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TaoJiang

@[email protected]

Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, US. Specialized in Classical Chinese philosophy and Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy. Author of "Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China" (Oxford 2021) & other 📚 http://amzn.to/3bzJ2qU
I mostly share musings about Chinese and Buddhist materials, and occasionally post random stuff about the human condition (ha!).

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TaoJiang , to philosophy
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In this interview with AsiaNow at the Association for Asian Studies, I reminisce about inspirations, challenges, and surprises when writing Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China (Oxford UP 2021). I also talk about other projects I am engaged in.
@philosophy @chineseliterature
https://www.asianstudies.org/asianow-speaks-with-tao-jiang/

TaoJiang , (edited ) to philosophy
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A fun memory from last month's visit to Greece for a symposium on Confucius and Aristotle. A bus took us from Athens to Thessaloniki (Aristotle's birth & burial place) and back. It took 8 1/2 hours to get to Thessaloniki. On the way back, someone proposed that we play a game: we'd predict when the bus arrives in Athens and the closest one to the actual time (specified as when the bus door opens) wins. Seven people at the front of the bus joined in. We left Thessaloniki around 3pm. 1/
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TaoJiang , (edited ) to random
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One more twitter transfer. I was intrigued by Husserl’s rather effusive praise of Buddhist thought in his review of the Pali Canon, "On the Teachings of Gotama Buddha," and wanted to know more about the backstory. Karl Schuhmann's chapter "Husserl and Indian Thought" in Phenomenology and Indian Philosophy has some details about this. According to Schuhmann, Karl Eugen Neumann's German translation of Sutta Pitaka was initially published around the turn of 20th cent. 1/
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TaoJiang OP ,
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The publisher was doing a reprint and might have asked Husserl for a review of the reprint for publicity purpose. This led to the publication of Husserl’s review in an advertisement journal of the publisher in the spring of 1925. Interestingly, in January 1926 Husserl wrote a manuscript, “Socrates-Buddha,” to study two forms of rationality, Greek and Indian. Rather disappointingly, but perhaps unsurprisingly for someone at the time 2/

TaoJiang OP ,
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Husserl found Buddhist thought (or Indian thought more generally) inferior to European philosophy because of the former’s supposed inability to produce “a universal science of being.” It is interesting that when philosophers have certain telos in their minds they would marshal all their conceptual prowess (or perform strenuous philosophical gymnastics) to make their particular philosophy the end of all philosophies. 3/

TaoJiang , (edited ) to philosophy
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Another transfer. If Allegory of the Cave has shaped Western understandings of knowledge, truth, reality, ethics, & politics, Fable of a Frog in the Well has played a similar role in the Chinese approaches. There is some overlap but the differences and their implications are fascinating. The primary setup in the Cave is illusion/ignorance vs reality/knowledge while in the Well the primary tension is between limitation/small-mindedness and limitlessness/capaciousness. 1/
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TaoJiang , to random
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I'm transferring some earlier materials from twitter to this platform. Here's Linda Zagzebski's amazing story at last year's Rutgers Workshop on Chinese Philosophy (virtue epistemology). It highlights the intimate body/mind connection. When she was in Dublin several weeks before the workshop, she went to the Chester Beatty Museum that has a huge collection of Asian manuscripts and paintings. The rest of this thread is a slightly edited quote from her comment of a paper on Xunzi and Aristotle. 1/

TaoJiang OP ,
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"It has on display something I would not have stopped to look at if it were not for the fact that I happened to walk by just as one of the docents was giving an enthusiastic discourse. The object on display is a small piece of stone about two inches on a side. To the naked eye it looks like there is nothing on it except perhaps some pin pricks if you look close. It is a micro-carving by the Chinese artist, musician, calligrapher, and micro-carver Chen Zhongsen. 2/

TaoJiang OP ,
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"That tiny piece of stone contains the entire Diamond Sutra, over 5200 characters in length. Chen Zhonsen is now 82 years old and lives in a remote part of China. During Cultural Revolution of the 60s and 70s he was imprisoned, and part of the time was in solitary confinement. During that time, he disciplined himself with Buddhist meditation and started carving characters so tiny they are not visible to the naked eye on small pieces of stone. 3/

TaoJiang OP ,
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"Through meditation he was able to slow his heart rate to almost nothing and stop his breathing so that he would have complete control of his hand since even a heartbeat could cause his hand to move imperceptibly. In that state he was close to clinically dead. The docent held up a magnifying glass with 40x magnification so that we could take turns looking at it. I cannot read Chinese characters, but I could see that they were there. The docent said people have examined it under a microscope, 4/

TaoJiang OP ,
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"and the characters are perfect. There are no mistakes. After carving it, Chen Zhongsen filled in the carved characters with ink, which means he had to do the whole thing a second time. He has also carved the Tao Te Ching and other major works in their entirety on small stones. He has written two Tang dynasty poems on a single strand of his wife’s hair. In my opinion, Chen Zhongsen is one of the wonders of the world, but he is human and he does in a superlative degree what all of us can do... 5/

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