that Hobbes was Locke‘s primary target of attack (Filmer was), but doubtlessly Hobbes was involved in Locke‘s attack of Filmer (cf. p. 70). See Locke: Two Treatises of Government (1960), edited by Peter Laslett, Cambridge University Press, 1988. All this however is a side issue in the history of ideas. 41 See ibid., especially pp. 93-122. 42 Plato‘s people are the voluntary-appetitive part of body-politic. Aristotle just repeated Plato, saying that those fit to rule must rule and those fit to be ruled must be ruled. 43 People were not born with natural reason as animals were with instinct.

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No wonder, as Plato stresses education, Jefferson insists that democracy can properly operate only as people are educated. Confucius says that it is joy to learn from teachers, classmates, and people around, and we must be princely enough not to be offended by people ignoring us.44 That is the sign of an educated person.45 If uneducated, we take offense at people and begin to take the law into our own hands. Violence ensues. As O‘Neill said, Dictator Bush is a blind man among deaf people.46 Bush was quite a poor student at school,47 and American people honor education with their mere lips.48 No wonder gun control is quite unpopular in USA and its National Rifle Association rules supreme as a member of ―international rifle association‖ where various weapons trades thrive. Raw violence is popular. Democracy is in a shambles now, for no one takes serious education seriously. Many dictators today thrive under the name of ―democracy,‖49 including brutal plutocracy of which USA is preeminent with its unabashed dictatorship, and Bush bullying everyone with worldunilateralism. Since democracy thrives on capitalism50 (like it or not, justified or not) plutocracy easily takes over democracy in the name of ―democracy.‖51 Democracy is thus gutted empty, leaving its hollow name, ever dangling to entice people. Churchill famously said in 1947, ―(D)emocracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.‖ What he said is apt if ―democracy‖ were replaced with ―wolf dictatorship‖ under the sheep-hide of ―democracy.‖ 44 ―O, learning and often practicing it, isn‘t [it] rather delightful? O, having classmates from afar [to mutually learn], isn‘t [it] rather pleasant? O, people-ignored and not offended, isn‘t [it] rather princely [of] man?‖ ―Among three people walking must be my teachers.‖ (Analects 1/1, 7/22) 45 No wonder, the father of legalism Hsün Tzu insists on education to shape us into obeying the law. Sadly, later legalists insist on education of the people, not of the ruler, i.e., shaping people to obey ruler, not shaping ruler to care for people. 46 Paul O‘Neill, Bush‘s former Treasury Secretary, said in ―60 Minutes‖ (1/11/04), ―In the cabinet meeting, Bush is a blind man among a roomful of deaf people.‖ 47 Bush was a C- student (got D- in philosophy) at Yale; it is not proud of him. Worse, he is a born-again Christian who wants simply to bask in God‘s cozy acceptance as he is, refusing to be under the dictates of God‘s law of compassion. He is now a law unto himself and flaunts his money and military might over the whole world. 48 The dumber you are, the politically better you are; it is the worst of ―American egalitarianism.‖ Eisenhower beat Adlai Stevenson who spoke too well, an "egg-head." See Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, NY: Vintage, 1966; ironically, an American intellectual has written on American anti-intellectualism. It evokes many thoughts. [a] Plato is right to see democracy as the worst mob-rule of unbridled/uneducated desires, as Jefferson is to stress education as the backbone of democracy. [b] How the educated can live in the stuffy uneducated air without suffocation is a marvel. [c] How ―dumb USA‖ is the richest in money and science is another marvel. 49 Fareed Zakaria portrays a deterioration of democracy in the name of ―democracy,‖ from Peru to the Philippines, in ―The Rise of Illiberal Democracy,‖ in Foreign Affairs, November/December 1997, pp. 22-43. Sadly, he did not note USA as the highest hijacker of democracy with ―money democracy.‖ 50 Perhaps this is because money is power anyone can get in a free market, capitalism is free-market economy, and democracy is people-power. Communism has equality of the people but no equal opportunity for the people, democracy and people‘s equal opportunity to make money is capitalism. Such is how reasoning on paper goes, but in fact money-power is not free for everyone, for capitalism turns into money-elitism, plutocracy, to oppress people. 51 Someone may say, ―Democracy is associated with capitalism that is money-operated, and so plutocracy, moneyrule, is at the center of democracy.‖ We must disagree. Capitalism is money-democracy; plutocracy is moneydictatorship. People in democratic capitalism freely compete in money-enterprises, while people in plutocratic regime are suppressed by money-tyranny. We must admit, though, that the two tend dangerously to collapse into each other, and democracy easily slides into plutocracy, while it is quite hard if not impossible for plutocracy to ―climb‖ up to democracy, simply because competition selects the winner who dominates the rest. Look at how often the Republican Party, money-party, elects the president. Cf. John W. Gardner, Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent too? NY: Harper, 1961, and Theodore J. Lowi, The End of Liberalism, NY: W. W. Norton, 1969.

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The revolt came in Henry D. Thoreau‘s ―Resistance to Civil Government‖ (1848) closely followed by John S. Mill‘s ―On Liberty‖ (1859).52 Sadly, however, eloquent as they both are, they are more of powerful tracts against government abuse than careful theoretical essays elucidating what true democracy consists in. Theoretically unstable and devoid of solid rational basis, democracy flourishes today all over the world, to enable catastrophic confusions to rule supreme. This phenomenon would have dumbfounded if not confounded Locke and Jefferson whose promotions of democracy were precisely in order to stem such catastrophes. True reflection on democracy, truly effective, is yet to appear53; such a sad story of world democracy! But then, how do we know all politics as dire? We do so by history of politics that judges all politics wrong. What is it that judges history, then? It is history, and in fact history makes no mistakes. All our sadness must not blind us to a solid base of life that is infallible through histories of all ages, history itself. This surprising fact we must consider now.

HISTORY AND THE I CHING 易經 MAKE NO MISTAKES The original Aesop‘s fables are a rough mirror of the rough world in the sixth century BCE Greece and its environs, mixed with eye-catching wits and clever jokes. People later trimmed them to charm us, instructing us in our moral standards. This is the story of ―progress of mankind,‖ history improving on history. China goes the same way, just more self-conscious of history with grand historians judging the events as they record the events, as with the Tso Chuan 左傳, the Shih Chi 史記, and so on. Thus human behaviors continue as they are but standards to judge them change as history progresses. To ―continue as they are‖ is Akrasia, describing nature as mix of compassion and cruelty mirrored by the original Aesop‘s fables; humanity tells compassion from cruelty, and comes to choose compassion as a ―moral standard.‖ The reason is that compassion lasts (it is ―proper in situ,‖ yi2 宜, so it is ―right,‖ yi4 義), while cruelty does not last (called ―violence‖). Thus we humans are part of nature to follow the nature of things. Our story of naturefollowing is called ―history,‖ human-natural, to judge human behaviors. Such history―judging‖ with its standards changing as it progresses shows that history makes no mistake. Aesop‘s fables are pretty but ―complete Aesop‖ is not pretty, out of which pretty Aesop is born. Such birth-story is history, and so history makes no mistake. The same historical progress is told by ―complete Grimm‖ and ―complete Andersen.‖54 Let us concretely see history as storytelling by considering the I Ching 易經 the Classic of Changes Confucius admired. We ask, ―Does the I Ching ever make mistakes?‖ Before answering this fascinating question as point (3), we must see (1) what mistake in life is and

52 Walden and Resistance to Civil Government: Henry D. Thoreau, Second Edition, ed. William Rossi, NY: W. W. Norton, 1992, and John Start Mill: On Liberty: Annotated Text, Sources and Background Criticism, ed. David Spitz, NY: W. W. Norton, 1975. 53 Plato correctly said that democracy is the worst form of government and education is the cure, but his ―solution‖ of philosopher-king is empty of content and has fostered dictatorship of dunces. 54 On the not-pretty story of the original Aesop‘s fables, see Olivia and Robert Temple, trs, Aesop: The Complete Fables, NY: Penguin Books, 1998, pp. ix-xxiii. See also The Complete Grimm‟s Fairy Tales, NY: Random House, 1972, p. xiii, and The Complete Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales, NY: Random House, 2006, p. xi.

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then see (2) what the I Ching is. We will then (4) conclude that history makes no mistakes, and derive some benefits from this point. (1) Western thinkers have long been so preoccupied with ―mistakes‖ as a central notion,55 to miss the ―knowledge‖-forest for the ―mistake‖-trees. Let me explain. We sense in life; as sensing is direct, so knowing is. Knowing things is direct, starting at knowing that I am hungry.56 Of course no direct human sensing of knowing is immune from taking things amiss; such mistaking is part of humanity that yet does not take away the directness of sensing that induces knowing. Knowing directly contacts things that include my self, and directness is an ingredient of 57 ―truth.‖ Without such directness as truth there can be no human life. Directness is primary; occasional mistakes are secondary. In the final analysis, we must follow our heart, our inner conviction—it is directness. Such thickness and depth of actuality make us. We must check our conviction against outside actuality, to check against self-infatuation; an unexamined life such as Hitler‘s is not worth living. Checking yet remains a subordinate, a servant, to conviction, not its substitute. One enslaved to endless checking eviscerates oneself soulless. An unexamined life is less worthless than a life lost in endless self-examinations, forever uncertain. Hitler at least earned his foul name in history; a man lost in examination, confirmation, and verification has lost his human identity, even a ―bad human.‖ 58 After all, ―to err is human,‖ we say to express our self-knowledge that betokens our 59 knowledge of no-mistake, knowledge of truth, without which we cannot ―err.‖ This fact indicates that truth is inextricably involved in our very ―erring‖; we betoken truth in and via error. We are in truth by way of being in error, often truth-ing by erring. Now, we note here many action-words. These words prod to warn us that the above paragraph does not mean that to correct mistakes we must pre-suppose truth. Saying so arranges ―mistake‖ and ―truth‖ as static pieces, concepts, and concludes backward to their logical relation. This is a static thinking, spatial, observing, and detached. We leave such analytical and objective inference, and claim that detecting mistakes, that 60 is, perceiving that we have taken things amiss, leads us to correcting them, and in correcting 55 Western philosophy is a series of inter-pickings-apart of mistakes. The possibility of mistakes has fascinated Western thinkers since Plato (the Theaetetus). Josiah Royce built his idealism on it (The World and the Individual, 1900-1901). We consider this question concretely by considering the I Ching in China. 56 Descartes convolutedly shows it in the Cogito; Royce elaborates it into a complex system of pragmatic idealism. 57 Bertrand Russell contributed to philosophy with knowledge of acquaintance distinct from knowledge of description, the latter being based on the former. Sadly, he takes ―acquaintance‖ as that with ―sense data‖ alone, and has hard time inferring direct self-knowledge from knowing sense-data. The supremacy of contrived sense-data and logical inference haunted his philosophy throughout life, confusing such contrived supremacy with ―clarity‖ of thinking. See his The Problems of Philosophy (1912), Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 46-69. Cf. his Preface to The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell 1903-1959, eds. R. E. Egner and L. E. Denonn, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1961, pp. 7-8, and my comment on it in ―‗Emperor Hundun 渾沌': A Cultural Hermeneutic,‖ Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, September 2007, pp. 263-279. 58 We follow Alexander Pope who said so in his ―An Essay on Criticism (1711)‖ (line 525). 59 How we could do so at all is a mystery, performatively expressed as ―akrasia.‖ E.g., Japan cherishes China‘s cultural treasures and despites ―dirty Chinamen‖ (akrasia-1), yet does not consider why Japan can cherish and despise at once (akrasia-2), why ―dirty Chinamen‖ could have produced such treasure (akrisia-3), and why producing elegant treasure, Chinamen remain so ―dirty‖ and uncouth (akrasia-4), and so on. 60 How can we detect mistakes in the first place? This is the mystery of being historical, that we are wiser after the fact. We have a mysterious intuition to detect mistakes after the fact. See my Ph.D. dissertation, ―Existential Relativism,‖ Philosophy Department, Yale University, 1965. We intimated its solution as we mentioned ―more rhetoric cures rhetoric‖ when this volume began, and then cited history as correcting history.

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ourselves there emerges truth, post factum, historically, performatively. ―Truth‖ here then is a historical performance of detecting and correcting ―mistakes,‖ what has been taken amiss. Here ―truth‖ and ―mistakes‖ are concrete descriptions, telling stories of our thinking process in time, not static concepts. We do not analyze ―time‖ as an object; we are one of all 61 existents that are in process, in action in time, in ―history.‖ This is a dynamic story-thinking time-ly, historical. But all this is to anticipate. (2) Now in this dynamic light, we can consider what the I Ching is. Scholarly Freud 62 quipped, following splashy Wordsworth, ―The child is the father to the man‖ who has 63 obviously fathered the child. Human actuality is made of such inter-parenting, essential to the Yin-Yang interacting to structure the I Ching thus schematized. Beware, however; its logical binary schema is not abstractly analytical but thoroughly concrete, that is to say, enfleshed with poetic story-bits that shimmer forth various tangible meanings at every meeting with every wayward contingency, the concrete specifics of the situation of a specific person-milieu, and a specific ―self.‖ Western binary system (11 and 10, 01 and 00) is abstractly concocted to apply mysteriously to actuality. In contrast, I Ching‘s Yin-Yang mirrors natural mountain shade and its sunny side, existentially inter-fighting in inter-parenting, reflected in story-bits of the poetry of five factual trends. The I Ching is a poetry of nature spontaneously no-does (wu-wei 無為), inclusive of the reader, and is open to the future that simply dawns ―without rhyme or reason‖ yet captured in the Yin-Yang web. Here is a non-analytical scheme, its sense is non-logical, to tell fortune-future. What comes we can only meet, helped by the I Ching in the time-river.64 We cannot push the river; we can only swim in it. Swimming and not pushing, meeting and not controlling, we simply no-do wu-wei 無為. How? Tommy shouts, ―I don‘ wanna sleep!‖ Mom says, ―OK, don‘t sleep. Just sit here beside your pillow. Mom will tell your favorite story, OK?‖ He nods. ―Once upon a time . . . ,― And he hits the pillow. Mom did no-do and nothing not done.65 (3) Now we can ask, ―Does this I Ching make mistakes?‖ Incredible as it may sound, it does not, as nine points here explain. One, the I Ching is a poetry, which makes no mistakes, for Two, poetry opens out to the human situation for sense, and it makes no sense to say that the situation makes mistakes, for situation simply situates us, beyond sense or no-sense, and ―mistake‖ is possible only in the context of sense-meaning. Three, the I Ching‘s composition includes history and the history of its interpretation. Helmut Wilhelm said,66 61 On how time-as-object to analyze differs from time-as-lived to undergo, see my On the “Logic” of Togetherness: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 1998, pp. 342-385. 62 Wordsworth said so in his ―The Rainbow‖ (I.7). Freud‘s psychoanalysis that digs out the client‘s past is based on this idea that childhood-features continue on in life to beget all adult consequences. Japan also says, ―The soul of three year-old till one hundred 三つ子の魂百まで.‖ 63 Chinese thinkers‘ ―actuality‖ is inter-opposing and inter-parenting (相剋相生), and such opposing and parenting inter-parent! Western ―actuality‖ is linear, not inter-recursive. Kierkegaard opposed Hegel but not the other way around, nor did the one parent the other; nor did Nietzsche parent Christianity as he demolished it. 64 On ―time‖ in China as seasonal timeliness, see Kuang-ming Wu, The “Logic” of Togetherness, Leiden: Brill, 1998, pp. 342-385. 65 We will come back to this irresistible story later. 66 Helmut and Richard Wilhelm, Understanding the I Ching: The Wilhelm Lectures on the Book of Changes (1966 and 1979), Princeton University Press, 1995, p. 51. This is extraordinary in the West, where no books would be made of its interpretive history.

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Kuang-ming Wu But the essential thing is to keep in mind all the strata that go to make up the book. Archaic wisdom from the dawn of time, detached and systematic reflection of . . . the Chou era, pithy sayings from the heart of the people, subtle thoughts of the leading minds: all these disparate elements have harmonized to create the structure of the book as we know it. Its real value lies in its comprehensiveness and many-sidedness. This is the aspect under which the book lives and is revered in China, and if we wish to miss nothing important, we must not neglect the later strata either. In these, many of the treasures of the very earliest origins are brought to light, treasurers (treasuries?) that up till then were hidden in the depths of the book, their existence divined rather than recognized. When the occasion arises, we shall follow the lines leading back from the later to the earlier elements, in the hope that from the study of the living development of the book itself we may also derive insight into its meaning.

In other words, the I Ching is the book of changes of the times; it is the book-of-history. It is itself made of history, an accumulation of the transpiring of the situations, and as no situation makes mistakes, so no history does, nor does the I Ching make mistake of its story. Four, thus, the I Ching describes and tells the story of history. History in Chinese is lihshih (歷史); ―lih‖ is ―footprints‖ of what continues dripping and ―shih‖ is ―(human) handling of the records (on bamboo strips).‖67 So, history in China is natural goings-on plus human meaning-giving (hermeneutics) following it; history unites the natural and the human in it. For Hegel, world history is world judgment; China adds, ―World history is world meaning, which the I Ching describes.‖ A ―game‖ evolves out of how its rules naturally evolve in its constant playing, and the evolving is history; so did the rule of life‘s game. The I Ching is a poetic storybook of rules of life‘s game, and its storytelling makes no mistakes, for the rule-story is the rule by which we spot mistakes. Now, in all this time-process, as the situation from past to present is history, so the situation from present to future is ―destined (天運),‖ not fated (命定). ―What is their difference?‖ Well, if we so love birds as to make a big birdcage for them, to enjoy them. Then we expand the cage into an aviary for them to fly freely in it but not outside. We realize then that the fields and skies are a natural aviary for all birds, with us with them, and so we let them go, knowing that they won‘t fly out of this Globe, on pain of perdition. This Globe is the aviarymilieu where they move, live, and have their free being. Clearly birdcages and aviaries confine birds, ―fated‖ to live in a determined way, but can we say that these birds with us are ―confined‖ in an ―aviary‖ of this Globe? Are we fated to live here? No, for we all cannot freely survive outside this Globe. The Globe is the home that enables us all freely to sing, soar, live and thrive. Here we are ―destined,‖ not ―fated,‖ to live, and our Globe-in-time is ―history‖ where we are ―destined‖ to move and have our free beings. Thus history is destined, and destiny is historical. We know our destiny after we have been through it all and look back at it as history. The I Ching in contrast looks forward to the future and enables us to know what ―it‖ all is, destined, before we live it; as the I Ching says, ―By managing historical goings-on, the Princely People clearly perceive the timely 君子以治歷明時.‖68 The I Ching renders the future as definitively destined as history is set

67 藤堂明保著, 漢字語源辞典, 東京學燈社, 1965, pp. 477, 480, 106. 68 周書 in 禮記 says, ―易曰, 澤中有火. 革. 君子以治歷明時.‖

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and mistake-free. So the I Ching is as mistake-free as our past-and-future is destined, for ―mistake‖ is senseless in destining. Five, human understanding of the times can be mistaken, and human mistakes are part of history that makes no mistakes, for in history the notion of ―mistake‖ makes no sense. The witches told Macbeth that no man born of a woman could kill him, so he thought him invincible, yet Macduff who killed him was not ―of woman born‖ but ―was from his mother‘s womb untimely ripped.‖69 Macbeth made a mortal interpretive mistake, but not the witches telling of future destiny as sure as past history, whose part Macbeth‘s interpretation became. In general, a definite affirmation, ―It is A,‖ can make mistakes, but future prediction is no definite statement but hypothesis awaiting future confirmation or disconfirmation. A hypothesis is a probable statement, ―It may be A or not-quite A‖; if this hypothesis turns out to be ―not-quite A‖ it is not ―mistaken.‖ Thus future prediction makes no mistakes, and the I Ching is a poetic guide to future prediction, therefore the I Ching makes no mistakes. Six, the I Ching (a) blends natural transpiring of events with human understanding, and (b) such human reasonable blending composes a pattern (structural hexagrams, 64 arranged in a rhythmic poetic pattern) that opens out in time, and (c) the timely, structural, makes no mistakes, for (d) this structure is no mathematical repetition, for life-patterns structurally return to offer a fresh beginning at each moment in each situation, enabling life to produce significant diaries and journals, each different from others. In difference is no mistake that exists in repetition alone. ―Repetition‖ in life is significant. We can learn from the mystery of children‘s love of repetition. Adults welcome things fresh, the familiar renewed that refreshes, not novelty that threatens with unfamiliarity; we smile at things fresh each morning but shrink from challenges in new places and new jobs. Children in contrast have no such luxury. For them, everything is novel for the first time in life, and repetition is one way to turn it into the fresh, to ease them into things novel in life, as the fish take to fresh water. Something similar happens in music, where repetitions and variations abound to help us dwell in the memorable rhythm and tunes we love. Children particularly love music; they live in its rhythm to learn and thrive in things novel. Stories have a musical rhythm; storytelling makes music-in-events, and children of all ages love stories. Following children, we adults can/should repeat the routine activities to savor their unsuspected depths as every morning refreshes itself. Seven, history says, ―That is the way it was and is, and there is no room for mistakes or no-mistakes.‖ The I Ching records history as structured in 64 ways of Yin-Yang opposingparenting, in 64 hexagrams.70 Someone may say, ―History may make no mistakes, but the I Ching that describes it may.‖ Our answer is No, for the following reason. To begin, the I Ching‘s description is couched in poetic story-bits that are open to the situation and to the reader in the situation, and so the I Ching‘s meaning is a blend of the 69 Macbeth, 5.10 (lines 10-15). 70 Numbers and mathematics are envisioned in the West as a mechanizing force of human life, as with decision theory, game theory, and economics. In contrast, China has humanized mathematics and mechanics throughout the entire universe, in fiction, painting, calligraphy, healing arts, martial arts, arts of war, culinary arts, and so on. Such humanistic application of numbers and mathematics is quite powerful indeed. We cite only one example, in the I Ching, of the cosmic, sociopolitical, interpersonal, and personal application of numbers and mathematics. We note its one surprising feature alone, that the I Ching makes no mistakes in history any more than history does. Interestingly, backed by mistake-less mathematics, human time-journey, in history or into the future, makes no mistakes, and this feature is what the I Ching captures.

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―suggested‖ meaning of poetry and the reader‘s interpretive decision. Thus, the reader decides on the definite meaning of the I Ching. From the objective interpreter‘s side, then, the I Ching is obscure in meaning, and its obscurity prevents it from the reader judging that it has made a mistake. Thus we cannot objectively see if the I Ching, in itself, has made mistakes or not. This is not to say that history is purely subjective, for there is no such thing as ―pure‖ or ―in itself alone‖ here. The true enough statement, ―All history is contemporary,‖ does not deny that history is also about the past toward the future. This is because actuality is concrete, and concreteness is an interwoven concresced71 composite, where ―objectivity‖ is subjectively perceived and constituted and ―subjectivity‖ is objectively constituted by the past to compose the present and the future. Natural science in the West says, ―Whatever has been will be‖; it is a science of the past, to tend to fatalism. The I Ching says, ―Whatever goes on will become‖; it is a science of the future (what is to come), to destine us to destiny. How? Since whatever goes on now will become, the I Ching helps us to discern the trend now, the Way things are going, and helps us on how to act accordingly, as we drive safely by ―watching out for the other guy‖ on how he drives. ―The other guy‖ is the future in our life-driving; future is mine, and so future the other guy is my brother. The Chinese people for millennia have constantly patterned their lives after the I Ching to tend their future. History is an ultimate judge; it has consigned Babylon to oblivion and now judges the I Ching mistake-less, as our constant use of spinach from time immemorial judges spinach to be our unmistakable food. Eight, in this connection, the notion of ―mistake‖ is crucial and interesting. The Western thinkers often take it to be a noun, and tread backward to get to that because of which mistake is made possible. So Plato had to assume the eternal Idea, and Royce had to go to absolute idealism. Now, such a treatment of mistake is either trivial or senseless. It is trivial because mistake-as-wrong does assume no-mistake-as-right; what else is new? Such a treatment of mistake is senseless because one cannot make a mistake when one knows it to be a mistake, when one knows ―what is not mistake.‖ One cannot take something wrong if one knows what is right that ―wrong‖ presupposes; in other words, one cannot make a mistake if one knows what makes it possible, this backward way.72 To put it another way, this sort of oddity happens because we treat mistake spatially. We would be puzzled on why two cars can tread the identical crossroads, if we do not take into account the traffic light that tells one car to go through a spot at one time in one direction, another car to the same spot another time in another direction. If we do not consider the phenomenon in a time-ly way, we would be puzzled on why two cars can go across the same crossroads at all. Besides, we are curious. How did China, being human, come to hit upon the eternal Something, the I Ching, so comprehensive and divinely unmistakable as to reign over all our life, activities, and mistakes, and make sense of them all? The question contains its own answer, in the little phrase, ―come to.‖ History, our retrospective survey, realization, and

71 ―Concrete‖ is concrescence done, a togetherness. See Kuang-ming Wu, On the “Logic” of Togetherness: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 1998. 72 This is the real cause for an extraordinary contortion Plato/Royce had to undergo in considering ―mistake‖ in the Theaetetus. The contortion is not because the problem of how making mistakes is possible is difficult, but simply because the problem of mistake is approached in a mistaken manner.

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storytelling, mysteriously reveals to us an amazingly accurate panorama of what was the case, impossible while we are undergoing the situation. Let us come back to our original theme of mistake. Observing how we come to make a mistake, we see that ―mistake‖ is a verb, to take-amiss, to take something to be other than what it is. The ―Eternal Idea‖ or ―All-Encompassing‖ describes what we realize to differ from what we did after we did it. How do we realize that we have made a mistake? We find it later that we took something in error. It is the finding-it-later that makes mistake possible, and finding-it-later clearly tells a story-of-how we first think of A to be B, and then come to realize that A is not B, to wit, that we mistook A to be B. This story-of-how, this finding-it-later, is history. ―Mistake‖ shows a dynamic history, not a static substance of what makes mistakes possible. Mistake is an historical notion, a storytelling, and the story of mistake-making makes no mistake, for otherwise ―mistake‖ would be impossible to make. Perhaps this story of mistake-making is what is indicated (not told) in the ―story‖ told in Plato‘s Idea, Royce‘s ―an infinite unity of conscious thought,‖ and Jaspers‘ All-Encompassing. So, in asking the question, ―Can the I Ching make mistakes?‖ we unwittingly but inevitably connect the I Ching to history, which we later find is the core of the I Ching. Thus, asking this question answers itself in the negative. If the I Ching reflects history, making mistake is history, and what makes mistake possible does not itself make mistakes, then the I Ching cannot make mistake, for history does not. Nine, now, we are ready to see the point to which our consideration of the I Ching has been leading us. How is I Ching a book of history? We have seen that it is its poetic storytelling hooked on and open to the situation-as-it-transpires. We have seen that this storytelling composes the I Ching. The situation-as-it-transpires is history. So the I Ching is a book that is history, which makes no mistakes but is that in which mistakes make sense, and so this is also what makes the I Ching mistake-less but makes sense of mistakes, transpired as history description. In other words, it is storytelling-open-to-actuality that is solidly mistake-free to enlighten us to our future to tell our fortune (i.e., destiny), to make us prudent, worldly wise. Is all this a story told? Yes it is, all of it, as long as we keep firmly in mind (without letting it slip into the mistake of taking all this as eternal unchanging truth, a noun) that we have gone through a process of inferring that is a process-in-time, our situation-as-it-transpires into understanding. It is our history, our story, of how we came to realize all this. Thus history is more significant than we realized. Bacon said,73 ―(N)o pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage-ground of truth (a hill not to be commanded, and where the air is always clear and serene), and to see the errors, and wanderings, and mists, and tempests, in the vale below; so always that this prospect be with pity, and not with swelling or pride.‖ Little did he realize that ―the vantage-ground of truth‖ is no other than the story told of these ―errors, and wanderings . . in the vale below.‖ It amounts to saying that ―the vale‖ is not ―below‖ but itself the ―hill‖ of ―truth‖ once it is told as history, ―always clear‖ but its air not

73 Francis Bacon: Essays and New Atlantis, ed. Gordon S. Haight, Toronto: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1942, p. 5. Cf. Selected Writings of Francis Bacon, ed. Hugh G. Dick, NY: The Modern Library, 1955, p. 7.

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serene. In all, the gentle almighty power of storytelling impresses on actuality that is ours, that is history that is a storytelling after all, and such a history makes no mistakes. (4) Now, is this conclusion surprising? It is surprising at first, but on second thought it is as it should be, for all this just straightly tells the story of life of existence, and since the story of existence is history, we can simply say that history makes no mistake, so its mirror the I Ching does not. This is because history is the process of humans re-enacting (Collingwood), that is, they re-act, reactivate, and reanimate what they have lived to relive their lives anew in time, and the process makes no mistake. Thus history is truly a process to ―warm up the old/past and know the new 溫故而知新,‖ as Confucius said (2/11), where ―and 而‖ is the process from the ―past 故‖ to the future inherent in ―knowing the new 知新‖ itself. And beware. The new 新 differs from old in the past that is imperfect, full of mistakes. Is the new filled with mistakes as well? It is another story of reenacting what is said here, thanks to its being a verb; the new renews itself. The ―knowledge of the new 知新‖ here is a self-corrective act of new creation 創新, always ―new from day to day, and daily anew 日日新又日新‖; here ―new, anew 新‖ is a selfreflexive verb, self-adjusting, self-correcting, thereby daily, constantly, self-renewing. History is a verb, an unbroken act of renewing, new-(新)-ing, repeatedly. History is the story of humanity‘s process of reprocessing, of self-renewing. This is literally the process of ―threading (with the time-thread) the gone to open the coming 繼往開來‖ that life itself inherently implies. To live life is to engage an unbroken activity of time-threading the gone to open the coming, for life is a continual living, living is to ―open the coming‖ that is to ―open the yet-to-come,‖ the future. The future cannot come without ―time-threading the gone,‖ for this ―continuing the past‖ is itself the very process of ―opening the future‖ we are currently going through. For Collingwood, only humanity has history. Pace his objection, we must say that every life, not just human life, is historical, whose story Darwin‘s ―evolution‖ graphically tells. All living existence is such lived historical story, and in fact all existence in nature is 74 such a historical story. This is because existence literally stands-out of its past to constitute nature, and ―nature‖ is natura naturans (nature naturing) emerging out of natura naturata 75 (nature natured), future emerging out of past. Existence is renascence in process, constantly rebirthing and re-evolving, literally rollingout of itself again and again, to weave out a situational context, a tapestry of the story of natural history, of the history of nature. As long as history re-enacts itself, that is, reacts, reactivates, and reanimates itself, history is the story of self-adjustment and self-correction in time, including us ourselves correcting ourselves. In fact, to realize a mistake is to have gone beyond what is done and see, looking back, to realize that what was done has missed the target. ―Mistake‖ is a historical performance of retrospection. Every ―mistake‖ betokens a re-enacting, re-evaluation, of what-is-gone, the

74 ―Existence‖ is made of ex-histemi, to stand-out. 75 The twin phrases were made famous by Spinoza who, elaborating on his forebears, Vicente Beauvais and Giordano Bruno, took them to mean the infinite essence and eternal principle and finite temporal existence follows, by necessity from this principle. Thus the West destroyed the living historical rhythm of these twin phrases, even though this very process of philosophical reanimation aptly tells the story of historical process.

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past, to re-correct itself into the future. World history is world judgment of itself, the world self-correction, again and again, forward. Therefore history makes no mistakes. Perhaps we can have a final refinement here with the help of our imaginary critic. He may say, ―Wait a minute. You said history makes no mistakes because it corrects itself, but ‗correction‘ makes no sense unless there are mistakes to correct. As long as history selfcorrects, history does make mistakes, then.‖ Our reply is, ―Of course, but correction itself is no mistake, and history self-corrects, so history makes no mistakes, after all. But you are right. It is not that history makes no mistakes but has no mistakes after self-correction, as we are wiser after the fact, and this dynamic ‗after‘ is history. Thus the statement, ‗History makes no mistakes‘ says, not that history is a static perfection, but that history constantly moves to having no-mistakes, dynamic moving to and into the no-mistake realm. History moves, history moving is no-mistake, so history makes no mistakes.‖ Our dear critic would not give up so easily. He continues, ―Let me put it from the other end. Your ‗self-correction‘ presupposes mistake-making. This claim goes contrary to Plato (Idea), Spinoza (God), Hegel (Absolute Spirit), Royce (Being), Collingwood (Absolute Presupposition), Jaspers (the Encompassing), and the list goes on, all saying that ‗mistake‘ presupposes Truth (no-mistake) to obtain. Your statement, ‗History makes no mistake,‘ then, turns upside down the world of Plato, and so on.‖ We answer, ―Perhaps so, but our saying all this merely describes how history operates, showing history as a how, a movement of ‗turning‘ the time-less world of speculation (Plato, and so on) ‗upside down.‘ We tell presupposition-thinkers that ‗history‘ as time-dynamics has nothing to do with their spatial thinking; and such a ‗turning upside down‘ is what we described as ‗self-correcting‘ of the world, of Plato, and so on. History simply corrects wherever mistakes are found to have been made, by Plato, and so on, who thereby become parts of history. The claim, ‗History makes no mistakes,‘ shows history as a dynamics-in-time; the statement is itself an historical statement. In fact, our very dialogue so far on this statement—and ‗so far‘ here is historical—is itself part of history that presents such fact of history, thereby demonstrates this dynamic truth of history.‖ This is why great reflective people of ancient times have all thoughtfully appealed to history to justify things and their performances, at least to their satisfaction at the time. Later generations continue to correct their corrections to the latecomers‘ best knowledge and in their good conscience, and Chinese people are people of such historical conscientiousness on the go. Sadly, however, we today, perhaps including Chinese people, tend not to realize, at least not quite as much as ancient people did, how essential history is to us,76 because we are influenced by the Western spatial thinking static, and so we are very clumsy at handling history. Philosophy of history is one of the weakest disciplines in the West, together with philosophy of arts, but both are the warp and woof of humanity and of their history. All such 76 Sadly, even today‘s arch-historian, Jaroslav Pelikan, is no exception. His spirited The Vindication of Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984) is just that, cleverly spirited. He merely touched the hem of history; he failed to carefully reflect on what ―tradition‖ is, to wit, how history goes. He draws exclusively on the funds of Western ideas on history and tradition, thereby violates the universality of history as the history of all human cultures, not just the West. Worse, he takes history as objects of our reflection, not our reflective [a] process itself that is [b] our very livings-on. His thinking is curiously spatial, not in time, as dynamic as time‘s ongoing. His reflection on history is not historical but anti-historical.

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reflection, however, belongs to history, and to another essay another time, and another story of human history. Our critic finally says, ―History without mistakes is a cake painted on the wall, filling no hunger of mine, for I would not live to benefit from history; posthumous benefit is no benefit.‖ We nod, ―A good point you raised, pal. Still, our knowledge of infallible history does give us two strengths to go on now while alive. One, we can be sure that things we feel ‗wrong‘ now would be exposed as such later, so we need not fret. Two, we can ‗warm up the old‘ now to discern and steer our living better, now. So this section has cash value, thanks to storytelling history!‖ Meanwhile, we cannot ignore numbers and mathematics since they are so fashionable today. We must tell their story in the context of human history and cultures. We must see first how numbers and mathematics were originally humanly understood in the context of human affairs and human world. The I Ching as mathematical poetry of human time is instructive.

HISTORY, NUMBERS/MATHEMATICS, CULTURES No human culture, however ―primitive,‖ is devoid of numbers and computation, mathematics. The West has been so obsessed with them that numbers are alive in thinking (―number mysticism‖), and anything learned (μάθημα) amounts to thing mathematical. This has been so in Plato whose poetry was inspired by mathematics mystically spread wide, in Aristotle and in the vast majority of Western thinkers whose thinking is ―logical‖ as mathematical. All fields in science and technology today are thoroughly mathematical. We all recognize this ubiquitous presence of numbers and mathematics among us. What is less evident yet just as factual, is that the ―story of lives‖ of numbers and mathematics, that is, their history, tells a fascinating story of cultural differences.77 Five points below tell how it is so. One, today numbers and mathematics are supreme; calculation infuses all things. ―Mathematics‖ is supposedly poetry and mysticism united with mechanics. Now, math drops poetry and mysticism and parades itself everywhere as proud comprehensive metaphysics of mechanics of impersonal calculation. Two, worse, business, socio-ethics, and psychology are construed in terms of mechanical mathematical metaphysics in stories of ―efficiency,‖ ―calculation,‖ ―precision,‖ and ―management‖ to dominate academia. Psychology of persons is now sociology of statistics, physical science of behaviorism, brain physiology, and chemical pharmacology, all strictly computed in numbers. Metaphysics is mechanics-physics; humans are stones. If someone socializes mathematics and understands stones in human terms, it is ―anthropomorphism,‖ superstition quite unscientific. Three, we forget that it was naturally the other way around in former days. Things and numbers were alive as humans in Plato, Aristotle, and this sentiment was carried almost to the present day, such as once quite popular Lorenz Oken (1779-1885) whom the

77 Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (1988), London: Verso, 1993, is instructive in this context, as is Morris Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty, Oxford University Press, 1980. Both books tell of the lively story of mathematics throbbing, and its throbbing decline, quite fascinating.

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transcendentalists (e.g., Emerson) praised and admired.78 Yet even Oken did not personalize numbers and mathematics, which he made cosmic, quite impersonal; and even he died out of fashion. He was dated, to be demoted into wastebasket. The number ―zero‖ has much bedeviled and fascinated thinkers from ancient Athens to Los Alamos today; it collapses the sun into a black hole, was hated by the Romans, feared by Catholics, revered by Muslims, and turned inherent in modern physics.79 Still, zero has never entered the human world in the West, never making itself an ethical or social force. Numbers and mathematics in the West remain impersonal albeit cosmic factors. Four, in contrast, zero in China is Taoist roominess (hsü) that accommodates, and Buddhist nirvanic emptiness (k‘ung) of our very beings; in both worlds zero is something cosmic, socio-ethical, and personal, all at once. To simplify the matter, let us take examples from philosophical Taoism alone. For Lao Tzu, the Heaven and the Earth work like an empty bellows (5). The mysterious Female is the empty birth-gate of the Heaven and Earth (6). Nothingness (wu) at the hubcenter, in the vessel, and in the room, is what makes the cart, the vessel, and the room useful (11). In fact, the entire Tao Te Ching elaborates on this zero at every juncture of the cosmos and our living. It is no less so with Chuang Tzu. The Cook‘s knife carved in exquisite dancing through an ox for nineteen long years, while the blade remains as sharp as fresh from the grindstone. Why? Because ―joints have spaces; the blade has no thickness. Enter the space with the thickless, and there is space to spare for the blade to leisurely play around in.‖ Hearing of such story of thick-less playing blade in ample joint-spaces, the Duke sighed, ―I have heard the words of the Cook, and got my life nourished!‖ (3/12) The delightful mutuality of zeros nourishes us. Five, it is likewise with numbers in China. They in their nimble combinations throb in living bloodstream through Heaven and Earth, flowing pulsating in human lives personal, interpersonal, and sociopolitical. China has humanized mathematics and mechanics throughout the universe in fiction, painting, calligraphy, healing arts, martial arts, arts of war, culinary arts, and so on. Such humanistic application of numbers and mathematics, living them, is quite powerful an argument indeed. We cited only one example, the I Ching, of cosmic, sociopolitical, interpersonal, and personal living-applications of numbers and mathematics, and noted just one surprising feature, that the I Ching makes no mistakes in history as history does not. Interestingly, backed by mistake-less mathematics, human journey in history and into the future makes no mistakes, as captured by the I Ching. Sadly, however, the West turns numbers and mathematics into the mechanizing force of human life (decision theory, game theory, economics) and the predominant force in nature. We have bewailed mechanism with personalism, to redress today‘s trend of panmechanism. Numbers and math can go either way but must not go one way alone. Machine alone kills humans into stones; personalizing stones deifies in superstition. Personal mechanics in machine-infused persons is natural sanity of myriad all.

78 Lorenz Oken‘s story on numbers is in Paul Edwards, ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, NY: Macmillan Co, 1967, V: 535-536. See also ―Mathematics in Cultural History,‖ Philip P. Wiener, ed., Dictionary of the History of Ideas, NY: Charles Scribner‘s Son, 1973, III: 177-185. 79 Cf. Charles Seife, Zero: the Biography of a Dangerous Idea, NY: Viking Press, 2000.

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Cultural stories of numbers and math reveal this crucial point. The next chapter tells the story of how ―science‖ today fares in nature, physical and human, in the West and then in Japan that naturalizes/humanizes science and technology.

Chapter 3

SCIENCE: STORY FACTUAL AND FICTIVE This chapter goes as follows. One, science today cannot understand things that just happen; psychology is a disaster. Two, an event is no brute happening but has three stories of three meanings; natural science today is mythological. Three, Japan tells its story of ―agrarian‖ science in Shinto love of land, in loving care of soil in ecological technology; it is based surprisingly on ―idleness,‖ just letting things be with the self. Thus culture is at the base of science, so we consider interculture in next Chapter IV.

HOW TO MANAGE THINGS HAPPENING WITHOUT RHYME OR REASON As nature has few straight lines in space, so it has few predictable happenings in time. Things just happen without rhyme or reason, but we must manage them with rhyme or reason, for both methods are all we have to manage things, that is, the methods of making literary sense or logical sense. We love to make logical sense and we would have loved to manage nature—things that just happen—by law. This is why we keep trying to find ―laws of nature,‖ but things just happen; we cannot indict/punish earthquakes, tsunamis, or tornadoes ―violating their laws.‖ Our reasoning by law does not work on nature, so we try mathematics. We say ―natural law‖ ciphers statistical average of things that just happen, and statistical measurement of things now helps us manage them. Statistics can handle accidents, tabulating sea battles won in history and sea battles lost, and take random samples, polling pre-election opinions. Statistics can even create incidents in scientific experiments. Statistics calculates random happenings to make some logical sense; scientific tryout checks, probes, and controls to manage random accidents. Thus ―randomized trials‖ is the most ―powerful‖ of our tools to logically manage things that just happen without rhyme or reason. Unfortunately, this tool is not as powerful as we wish it to be. 1 Take a scientific nightmare, missing data in randomized trials that generate missing data to haunt statisticians, the problem inherent in scientific exploration. The very purpose of 1 See ―randomization,‖ ―randomization test,‖ etc., in Andrew M. Colman, Dictionary of Psychology, Oxford, 2001, pp. 613-614, and ―Random Samples‖ in Edward W. Miniu, et al., Statistical Reasoning in Psychology and

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randomized trial is to explore, fish up, whatever we may have missed in our allegedly scrupulous coverage of an intended research area, making the area exceptionless, yet randomness by definition entails missing of potentially crucial data. In other words, randomization by nature hits or misses, and so a randomized trial that hits always is not random but comprehensive, and yet randomized trial is designed to cover comprehensively the territory. It is scientific randomness that generates two results mutually opposed—obtaining new data otherwise would be missed and potentially missing relevant data. Exploration entails randomization in novelty and slippage and, in fact, novelty entails slippage. Exploration, the soul of scientific research, is incorrigibly messy, if not contradictory; its ―solution‖ is twofold. One, there is no way to totally cut slippage—missing data—in randomized trials, and yet we cannot cut randomization from scientific research, for research is exploration entailing randomized trials that entails potential missing of data. So, all we can and should do is to minimize (not eliminate) the slippage and narrow down (not close up) the range of possibilities of data-missing—as best we possibly can. Two, this methodological maxim suggests a way of dealing with the problem, to wit, we must have more randomized trials. Why? As perceptual errors are corrected by more perceptions and logical errors straightened by more numerous and more careful arguments, so randomized trials can minimize their potential missing of data by more trials. Randomized trials must be conducted more often, in more diverse directions, in more extensive areas, and with more researchers in more diverse fields. In this way, we must spread our net of research by randomized trials as far and wide as possible to find more data to detect and correct errors in them. We fully use statistical apparatuses to help reduce potential missing, fully aware of their strengths and weaknesses. While not 100% foolproof, our cautionary tactics saves us from unnoticed blunders, as best we can. Scientific research advances this way, ever exploring virgin territories, ever vexed with mistakes and missing data, to ever find new truths by randomized trials, finding new errors even in these precious new truths discovered. Things are ever messy in science, for logical exploration in science has no convincing frame2 to unify its two opposing tendencies, finding in missing, missing in finding. All this while, things keep just happening randomly. Randomness at the core of things can never be completely managed by logic, for randomness is by nature beyond logic. ―Randomized trials‖ remain in the realm of ―inexact science,‖ a term unpalatable to scientific logical reason, for randomized trial tries to be both mathematically coherent and open to embarrassing adjustments to accidental happening, and logic allows no tight coherence coupling uncertain openness to unpleasant surprises. Accidents, random happenings, remain beyond logical reason. Now we know things just happen without rhyme or reason, and ―without reason‖ describes as above how hopeless management by logical reason is—and description is storytelling. If so, then we can manage accidental things happening ―without reason‖ by storytelling that is both coherent and open—the coupling that is an embarrassment in science and logic. Education, NY: John Wiley and Sons, 1993, pp. 16-17. Books on statistics in psychology are cited, for the ―science‖ of psychology cannot avoid statistics, and the strict science of statistics cannot avoid randomization. We will soon look into the disaster of psychology as such science. 2 We know that the ―convincing frame‖ is storytelling, both coherent and open, both systematic and exploratory.

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With storytelling we can now describe and comprehend—embrace and understand— cases of things that just happen. This is how history thrives to ―rhyme‖ with things just happening to reenact and re-enrich living in time, for us to sense their ―reason.‖ The story of history keeps telling to comprehend things that happen, without rhyme or reason. How does all this happen? Watching events, we come to realize that ―randomized experiments‖ constantly happen to make up life. They are all quite inconceivable, often tragically unspoken. Young Ann Frank wrote in her diary, ―I still believe people are basically good,‖ as she perished in people‘s hand in Auschwitz. Such tragic incongruity is unthinkable until told as a story. Life has many tragic Auschwitz‘s so unspeakable and so persistently repeated in so many lands, so often in history of the world. What perishes without rhyme or reason sometimes produces paragons and no-paragons. Viktor Frankl‘s Auschwitz-loss of all his family produced his ―search for meaning‖ that heals people, as Socrateses and Jesuses came of sad events, Monicas pray for her sons Augustines, and many Neroes‘s mothers perished in her sons‘ hands, all again without rhyme or reason. We have no way of making sense of them until hearing their stories that give them rhyme, for us to sense their reason. In deep sighs, we appreciate that such is life. If beauty is in the beholder‘s eye, then justice is also, and so we can understand beauty and justice only by knowing whose beauty and whose justice they are—and ―knowing whose‖ comes only by telling and hearing their stories. That is what towering storytellers Victor Hugo, Leo Tolstoy, Jane Austen, and countless others in other lands, are for. Storytelling alone does justice to events just and beautiful. Why does storytelling do justice to actual events? How does storytelling do so where logical reason fails? Let us take a concrete example of ―wavicle,‖ an entity with properties of both waves and particles. Joseph Needham said of ―wavicle‖3 that Old Chinese philosophers . . . thought of chhi as something between what we should call matter in a rarefied gaseous state on one hand, and radiant energy on the other. Though all our assured knowledge gained by experiment makes us infinitely richer than they, is the concept of ‗wavicle‘ in modern physical theory so much more penetrating?

Needham claims that China‘s ―ch‘i 氣‖ is more ―penetrating‖ than the West‘s new concept of ―wavicle‖ that is conceptualization of nature, for ―chhi, ch‘i 氣‖ is natural description of nature,4 a story of moving vapor or active breath of life. It is instructive to consider how this is so. ―Wavicle,‖ combining two abstract concepts wave and particle, is another abstract concept uneasily hovering over actuality it is designed to explain. It is a theoretical construct unstable, logically contradictory, each ingredient excluding the other, as ―wave‖ is no ―particle.‖

3 Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, Cambridge University Press, 1962, IV.I:135. He collects gadgetry, no scientific frame/attitude peculiar to China. See his interesting biography by Simon Winchester, The Man Who Loved China, HarperCollins, 2008; its pp. 191-194 have a theoretical frame of this massive collection of ―Chinese science,‖ all in a Western perspective of Whitehead‘s process philosophy. 4 Does the West have something similar? M. Merleau-Ponty said (The Visible and the Invisible, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 139, 147, 267) that Greek ―elements‖ are between objects and fields, before being. Cf. F. E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon, New York University Press, 1967, pp. 70-71, 180-185, on ―stoicheia (elements).‖ This is the closest the West came to Chinese ―ch‘i 氣.‖

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In contrast, ―ch‘i‖ describes a thing that constantly happens as natural vapor and life breathing, a not-thing breath of things, to compose things‘ life, a combination-activity of notthing and thing, to story-describe a common situation of concrete things, a notion performatively capturing an actually contradictory situation of nature. This is what storytelling does; where logic says no, storytelling says yes. Logical inconsistency in things ciphers randomness of concrete happenings captured by storytelling. How5 does storytelling comprehend random things? St. Augustine says, ―The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.‖ Another way of reading the world-book besides travel is to read its stories. Emerson says, ―Life is a dictionary‖6; we add, ―The world is a dictionary behind life-dictionary. We live by opening the world dictionary, taking in its word-things. Words compose our frame, perspective, and horizon to pull in random things, and they come in as our words coherent, rhymed and reasonable to become our world. Words are supreme, telling the story of the world, and our world merges with the world, whatever it is. Let us put it another way. In the beginning are words that organize into word-tissue, word-tell to make stories. In the beginning then is storytelling where words enflesh the world, to create the world; in storytelling the world begins. The world is story-shaped or it is nothing; such is how we word-shape the world. We open our dictionary of random things to read them, take them in, and organize them into one coherent world. ―Hazard a big guess, check on small details,‖ Hu Shih famously said.7 We boldly propose to open out to things, and carefully confirm them to cohere into one single world to make sense. We do both by means of ―stories.‖ Knowledge of science comes by randomized trials random-open to events to turn “coherent as random-ized.‖ This is our story of scientific trials, and things cohere randomized, events turn rhymed and reasonable. ―Randomized trial‖ is scientific experiment, knowledge-exploration; we have just performed its storytelling. To concretize all this, we zero in on a tough territory, studying human awareness in all this, ―psychology as science.‖ All sciences of things begin here, and it is precisely here that science in the West bankrupts.

EMOTION PSYCHOLOGY AS A SCIENCE Nothing is more tragic than sticking to science as straight mathematical calculation to study the incalculable realm of human awareness in mind and emotion. Reading books on ―emotion psychology‖ as ―science‖ of emotion makes us feel that feelings are straitjacketed there, where emotions are not allowed their full expressions but looked at, inspected, investigated, tabulated in scientific frames, and explained, and explained away. The fault is not in such a scientific methodology but in how aptly it is used and, more generally, how ―science‖ is understood. 5 This description—story—of how storytelling proceeds defines what storytelling is. This is an operationalperformative definition of storytelling. Storytelling unifies the how and the what, as life does. 6 St. Augustine‘s quip appears on a page after p. 32 in Foreign Affairs, March/April, 2010. Emerson‘s appears in ―The American Scholar‖ his 1837 address at Harvard (The Complete Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson, NY: Modern Library, 1940, p. 54). 7 胡適 quipped, 「大膽假設，小心求證。」 I translate it as ―Hazard a big guess, check on small details,‖ and ―Boldly propose, carefully prove.‖

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―Science‖ means ―knowledge‖ that accurately fits the nature of what is to know, and knowing is not just to know ―objects‖ alone. ―Natural science‖ in the West is a branch of science that deals with what is to know, strictly as object to be known by its separate subject. Such ―objectivity‖ is attained by objective treatment of the object of knowledge, that is, experimentation, ―trial and error‖ at manipulating data, the given, from outside, according to a set theoretical frame concocted by the subject, the frame and flow-chart of quantification. Crucial here is treatment ―from outside,‖ in studying what has happened, and remote from the subject. Thus the remoter the objects, the more effective such objective methodology is. Inanimate objects are most amenable to such treatment (physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology), lower animate beings come next (botany, biology, physiology), and the higher the living beings, the less amenable to such treatment they are (animal science, medical science, economics, sociology, cultural science, psychology). We often call the last bunch of sciences ―soft science‖ or, worse, ―inexact science,‖ as if they were less scientific, simply because they are not amenable to the patterns of physical studies of inanimate objects. Such calling exposes our partiality to physical sciences, which we take as the standard of ―true science.‖ Our partiality is our prejudice, blind to the simple truth that true ―scientific objectivity‖ lies in tailoring our standard and methods to fit the nature of what is to know, so various in nature. Our blindness leads us to simply identifying ―science‖ as ―natural physical science,‖ ―scientific methodology‖ exclusively as ―quantifiable repeatable trial and error,‖ and ―accuracy‖ as one mathematically measurable by these methods alone. This situation fares the worst in ―psychology,‖ the science of our psyche, the inner core of the subject‘s felt core, and ―science‖ in the sense of ―physical science.‖ We at once feel where and how it pinches, for we study human feelings with the method to study wholly unfeeling stones and sticks. Feeling feels actively as emotion that e-motes, ―moves‖ us ―out‖ of the status quo, spontaneously. It is not structure-less yet ―structure‖ is a notion too 8 structured to fit felt emotional core of human subject. Let us look elsewhere than stones. Music expresses emotion naturally. Music is not at all structure-less, yet musicology should not be dominated by structural mathematics of ―music theory‖ but rather to be helped by it. The music of emotion can be understood as its inner rhythm, which objective 9 methodology can help us understand but should not dominate as our frame of understanding. Moreover, importantly, as music creates its own melody and rhythm, so emotion has its own rhythm and pattern, to understand which requires not fixed external ready-made 8 Gendlin and Schrader may call the ―structure-less structure‖ of emotion ―prereflective,‖ ―preconceptual,‖ and ―prelogical‖ meaning, ―felt,‖ ―primitive‖ and ―primary‖ to mean emotion that is ―determinate,‖ so ―structured‖ in some sense. See George A. Schrader, ―The Structure of Emotion‖ in James M. Edie, ed., An Invitation to Phenomenology, Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965, pp. 252-265, esp. p. 256-258. Schrader‘s is the most ―accurate‖ (though somewhat wandering) thoughtful treatment of emotion I know of, although his view that in human existence feeling is thoughtful and thought is feeling-filled (my words) would have difficulty, without further elucidation, and ―prereflective,‖ ―preconceptual,‖ or ―prelogical‖ smacks of taking ―reflection,‖ ―conceiving,‖ or ―logic‖ as external objective operation.. 9 A recent example is Tracy J. Mayne and George A. Bonanno, eds., Emotions: Current Issues and Future Directions, NY: The Guilford Press, 2001. Almost at every step I feel pinched by their approaches and conclusions. Just to cite an example, a conclusion is drawn from two rather commonsense facts that social experience influences expression of emotion, and emotion has social functions, both of which ―scientific researches‖ document ad nausea (p. 234). Those ―scientists‖ are blind to the simple fact that emotion is not a function of its social influences. To deny emotion as ―a natural category‖ because of social interactions in emotion confuses a thing‘s influence/function with the thing itself. The confusion stems from studying feelings from outside, as if studying stones by a subject separate from stones.

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methodology of quantification and experimentation but inner personal empathy, as with musical appreciation. Empathy has a definite methodology to ascertain the empathized structure that cannot be missed, yet harder to ascertain than investigating crystallography. It is precisely this inner idiosyncratic ―structure‖ of emotion that distinguishes it from predictable calculable logic. Describing emotion need not be emotive, but it must be properly congruent with emotion. Studying Auschwitz as if studying dinosaur-extinction is improper; improper also is Kipling reporting with equanimity a British soldier beating a ―nigger‖ to 10 extract money. In contrast, the author of The Rape of Nanking committed suicide ; our tears admire her integrity, for her report-content cohered with its report-impact on her. This is a fair desideratum, and storytelling flexibly fulfills this requirement. Storytelling does justice to emotion that is not structure-less yet not structured in the mode of physical science. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Hugo, Dickens, and many other literary giants, great storytellers, tell us more, and more directly, accurately, and poignantly, of human emotions than objective, roundabout, external, and quantitative research of emotions with methods of natural science. Perhaps we should say that natural science tells best stories about stone, while literary writers tell best stories about human emotion, and one sort of storytelling cannot apply to both sorts. Stories of human reactions to (precious) stones are stories of human reactions, not of stones. We should not tell stone-stories of natural science about human felt psyche, nor should we tell literary stories about stones themselves. ―But can‘t we ask for how stories of all existents tell?‖ I suppose we can. Let me try.

EVERY EVENT HAS THREE STORIES Every existent has three stories: (a) what it is, (b) what it means, and (c) what it means for us storyteller(s) and their listeners, and these three stories inter-involve.11 Seemingly colorless, this simple observation has crucial life-implications to be developed by storytelling alone, as can be seen in four examples below of meaning-imbued facts. Example One: Here is a fact, (a), that human genes are said to be 99.4% identical with chimpanzees‘. (b) What this simple ―scientific fact‖ means is staggering. It can of course mean that studying chimps would benefit our knowledge of the human and promote the progress of medical science to benefit mankind. Humans are not supposed to be monkeys, though, and so how they differ becomes for us a problem. If humans do not differ from monkeys, there would be no ―species‖ of humanity. If, as China traditionally says, humans are the spirit of myriad things (人為萬物之靈) and ―spirit‖ is no ―animality,‖ then genetics gives us nothing specifically human and ―spiritual.‖

10 To study Nazi atrocity ―with scholarly composure‖ is insanity, not scholarship. James H. Cone‘s Black Theology and Black Power, HarperSanFrancisco, 1969, is written in such legitimate anger. On Kipling, see A Collection of Essays by George Orwell, Doubleday, 1954, pp. 123-124. Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking, Penguin, 1998. 11 This is a shorthand elucidation and illustration of my four-level story-thinking in ―Chinese Philosophy and Story-Thinking,‖ Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, Summer 2005, pp. 217-234, and ―Distinctive Features of Chinese Hermeneutics,‖ Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies, June 2004, pp. 233-247.

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So, the ―fact‖ that humans and monkeys share 99.4% of genetic structure can mean that ―humanity‖ overflows if not eludes physiology and medical science of the West.12 Skin-down gaze misses skin to miss elephant with butterfly13; skin-up expands skin to sociopolitical lifeworld. Thus lifeworld overflows physiological skin. Science says human brain has been alike for 100,000 years; if so, then, why ancient myths are so preposterous compared with science today is a mystery.14 Culture thus overflows brain. (c) What humanity is, then, can only be discerned apart from genetics. For example, Five Social Relations (五倫) can be said to constitute humanity that physiology and medical science of the West cannot describe. ―Sociobiology‖ that explains human sociality by ants‘ is invalid, then, for ants‘ ―sociality‖ is only analogized from humans‘; sociobiology is anthropomorphism pretending to biology-morphism. Human arts—poetry, fiction, sculpture, painting, and music—would evoke humanity, thereby capture it, genetics does not, but arts are not unrelated to genetics. The arts-genetics relation may be best—artistically—expressed as lotus flowers blossoming out of mud-humus of physiology and genetics. How genes-mud relates to arts-flowers remains unknown, but they remain related, as mutually different. Example Two: Let us pursue further the (c) pondered above. The arts as a whole that are crucial to humans are, to think of it, much more pervasive than the specific ―art‖ connotes. If humans are by nature social, then we live on communication of self-expression we casually call ―arts,‖ and the (c)-level of life-stories, occupied by the arts, pervade our entire human life. This point itself raises three points on three levels. On level-(a), Professor Gene Barabtarlo contends that poetry with its peculiar music of a specific culture is untranslatable into other cultural medium; Professor Lin Huo-wang (林火旺) wonders aloud how the image of Chuang Tzu or Confucius produced by a scholar can fit in with another different image of another scholar.15 We can see, on level-(b), what both scholars contend means; they have raised an important enigma, on the feasibility of art as artistic communicability among humans in general. On level-(c), we realize that their enigma is a caution/problem within human communication, not a challenge to communicability itself, for if it were the latter, their own raising of the challenge doubts its own communicability and cuts down the very possibility of their raising itself. Thus two points are here. One, we must personally and culturally inter-translate to inter-learn to be human at all; we are no human if we are cut off from communication. Thus the necessity of communication dictates the imperative of inter-human and inter-cultural learning/communicating; translation in a widest sense is our existential imperative to be human. 12 As an example of how humanity overflows science, here is a scientific measurement on how we cannot tickle ourselves; subjectivity evaporates in objectivity. 13 Buddhist would of course nod, saying, no elephant or butterfly exists. They are puffs of wavicle-wind blown by my desire into empty ideas, empty wind blowing over empty chaos; ―all actuality‖ is vanity. This route silences all. All Buddhist discourses so massive are actually so much engine-idling tautology, signifying literally nothing. ―Nothing signifying‖ is the Buddhist pride and glory. If this is a contradiction, so be it, for nothing can be said, and so anything said is contradictory. 14 Elizabeth W. Barber and Paul T. Barber bravely deal with this problem with scientific analysis. Whether they succeed or not remains to be seen. See their When They Severed Earth from Sky: How the Human Mind s\Shapes Myth, Princeton University Press, 2004. 15 I treated this problem of ―objectivity‖ from another angle in On Metaphoring: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 2001, pp. 85-87.

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Two, yet inter-learning is full of difficulty of missing the communicated content and, if ever communicated, its misunderstanding. What we can/should do is to make a virtue out of the necessity and make a creative use of the predicament of misunderstanding, to, if possible, ―improve‖ on the original message, as if we could improve on Mozart! In fact, Mozart ―imitated‖ Bach and Haydn, and his ―imitations‖ remind us of Bach and Haydn in Mozart, what is a delightful ―enrichment‖ of Bach and Haydn. Communication of the music of poetry in cultural media other than music is then eminently possible, even desirable in all its altered forms and sentiments. How to do so is another theme no less eminently worth developing, all dependent on a Mozartian ingenuity of the poetic translator. The history of ideas is rife with, in fact, amounts to, such creative misunderstanding of the great thinkers.16 Example Three: (a) A researcher at Medical School, NYU, proposed in June 2003 to create an individual called ―Chimera‖ of human-chimpanzee genes-mix. This is a fact. (b) If successful, this project means two things. One, genetic miscegenation shows that humans and monkeys are not just inseparable but also not even distinguishable. Two, it is a human who proposed to wipe out the distinction, not a monkey, and this ―not‖ shows that the very wiping-out of distinction establishes the human-monkey distinction. (c) Observing the above, we realize that life is after all such radical mixing. We have four examples. One, health is kept up by ―balanced diet,‖ a wide mixture of vegetables and meats. Two, incest depletes life; exogamy, mixed marriage, propagates healthy species. Three, the future is vigorous only by learning from history, for forgetting the past differing from now repeats it. Four, a culture is healthy only by learning from other cultures; the Nazis refusing other cultures committed suicide. These four examples show mixture to invigorate life. Lifemixture lives better. Example Four: Have we noted above a curious ―mix‖ of fact (genetic-mixing) and value (ought to)? The mixture smashes away the notorious fact-value dichotomy of fact-(a) from what it means-(b) and what it means for us-(c), establishing their interrelations, how (a) inevitably leads to (b) and (c), while (b) and (c) thoroughly shape the manner and direction of (a). There is no (a) without the interest of (b) and (c), no ―pure‖ fact-description without extra-factual axes ((b) and (c)) to grind. Russian geography, say, is not Chinese or American one. The very structure of today‘s psychology is patterned after Anglo-European natural science. The Western medical science is not Chinese medicine or Indian. Journalism is often a political/cultural mouthpiece, conscious or not. Each culture is a specific journalism that tells a story about life different from other cultures, that is, different sorts of ―journalism.‖ A ―culture‖ means a specific sort of ―storytelling,‖ nothing else.

EXISTENCE AS THREEFOLD MEETING Now, to say that an event has three stories, what it is, what it means, and what it means to us, amounts to saying that things and events ―exist‖ only as the subject notes them. The falling tree on the mount no one sees neither exists nor makes sounds; the sight, sound, and 16 I touched on this problem from the angle of ―objectivity‖ and ―relativism‖ in ibid., pp. 119-124, 180-183, 338345, etc. Cf. our Section later, ―Writing China in English.‖

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indeed the very existence of a tree (falling) on the mount does not lie in the tree (―objectivity‖) nor in someone close-by (subjectivism) but in their meeting. So, to exist is to be perceived (Berkeley) and existence is a subject-object inter-existence. Subjective under-standing composes objective substance (stand-under). The three-story structure of a happening indicates that ―actuality‖ is a subject-object meeting, that there exists no subject or object, pure and simple; and such a ―meeting‖ is three in kind: (1) I-Thou, (2) I17 It, and (3) I-Milieu. To the story of this exciting threefold meeting we now turn. (1) In the I-Thou realm, we see how opposed ―infatuation‖ that burns the self to death is to ―concern‖ for others that lasts forever, as Paul vividly tells us in his ode to charity. 18 I wrote to John my son as follows.19 Dear John: I admire you as a deep thinker, profoundly reflective. I wish you would calmly consider with extreme care what I tell you now. Take time to read it. Important! There is a big sharp difference between ―infatuation‖ and ―concern.‖ ―Infatuation‖ is infatuus, fatuous, in folly (as Webster‟s Dictionary says). It is a silly trap in the ―self‘s‖ heat. Heat is blind. Infatuation blindly burns the self to death, a great life-danger. Paul‘s Poem of Love (1 Corinthians 13) warns that love is not giving the self to burn (v. 3). Love is not blind giving, not infatuation. ―Concern‖ is for the ―other,‖ as you are for your son David. You do not burn yourself, you calmly perceive him; you are concerned with him. Paul‘s positive picture of love (vv. 4-7) describes perceptive concern. It begins with patience (v. 4), and ends with endurance (v. 7); love takes time. Concern-full love lasts (vv. 8-13). So, love is perceptive of other‘s true situation; love takes time and lasts and lasts. To know takes time. It took you eight years to know son-David. It takes as much time to know friend-Mary. Never burn; never blindly give. Calmly take time to perceive Mary. She is not going anywhere. If you love Mary, never be infatuated, OK? Please calm down and take time. Please. Praying. Love, Dad

(2) It is important to note that I-Thou relation alone has concern vs. infatuation, and nothing else. In the I-It realm, our pro-attitude takes on different feelings and features, with different shades of intensity, from an indifferent nod at it to liking it, through being possessed with its sentimental values, being a favorite, a treasure, to being an overwhelming fetish. IThou infatuation and concern are both intense but inter-differ; one burns, the other does not. I-It indifferent nod lacks the intensity of obsessed fetish. An example of I-It attachment to the extent of fetish obsession is a sad story entangled with the calligraphic Sage of all times, 王羲之‘s (Wang Hsi-chih, 303-379) legendary brush

17 Cf. my ―The I-Milieu: Its Implications for Culture and Thinking (I), December 2007, pp. 1-60‖ and ―The IMilieu: Its Implications for Culture and Thinking (II), June 2008, pp. 1-68,‖ Journal of World Religions. 18 1 Corinthians 13:3, 8. My letter to John soon explain this point in detail. 19 Later I told him instead of writing to him, for intimacy and effect.

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piece of his ―蘭亭集序 Preface to Orchid Pavilion Collection.‖20 This long story shows the length of several life-involvements in a fetish It, ―the Preface.‖ The story has it that Wang once went on a boat trip with many literary notables for an exorcise ritual (祓褉). On the boat they variously composed poems, and Wang composed a poetic introduction to the anthology and wrote it with a mouse-hair brush. This is the celebrated ―Preface.‖ This calligraphic piece was so divinely inspired that Wang himself could not reproduce it later, and it became Wang‘s own treasured piece. It was handed down to posterity till it reached Wang‘s seventh generation Chih-yung (智永) who, on deathbed of almost 100 years old, bequeathed it to his disciple Pien-ts‘ai (辯才) a literary genius, who carefully hid the precious piece in a hole in a beam above bedroom. Now in Pien-ts‘ai‘s days there was an emperor T‘ai Tsung of T‘ang dynasty (唐太宗, 627-649), an avid collector of Wang‘s authentic calligraphic pieces. Overhearing that Pients‘ai had that ―Preface,‖ the emperor invited Pien-ts‘ai to three, four sumptuous dinners, politely asking him about the ―Preface,‖ but Pien-ts‘ai kept insisting on his ignorance. Further reconnaissance assured the emperor of Pien-ts‘ai‘s possession of it; his eagerness for it made him lose sleep, appetite, whereupon someone recommended Inspector General Hsiao I (蕭翼) to obtain the ―Preface‖ by hook or by crook. Hisao I requested some minor calligraphic letters of Wang‘s, changed his attire into a student‘s from Shan-tung area, visited Pien-ts‘ai‘s temple, and ingratiated himself with Pients‘ai in ten odd days. The two intimate literary friends now discussed literary matters day in and day out, composing poems over drinks. One day when conversation went to calligraphy, Hsiao casually mentioned his family inheritance, some authentic Wang pieces. Delighted, Pien-ts‘ai pressed him to bring them over. Gazing at them, Pien-ts‘ai calmly said, ―Very good, although not the best of Wang. I also have Wang‘s piece, not at all anything commonly seen.‖ ―What letter pad of Wang‘s is it?‖ ―The Preface.‖ ―Ha, ha! You are kidding. After these long war years, such real Wang cannot be in existence now. Yours must be a copy or a fake.‖ ―O, yes. It was my beloved Teacher‘s treasure; he personally bequeathed it to me; no mistake about it. I will show you tomorrow.‖ On seeing the Preface the next day, Hsiao purposely pointed out its defects, insisting that it was a tracing, and Pien-ts‘ai no less vehemently insisted its authenticity. Since then, however, Pien-ts‘ai left the Preface on the desk with Wang‘s calligraphic letters that Hsiao brought over, practicing on them. Thus it was that Hsiao‘s intimate comings and goings were taken for granted in the temple. The time was ripe, Hsiao thought. When Pien-ts‘ai was out, Hsiao came claiming to fetch for him something he forgot, let a boy-guard open the door into Pien-ts‘ai‘s study, and took all Wang‘s pieces. Hsiao then went to the local authorities, announced his identity and his royal mission, summoned Pien-ts‘ai to his august presence of Inspector General, and said goodbye. It was too much for Pien-ts‘ai in his eighties—he fainted, and within a year, he died, without eating much. Hsiao on his part was greatly rewarded and promoted. The emperor then ordered the Preface to be copied by several notable calligraphers of the day and distributed to the luminaries of the day. This was a story 20 See 伏見冲敬‘s summary of it in 東晋王羲之蘭亭叙七種, 東京二玄社, 1988, pp. 60-62. It is taken from one of the oldest legends on the matter, 何延之‘s 「蘭亭記」.

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supposedly told by Yüan-ssu (元素), a disciple of Pien-ts‘ai‘s; a sad inhumane story it was indeed.

This long touching story conveys, as no other medium can, the long unbearable pathos lasting more than ten generations and beyond till today. To balance off this sad story, here is one healing story on Chih-yung (智永) who devoted thirty years to writing 800 copies of ―Thousand-Word Poem 千字文‖ and deposited them in 800 temples. Its one version has been my personal intense delight. This version makes me gaze and gaze at it, till I get so relaxed as to facilitate my bowel21 movement. So, ancient calligraphy has deep effects on bodily health today; it is my season of spring. Even Needham in England fell in love with calligraphy, and then with China, as to devote his life compiling China‘s gadgetry,22 and also so much so that removing calligraphy removes Pien-ts‘ai‘s life. (3) Such a story of the touching I-It attachment simply brands itself into our hearts and bodies. It is no longer a simple It but consumes and heals our whole beings, as the Preface and Chih-yung did in above stories. The It shades into the I-Milieu where a thing to which one is attached is the world wherein one breathes and is invigorated, so much so that removing it removes one‘s life, as the story above shows. ―It‖ is now ―milieu‖-environment. The senior folks deprived of their job-environment upon retirement are as mothers deprived of their babies in whom they live—they die early. The Milieu of life is life itself to any living being; yet it is itself hidden as air from one‘s awareness, until it is removed. Culture shock suffered by moving somewhere else than one‘s birthplace is as painful as a fish thrown into alien water. Everyone knows when the spring comes, even kids welcome it singing, ―The spring came! Spring came! Where has it come? It comes to the hills, it comes to the villages, it 23 comes to the fields!‖ Still, no one can exactly point at it, for the spring is not an ―it,‖ an object to be separated, specified. Wild flowers say, ―The spring is here‖ but they are not spring, or are they? Spring is ―here‖ showing in them; spring-―milieu‖ just enfolds us all, and birds chirp spring, grass turns green shy and tender. I take my cap off, and spring warms up into me, as I walk on breathing birds and grass. The spring is that in which we feel we are, all balmy, when/where we relax, smile, and take a deep breath afresh, alive out of chilly winter. The season is such a life-milieu, as unmistakable as it is elusive, impossible to objectify. So is every morning, the tender dawn of myriad all. To be a friend to someone is to be the dawn of the spring in which someone springs into herself. Friendship is a spring to inter-existence to authentic existence. We shifted our gaze from our hugged It to our enwrapped Milieu, and It-in-Milieu leads us to friends to make us be. If friends inter-birth our beings as spring, then loss of friendship is loss of life in winter, even if those persons are still alive. We attend their mourning again 21 The version is 「智永草書千字文」 published by 臺南市大眾書局，民72. It is my treasure. Oddly, the same version, 隋智永：關中本千字文，東京二玄社，2007, is more expensive and less good for my taste, at least. 22 Joseph Needham compiled 24 volumes of Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge University Press) since 1954, still adding. His project began at him practicing calligraphy in England, told of by Simon Winchester, The Man Who Loved China, HarperCollins, 2008, p. 45. Sadly, he collected gadgetry, not theory. His ―dexterous China,‖ not inept mandarin, gives us smile; his China as hand-nimble and theory-blind sheds our tears. Our tears in smile began at Needham‘s practice of calligraphy. 23 ―春が來た! 春が來た! どこに來た？ 山に來た，里に來た，野にも來た!‖ sing Japanese kids!

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and again, silently bewail their absence, so sad; we cannot even cry. While describing friendship, China is silent about this sad incident, while Thoreau expresses it this way, 24 perhaps hiding his sobs : We lose our friends when we cease to be friends, not when they die. Then they depart; then we are sad and go into mourning for them. Death is no separation compared with that which takes place when we cease to have confidence in one with whom we have walked in confidence, when we cease to love one whom we had loved, when we know him no more. When we look for him and cannot find him, how completely is he departed!

It is an eternal winter when everything withers, no life but a blanket of chill, of snow. Spring cannot be found here. It is sad chilly winter-milieu. Friendship is weather of personal living. It can vanish. We cannot directly describe how indispensable the Milieu is, however; we must appeal to indirection via storytelling of things in that milieu, and those ―things‖ are things of I-Thou and I-It. The I-Milieu appears only via I-Thou and I-It, to which we attend. They are the objects of our intending; in our awareness that we are; we are aware of Thou and It, in a certain Milieu. The Milieu does not exist without Thous and Its, while Thous and Its do not exist without their Milieu. Asked how he could live in din of horse buggies and not hear it, poet T‘ao Ch‘ien said ―heart distanced, place self-retire,‖ and casually picked flowers at eastern hedge, gazed long at southern hills in dusk air suffusing hills, dotted by flying birds paired encircling, and sighed, ―herein is real sense, want to explain, already forget words.‖ Two points appear. One, the ―place‖ and the ―sense‖ is the milieu of the heart, and two, the milieu can be intimated only by describing casual incidents in it. So here is an interesting situation. As soon as we are aware of our Thous and our Its, they surround us to become our world/environment/Milieu in which we are. It now infuses us with Thou-ish style and It-ish atmosphere, and that in our own way, and then we note that all these Thou, It, and Milieu inter-infuse. Two examples may help to explain this strangely complex yet utterly familiar ordinary life-situation. Example One: This was how I enjoyed the spring. As I was enchanted by springchirpings of the birds, I realized that I was unwittingly switching back and forth between listening to their songs and letting go of them, as it were. I allowed them to seep into me while I merely steeped myself—bathed—in them. Whereupon I suddenly realized that I steeped myself in them as I listened to them, and listened to them as I was engulfed in them. Here I was in them without losing me as I listened to them; in fact, my attention was sharpened by being thus enchanted. Both were there with me—my awareness of them and my enjoyment in them unawares. The in-milieu enjoyment attends the enjoyment of-Thou-It of my attending. For me the birds are my Thou and my It, to compose my milieu that is my spring all over me. This is the case now even when birds are not singing, as they sing silently in me. No birds singing for two mornings now. What happened? Silent spring is no less dreary than silent winter. O I hear some! Ugly cute squawking! But how rare, in the first warm sun, 24 ―1850: age 32-33: After January 5‖ in I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, ed. by Jeffrey S. Cramer, Yale University Press, 2007, p. 44. This is the only description that I could find of such loss, anywhere.

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the morning sun since after several days of chill! Now, I hear one faint chirp, and one more! O how I missed you, birdies! There they are again, chirping! My god, they are chirping! And then they stopped. Dogs keep barking. I have found my own rhythm walking, slow at my pace. It‘s getting warm, in my winter morning walk. Dried leaves on sidewalk have now been swept away clean. I miss them. Birdies are nowhere to be heard. I miss doves cooing the other morning as I walked right here. They are so loud in their silence. They are my Thous my Milieu. Example Two: Now we can understand the mother-child relation, the basic originative human relation of humanity. The mother is both the Thou-meeting and the Milieusurrounding the baby, both vital to him. The baby is in turn both the Milieu where the mother breathes her life and the Thou to whom she attends with constant caring solicitude; her cares It-arrange for his growth in which Mom grows, and their Thous and her It blend into a unique Milieu, as their air to inter-enliven their Thous. Thus in It-birds in Thou-birds Milieu and mother-baby as Thou-Milieu inter-growing, they tune in Thous and Its, to gently shape a specific Thou-air and It-style of life we live. These relations can negatively extrapolate into a network of conspiracy to 9/11 Tragedy. Importantly, storytelling alone can evoke these life-and-death relations, pro and con. Journalism is a poignant art of daily storytelling. Now we are convinced of a right answer to our old persistent question, ―Why do we tell stories?‖ Our storytelling somehow makes deep sense of all this life drama; storytelling makes a felt story-sense of all life‘s routines and even absurdities. We cannot help mumbling about what goes on, and our mumble makes a story that somehow comforts us by giving us an orientation inexpressible otherwise. That was what happened to the story of Wang‘s ―Preface‖ cited above, and since then we have been rehearsing stories one after another. Today journalism is the science as science is the journalism—of storytelling of life. Journalism journeys through life as science knows life, both spinning out a new story a day. Kids do so at the crack of every dawn, to powerfully pulse into tomorrow. I dreamed of telling a tiny boy to use his tender palm to cup and reflect his warm breath into his freezing nose. He did, clumsily, and I awoke. His wobbly palm is still here, and I am so very happy. His palm is my dawn. Now, to mix palm-It as kid-Thou in my Milieu of Nature is agrarian revolution, of today‘s technology in Japan.

AGRICULTURE IN TECHNOLOGY IN JAPAN25 Here is an amazing story of today‘s Japanese technology as agrarian. We often take agriculture as a dated primitive engagement now replaced by efficient industry and technology today. This section contends that precisely this ―dated‖ agriculture is the green salvation of today‘s technology the destroyer of nature and humanity. Japan leads the world in infusing the spirit of agriculture into science/technology/industry. Japanese farmers treasure land as gold, cherishing the ―family‖-community in loving land-cultivation together. Such agrarian sensitivity pervades Japan‘s ecological industry. Agrarianism is an agricultural way of life, to love/respect Nature, to live with it on it, not off it over it; the land is an undercurrent that nourishes its science/industry today. This section 25 My dear student Miss Jessica Pue‘s permission to adapt her detailed essay on this theme is deeply appreciated.

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tells this exciting story of ―agricultured‖ technology in ecological industry, for our whole world to follow to thrive together in nature. Agrarianism is our global future. Ancient Japanese lovingly cultivated their precious land for centuries, and their agrarian attitude survived nineteenth century industrialization that killed traditional institutions to create an industrialized veneer. We now tell the story of (1) Japan‘s traditional agrarianism, (2) destruction of its agrarian institutions by industrialization/urbanization, and then (3) the persistence of agrarian traits/attitudes today (4) to nourish Japanese science/industry, based on (5) agrarian principles that forebodes well for (6) the future green world.

1. Respectful Oneness with Nature—Japan’s Traditional Agrarian Lifestyle Japan‘s ―agrarian attitude‖ is a respectful intimate identification with nature as typified in its sociocultural life, rooted/thrived in ancient times, and went underground in the Tokugawa era. Japan‘s rocky, mountainous terrain limits cultivation to a fraction of its tiny islands; people developed an intensive small-scale agriculture to treasure Mother Nature. Because life totally depended on scarce arable land a tiny plot was prized as gold.26 Intense cultivation familiarized farmers with their land, and many generations‘ landcultivation intensified oneness with the soil. All this led in turn to close family ties working together and their cooperation and sharing resources led to village camaraderie. Treasuring Nature led to its reverence in nature-religion, and they appealed to Naturedeities kami to protect them from sickness/catastrophe and for good harvest. Thus geography shaped Japanese agrarian life-patterns far back in history, deeply attached to land, and tightly bonded them as family-community of intensive land-cultivation, in a filial religion of the spirit of Nature-reverence.

2. Destruction of Japan’s Agrarian Institutions by Industrialization/Urbanization Meiji Restoration (1868) swiftly industrialized Japan into Western lifestyle, uprooting the above traditional agrarian institution in the family, rural villages, religion, and annual events. One: Agrarian kinship bonds assured support of cohesive farming community, and then, outside hirelings came in to loosen family farming,27 and individualism came to choose one‘s own work.28 Young folks moved to cities en masse for lucrative factory or office jobs. New city-dwellers with different work-styles separated rural families spatially and then culturally. Families fell apart. Two: Family land-ownership vanished in government annexation or administration under new townships to benefit a few VIPs.29 Three: Modern transportation brought new culture, and belief in ―taboos‖ on childbirth or death faded, for urban situation prevented their observance, and village taboos lost authority as no harm came on their violation.30 The 26 Shoichi Watanabe, The Peasant Soul of Japan, NY: St. Martin‘s Press, 1989, p. 10. 27 Kunio Yanagida, ed., Japanese Manners and Customs in the Meiji Era, Tokyo: Ōbunsha, 1957, p. 105. 28 Ibid., 109. 29 Ibid., 78-79. 30 Ibid., 305-308.

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government banned ―socially disruptive‖ beliefs of fox-messengers of agriculture-god, Inari, to possess people, to pit ―possessed‖ houses against ―unpossessed‖ ones31; Western education of mechanism dismissed spell-casting. Finally, the government dropped traditional lunar calendar for Western solar calendar and created new less meaningful national holidays, e.g., Emperor‘s Birthday.32 Traditional agricultural festivals lost fascination for city-dwellers who with a little money could easily afford entertainment any day.33 The ancient festivals and holidays on the lunar calendar were essential to marking seasons and giving relief from taxing farmwork. Stopping farming stopped observing these special events, severing vital links to Nature.

3. Agrarian Undercurrent in Modern Japan Yet agrarian attitude continued in clan loyalties in city, village spirit of cooperation, religious practices, farming holidays, and old festivals. Clan loyalties stayed. Young people in cities still felt obligated to fight for financial success to bring honor to families.34 They preferred hardship to bringing shame to the family. City employers preferred applicants from their own villages to strangers.35 Villagers formed cliques in companies, schools, and political parties in the same city. Provincial rulers in the city sponsored education of youths from their own villages.36 Religious practices survived despite government proscription and education. People observed ―immoral‖ bon festival (when spirits from hell roam about the earth), carried talismans or held rituals to fend off bad fortune (―small pox deity‖). They developed new festivals of old village in schools (organized sports, picnics), new conscripted army (feasts for new recruits).37 Fortunetellers advice on decisions to build a house, change residence, or adopt a new method of tilling38; fortunetellers fulfill old needs that new institutions could not satisfy. It is thus that Japan retained ancient agrarian values within modern industrial society, with closeness to Nature at the base, which have positive impacts on Japan‘s industry.

4. Japanese Industry Nourished/Directed by Agrarianism These agrarian life-patterns merged with Western cultural elements to distinctively shape Japanese industry. Japanese industry now has ―quality in meticulous details‖; agrarian kinship bonds re-configured modern workplace; Japan molds the society to fit traditional values; love of Nature ecologically shapes industry; and infusing industry, technology, with such love of Nature would lead modern world to an ecological future. Japan‘s detailed quality in manufacturing industrial products came from ancient smallscale, intensive farming, where attention to details gave quality on the smallest scale. In 1979, 31 Ibid., 309. 32 Ibid., 255-257. 33 Ibid., 273. 34 Ibid., 113. 35 Ibid., 78. 36 Ibid., 102. 37 Ibid., 267. 38 Ibid., 315.

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Hewlett Packard reported that Japan‘s microchips had a defect rate one-tenth of US ones. 40 Sony introduced its revolutionary pocket-sized transistor radio. Detroit faced competition as American consumers turned to fuel-efficient Japanese cars after the Arab oil embargo in 41 1973. American auto industry collapsed in early 2000s, survived by Japan‘s Honda, Toyota, and others. In the past, working on tiny plots, Japanese farmers had to coax every bit of soil into productive harvest, and so learned to appreciate compactness, high quality, and the greatest yield, to pervade ingenuity with tight quality control. This effort at quality control is now the entire workforce‘s duty, not just overseers‘. Employee loyalty to their own company is a legacy of farmers‘ tight kinship bonds; 42 workers often forego vacation to show devotion. Japan has the fewest strikes, often symbolic, than other nations. Art Buchwald was surprised to see employees with red headbands showing dissatisfaction with the management, yet continue to be hard at work; 43 ―they work even harder and with more proficiency‖ to appeal to their bosses‘ consciences. Executives look out for employees‘ interests to assure company cohesion and loyalty; 44 employees are never asked to serve under someone their age or younger. Lay-offs are avoided in the lifetime employment system, and top management suffers the largest pay cuts 45 in tough times. The management is head of the family, directing family activities to protect/promote the clan. Employees are family members, hard at work for the defense/prosperity of the clan. Company‘s farmer-family security fulfills the amae-need, our desire to presume another‘s goodwill, to enjoy an innermost circle where we are permitted some self46 indulgence, perhaps because (though Doi did not say so) of Japan‘s agrarian family cohesion, a must for collective survival. Employees see themselves as members of a team, identified to outsiders not by position but by company name. 47 Company sports teams, vacation resorts, and field days foster familial solidarity. Group cooperation is encouraged by ringisei, conducting meetings for consensus over personal 48 opinion. Such agrarian shaping of modern industry beckons Japan to many unique prospects industrial, technological, and scientific. Japanese resentment of Western modernity originated in agrarian environmental respect. As gaudy Western products offend Japanese aesthetics, so must Western industry‘s disregard 49 of the environment, for profit at all cost (a contradiction!) offend Japan‘s historic love of

39 John Hunter Boyle, Modern Japan: The American Nexus, Ft. Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993, p. 378. 40 Ibid., 374-375. 41 Ibid., 368. 42 Edwin O. Reischauer, The Japanese Today, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988, p. 324. 43 Boyle, Modern Japan: The American Nexus, op. cit., p. 378. 44 Reischauer, The Japanese Today, op. cit., p. 321. 45 Ibid., p. 321. 46 Takeo Doi and John Bester (trans.), The Anatomy of Dependence, NY: Kodansha International, 1973, p. 28. 47 Reischauer, The Japanese Today, op. cit., pp. 323-324. 48 Takeo Doi, tr., Mark A. Harbison, The Anatomy of Self: The Individual Versus Society, NY: Kodansha International, 1986, p. 35. 49 Profit cannot obtain by costing it. Besides, as we short-sightedly abuse our planet today to secure our own comfort, convenience, and wealth, we most assuredly risk destroying our future in which to enjoy them.

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Nature. Against them, Japan can draw on its agrarian roots to prosper nature-loving technology, to prosper all. Japanese scientists have dedicated shrines to laboratory animals, honoring them as ―comrades‖ who sacrificed their lives to scientific progress. Were this attitude to pervade all science/industry, Japan would change our views and behavior toward Nature where we breathe. Japan is ready to lead the world to ecologically sound technology in auto-industry, transportation industry, factory designs, and government policies. Japan produces fuel-efficient hybrid gasoline-electric cars that combine an efficient gasoline engine and an electric motor to emit one-tenth the pollutants of standard cars, and fuel-cell vehicles that produce electricity by mixing hydrogen and oxygen electrochemically 50 to emit the ―waste‖ of water. The continuance of this trend in auto-industry and its further application to other clean, energy-efficient technologies shows Japan‘s environmental 51 concern in industry. The 500 Series shinkansen between Tokyo and Hakata in northern Kyushu maximizes speed, safety, and comfort, and minimizes environmental impact with a novel aerodynamic 52 design and reduced noise. Japan plans an Intelligent Transport System to connect people, roads, and vehicles via a data communications network, cutting exhaust gases by reducing acceleration/deceleration. Drivers could pass through tollgates without stopping, for the 53 transaction occurs instantly by on-board equipment with a roadside computer. By 1998, Asahi Breweries had converted all its plants to zero-emissions by recycling 54 excess yeast for use in foods and pharmaceuticals. The Ministry of International Trade and Industry gives tax incentives to research to find energy efficient technologies. In 1993, the government initiated ―The New Sunshine Program‖ to speed development of renewable energy sources and advanced fossil fuel use. Relatively high energy prices and 3% consumption taxes on refined oil products, natural gas, and electricity, urge responsible 55 energy use. Thus with environmental respect Japan surpasses the West in reducing industrial pollution and in conserving energy. Their automobiles run cleanly, public transportation combines speed and safety with energy-efficiency, and factories produce little pollution. Government policies reinforce technological innovations, for people and corporations to use energy prudently. Reverence for Nature sustains environmentally sound science, technology, and industry. Western technology is based on abstract objective science to separate human subjects from Nature, to exploit/manipulate, to ruin Nature and humans. Japanese technology should continue to build on concrete human-involved nature-friendly science. Concrete theories or 56 perhaps meta-theories (Shinto Kamis) show human intimacy with Nature, Nature-dependent 50

Yahoo! News: Asia, ―Asian carmakers tout weird and wacky designs‖ 25 Oct. 2001