Asian 212 Lecture 12: Absent
I was absent for lecture 12. I hope to eventually acquire notes from a friend. Julie Geng kindly writes in with fantastic notes:
Silk Road
It’s very difficult to determine exactly qualifies as “Chinese” as there are dozens of languages that exist in this area of the Gansu corridor and the Silk Road. It’s very problematic to trace direct ancestry from today’s Chinese to the Han dynasty, primarily because there are just waves upon waves of people from Central Asia migrating into China.
Buddhism, Enlightenment/Nirvana
Students kept saying that Nirvana is like the Matrix. However, McNeal says this is untrue. There is some denial of reality, but other than that the similarities end. Buddhism is saying that reality is quite convincing, but all of this is just not real. Ultimately there really isn’t any significance in this world. It’s defined by impermanence, imbalance and suffering.
There’s a painting of three philosophers standing around a cauldron of soup: the Buddhist, the Daoist, and the Confucian. The Buddhist says the soup (of life) is bitter all the time, while the Daoist and the Confucian are arguing off to the side. This painting depiction isn’t entirely accurate: The Buddhists aren’t saying life is horrible, but rather that life is okay, and it makes you keep looking for better.
For example, when you’re doing homework, and you begin to think about the candy bar in the vending machine upstairs. When you go to get the candy bar, for a moment, life is not suffering anymore. You go back to your work, and in the end, you’re brought back to suffering. Nothing will really fulfill you, they’ll just pull you deeper down.
Imbalance & Suffering
But, Buddhism says there is a path out of this: learn to break away from attachments in this world, learning to disappear from this world. If this world isn’t real, neither are you. None of you are lasting, permanent.
Another example of this cycle is that “Humans are piles of shit.” We’re just something that’s in transition. All you are is a cycle. (There are piles of shit outside the city, and then you take the shit back into your garden and you grow some plants and you eat the plants and you shit and you bring it back outside and you bring it into your garden etc.). The path from escaping all of this is a very arduous lengthy process: there is faith to find someone who’s already well on the path who is willing to help others to find the way, with a big boat called Mahayana.
Period of Disunion
Just following the Han, there is a breakdown to three large powerful kingdoms. These maps are not all that meaningful. This period of disunion there is a constant shuffle of changing of boundaries (The Three Kingdoms). Most of what we know about the Three Kingdoms is literature that is written much later. There’s no doubt it’s been romanticized. This is the prime time for Buddhism to take a good hold in China. At the end of the Three Kingdoms, China is reunified.
Organized Taoism
New religions have easier access when there is social breakdown (as the Han collapses); Daoism becomes a popular religion because there is indeed a social and political vacuum caused by the decline of central authority.
There is an enormous endeavor to figure out a way to translate Buddhism into Chinese. They took a lot of Indian words and phonetically kept it the same when translating it to Chinese. They also look to Daoism to find ready-made terms that can be used in Buddhism. You begin to see that Buddhism goes in phases: there is a time when it is very foreign, then it’s somewhat Daoist, then it slowly becomes more indigenous and nowadays Mandarin has many terms borrowed from Buddhism/Sanskrit.
Aristocracy reemerges
The power of the Han court has been somewhat diminished, and suffers a little bit because of the reappearance of the aristocracy (which had disappeared). This is a different aristocracy/nobility that had wiped itself out while trying to compete with itself in the state of Jin. They formed clans while trying to fight each other in the Spring and Autumn period but eventually conglomerate into three states. The three states chose to slice up the state of Jin, but this continues to weaken them and eventually eradicate them. The Han dynasty tried to restrict the intervening lineages (that were reemerging) and they envisioned themselves as the protector of the commoners from the aristocracy. They are successful to a certain extent, but eventually a powerful nobility emerges in the Eastern Han which sends its sons into the Han’s capital and dramatically weakens the Han’s central bureaucracy.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 8th, 2006 at 6:25 pm and is tagged with three philosophers, vending machine, silk road, candy bar, moment life, daoist, friend julie, han dynasty, confucian, geng, central asia, buddhists, cauldron, buddhism, depiction, buddhist, piles, enlightenment, ancestry, nirvana. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.
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on March 9th, 2006 at 9:12 am
Im curious about why you are interesting in Asia things?
on March 16th, 2006 at 4:43 am
…I emailed them to you. Should I email them again? They are in an email with a subject line of “Asian 212 edited notes” with an attachment named “Mar 7 06.doc”.