tp86kuta – Page 5

Papers on Language II

Culture
Thursday
11:00 am – 12:45 pm
Room H

Chaired by Adeline Tan
Adeline Tan, “Path Verbs in a Motion Event: A Comparative Approach between Chaozhou Dialect and Standard Mandarin”
Pen-Ying Wang, “Tonal Convergence in Southern Hunan Province—Evidence from the Linguistic Strata of Southwestern Mandarin and Tu-hua”
Xinyu Zhang, “The Language of Chinese Food”
Yaroslav Akimov, “Sensitive Vocabulary in the Contemporary Chinese Media Landscape: Between the Scylla of ‘Linguistic Positivity’ and the Charybdis of Radical Censorship”

Adeline Tan, “Path Verbs in a Motion Event: A Comparative Approach between Chaozhou Dialect and Standard Mandarin”

Chaozhou is a Sinitic language of min group, mainly spoken in Guangdong, in the south-east of China. The purpose of this paper is to describe the use and the syntactic features of path verbs in a motion event. Unlike path verbs in Standard Mandarin, those in Chaozhou can introduce a locative noun phrase (NP) denoting the Goal (the endpoint of a motion) whatever the paradigm they appear (Li 1999). Besides, we show that path verbs in Chaozhou can have the causative use, just like Cantonese (Yiu 2014). We argue that Chaozhou differs significantly from Standard Mandarin in terms of typology of displacement events. This implies that the nature of the verbal complex in Chaozhou may be different from that of Standard Chinese.
Our analysis is based upon data collected through elicited videos showing different scenes of motion events and through the narrations of Pear story.

References
LI Hai’ou 李海鸥. 1999.〈“回北京去” 跟“翻去北京” “转去北京”〉[Rentrer à Pékin]. In 陈恩泉主编, 《双语双方言 (六) 》, 154–162. 香港 :汉学出版社.
YIU, Yuk-man Carine. 2014. The Typology of Motion Events: An Empirical Study of Chinese Dialects. Berlin/Boston : De Gruyter Mouton.

Pen-Ying Wang, “Tonal Convergence in Southern Hunan Province—Evidence from the Linguistic Strata of Southwestern Mandarin and Tu-hua”

Convergence, a linguistic phenomenon in language contact, can mostly be found in the syntactic system. The languages in contact share the same syntactic structures but the lexical words may be retained. In contrast, convergence in the phonological system has been rarely discussed. What would it be like for convergence in the phonological system? With a focus on the phonological system in Chinese dialects, it seems that the tonal system would be the component to converge most in language contact. Southern Hunan Province has been a diglossic community in which the locals are speakers of Southwestern Mandarin and Tu-hua. The latter serves as the low variety while the former acts as the high variety and the regional lingua franca as well. An analysis on the literal-colloquial readings of the Southwestern Mandarin and Tu-hua reveals that the literal-colloquial distinction mostly remains in initials and finals. For example, in Lanjiaoshan, Hunan, diào(drop) has a literal reading (tiao324) and two colloquial readings (t’iao45, ɖiao324) in Southwestern Mandarin. The same character in Tu-hua has a literal reading (tiao324) and two colloquial readings (t’ie324, tie324). In contrast with the variations in initials and finals, the tones of the six readings show a surprisingly consistent. Five out of the six readings from the different linguistic strata of both dialects are the same. Based on the analysis of the linguistic strata and other dialects in contact, we conclude that the tones would be more susceptible to language contact than initials and finals.

Xinyu Zhang, “The Language of Chinese Food”

Gastronomy consists of the cornerstone of all civilisations and the essence of every culture worldwide. Chinese cuisine has been enjoying growing popularity internationally over the years. The richness of Chinese food not only resides in its delicate and abundant tastes but also in its millenary history, which contributes to the numerous regional cuisines and deep gastronomic culture.
The nomenclature of Chinese dishes is considered as a linguistic art, which is composed of various cultural elements, including culinary techniques, utensils, anthroponyms, metaphors, historical legends and so on and so forth. Moreover, it is denominated following certain patterns, which could be roughly divided into regular, figurative, and mixed kinds.
In this presentation, the language of Chinese food will be interpreted in detail with the hope to reveal the linguistic beauty of the Chinese gastronomic culture.

Yaroslav Akimov, “Sensitive Vocabulary in the Contemporary Chinese Media Landscape: Between the Scylla of ‘Linguistic Positivity’ and the Charybdis of Radical Censorship“

If one treats the global phenomenon of political correctness linguistically, two major trends are discernible in Chinese mass media. On the one hand, novel items with new connotational value are formed and deployed instead of unfavoured expressions in order to avoid any unpleasant associations emerged between communicants, namely offence, aggression, and exclusion. Apart from the pursuit of new language forms in the challenging and highly sensitive domains of sex, gender, race, disability etc., “linguistic positivity” is being manifested in broader contexts, cf. euphemistic paraphrasing in English ‘sandwich artist’ for ‘sandwich maker’; or translinguistically in Mandarin 负增长 / ‘negative growth’ instead of ‘decline’. Alternatively, silence, also known as “the ultimate euphemism” (Epstein), can be applied concurrently in an attempt to conceal inappropriate or undesirable content, which is exemplified in the fiercely debated List of Taboos and ‘Use-With-Caution’ Words in News and Information Reports of the Xinhua News Agency 新华社新闻信息报道中的禁用词和慎用词, along with other cases of print or Internet censorship.
Both tendencies apparent in official Chinese media have not been adequately described or thoroughly explored. Mandarin Chinese shows a wide range of formal and non-formal (semantic) mechanisms of euphemistic formation, and Renminribao officialdom style and Xinhua reports provide the easiest access route into the analysis of sensitive vocabulary with graphic examples which have been given a prominent place in this paper.

Coming up with Terms of History

Ethnography as Method and its Significance
Wednesday
2:00 pm – 3:45 pm

Organised by Yang Shen
Jacob Tischer, Chair
Yang Shen, “The Appearance of History: Approaching Lottery Divination in Chinese Buddhist Temples in China Today”
Jacob Tischer, “Making History in the Field: Appropriating Pak-koan Ritual Music from the Central Margins of Modern Taipei”
Ruslan Yusupov, “Semiotics of Authenticity: Islamic Signs and the Question of History in the Xi Jinping Era China”
Daniel Murray, “A Spatial History of Communal Temples: Urban Anthropology and Local Historical Documents in Xiamen”

Chinese Studies have much potential to contribute to general reflections about perceptions of history, historical imagination, and history-writing. As anthropologists, we are interested in pushing this potential by using ethnography as a reflexive practice of historical inquiry. While recognising the history-making potential of any human being, we emphasise that the making of history also depends on the meaning-making of history. Hence, ethnography—which is based on fieldwork participation among the people who produce and manage the meaning of history in their own ways—gives scholars a unique footing to discuss the problem of history as it is experienced by those who live through their times. The panel draws together the concerns of diverse interlocutors who we encountered through fieldwork, ranging from average temple-goers in Chinese Buddhist temples, Taiwanese ritual musicians, southwestern Muslims, neighbourhood temple attendees, and so on and consider how they understand, talk about, and engage with terms of history. At what kind of moment in history do these various actors perceive themselves to be living? How do they account for their practices in the midst of controversies, suspicion, cynicism, and/or denials? In each case, how do our interlocutors negotiate the significance of past and present and mark their presence in a future that is historically convincing? Instead of projecting any meta-narrative of religion, we focus on how our interlocutors situate their practices in a history that is meaningful to—hence, part of—themselves. In this way, we provide an anthropological ground to rethink the historiography of Chinese Studies.

Yang Shen, “The Appearance of History: Approaching Lottery Divination in Chinese Buddhist Temples in China Today”

In late socialist China, divinatory arts persist, although the stigma of “superstition” still overshadows the public accounts of divination. What is at stake is the public representation of a popular potential. The socialist teleology of modernity poses only select rationalists as “pioneers” in history and leaders of the future. Accordingly, it freezes popular divinatory activities in an image of a past “residue” that is doomed for demise. Then, what accounts are empirically produced when divination is seen as a force in current history and affecting one’s relation to the past and future? In Temple Commons, a Chinese Buddhist temple in the City of Glory in East China, and its branch temple in the city’s rural outskirts, the presence and the absence of divination triggered vastly contrasting emotions, conflicting views, uneasy ambivalence, heated disputes, and immediate reactions. The controversy surrounds the practice of “seeking efficacious lot” (qiu lingqian) or lottery divination, which involves a self-help diviner shaking a hand-size container of wooden sticks until only one lot emerges. The paper investigates various stances approaching lottery divination in contemporary Buddhist temples and discusses how temple encounters disrupt a stereotypic discourse of divination. It suggests that temples’ non-discursive spaces are crucial because they allow public contacts of divinatory performance, which, in turn, dissolves ideological abstractions and make biographies and lives the centre of talk about divination. With these fragmented but meaningful personal conversations, we might re-imagine the appearance of history as a play of possibilities.

Jacob Tischer, “Making History in the Field: Appropriating Pak-koan Ritual Music from the Central Margins of Modern Taipei”

This proposal engages two questions: Does anthropology, especially in its post-colonial guise, have something to offer Chinese Studies beyond contributing a methodology? And: What place does Taiwan occupy in relation to China? Doing ethnographic fieldwork with younger adults in Taiwan shows that the latter question not only occupies researchers but also their interlocutors, who have to navigate the role of (Chinese) traditions in the framework of a modern, sovereign, democratic state and an increasingly localising society. In this paper, I analyse how the members of a religious association playing Pak-koan 北管 music negotiate questions of identity that arise from the historically and geographically Chinese origins of their brand of music, its traditional cosmological backgrounds, and their application of this music in a modern, urban context in contemporary Taipei. In part, their struggles reflect contradictions inherent in Taiwanese modernity, in which political institutions promote cultural expressions, including Pak-koan music troupes, as living traditions that authenticate and anchor—“centralise”—Taiwanese history in concrete practices. At the same time, runaway modernisation shapes distinctly urban attitudes, expectations, and stigmata among residents regarding noise, privacy, and individual-based cultural consumption. The changing preferences of urban denizens create pressures on religious troupes to adapt and innovate, thereby driving cultural change, while also implicitly undermining—“marginalising”—the ability of troupes to uphold the traditions so prized as authenticating practices.

Ruslan Yusupov, “Semiotics of Authenticity: Islamic Signs and the Question of History in the Xi Jinping Era China”

Muslim communities in China have for centuries used qingzhen sign to mark the religious safety of their eateries and food in the wider society characterised by the cultural valorisation of pork and alcohol. However, the increasing appearance of halal sign alongside qingzhen in the past two decades has recently attracted the suspicion of the current Chinese government. Equating this novel phenomenon to the worrying trend of Arabisation and Saudisation, it has embarked on an ambitious campaign to clamp down on the proliferation of halal and thus to recuperate the “pristine” Chinese Islam from the otherwise radical influence from abroad. Drawing on the interviews with Chinese Muslims, this paper shows, however, that this campaign loses sight of the Maoist China history during which Islam was instrumentalised to create ethnic Muslim minorities separate from the Han majority. As Islam became ethicised, qingzhen has lost its religious credibility, the very credibility that the adoption of halal is now aimed at remedying. It then follows that by pitching Arabic signs against Chinese ones, the Chinese state is actually neglecting the period that was critical for its own formation. By looking at how Chinese Muslims enduring through the campaign historicise the claims of the government, this paper thinks about how anthropology might provide critical historical insight that is indispensable for our understanding of contemporary China.

Daniel Murray, “A Spatial History of Communal Temples: Urban Anthropology and Local Historical Documents in Xiamen”

Over the past thirty years, the shift towards local and regional histories of China has developed substantial new perspectives of late imperial society and culture. This work has brought together the study of local documents, such as land deeds, genealogies, stone inscriptions, and liturgical manuscripts, with fieldwork conducted where these texts were composed. Yet, despite the progress made through this interdisciplinary research, these studies generally do not account for the events of the twentieth-century or contemporary situations. This paper attempts to address modernity in China through a history of infrastructures and urbanisation, rather than secularisation. I use Xiamen, a coastal city in southeast China, as an example of the multiple waves of infrastructure projects that occurred over the past hundred years from Overseas Chinese business people, local and national governments, and the return of overseas investment since the 1980s. Each wave of development has had differing relations to the existing structures of local organising such as communal temples and lineage halls. To construct this history, I draw on local historical documents produced by communal temples (stone inscriptions and temple gazetteers) gathered during fieldwork as well as sources about urban planning and development. By thinking these two sets of documents together, I avoid presenting ritual in opposition to modern infrastructure and present communal temples and their participants as actors in urban history. This then leads to a consideration of how temple attendees today present the history of their communities and their potential futures.

Papers on Labour

Thursday
9:00 am – 10:45 pm
Room 6

Chaired by Konstantinos Tsimonis
Linzhi Zhang, “Creating Art Dealership in China: Strategic Action in a New Market”
Ryanne Flock, “Beyond the hukou System: Marginalisation Processes in Urban China Shown through the Perspective of Public Space”
Qiujie Chen, “Escaping Metropolis: Lifestyle Migration as a Cultural Practice in Contemporary China”

Linzhi Zhang, “Creating Art Dealership in China: Strategic Action in a New Market”

The meteoric development of art markets in China has attracted much media attention but relevant academic research remains scarce. The very few existing studies focus primarily on how institutions of Western origin such as galleries and auction houses diffused in China. In particular, a new-institutional perspective regards the creation of Chinese art markets as a process of imitation and limits Chinese dealers’ actions to mimesis and unintended failures in attempts to reach Western standards. Little justice has been done to the agency of local dealers. As a remedy, turning towards a framework that views markets as strategic action fields (Fligstein and McAdam 2011), this paper explains how Chinese dealers created a primary market of contemporary art by solving problems unique in the Chinese context. No ready solutions to these problems can be found by imitating Western galleries, which enjoy the benefits of widely-accepted regulations on competition in established markets. I argue that Chinse dealers rely on the networks they built, and the practical competence they developed from the exact practice of running their galleries. My explanations draw upon interviews with 15 dealers who opened the first galleries (between 1997 and 2006) in China and 20 artists who collaborated with these dealers. Unpacking the process through which Chinese dealers created an intermediary position between artists and buyers, this paper provides a much-needed qualitative understanding of art market formation in China.

Ryanne Flock, “Beyond the hukou System: Marginalisation Processes in Urban China Shown through the Perspective of Public Space”

In many developing and emerging economies, rural migrants are part of the urban poor, and many scholars argue: Those who earn their living on the street—collect trash, panhandle for money, offer services, or sell goods—have no alternative. Is this true for Chinese cities too? Are street vendors including fortune-tellers and beggars—who all depend on access to public space—the most marginalised among the unfortunate rural migrants?
This paper approaches this question by taking Guangzhou as a case study. The data is derived from fieldwork conducted between 2011 and 2014, including half-structured interviews with 52 street vendors plus fortune tellers, and with 42 beggars on their motivation, socio-economic background and urban integration. The academic interest in these social groups is still in its infancy. Thus, this paper offers new data and gives a more complex picture of the actors in Guangzhou’s informal street economy. It argues against common assumptions such as their lack of alternatives, low access barriers, or the formation of “gangs.” Moreover, instead of absolute concepts such as poverty lines or the idea of a definite exclusion through the rural hukou, this article focuses on marginalisation as a process which is based on institutional, social, economic and spatial factors. From street vendors in general to mobile fortune tellers in particular, to beggars, it elucidates their vulnerability and the threatening downward spiral. Eventually, to limit the access to urban public space comes to the fore as an important driver of marginalisation.

Qiujie Chen, “Escaping Metropolis: Lifestyle Migration as a Cultural Practice in Contemporary China”

Since around 2006, the emerging presence of lifestyle migrants with their hostel businesses in Lhasa city, the provincial seat of the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR), has shown disproportionately wide cultural influence across the country, has become the new jewel in the crown of Tibetan tourism, with many questions still to be answered: Who are these lifestyle migrants, for what purpose are they moving to Lhasa, and what do their daily lives look like once they have arrived? To decipher this phenomenon, three fieldworks have been conducted throughout 2018–2020 in Lhasa city. The collected data reveals key features of this group regarding their age, gender, education background, relocation strategies, and daily life, etc. It further provides a lens to examine the history of their presence in the city, unveiling both similarities and surprising differences between this group and its counterparts elsewhere in the world, as documented by scholars. By further placing this lifestyle migration in contemporary Chinese society in a broader socio-historical context, this study reveals the interlocking elements between the migration practice and the traditional Chinese culture of the elite—elements that reshape the image of contemporary Lhasa for Chinese tourists by partially incorporating its imagery into the elite culture, by which it largely contributes to the development of the regional tourism economy. Additionally, the study of lifestyle migration in Lhasa provides us with a possible new perspective for a more comprehensive understanding of tourism in China in general.

Papers on Sinophone Worlds

Thursday
11:00 am – 12:45 pm
Room 6

Chaired by Jessica Ka Yee Chan
Jessica Ka Yee Chan, “The Voice of Bruce Lee”
Cui Zhou, “Can Cinematic Forms Affect the Other? Problematising the Soundscape of the film On the Hunting Ground (dir. Tian Zhuangzhuang, 1984)”
Guowen Shang, “Norwegian Soul in Chinese Body: A Study of Chinese Adopted Norwegian Students’ Perception of Chinese Identity”

Jessica Ka Yee Chan, “The Voice of Bruce Lee”

Although fluent in Cantonese and English, Bruce Lee’s original voice is rarely heard in his film. Out of the films that Bruce Lee completed, the only one that features his original voice (in English dialogue) is Enter the Dragon (1973). As a record of his living, rarely heard, and irreplaceable voice, Bruce Lee’s signature scream, in his own voice, has acquired charisma, capturing colonial angst, and raw emotions.
This essay traces the (missing) voice of Bruce Lee and reveals the creative tension between dubbing and subtitling, symptomatic of the negotiation between spoken dialects (Cantonese), written languages (Chinese and English), and competing mother tongues in Hong Kong cinema. Typically shot without sound, Hong Kong action films in the 1960s and 70s were often dubbed in Mandarin during post-production for the Mandarin language market. A bilingual subtitling system, in Chinese and English, reduced the cost of dubbing in multiple tracks for multiple dialects and maximised profit by appealing to overseas market, especially Southeast Asia, where various Chinese dialects and English were spoken. Through a close reading of image, sound, and script (subtitles), this essay examines the understudied role of dubbing and subtitling in making Bruce Lee a kungfu icon and transnational star.

Cui Zhou, “Can Cinematic Forms Affect the Other? Problematising the Soundscape of the film On the Hunting Ground (dir. Tian Zhuangzhuang, 1984)”

As a significant director of the so-called Fifth Generation in China, Tian Zhuangzhuang first established his reputation by producing two 1980s ethnic minority films: On the Hunting Ground and The Horse Thief. Even though scholars have affirmed Tian’s innovative experiments in the aspect of cinematic forms, they seldom dig into the complex effects and functions of Tian’s intriguing audio-visual strategies. It is the time to listen to the silenced stories hidden behind the forms and reflect how these stories can renew one’s understanding of the ethnic issues in 1980s China. Using On the Hunting Ground as an example, this article centres on the perspective of the soundscape to understand the function of Tian’s formal experiments in the 1980s. Tian’s double-layered soundtrack, which lays a monotone male Mandarin translation over all the Mongolian dialogues, serves as the focal point. I argue that this peculiar auditory design not only reveals the Han-centric hierarchy but also, more importantly, constructs a reflexive space and a new point-of-audition, which exposes the Han to the moviegoing experience of ethnic minorities in Socialist China. Thus, Tian deviates from the stereotyped Han-centric point of view of Socialist minority films and puts the minorities’ experience in the centre. Further, the film’s complicated soundscape and narrative austerity distract audiences from the conventional pleasure deriving from dramatic narration and instead stimulate their sensation and sensibility to feel the sound and the image. In this way, Tian explores how form can affect audiences and whether the Han and non-Han, who have many cultural differences, can share each other’s subject positions by communicating through the shared sensation and sensibility. For Tian, the potential exchangeable subject positions, to some degree, serve as a way to intervene in the identity crisis and ethnic issues in 1980s China.

Guowen Shang, “Norwegian Soul in Chinese Body: A Study of Chinese Adopted Norwegian Students’ Perception of Chinese Identity”

The identity formation for international adoptees has attracted much academic explorations in the past decades. Norway is one of the top 10 adoption-receiving countries in the world. However, no specific research has been carried out regarding the ethnic identities of Chinese adoptees in Norway, and little is known about Chinese adopted Norwegian’s attitudes towards their ethnic origins. This study is intended to examine Norwegian adopted Chinese students’ perception of their identity and their attitudes towards China and Chinese culture. Altogether 20 Chinese adopted Norwegian students at universities in western Norway were involved in the questionnaire survey and semi-structured interview in order to find out how they perceive their ethnic identity and how they deal with the ‘identity dilemmas’ within a predominantly white environment. Phinney’s (1992) Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure (MEIM) was used to measure the participants’ identification with China and Chinese culture and society. In addition, an individual-based, face-to-face interview was conducted to understand more about the participants’ attitudes towards their cultural identities. It is found that the group of Chinese adopted Norwegian students generally felt secure about their identity. They all perceived themselves as Norwegian but could experience some challenges in having a Chinese appearance. The majority of the participants expressed a somewhat superficial interest in China, their birth country. Most of the Chinese adoptees feel less confused and conflicted about their cultural identity.

Imagining a Watery World

Aquatic Animals, Water Calamities, and Bathing Rituals in Chinese Literature and Cinema
Thursday
11:00 am – 12:45 pm

Hui-Lin Hsu, Chair
Yuqing Liu, “Fantasising Women in the Bathhouse: The Imagery of Water and the Gender Space in the Film Shower (1999)”
Bo-Yan Chen, “Waterways, Disasters, and Knowledge Construction: Narratives of Aquatic Animals in Tang Stories”
Yiwei Zhang, “The Calamities of Water in Journey to the West”
Einor Cervone, Discussant

This panel explores the lasting importance of the literary and visual representation of water in premodern and modern China. Water is, of course, a natural element that has long been used as a metaphor in literature and a symbol of philosophical concepts. How has the experience of encountering, managing, and consuming water influenced the arts in China? Focusing on the theme of water, this panel investigates the epistemic, ecological, and gender issues in literary and visual production from the Tang dynasty to contemporary China. Bo-Yen Chen examines narratives of river cruises and voyages in the early Song collection of stories, showing how knowledge of aquatic animals and spirits was represented in Tang tales. Yiwei Zhang explores the idea of nature in The Journey to the West by analysing the writing of water calamities and the significance of water control in religious and cross-cultural contexts. Focusing on the reworking of the traditional aesthetic theme of the “bathing beauty,” Yuqing Liu investigates the role of water in the construction of gendered relationships in contemporary Chinese cinema. Art historian and Discussant Einor Cervone will enrich the discussion with her research on the “waterscapes” of late imperial aquatic theatre. Chair and literary historian Hui-Lin Hsu, who studies the relationship between floods and literature in late Qing China, will place the aesthetic concerns of the panel into a longer and broader literary-historical context.

Yuqing Liu, “Fantasising Women in the Bathhouse: The Imagery of Water and the Gender Space in the Film Shower (1999)”

This paper looks at cinematic nostalgia and the reworking of the traditional aesthetic theme of bathing to unravel the gender relationships in Zhang Yang’s 1999 film, Shower. Set in a traditional Beijing bathhouse, Shower offers a nostalgic take on the problematics of urbanisation and economic development. What role does the imagery of water play in the film? What kind of literary and visual tradition does the film attempt to evoke through the many scenes of bathing? And how to understand the image of water in the cinematic context at the turn of the 21st century? I argue that the idealisation of water in Shower expresses a longing for a traditional patriarchal order. For one, it employs the motif of the “bathing beauty” common in classical Chinese literature and paintings. I trace the history of this motif and observe that the bathing pool has been a literary site and vehicle for males to gaze at female bodies. The film uses a male bathhouse to rebuild a gendered space in which men dominate the storytelling and women are only objects to be narrated, gazed at and fantasised about. Through erotic scenes of female bathing, the film evokes the voyeuristic visual tradition that links water with femininity as well as the imagination of a past golden age. The film’s nostalgia is, therefore, based upon a male-centred narrative and the absence of a female voice. Furthermore, I contend that the floating, fluid, and watery landscape that permeates contemporary Chinese films foreground male anxiety in a transitional era.

Bo-Yan Chen, “Waterways, Disasters, and Knowledge Construction: Narratives of Aquatic Animals in Tang Stories”

This paper examines the narratives of “aquatic animals” and the representation of “water” in Tang stories. Researchers have already explored the romantic tradition in the water-related Tang tales such as Liu Yi by Li Chaowei and Xiangzhong Yuanjie (An Explanation for “Xiangzhong Yuan”) by Shen Yazhi. However, the voluminous stories of watery experience in Taiping Guangji (the Extensive Records of the Taiping Era) manifest that writing about water in the Tang dynasty was not limited to romantic legends. Different from previous studies, this paper focuses on how officials’ experiences of travelling by water developed into narratives about aquatic animals and formed the natural and historical knowledge of rivers and lakes in the Tang dynasty. Taking Li Gongzuo’s Gu Yuedu Jing (The Ancient Yuedu Jing) as an example, I argue that Tang story writers were active explorers and detectives who ceaselessly surveyed, investigated, and recorded the mythical creatures they encountered in voyages. With a wealth of aquatic knowledge, they were able to identify the clues and provide explanations for the appearance in their tales of aquatic animals and monsters often related to disasters such as shipwrecks and floods. Moreover, based on the ecological, religious, and historical knowledge of rivers and lakes, the Tang tales shape a mysterious underwater world as an ideal society, embodying a Confucian pursuit of integrity and social justice.

Yiwei Zhang, “The Calamities of Water in Journey to the West”

Water plays an essential role in Journey to the West, showing multilayered meanings through the environment such as floods, droughts, rivers, and lakes, and the objects such as rainwater, sweat, tears, wine, and holy water (shengshui). Focusing on the idea of nature and destiny, this paper explores the ecological, religious, and cross-cultural meanings of water in the novel. I observe that the novel often represents water as related to violence, disasters, and crises. As an emblem of personal catastrophe, the childhood name of Monk Xuanzang, “Jiang Liu’er” (river current), points to violence that happened on the river where Xuanzang’s parents were robbed and his father murdered. The perilousness of water is even more evident in floods and droughts, which trigger major events in the novel. Noticeably, most if not all of the water calamities are related to the problems of Sihai Longwang (Dragon King of the Four Seas) who is in control of the rain and of all aquatic creatures. As the deity of water and the zoomorphic incarnation of the masculine power (yang), the figure of the Dragon King could be traced back to the belief of Nagaraja in Indian religions. By analysing the multifaceted cultural and religious meanings of water in Journey to the West, this paper seeks to further our understanding of the idea of nature and the imagination of a watery world in late imperial China.

Inquiries into the Sociology of Modern Confucianism

Wednesday
4:00 pm – 5:45 pm

Organised by Ady Van den Stock
Ady Van den Stock, Chair
Ady Van den Stock, “Once More unto the Breach: The Transcendental Distinction between the Phenomenal and the Noumenal in the Philosophy of Mou Zongsan and the ‘Continental Divide’ in Contemporary New Confucian Philosophy”
Ralph Weber, “A Sociological Reading of Tu Weiming’s Philosophical Discussion of ‘Multiple Modernities’”
Philippe Major, “A Doxa in the Making: A Bourdieusian Reading of the New Confucian Manifesto”

The majority of studies produced with the context of the relatively recent growth of interest in modern Confucianism (also known as “New Confucianism”) have adopted either historical or philosophical perspectives. While such studies have greatly improved our understanding of modern Confucianism, they have tended to downplay or neglect aspects of modern Confucianism that are not straightforwardly philosophical or historical. Few scholars have highlighted the social context as an important factor bearing its mark on modern Confucian philosophical production, for example, and rather few have been attempts at drawing from the methodology of the sociology of philosophy in doing so. This gap in the field is particularly hard to justify, as one of the central concerns shared by intellectuals retrospectively classified under the banner of “New Confucianism” has been that of finding an institutional space for Confucianism within radically new social conditions, and particularly within a university system shaped around a European model of knowledge classification.
The present panel draws from the literature on the sociology of philosophy and the sociology of knowledge in order to rethink modern Confucianism as a loose association of intellectuals inscribed in shifting social conditions and highly concerned with the necessity to create or protect a space for themselves and their version of Confucianism within modern institutions such as the university, as well as against competing groups (such as representatives of scientism, historicism, Marxism, etc.) and alternative conceptions of what authentic Confucianism is.

Ady Van den Stock, “Once More unto the Breach: The Transcendental Distinction between the Phenomenal and the Noumenal in the Philosophy of Mou Zongsan and the ‘Continental Divide’ in Contemporary New Confucian Philosophy”

Mou Zongsan’s (1909–1995) (in)famous engagement with Kantian transcendentalism as a means for reasserting the normative and philosophical validity of the Confucian tradition seems to have largely fallen into disrepute, most notably among the majority of Confucian revivalists in mainland China. The latter generally seem to be comfortable condemning Mou’s audacious combination of Kant and Confucius to the dustbins of history. The relentless iconoclasm displayed by the most vocal representatives of the Confucian movement in contemporary mainland China arguably prevents them from contextualising Mou’s thought within the broader historical trajectory of modern Chinese thought. As such, in rejecting the possibility of any form of affinity between transcendental philosophy and Confucianism, some of the basic questions which are still worthy of our consideration remain unanswered: what was Mou actually trying to accomplish in reconfiguring Kant’s distinction between phenomena and “things in themselves” and in reaffirming the possibility of intellectual intuition within Chinese traditions of philosophy? Why did he insist on portraying this distinction as overlapping with that between “fact” and “value”? And why do contemporary mainland Chinese critics who claim to depart from a supposedly more authentic Confucian position find this basic epistemological and ontological divide within reality so hard to stomach?

Ralph Weber, “A Sociological Reading of Tu Weiming’s Philosophical Discussion of ‘Multiple Modernities’”

For many Confucians, modernity has stood as the central challenge for more than 100 years. Tu Weiming has shown great ability to present Confucianism to a global audience by drawing on the sociological vocabulary of his day (Talcott Parsons, Benjamin Nelson, Shmuel Eisenstadt, etc.), but never quite confining his study of Confucianism to sociology. Instead, as this paper will argue, his discussion of ‘multiple modernities’ has a clearly normative bias. It is a philosophical discussion.
Somewhat counterintuitively, I will make this point by offering a sociological reading of how Tu Weiming came to align with Eisenstadt’s macro-sociological version of ‘multiple modernities’, on the one hand, while deviating from it in important ways. Methodologically, I will follow Thomas Brisson’s recent sociological writings on Tu Weiming but object with regard to one major claim that he advances. Brisson sees Tu Weiming as a “postcolonial thinker”. My sociological reading of Tu Weiming’s philosophical discussion of ‘multiple modernities’ will show that Tu is anything but a postcolonial thinker. His reliance on macro-sociology makes him more an advocate of cultural diversity than of the kind of cultural difference propagated by postcolonial. To this end, I will analyse two debates between Tu and Homi Bhabha held in Beijing and in Harvard respectively in 2010.

Philippe Major, “A Doxa in the Making: A Bourdieusian Reading of the New Confucian Manifesto”

Most studies of the New Confucian Manifesto (Wei Zhongguo wenhua jinggao shijie renshi xuanyan 為中國文化敬告世界人士宣言; 1958) have thus far approached it as a philosophical treatise and/or as a historical document marking the beginning of the formation of a group conscious of itself as an association of modern Confucian intellectuals. While the present contribution situates itself in the latter, historical approach, it aims at presenting the Manifesto as a concerted effort, on the part of its cosignatories, of producing a school around a number of fundamental ideas they shared.
Drawing from Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of philosophical knowledge, I argue that the Manifesto can be read as an attempt to set the rules of inclusion—what is known as the doxa in Bourdieu’s terminology—into the school that was retrospectively named “New Confucianism.” While in an established field, the doxa refers to a number of implicit rules or “presuppositions whose acceptance is implied in membership itself,” the fact that the cosignatories of the Manifesto felt that the rules of their field should be clearly spelt out in writing implies, I suggest, that their school was in the making, and was not yet recognised, in the philosophical field, as an established school with a set doxa. A significant element of the Manifesto, I maintain, is its attempt at introducing the readers in what Bourdieu calls the illusion of the field, by asking of them that they perform of leap of faith.

Papers on Philosophy IV

Concepts
Thursday
2:00 pm – 3:45 pm
Room 5

Chaired by Bart Dessein
Xinyu Wang, “The Odes of Qin and Zhu Xi’s Conception of History”
Alexandra Fialkovskaya, “Meeting of Languages and Minds: Problems and Specifics of the Translation of the Terminology of Jungian Psychology into Chinese”
Patrycja Pendraskowa, “The Reception of Hegel in China: Key Aspects and Challenges”

Xinyu Wang, “The Odes of Qin and Zhu Xi’s Conception of History”

As one of the most significant theorists in traditional China, Zhu Xi was renowned for his philosophical thinking. Zhu Xi’s conception of history, however, was only implied but had a considerable presence in his various works. In his annotation of the Book of Odes, Zhu Xi used his understanding of historical figures and incidents, especially for the portion of Ballads from the States (guofeng 國風). As for Qin (221 BC–207 BC), which is a controversial dynasty in Chinese history, several of its typical features could also be found in the poems, and Zhu Xi’s interpretation must be considered a splendid monument in terms of its extensive explanatory work. Following the thread of his thought allows us to excavate his conception of history, such as the roles ‘Principle’ and ‘Tendency’ in history, or rectifying customs. These ideas showed a new attitude to the Qin Dynasty as well, which had a great influence on Chinese historical and philosophical studies in later generations.

Alexandra Fialkovskaya, “Meeting of Languages and Minds: Problems and Specifics of the Translation of the Terminology of Jungian Psychology into Chinese”

The problem of translation of terminology is a question that always becomes valid when one speaks about the transfer of knowledge. When it comes to Western psychology being transferred to China, it is obvious that the problem of the translation of the basic terms is one of the first to be solved. Since the field of Jungian psychology in China is still rather new, some problems relating to the translation of the “new” terms appear.
Firstly, the majority of translations of works by Jung and about Jung are done from English translations, not from original works in German. This means that if the English translation is inadequate, the Chinese translation will most likely also be incorrect. The second problem that appears is the translation variations between the Mainland and Taiwan. Finally, the absence of standardised terminology in Chinese works on Jungian psychology makes researchers spend more time on actual interpretations of the terms and can sometimes lead to confusion in interpretations of what the authors wanted to say.
This paper intends to study two questions. The first question is what are the current strategies of translating Jungian terms into Chinese? The second question is what the goals of these strategies might be? Do these translation strategies aim at showing that Jungian terminology is alien to Chinese culture or do they try to incorporate the foreign terminology into the traditional Chinese views on psychology?
Hopefully, the intended research will outline which translation strategy(-ies) might be optimal for this particular field.

Patrycja Pendraskowa, “The Reception of Hegel in China: Key Aspects and Challenges”

Hegel has been regarded as one of the most influential Western philosophers after 1949 in China. The aim of this presentation is to analyse how Hegel’s reception in China developed after the founding of the PRC and what were the most crucial factors shaping the research on Hegel. Key research questions of this presentation are related to the following aspects: How the Chinese Communist Party influenced the reading of Hegel since 1949? How to treat books written by Chinese philosophers on Hegel, that are actually a manifesto of dialectical materialism and Marxism-Leninism?
The answer will be given based on the analysis of the works on Hegel written by four generations of Hegel scholars. Firstly, He Lin 贺麟, Wang Jiuxing 王玖兴. Secondly, Ru Xin 汝信 and Wang Shuren 王树人. Thirdly, from the generation born in the 1950s and 1960s including Zhang Rulun 张汝伦 and Deng Anqing 邓安庆 and the youngest generation, who researches Hegel at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and the Beijing University. It is important to notice, that 1978 became a symbolic date for the reception of Hegel. Between 1949-1978 Hegel was mostly read through the Lenin/Marx/dialectical materialism lense. After 1978 new narrations on Hegel emerged, i.e. Zhang Shiying’s works that combine Neoconfucianism with the Phenomenology of Spirit. In the book, 天人之际：中西哲学的困惑与选择, Zhang Shiying offers an interesting comparative perspective on the relations between subject and object, and the reading of Hegel’s subjectivity (zhutixing 主体性).

Papers on Philosophy III

Daoism
Thursday
11:00 am – 12:45 pm
Room 5

Chaired by Dinu Luca
Antoaneta Nikolova, “Naming the Changeability”
Richard J. Sage, “Concepts of ‘Time’ and ‘Change’ in the Liezi”
Yuhan Gao, “The Unification of ‘Wu wei zhi li (The Force of Inexertion)’ and ‘Zi er zhi li (The Force of Nature).’ A Study of the Dao-Thing Relationship in Jiang Zhou yishu lun jiayi ji 講周易疏論家義記”
Dinu Luca, “Ghosts of Sinology Past: On Abel-Rémusat’s Laozi”

Antoaneta Nikolova, “Naming the Changeability”

The aim of the paper is to debate the Daoist “philosophy of language.” It is based on the presumption that Chinese philosophy and especially Daoism is a philosophy of dynamism that regards the world as changeable, variable, volatile, and fluid. Therefore, one of the important questions of this philosophy is the question of name and naming. How naming, which is a kind of fixation, could grasp the fluidity of reality? In order to understand the Daoist vision of naming and the way in which daoists resolved the issue of naming the changeability, I discuss the concepts of dao and ming and their relation in the opening paragraph of Daodejing. I argue that its usual interpretation in terms that are close to the ideas of apophatism needs revision.

Richard J. Sage, “Concepts of ‘Time’ and ‘Change’ in the Liezi”

Specific concepts of “time” and its immediate derivatives are neither independently, nor in fact explicitly, discussed within the Liezi. Instead, they are always embedded in overarching clusters of key themes that dominate the entire work. The most important of these are: (1) the Liezi’s general idea of cosmogony, cosmology and evolution; (2) the omnipresent notion of “change;” and (3) the lifetime and fate of each individual being that is subject to the former concept clusters.
In this paper, I will discuss “time” on the background of these three themes and demonstrate how, for the Liezi, only the absolute timelessness that predates any existence constitutes an unchanging concept that pertains the realms of non-being as well as, albeit only latently, that of being.
Apart from this meontological principle, however, the attributes connected with “time” are subject to the same “change” that dominates every other existing and pre-existing entity mentioned in the Liezi.
Using a simplified model, one can say that each of the three major layers of existence that are discussed in the work—namely “pre-existence,” “cosmic existence,” and a being’s individual life—are characterised not only by a different notion but also a different movement of “time.”
According to the Liezi, the ultimate goal for the adept who fathomed these notions and their interconnection with the concept of “change,” is to gradually conquer this model by countering the specific movements associated with each layer of existence and thereby leave any concept of “time” behind.

Yuhan Gao, “The Unification of ‘Wu wei zhi li (The Force of Inexertion)’ and ‘Zi er zhi li (The Force of Nature)’. A Study of the Dao-Thing Relationship in Jiang Zhou yishu lun jiayi ji 講周易疏論家義記”

This article intends to define the text Jiang Zhou yishu lun jiayi ji 講周易疏論家義記 (The original text is preserved in Nara, Japan and has been emended by some Chinese scholars in recent years) as a successor of the neo-daoistic Xuanxue-tradition of Wang Bi and Guo Xiang and a transitional work among the exegeses in the period of the Six Dynasties by analysing its summary and transcendence of the metaphysical discussion of the Dao-Thing relationship in Wei-Jin Xuanxue, and examining its affinity with the ‘School of Double Mystery’ 重玄學, which matured later as a new tradition of daoistic exegeses in the early Tang Dynasty. Jiang Zhou Yi Shu Lun Jia Yi Ji has not only inherited from Xuanxue the problem consciousness of defining ‘Dao’ as the original basis of ‘the ten thousand things’ 萬物 and harmonising the tension between this creative force of ‘Dao’ and the nature and the ‘self-genesis’ 自生 of the things, but also introduced the methods of argument of the ‘School of Double Mystery,’ for example, the “double-elimination” 雙遣 and the “triple-procedure” 三番, and finally come to a conclusion close to the central proposition, namely “Nature is the basis, and Dao is only its trace” (自然為本，道為跡) of Cheng Xuanying, the central figure of the ‘School of Double Mystery.’

Dinu Luca, “Ghosts of Sinology Past: On Abel-Rémusat’s Laozi”

The role played by Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat (1788–1832) in shaping the views of his contemporaries on things Chinese is well known. Humboldt, Hegel, Schelling, and Victor Cousin, inter alia, make (extended) reference to his work, with Hegel, for instance, building his famous paragraphs on Chinese philosophy and religion on Abel-Rémusat’s 1824 Mémoire sur la vie et les opinions de Lao-Tseu. While frequently invoked in many recent discussions about sinology, philosophy, and comparative studies, this particular text remains quite understudied. Apart from several articles and dissertations typically focusing on the more extravagant points in the Mémoire, scholarship seems to engage in little direct work on a piece that “strangely dreamed into being” (Léon Rosny) Europe’s first “ghostly” Laozi (Cousin).
My contribution approaches the Mémoire from several different perspectives. First, by placing the text against Abel-Rémusat’s larger oeuvre and its context, I show how it shaped early European sinology in dialogue with the major intellectual developments of the time. Next, by concentrating on Rémusat’s reading strategies of the Daodejing and discussing the ways in which he used both primary and secondary texts, I tease out the specificity of what he himself calls his “doubly insufficient” translation. Lastly, I place this effort at “historical comparison” against Stanislas Julien’s 1842 renowned version of the same Laozi, sketching the main features of a philosophical/philological “parricide” that, with different names and under different guises, still informs perhaps much of what remains at stake regarding the role and meaning of translation today.

The Genre of Historical Disquisition (shilun 史論)

From the Early Medieval Period to the Song Dynasty
Thursday
9:00 am – 10:45 am
Room 5

Organised by Béatrice L’Haridon
Béatrice L’Haridon, Chair
Béatrice L’Haridon, “Fan Ye’s Disquisitions and the Task of Discovering the Reason at Play in the Fall of the Eastern Han Dynasty”
Sebastian Eicher, “Judgements of the Fall of the Later Han Dynasty in the Disquisitions (lun 論) and Appraisals Found in Later Han Historiography”
Bingwei Jia, “Song Scholars’ Conception of Historical Evolution as Seen through the Fall of the Eastern Han Dynasty: A Study of Han lun 漢論 of the Northern Song Dynasty”

From Jia Yi’s 賈誼 (c. 200–168 BC) Guo Qin lun 過秦論 (Disquisition finding fault with Qin), which was integrated in Sima Qian’s Shiji 史記 as the conclusion to the Basic Annals of Qin Shihuang, the genre of historical disquisition had a strong relationship with standard historiography, being potentially written and read as a synthetic lesson drawn from the preceding historical narrative or as an independent essay. These disquisitions are centred on historical figures, institutions or historical transformations. This panel aims to study the historical disquisition as a genre, and how it develops on the basis of or in the frame of historiography, from the early medieval period, which was a time of experimentation with this genre, to the Song dynasty, which saw a blossoming of the historical disquisitions. In order to highlight the importance of the disquisitions as a place for historical and philosophical reflection, we will focus on the theme of the institutions of the Eastern Han dynasty, their evolution, and ultimate failure, as it was dealt with by different authors of disquisitions.

Béatrice L’Haridon, Fan Ye’s Disquisitions and the Task of Discovering the Reason at Play in the Fall of the Eastern Han Dynasty

In Fan Ye’s 范曄 (398–445) letter to his nephews, which expresses his vision of himself as a historian, the narrative account (zhushu 著述) and the critical disquisition (pinglun 評論) are clearly distinguished. Fan Ye puts special emphasis on the latter: When criticising Ban Gu’s 班固 (32–92) work, he sets apart his predecessor’s houzan 後贊 (Ban Gu’s term for disquisitions), with which he is particularly dissatisfied. On the contrary, he has some emphatic words for his own disquisitions. Following Fan Ye’s development and renewal of this rich and complex historiographical paratext, it soon became the object of specific interest, as it appears clearly through the inclusion in the Wenxuan of a relatively important number of Fan Ye’s disquisitions, and also through the edition of separate Disquisitions and Eulogies. In my presentation, I will analyse a few specific disquisitions through which Fan Ye reveals his conception of the historical disquisition as a place to discover the reason at play (li 理) in the historical process (especially in the conclusion to chapter 39/49 on the “essayists” Wang Chong 王充, Wang Fu 王符 and Zhongchang Tong 仲長統 and his vision of the degradation of the institutions of the Eastern Han dynasty (as developed in the conclusions to collective biographical chapters as Kuli liezhuan 酷吏列傳 or Huanzhe liezhuan 宦者列傳).

Sebastian Eicher, “Judgements of the Fall of the Later Han Dynasty in the Disquisitions (lun 論) and Appraisals Found in Later Han Historiography“

Historical judgement was an important part of Chinese historiography, whether implicit or explicit. With the emergence of the annals-biography-style (liezhuan 列傳) it became customary for historians to add a short appraisal after every chapter, in which they expressed their opinion in usually tetrasyllabic verses. The many works of history that were compiled about the Later Han (25–220) dynasty in the centuries after its fall diverged from this pattern. Parallel to the rising importance of the genre of Disquisitions, the historians started to not only write appraisals (named variously as zan 贊, xu 序, quan 詮, ping 評, or yi 議), but often also added Disquisitions (lun) to their works of history. Depending on the author, not only the content of these judgements varied widely, but also their form and style. This paper will look at the surviving Disquisitions and Appraisals of the second century of the Later Han that are found in the Hou Han shu 後漢書, the Hou Han ji 後漢紀, the Sanguo zhi 三國志 and the recompiled fragments of the Dongguan Han ji 東觀漢紀 and Bajia Hou Han shu 八家後漢書. It will look at the way the historians expressed their opinions and consider the function and relationship of Disquisitions and Appraisals.

Bingwei Jia, “Song Scholars’ Conception of Historical Evolution as Seen Through the Fall of the Eastern Han Dynasty: a Study of Han lun 漢論 of the Northern Song Dynasty“

The Song dynasty saw a full development of the genre “historical disquisition” (lun) in terms of its form, its literary richness and the historical consideration contained in it. The majority of the numerous disquisitions written during the Song period are constituted by individual essays rather than commentaries figuring after a historical narrative. The Han dynasty was a major subject for Song historical thinkers whose interest in the Han had been stimulated by the revision and the printing of Shiji 史記, Han shu 漢書and Hou Han shu 後漢書that started in 994. Scholars began to systematise their reflection on the Han dynasty by writing disquisitions which are often entitled “Han lun” (漢論). In this paper, I will analyse several historical disquisitions on the Han dynasty contained in the Quan Song Wen 全宋文. Their authors include such great promoters of ancient style writing as Shi Jie 石介 (1005–1045) as well as famous scholars such as Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037–1101) and Su Zhe 蘇轍 (1039–1112). I will analyse how these authors used historical disquisition as a means to reflect on the art and politics of governance as well as the historical evolution in general by commenting on the fall of the Eastern Han dynasty. The authors addressed two main questions: the causes of the fall of the Eastern Han and the place of the Han dynasty in the transmission of the kingly way (Wangdao 王道).

Papers on Religion VI

Beliefs
Friday
11:00 am – 12:45 pm
Room F

Chaired by Friederike Assandri
Jakub Otčenášek, “Time Against Time: Types of Millennialism in the Early Way of the Celestial Masters”
Valente Lee, “New Light from Chu Divinatory Bamboo Slips: Issues on the Practices of Divination in ca. 4th Century BC”
Ann Heirman, “Insects in Chinese Buddhist vinaya Commentaries: From Non-Killing to Release and Protection”
Mariia Lepneva, “The Life-Giving Power of the Word: Generation Demarcation Stanzas and Buddhist Lineage Formation in Early Modern China”
Tsintsin Peng, “Evolution and Enlightenment. Taixu and His Writing of Buddhist History”

Jakub Otčenášek, “Time Against Time: Types of Millennialism in the Early Way of the Celestial Masters”

Chinese millennialism (millenarianism, messianism etc.) has been distinguished mainly by two features—the notion of the Great Peace (as a Chinese version of Millennium) and the cyclic time. Tianshidao, or the Way of the Celestial Masters, has been often presented as crucial for the development of Chinese millennialism. This paper is focused on the texts of its early stage (2nd–5th century) with the following questions: Does the term Great Peace always refer to millennialism? Is there a unified millennial worldview or are we dealing with various kinds of millennialism? Is there just a one-time model associated with the Great Peace? Is the cyclic character its dominant feature? The conclusions are based on the observation of the relations between different worldviews presented by the texts and the models of time they employ.

Valente Lee, “New Light from Chu Divinatory Bamboo Slips: Issues on the Practices of Divination in ca. 4th Century BC”

Divination is an important occult ritual which correlates not only to the religious realm but also aids the crafting of one’s secular life. Bu (pyromancy) and shi (stalk divination), both categorised as “inductive divination” in technical terms, were the most dominant forms of divination in early China. They required not only observation and interpretation of portents but also artificial “production” of portents, which allows human manipulation of divinatory events.
Previous scholarship has revealed a dramatic change in the function of divination, namely that divination became not only a means of informing the diviners about the future, but of also controlling the future, during the late Shang and early Western Zhou (i.e. ca. 11th c. BC), but its subsequent development in later periods remains under-explored.
New documentary evidence shows that the use of divination as a fate-controlling agent was regularised and systematised toward the 4th century BC. The paper surveys a cache of the Warring States divinatory records, commonly known as divinatory bamboo slips (bushi jian) of the Chu State. The evidence bears witnesses to unprecedentedly systematic practices of “repeated divination” and “secondary divination”, through which diviners were able to direct the ultimate divinatory results to fulfil his pre-expected outcomes. It is suggested that more than a consultant, diviners had taken a more active role as the moderator of divinatory results. The article analyses the role of men’s will and intervention in divination and argues that divination was deliberately “made” into an agent that achieved a desirable life in ca. 4th century BC.

Ann Heirman, “Insects in Chinese Buddhist vinaya Commentaries: From Non-Killing to Release and Protection”

While it is well-known that Buddhist texts call for the protection of all living beings, humans and animals alike, it is less clear what this exactly implies. What does protection involve? How far does it go? Are guidelines equal to all animals? In this paper, we pay attention to the tiniest animals, the insects, often seen as insignificant or annoying, but sometimes also as dangerous, or, on the contrary, useful to human beings. Our study focuses on a crucial period of Chinese Buddhism, going from the fifth century to the Tang Dynasty (618–907), a period when a wealth of major Indian vinaya (disciplinary) texts was translated to Chinese, laying the foundation of Chinese Buddhism. We rely particularly on the commentaries and guidelines of Daoxuan 道宣 (596–667), who laid down the standard for monastic behaviour in China for centuries to come, even up to contemporary times. In his texts, Daoxuan strongly adheres to the Indian vinayas, and in this way, he argues for a ban on killing and harming animal life, including insects. As we will see, however, Daoxuan extends the vinaya arguments to advocate for the protection of insects in all situations. As a consequence, he cannot but plea against many economic realities, such as agricultural practices or the harvest of honey and silk, even if this is strongly opposed to Chinese customs and, in the case of silk, even to Chinese identity.

Mariia Lepneva, “The Life-Giving Power of the Word: Generation Demarcation Stanzas and Buddhist Lineage Formation in Early Modern China”

When Buddhist masters in Early Modern China wished to establish a new lineage, they did so by composing ‘generation demarcation stanzas’ (paibeishi 派輩詩), according to which the names of neophytes would be reshaped to show their spiritual succession and factional fraternity. A character from the verse would be grafted into the clerical name of a novice at tonsure, and for the most outstanding monastics another naming metamorphose would occur at the time of dharma transmission. This paper probes into how far Buddhist masters could fare in forming new lineages, and what were the pitfalls of applying this poetic tool to fuel partisanship. The case under scrutiny here is a reformist move by an eighteenth-century Vinaya patriarch Wenhai Fuju who sought to shift the point of ascribing lineage affiliation from tonsure or dharma transmission to precepts reception. Through the close reading of relevant writings by Vinaya masters from the sixteenth through the early twentieth century, the current research reveals how personal attribution to a lineage and its alteration was perceived, and then moves on to unveil the intricacies and implications of calibrating the wording of a generation demarcation stanza. Finally, the actual fortunes of Wenhai Fuju’s reform are traced and the main factors affecting its implementation are identified by analysing at the biographies of his disciples.

Tsintsin Peng, “Evolution and Enlightenment. Taixu and His Writing of Buddhist History”

From Late Qing to Republican China, the traditional narrative of Buddhism has been challenged by the concept of linear time and the modern evolutionary view of history. Taixu 太虛, the leader of the ‘doctrinal reform’ of Buddhism, is one representative figure who made his effort to establish a pragmatic, critical, and structured Buddhist history focused on change, continuity, and relationship. The aim of my study is to demonstrate Taixu’s understanding of the origin, development, and periodisation of Buddhism and his fundamental concept of history. Based on a preliminary investigation of Taixu’s literature on history, I point to his endeavor to reconcile the cosmological conflicts between Buddhism and the modern worldview and his concerns about the future of Buddhism in the project of Chinese modernisation. I argue that the writing of Buddhist history represents how Chinese Buddhists interpreted the past of Chinese Buddhism beyond the traditional sectarian narrative and understood the causality behind historical changes from a ‘modern’ Buddhist perspective. This historiographical approach toward Buddhism not only demonstrates the new paradigm of the formation of Buddhist knowledge in practice and in discourse, but also contextualises the tension between the ‘theological truth’ and ‘historical truth’ in modern Buddhist scholarship. The inherent paradox of ‘evolution’ and ‘decline’ in Taixu’s narrative also inspires reflections on the dominant model of ‘revival’ in current studies of modern Chinese Buddhism, which is deeply influenced by the modern presupposition of revolution and Buddhist modernists’ self-construction.