Room for Milk (A Very American Interlude)

Loath though I am to support Starbucks - primarily because of a presentation that some of the students in my senior year Anthropology of Globalization class gave, the details of which I can't remember but which left a bad taste in my mouth vis-a-vis Starbucks as an ethical consumer choice - here in Chengdu, I have succumbed to its several appeals.

Firstly, the coffee situation in Chengdu is very weird. There are many coffee shops, and they sell excellent coffee, but it is European style coffee - small, well-prepared cups of espresso - and one of the few items that is actually more expensive here than in America. There must be some supply/demand quirk in the Chengdu market, because it is only slightly more expensive to buy a pound of these good coffee beans at the supermarket than to buy a single cup at one of the caffes. So, when I want to go sit at a coffee shop and read or work for a while, I have been unable to bring myself to pay four or five bucks for a teacup of espresso, and rather I head to Starbucks for the comfort of a vein-coursingly caffeinated, large mug of decent, if slightly bitter joe. There is also something very relieving to me about Starbucks as a public space. The decor is simpler and the seating arrangements more spacious than at most Chinese coffeeshops, and, since the five or six Starbucks in town have relatively high foreign patronage, it is less shocking for the Chinese customers to see you there, and therefore one is subjected to less of the staring and whispering with which we foreigners become more and more acquainted but never accustomed.

In addition, Starbucks has provided me with some interesting sights.

The cutest thing I have seen in Chengdu (aside from the babies and toddlers, who, because they by and large do not have diapers here, run around with their little butts hanging out of the crotch-slitted toddler-wear that allows them to just squat and poop at will), are the middle-aged, male, Western tourists standing in their all-weather, zip-off mountaineering pants in the middle of Starbucks, arms crossed, eyeing the bilingual menu like some worn but vigilant bannerman manning one of the far-outposts of western civilization.

Although Tom and I are perhaps less wary of China than they are, I cannot say that we are without our peculiar Americanisms. To wit: one afternoon last week, at the Starbucks a few minutes from our apartment, Tom and I committed an almost unbelievably American use of the milk-and-sugar station. Although Tom had asked for room for milk in his coffee, his steaming mug was filled to the brim. They serve the coffee boiling hot at this Starbucks, so, unable to sip it down, Tom proceeded to pour the top few centimeters of his coffee into the the little, round trash hole in the middle of the counter. Watching this tall, blond American pour a coffee he had just purchased into the trash of the very store he had just purchased it in struck me as such a profoundly, incomparably American thing to do, I found that I could not control my chuckling for several minutes. For my part, I had in hand one of the roasted sweet potatoes that they sell on the street here and, finding it a little bland, I added to this farm-grown, fresh roasted root a packet of Starbucks brand coffee sugar-crystals, thus completing our very American usage of the condiment station.

On the Possibility of Transcendent Language, Part II - China

It is known to most students of Zen that, although our intention is to realize the tradition outside of the Scriptures - to inherit the mind-to-mind lineage - language is an important and perhaps even fundamental aspect of our practice. Indeed, research in the fields of linguistics and human evolutionary biology is proving to greater and greater degrees that language is imbricate with our brains and beings. It is impossible to conceive of a human-being or of humanity without language. Moreover, as Dale Wright observes in his essay, "Koan History: Transformative Language in Chinese Buddhist Thought," although many of the monks who carried the Chan lineages through Tang and Song China saw amongst their patriarchs the common thread of rejection of Sutra and literature study, the antipodal conclusion - "that what the great masters had in common was prolonged and serious study of the sutras" prior to their "critique and negation of this learning" - could just as well have been drawn.

This being the case, the question arises as to whether and how we as contemporary practitioners can engage language without becoming mired in the self-referential nature of linguistic systems, caught in the smooth workings of conceptuality which language simultaneously facilitates and conceals.  Where is the territory in which language bursts forth from the confines of its conceptual and systemic limitations such that it is discretely meaningful, practice-able, and experiential?  How can language, instead of circulating in known channels, serve to inflect and articulate our psycho-physical lives with the clarity and freshness of a baby’s cry?

In the process of living in China and studying Chinese during the fall of 2007, I thought about these questions and wrote about them in several blog posts. What follows is one of those, dealing in particular with the nature of Chinese characters in their attempted use to generate transcendent experiences of language.

***

The strange looking fellow pictured to the left is Bodhidharma, legendary transmitter of Buddhism from India to China, as drawn by the 18th century Japanese Zen master Hakuin Ekaku. Bodhidharma's intense stare is typical of his depictions, as he is reputed to have cut off his own eyelids in order to combat sleepiness while meditating (the eyelids, having dropped to the ground, supposedly then sprouted as the world's first tea bushes). In this painting, the master's bulging eyes do not appear to be staring steadfastly at the wall of a cave, which Bodhidharma is said to have done for nine years, but rather at a series of Chinese characters. Although modern scholarship has shown that Bodhidharma is very likely a legend - a composite figure drawn from the complex history of the northeasterly transmission of Buddhism and from certain Chinese cultural inclinations - there were in fact numerous true-to-life individuals who, across many hundreds of years, took it upon themselves to transmit Buddhism to China and root it in Chinese soil. Much of what they trafficked in was translation - which, in this case, meant the movement of language from letters to characters.

Foremost among these men was Kumarajiva, a 4th-5th century monk who, like many of the men responsible for bringing Buddhism to China, hailed from Central Asia (his birthplace, the ancient state of Kucha, was in what is today the predominantly Muslim Xinjiang Province of western China). Born to an Indian noble and a Kuchean princess, Kumarajiva was prodigal in his absorption of Buddhist scriptures and would go on to produce an astonishing quantity of innovatively translated Buddhist texts. He and his successors over the next seven or eight centuries translated all the available Buddhist scriptures and commentaries, some seven to eight thousand in number, into Chinese. In doing so, they often invented new character combinations or simply used existing characters as homophones for the Sanskrit. The advent of Buddhist Chinese would ultimately have a noticeable influence on the language as a whole. More pertinent to this inquiry, however, is whether the shift from the alphabetic Indic languages to Chinese characters facilitated the possibility of transcendence in the language itself. That is - did the pictographic aspect of Chinese characters open up new avenues in the experience of language? To answer that question, we need to look at what exactly comprises a Chinese character.

Although it is true that Chinese is derived from a pictographic/ideographic writing system, there are today six different kinds of characters in the Chinese character set. The first type, referred to as xiangxing 象形 or 'image shape', refers to those characters which are derived directly from images. Among the most common are:

人 - Ren, person

大 - Da, a person with outstretched arms and legs, meaning 'big'

木 - Mu, tree

日- Ri, sun or day

口 - Kou, mouth

门 - Men, door or gate

The next set of characters, referred to as zhishi 指事 (which might be translated as 'pointing to the thing/matter'), are composed of ideographs, meaning that they are primarily symbolic rather than pictographic. The character 本, ben, for instance, is a tree with a small line in its trunk, and its meaning is 'root or stem', or more abstractly 'foundation, basis, origin.' Another example from this set is 母 - mu, meaning 'mother' - which shows an altered form of the pictograph for woman - 女, nu - with two dots representing breasts.

The third set of characters is composed of any combination of the first two: ideograph plus ideograph, ideograph plus symbol, symbol plus ideograph, symbol plus symbol. The fourth group, which contains some 70% of modern Chinese characters, is called xingsheng 形声 or 'shape and sound'. Its characters are composed of both an ideographic and/or symbolic element and a phonetic element. Thus the character 们, men, which signifies plural when added to a pronoun, is composed of the (slightly altered) character for people 人 plus the phonetic 'men 门', which as I noted above means 'door'.

Rounding out the typography are borrowed and derived characters, the first set being homophones of foreign words and the second being characters that have diverged over time into separate meanings.

What has been striking to me about the pictographic and ideographic characters is how plainly survivalistic they often are, as if speaking to us from an age when humans were closer to the realities of natural selection.

The character for 'good', for instance, is hao - 好, and it simply shows a woman 女 with a child 子. A woman with her child is good. And the character for peace, an - 安 depicts a woman underneath a roof. From a modern perspective, these characters might be viewed as sexist, but I tend to think of them more in terms of an evolutionary viewpoint, that is - the management of the reproductive capacity of a community. In a similar vein, the character for home, jia - 家, depicts a boar or pig 豕 under a roof. I thought it a bit odd at first that a picture of a housebound pig would turn Chinese minds toward thoughts of home, but from the perspective of the post-nomadic communities out of which Chinese society developed, home is not where the hearth is, it's where you keep a herd of domesticated animals.

There are other characters that venture into the realm of more refined Chinese culture. The character pin - 品, for instance, shows three mouths, and one of its meanings is 'to taste something with discrimination, savor'. Thus, to pin cha - 品茶 is to 'sample tea', sip by culturally discriminating sip.

Here are some more characters that I've enjoyed learning about:

王 - Wang, meaning 'king', shows a vertical line, symbolizing a person, crossing three horizontal lines, representing heaven, humanity and earth. Thus the character for king actually depicts the institution's cosmological role in traditional Chinese thought.

皇 - Huang, meaning 'emperor', shows a rising sun 白 above the character for king.

蝗 - Huang, meaning 'locust', shows the character for insect- 虫 - next to the character for emperor, making the locust the 'emperor bug'.

凶 - Xiong, meaning 'fierce', 'evil' or 'inauspicious', depicts a pit that has been crossed.

兇 - Xiong, meaning 'cruel or fierce', shows a person (altered) underneath the crossed pit. I find this character very compassionate, as it implies that people's cruelty is the result of their own past experience, rather than the spontaneous manifestations of evil.

原 - Yuan, meaning 'primary, original' or 'unprocessed', shows a spring 泉 (white 白 water 水) from a cliff 厂.



This rather large number to the left, coming in at 55 separate brush strokes, is the antiquated character 'biong', which apparently referred to a type of noodle.

So there you have it - Chinese characters are really cool.

But what of the question I posed above - does the pictography and symbolism of characters alter our experience of reading? Does the multifaceted nature of characters give them the ability to transcend the confines of linguistic self-reference?

A number of people I have met in China make the case that the pictographic origins of characters mean that you can read them differently, ascertaining their meanings as one would look at a painting. Having tried this, I tend to disagree.

For eamxlpe, all you hvae to hvae to be albe to raed an Eilnsgh wrod is the fsirt and lsat ltertes in the rhgit palecs. That is, most of the time we're not really reading words, we're recognizing them. It seems to me that it's the same with Chinese characters - once you've become familiar with one of them, you don't have to think about it anymore, much less look at it as a picture. It just registers in your mind.

For a character to be transcendent, then, it would actually have to encourage its viewer to slow down and really process it. To some degree this phenomenon occurs in classical Chinese poetry, which, as far as semantic breadth and subtlety, is unapproachable by any other language.

Here is a poem by Meng Haoran (691-740 CE), a famed Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty.

春晓 A Spring Morning
春眠不觉晓 Still in sound sleep is this spring dawn
处处闻啼鸟 till birds everywhere sing their song.
夜来风雨声 Last night, I heard the sound of wind and rain.
花落知多少 I wonder how many flowers have fallen?

This translation, by Edward C. Chang, favors preservation of the rhyme scheme (AABA, or xiao-niao-sheng-shao) over subtler language. Here is my own translation:

Spring Dawn
Springtime, slumbering, unaware of the dawn,
All around I hear the chirping of birds.
In the nighttime, sounds of wind and rain
Fallen flowers, little known

I read the poem as a four stage progression: a sleeping individual, unaware of the dawning light; he begins to awaken to the sound of birds; this sound triggers a recollection of the sounds of a rainstorm from the night before; he thinks of the flowers felled by the storm.***

With this reading, we can access some of the subtler meanings in the poem - the sense of a spectral movement from sleep into awakening, the tie between wakefulness and memory, the paradoxical convergence of spring, blooming and death, and a melancholy sense of the unknown. Still, even a translation far subtler than my own could not do service to the full breadth of the original.

In the Chinese, for instance, there is no pronoun in the entire poem! Chinese poems can often do without identifying the speaker, and thus can be read from different but equally legitimate perspectives. Although Chang and I put the first-person pronoun in different lines, neither of us managed to avoid sticking it in there, whereas the Chinese poem has the multivalence to suggest both a first-person perspective and a more universal evocation of experience.

Looking to the characters themselves, there is a certain striking compactness that, combined with the meanings suggested by their component parts, is very difficult to translate.

In the second line, for instance - 处处闻啼鸟, the words mean 'place place hear chirping birds'.

The visual repetition of the character for 'place' is much more forceful than saying 'everywhere' or 'all around'. The character for 'hear' contains the pictograph of an ear 耳, that for 'chirp' contains the pictograph of mouth 口, and that for 'bird' 鸟 is, well, a picture of a bird.

Despite all of this, I still think it is too strong to suggest that the characters really transcend themselves as language. We can, after all, make deep, interesting, multivalent readings of texts in alphabetic languages as well, even if they lack the cool pictographic element. Therefore it seems to be the reader's attitude, more than the language itself, which produces an experientially meaningful effect.

What, then, of specifically Buddhist poetry and writing? Were the unique aspects of characters used to unlock language from its self-referentiality, opening it to a fresh relationship with our own experience?

Here is a poem from a Chinese Buddhist nun named Haiyin, who lived in the latter part of the Tang Dynasty, some 1100 years ago:

水色连天色 The color of the water merges with that of the sky,
风声益浪声 The sound of the wind adds to that of the waves.
旅人归思苦 The traveler's thoughts of home are painful,
鱼叟梦魂惊 The old fisherman's dream-self is startled.
举? 云先到 Lifting his oars, the clouds get there before him,
移舟月遂行 When his boat moves, the moon follows along.
旋吟诗句罢 Although I've done reciting the lines of my poem,
犹见远山衡 I can still see the hills extending in both directions. ****

This poem (as the one above) is maimed by the fact that I had to type it in simplified characters, instead of the traditional form in which it was written, but still there are certain striking effects. In the first line, the character for water - shui, 水 - is a pictograph of ripples in a river. There is the visual pulse of the repetition of the second and fifth characters in both the first and second lines. Breaking down the etymology of 'dream-self', the third and fourth characters in the fourth line, we have something like unclear 林 at night 夕 vapor 云 spirit 鬼. The fifth and sixth lines, with their suggestive conflations of perspective, build into the abrupt challenge of the conclusion, wherein Haiyin does her Zen best to reach out and strike the reader into a new sense of awareness.

But here again we cannot say that it is the language itself facilitating its own transcendent usage. It is, rather, a developed posture of a religion with a particular, highly intentional attitude toward the use of language. This type of stance would see its furthest refinement in the gong an ('public cases,' derived from a pre-existing Chinese notion of public legal precedent; Japanese - 'Koans') developed during the Tang and Song Dynasties. The koans, usually consisting of paradoxical questions or brief interchanges between teacher and student, were developed as a way for students to hold or physicalize their relationship to words, thereby gaining access to their own experience in a way that simply answering a question never could provide.

Baker-roshi writes in his forthcoming book: : “Words can be something like pitchers, containers from which we can pour. Used in this way, we can pour the meaning of words beyond where they reach in language alone.”

It is in this aspect, then - the physicalization of words, their use to hold and pick at and lever and sand down and filter experience - that I believe one can find the most pointed and accessible form of transcendent language: calligraphy. Having recourse both to semantics and to the physically suggestive power of art, calligraphy, to my mind, is open to being opened in a way that is very difficult with most language.

I think the key to calligraphy is the fundamental simplicity of the medium. It is spare - ink and paper - and has no recourse to narrative. Aided by these constrictions, a skilled artist is able to practice remarkable, even stunning transparency in the art, in that the work itself can be an invitation to her own self's being. Of course any painting can reflect an artist's life, but with calligraphy there is something so pointedly fleeting: the experience of the artist, marked as exquisite by the irreversible inking of the paper. To me it is something like performance art, but with the sometimes hard edge of the concept of performance replaced by the pure factuality of the experience of creation and relationship. The artist's hand controls the brush, and yet the drops or splatters of ink, the unpredictable wicking of the ink through the paper - these mark out the inherent limitations of even the artist's control of her own relationship to her work. The delicate balance of ink and white paper to me signifies the succulent ambiguity of relationship - the artist to his work, the viewer to the artist, the self to the self. And yet it is an ambiguity that can be inflected by the meaning of the word itself. The above calligraphy (by Nelson Chu*****) is the word 'xiang', meaning 'to think' or 'to want'. It is composed of the words 'examine' - an eye 目 beholding a tree 木 - and 'heart/mind' 心. To think, to want - to examine the heart and mind. May our use of language flower here.


**The preceding breakdown comes via my boss, Liu Xiaowei, who also deserves credit for a few of the character etymologies. Most of the etymologies come from Rick Harbaugh's phenomenal Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary, Yale University Press, 1998. zhongwen.com

***My exposure to, and much of the content of my reading of, this poem, are thanks to Professor Paul Kroll of CU Boulder. We read the poem in his classical Chinese class. The Chang translation is from: Edward C. Chang, How to Read a Chinese Poem - A Bilingual Anthology of Tang Poetry, BookSurge Publishing, North Charleston, 2007.


**** Grant, Beata. Daughters of Emptiness: Poems of Chinese Buddhist Nuns, Wisdom Publications, Boston, 2003.

*****
Nelson Chu - http://www.cse.ust.hk/~cpegnel/calligraphy/ChineseArt.html

On the Possibility of Transcendent Language, Part I - India

In his prodigiously researched Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World, Nicholas Ostler writes in his chapter about Sanskrit:

"Sanskrit appears to us, as do most of its Indo-European sister languages, as the speech of conquering warriors, well capable of using horses and wheeled vehicles to establish domination over their neighbours, and turn them into serfs and subjects. The way of life is familiar from heroic poetry of Indo-European peoples in every direction: men who fight from chariots, speak forthrightly, and care for their own personal honour more than life itself. When, in the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata, Krishna advises Arjuna on his duty that day, he could be speaking to the Greek Achilles attacking Troy (a thousand years earlier), or the Irishman Cuchulainn standing against the hosts of Connacht (in a thousand years to come)."

After quoting Krishna's famed exhortation to Arjuna, in which the god encourages the king not to flinch from his duty as a warrior, Ostler continues:

"Being a Hindu god, Krishna does go on to ground this exposition of the heroic code within a theology of reincarnation and a theory of knowledge that reduces the world of action to a shadow-play of appearances; but the basic ethic of nobility expressed through courage and military prowess is clear."

Although I was struck by the historic-militaristic trend Ostler identifies within the Indo-European language group (particularly since I had just watched Die Hard 4, in which Bruce Willis single-handedly takes on an army of computer wizards, martial artists and men with guns), I did take note of how quickly Ostler skips through the caveat about Krishna's "theory of knowledge".

I began to experiment with Indian epistemology, as filtered through several thousand years of Chinese, Japanese and American culture, about five years ago, although it wasn't until just this last year or so I realized that that was what I was doing. In one sense, Buddhist meditation is experiential epistemological research, and its roots, while plural, are certainly as much Indian as anything.

As Dan Lusthaus writes in his exposition of Yogacara Buddhism, Buddhist Phenomology, "While it is not uncommon for Western philosophical systems to begin with ontological commitments or assumptions (this is especially true in Theological philosophy, but generally true in other forms as well, including Analytic Philosophy, which has bestowed a virtual ontological status on language and statements [and, I might add, of science, which has enshrined the 'facts' uncovered by 'the scientific method' as unassailably primary]) and secondarily to generate epistemological criteria and methods whereby those commitments and assumptions can be verified, in India the situation is reversed. Indian philosophers, including the theologians, begin with epistemology, and only once they have satisfactorily established the criteria for valid means of knowledge can they move on to make ontological, metaphysical or ethical claims. The various Indian schools and sects, Buddhist as well as non-Buddhist, spent as least as much time arguing over what constituted valid means of knowledge as they did arguing about other matters."

Returning to Ostler, while he may be correct in pointing out the existence of a tradition of militaristic heroism extending through Indo-European history, he glosses too quickly over the importance of epistemology as a dividing factor in that tradition. As my South Asian History professor at CU told my Indian history class many times, it took Indian armies close to a thousand years after the first Muslim invasions in the 8th century CE to begin using tactics. Not just ballistics, but tactics of any kind. To try to conceal oneself or deceive an opponent was seen not just as cowardice but as apostasy, insofar as Hinduism has such a thing. For while battle, as a kind of theater, made sense to Hindu devotees, trickery in battle amounted to denying the connection, symbiosis, or even the unity of oneself and one's enemy, and that made no sense at all. Now I certainly won't vouch that each and every Indian soldier saw his imminent slaughter at the hands of Arab armies, Turkish slave-generals or Afghan empire-builders as a 'shadow-play of appearances', but it is clear that the Indian epistemology which gave birth to that notion was very much underpinning their lives.

And what, then, was the crux of that epistemology? Roberto Calasso writes the following in Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India, his dazzling retelling and elucidation of the Vedas:

"Masters of the goaded, greased, hard-brushed, well-honed word, the rsis were dazzled by one revelation: the elementary fact of being conscious. There was no need to drink soma or develop techniques or be inspired. The bare fact of being conscious was enough in itself. Everything else was a supplementary hallucination superimposed over the primary hallucination: that of living inside a mind. Beset by nature's profusion, they shriveled it with a glance. For nothing, in nature, led to the mind. While nature itself might turn out to be but a brief experiment, a mise-en-scene of the mind."

What Calasso is getting at is the Indic fascination, unparalleled in human history, with the phenomenon of consciousness. Where Des Cartes made due with thought as the locus of the self, the Indians demanded more rigor: If the self is the thinker, who is the self that watches the thinker? Before they exercised consciousness outward, they wanted to step inward to know its origin, and that step proved to be not an initial but a determinative one, for the workings of internality were found to be manifold, complex and possibly infinite. But how could the mind know the mind? And how could one person's knowledge of his own mind be transmitted to another? Certainly not without language.

"No artifacts have come down to us from the Vedic era," writes Calasso. "Nothing that those who intoned the hymns of the Rg Veda has survived. Not merely because wood rots faster in a tropical climate. Not merely because they chose not to build in stone. Not merely because they decided not to have temples. The hymns speak of palaces with a hundred gates. They speak of well-crafted jewels. Of bronze palisades. They list the paraphernalia of ritual. They speak of arms and chariots. It is as if everything had been pure mental reality that allows the object to appear, then reabsorbs it...Between the conquering Aryas and the Buddha: a thousand years and not a single object. Not a stone, not a seal, not a city wall. Wood: burned, rotted, decayed. Yet the texts speak of paintings and jewels. Immensely complex metrics - and the void. One thousand and twenty-eight hymns collected by the Rg Veda. Not a trace of a dwelling. Rites described in meticulous detail. Not a single ritual object that has survived. Those who glorified the leftover left nothing over themselves, except what was filtered through the word. A highly articulated language, fine-wrought as a palace."

In their search for the meaning and origin of consciousness, then, the Indians put language at the forefront. Sacrificial chants, ritual intonations, a generative grammar (Panini's) that has never been equalled, and an entire caste of people dedicated to the propagation of sacred scripts. But the risk in all this was that language would prove a maze, a trap. As I wrote in an earlier blog entry, it is commonly accepted by linguists today that language is a fundamentally self-referential phenomenon. Like a pair of exceptionally effective gloves that we use to handle 'the world', language allows us to communicate in our manipulations of energy, but what we feel when we use it is not the energetic 'objects' themselves, but the gloves. This is a big problem for religions that would depend on language.

One solution is to assert that one's language is, unlike all other languages, objective. It is not a stretch to say that Orthodox Judaism is inconceivable without this premise. The Hebrew of the Torah is said to be the language of God and thus the language of reality, and this assertion is backed up in various ways - analysis of the shapes of letters and words, comparative etymology within the language, and, most potently, the system of gematria, wherein each Hebrew letter has a numerical value, and numerical comparison of words can lead to astonishing conceptual linkages. (Gematria is deeply intertwined with Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, and it is these days a common factor in the conversion of secular Jews into believers, as it is indeed difficult to believe that its sophistication is within the power of the human intellect.)

The Indians too made the case that their language, at least in the case of the Vedas, was "not from man", but India was a yogic culture, a culture that placed high value on experiential knowledge, and with the Buddha, that value became a clear emphasis. In the hands of Buddhism, language would not have to claim divinity to warrant use in accessing true reality. It would become, rather, a tool grasped firmly in the hand of meditative silence. And to what end?

Writes Lusthaus: "Literature is the attempt to fill the gap between sensation and discourse with meaning, an activity that is both a reduction of sensation to language and an evocation of sensation by language. It could be argued that beginning with the Prajnaparamita literature, the Buddhist theory of verbal and textual authority hinges on the ability of fictitious literature to evoke soterically expedient sensations."

Language could thus be transcendent not through connection to higher powers or effects in unseen spiritual realms, but in its ability to radically inflect the felt experience of human beings, to disrupt the cognitive loop in which it normally plays so crucial a part.

When the Muslim armies came with force into India, the Hindus did not use tactics, but the Buddhists did not fight at all. By the 11th or 12th centuries, what had formerly been almost entirely Buddhist populations - in modern Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh - had either fled, been killed or converted to Islam. But inquiries into transcendent language and its possible uses were continuing farther to the north. The Buddhist literature of India had been assiduously translated and copied by Chinese monks for more than six centuries by that point. But following the translations from Sanskrit and Pali to Chinese, we cannot say that the language was being written anymore. It was, in a sense, being drawn.

The Lowest Glacier in Asia (Entry the Last)

In my last week before leaving China, I took a trip to see the Hailuogou Glacier Park, which lies in the mountains of western Sichuan, fairly close to Tibet. A sign from the park police read as follows:
"When consumer's legitimate rights and interests receive the violation; when you discover the fake and shoddy merchandise, please dial..."

That was the best bit of Chinglish I had encountered since reading the suitability guide on the back of Tom's weight-gain protein powder: 'Suit Mass: Teenager, the elderly, weakling and fitness and body-building people.'

The most poignant sentence I saw came after I returned to America, as the opening line of an email from my friend Xiao Han: 'Dear Matt, Last night I dreamed tow bears and them wanted to hit me.'

Anyway, cheered by the park tourist affairs police bureau's effort at reassurance, I headed up to see the Hailuogou Bingchuan (the latter word meaning 'ice river') – the lowest glacier in Asia.

It's a beautiful place. I arrived in the afternoon, and the diffuse, gray clouds had already set upon the mountain, giving a fairy-tale quality to the looming trees and slicking the rock faces, which are shaggy with vivid green moss. As you can see in the above photo, the glacier itself (or at least its tongue, which is the part you're allowed to walk on) consists of hillocks of ice intermixed with dirt and snow and the various rocks and boulders that it has pushed with it down the mountain.

I was guided to and on the glacier by a friendly, middle aged local man with a thick Sichuanese accent. Having failed to foresee that my worn-out sneakers might not be ideal for hiking on a glacier, I accepted the man's hand now and then going up and down the icier patches. At one point he pulled out a cigarette and forged ahead, simultaneously smoking with one hand and pulling me along behind him with the other. Coming down the glacier, several times he turned full around and held both of my hands while backing down the slope, and I thought that we must have looked like a parent and overgrown child in some sort of bizarre but tender skating lesson.

The man told me that he has two children, one in college and one in high school, and that it is very difficult for him to pay their tuitions. I asked him what his daughter is studying at college, and he said he doesn't know. "Wo mei you wen hua," he told me by way of explanation. "I don’t have education."

When we got back down to the trailhead, I gave the man an additional seven or so dollars on top of the eight he had asked for, and he thanked me profusely, on the verge of tears. He said that if any of my friends ever visit the park, he would guide them around for free. I wish I could say that all of my stories about economic inequality in China were so amicable, but most were not. When I was in the bus station in Chengdu waiting to catch the bus to Hailuogou, I realized I didn't have a pen on me and went to try and buy one. It was early in the morning, and I spotted a woman just opening up her little store at the side of the station. I saw a box of pens and, taking one out, asked how much they were.

"Three kuai," she told me - about 40 cents.

I knew the price was inflated but didn't care about such a relatively small amount of money. It occurred to me, however, that the pen was very likely be of low-quality and might stop working after a short while, so I asked if I could have two pens for five kuai. The woman, in her late 30s or early 40s, nodded and took my five kuai, but at that point she either changed her mind or realized she had misunderstood me, because she said, "Six kaui! Add one kaui!"

Now, in a shopping market in Chengdu, one can probably buy ten or fifteen pens for five kaui. Feeling irritated, I put one of the pens back, took two of my kuai back out of her hand and began to walk out of the store.

"Okay," she said. "Okay."

As I gave her back the two extra kuai and took another pen, I noticed the shame in the woman's eyes. She had looked fierce and frightened as she challenged me for the extra pittance, and now she just looked bitter and unhappy.

I have no idea if that woman or my park guide are technically impoverished. I don't know much about their lives or how they feel. But what I do know - what I came to sense as I stayed in China - is that an ocean of desperate uncertainty lies beneath the social surface of that country. While I was in China, three people were trampled to death in a grocery store in Chongqing in the rush to buy large jugs of cooking oil that the store was selling for half-off to mark its anniversary. Part of the explanation for such tragedies is that there are simply so many people in China, but it goes beyond that. It lies in the presence of China’s past. Unprocessed suffering and its progeny, the anarchies of desire, are at play in China; they are at play within and amidst a billion and a half people. I know this because these tendencies, which are present to greater or lesser degrees in everyone, became more and more exacerbated in me the longer that I stayed in Chengdu. My breath grew shallower and my energy less focused. I found myself becoming easily irritated, and when I blamed people, the cautionary voice that I have worked to develop in my head, the voice which says that there is a reality of non-self as well as a reality of self, was becoming more of a toyish concept to me than the spiritual guide that I want it to be.

In the end, although I can say that I had an interesting time in China, I left there with a depth of sadness in my heart. It is a sadness sprung from the realization that the world’s largest population has been disinherited of its culture, orphaned from its identity, and left to make its way in the fields of modernity and postmodernity, where the soul-sickening weeds of nationalism and consumerism flourish. It is a sadness bred of the knowledge that there was nothing I could do but take heart in the good times I shared with people there, and go.

And so I have returned to the monastery, to the place where I feel most supported in the effort to understand and generate peace in our life. What peace I feel here is not, however, a peace outside of suffering, not a blissed-out detachment or a dreamer’s retreat; it is, rather, the peace of generating a nearer heart-broken life.

I am keeping China as close as I can. It is me.

My Time in the Elevator

(I don't have any good photos from the elevator, so I thought I'd put this one in instead. The photo is of my boss's aunt, a tiny, energetic lady of 71 and former star of Beijing stage and screen. I met her when she visited during the National Holiday week, and she treated us to a few numbers, including "Edelweiss," "Unchained Melody" by the Righteous Brothers, and some songs from Soviet Russia. Her husband, a retired pharmaceuticals chemist, is in the background.)

My apartment is on the 23rd floor of a humongous apartment complex. Everyone has to ride two elevators to get up or down. We ride down to the sixth floor, then get off and walk across a veranda that is in fact the roof of a large shopping mall, and then ride a second elevator down to the first floor. All in all it makes for a lot of elevator time and elevator-centered relationships.

The inside of an elevator tends to be an awkward space for most people, and in the case of the Chinese, having a large (by Chinese standards,) white male who may or may not understand Chinese standing there also in the elevator tends to exacerbate the tension. In most cases it's not so bad. People just glance nervously and exercise whatever little tics they have. Little kids duck behind their parents legs; young women look embarassed; middle age women look frightened. It's the younger guys who have it the worst - cool guys in their teens or early twenties who are used to being the coolest person in sight, or at least pretty clear on who is the coolest person in sight, and who now suddenly have to contend with a total unknown. I remember one guy, about my age or a little younger, in a leather jacket, tan slacks and a button-down shirt opened at the top of his chest. I was already in the elevator when he got on. He pushed the 'close door' button and started shifting from side to side and fidgeting with his cigarette (a paper sign prohibiting smoking in the elevators is pasted up on the wall, but many people do not heed it, and many of those who do simply stomp out their butts on the floor of the elevator.) We had to ride up quite a few floors together, and with perhaps five seconds to go until his stop, this man actually began clawing at the serrated, plastic brand identification placard (Guangzhou Hitachi) on the elevator wall. He scratched and scratched at it, which produced a sort of low whine, and he turned his head over his shoulder, in my direction, but not actually looking at me. I felt a little nervous myself.

The other day I got on the elevator as a woman on the outside carried on an argument of some kind with a man already standing inside. They were speaking in thick Sichuanese, so I couldn't make any of it out, but there was a bunch of stuff, small furniture and the like, outside of the elevator, so I took it they were quarreling over some work he had done or was supposed to do for her. His clothes were gray and worn, and his thumbnail was grown out in the style of those who want to show that they are not manual laborers (this is most commonly done, as I understand it, by the children of farmers or other manual laborers.) After I got on, I held the door open, as I figured they would want to put the stuff in, but the man gestured me away.

"Mei shi, mei shi," he said to me as the woman continued pestering him. "Don't worry, it's nothing."

The women was still talking as the doors glided to a close, and then the man and I rode down together two floors, he saying "Mei shi" a few more times as we descended. The elevator stopped on the third floor, where there was someone holding a mattress and some other large furniture. The man's tone picked up vehemence. "Mei shi! Mei shi!" he assured me, waving his hand prohibitively at the furniture as he nodded at me and pushed the 'close door' button. I got off at the first floor, and the man looked satisfied because I hadn't had to wait for very long. It was dreamlike, as if I had encountered some guardian who, upon meeting me, preferred me to his other wards and saw me safely on my way.

I love riding the elevator with babies or dogs. Babies and dogs do not kn0w that I am a foreigner. I can pat either of them as I please, which is both fun and an effective way to establish rapport with whoever is their guardian.

One time I rode the elevator with an unattended dog. The dog was hanging around outside the elevators when I showed up. No owner appeared, and, looking around, I saw none. When the elevator came I got on, and the dog, a small, mostly white, muscular mutt, got on with me. The doors closed and he began to growl and bare teeth. We rode on up together, the dog continuing its low-throated rumble and occasionally taking a few steps this way or that. Then the doors opened on the 23rd floor, and the dog preceeded me out. He went off to sniff things, and I to my apartment. It was an unprecedented and oddly satisfying experience for me.

Idiocy, Idiolect and Communion, or Why Talking at its Best is Just a Way for Us to Be Together

Last week, during a short trip with my boss, I went to the hotel lobby to have a beer before bed. I wanted to read, and the lights weren't on, but I found myself at a loss for how to ask the bartender to turn them on.

"A little dark in here," I said, pointing at the lights.

The young barkeep look confused.

"Too dark in here," said I, pointing now at my magazine and feeling mighty passive-aggressive indeed.

"开灯!" exclaimed the man. Kai deng - literally 'open light' - turn on the lights.

Embarassed as I was, I shall not forget it soon.

And so it goes: in exchange for all the bumblings and embarassments of acquiring a second language, one gets to be witness to a process that we were all too young to notice the first time around - the formation of one's idiolect.

Kai deng is a common enough phrase, (although certainly open for analogical use,) but what of other words and phrases that are more obscure or prone to idiosyncratic inflection? How do they come to be ours?

In one of the dialogues I listened to on a Chinese language website I am using, http://www.chinesepod.com/, a drug user approaches a drug dealer to try and score some goods.

"Don't worry," he says. "Your friend Joe sent me."

"Ah," replies the dealer, "you are ziji ren!"

Dzi jee ren - 自己人, literally 'ourself person.'

"Ah," he says, "you are one of us!"

Not long after hearing this dialogue, I was explaining to my tutor the differences between Judaism and Christianity.

"Christians think Jesus is the son of God," I told her. "But Jews don't agree. We think he is just ziji ren."

He is just one of us. Easy to translate, and yet, ziji ren is not one of us. Not exactly. It is, like any word or phrase, a conceptually discrete particle of an infinitely generative yet entirely self-referential system. For me, ziji ren has come to be inflected with drug users and contested messiahs, and I'm sure it will continue to evolve in idiosyncratic connotation. But no one can know exactly what ziji ren means to me, what associative bells are set off in my mind when I use it. What is interesting to me about studying Chinese is that I am coming to see why this doesn't matter. My tutor didn't have to know my personal etymology of ziji ren anymore than the barkeep had to actually hear me say 'kai deng,' because there is something more basic occurring when we are speaking to each other, and that is the fact of our physical togetherness.

Quite recently, neuroscientists began to study pairs of people instead of isolated individuals. The theory behind such experiments is that studying a brain in isolation to see how it works is a bit like studying someone's face to see what they are thinking, but without taking into account what they are looking at. Not surprisingly, what these scientists are finding is that our minds adjust to each other. If you are angry, I am likely to be defensive. If you are at ease, I am likely to be at ease. Of course that is a simplification, but what it points to, for me, is that in a given interaction, our being with each other is more important than the actual intercourse of linguistic meanings.

Words seem to be something like skiffs in which we ride atop a river more generous and diverse than language on its own ever could be. It is like this for everyone, but the ease of our naturally acquired mother tongues obscures a lot of the rest of what is going into communication. My rickety Chinese skiff does no such thing.

If I may switch metaphors, my Chinese at this point is like some strange puppet which I have pieced together over the past couple years, an accrued weight of the mind which I can animate and use but which cannot yet surmount its own inertia. And often in conversation the puppet lies collapsed, exhausted and limbs entangled, between myself and whomever I'm speaking with. And yet is not the fact of our being together, the reality of our mutual effects on each other, still more basic than the paucity of words?

It certainly doesn't feel that way if I am afraid or embarassed or angry. But if I am calm or happy; if, above all, I can behold an honest-to-God specific, sensitive person in front of me instead of a judge, then there is space to see the deeper communication that is present, that is necessarily present in any relationship.

To end, then, a story not from China but from Nepal, when I was there four years ago.

One evening my friend Ang and I were walking around the city of Pokhara and decided to stop and watch a small dance performance that was going on at a restaurant. We ordered drinks and sat amongst the other diners and watched some Nepalese folk dancing for a while. After half an hour or so, the show proper ended and the dancers and musicians began calling for the small audience to come up on stage and dance. As usual in that type of situation, I was reticent to go, but soon we were swept up onto the floor and had begun dancing with the performers and some of the other folks from the crowd. Among them were a few Japanese tourists, including several older women. Now, American teenagers have their reasons to be reticent to dance in public, but I can't imagine that they surpass those of elderly Japanese women. These women were up, however, and dancing, and soon we were all having a pretty good time. The Nepalese dancers were twirling and bringing drums onto the floor. People jumped and danced with each other and alone, and it was really a wonderful, impromptu thing. The song crescendoed to an ending, and in the energetically pregnant first moment of quiet, I caught eyes with one of the elderly Japanese women.

And there it was - as naturally as if we were basketball teammates celebrating a point, she raised up her hand for a big high-five. High-five we did, clasping hands and laughing for a moment, and then off we went our separate ways.

Lost in Translation

"By the North American free and novel wind, ACA is coming to China."

So proclaims the appliance guide to the small, Appliance Company of America coffee maker I recently purchased at the Carrefour (the French equivalent to Walmart) located near my apartment.

I'm not sure why ACA didn't have their Chinese department translate the American product guide, but they had the Chinese write a new one, and write it they did. At first I figured the writer believed that a little political flattery would earn him a promotion, or perhaps he's just a big fan of capitalism. The other day, however, my boss explained to me that there is a deeper cultural reason for this type of writing. In a civilization which has so long prized 'wen' - that is: literature, cultural sophistication, or more basically pattern, the patterning of material - it is an enormous embarassment to be seen as a poor writer.

"They don't want to write like a farmer," was how my boss put it.

And thus, whether in letters, ads or appliance guides, the Chinese want to show some literary flair. No matter if it's not their first language - they'd like to put a little oomph in their English as well. The result is some of the most florid, bombastic, over-eager or just plain nonsensical English you've ever heard. Reading the signs of Chengdu is about as amusing a pastime as one could hope for.


"Natural pie," asserts my bag of cashews. "How delicious. Make you taste back."

There was the example of the corner police station at a temple I was visiting. "Welcome Wenshu Fun Police - Police are Off Ice."

And of course the above pictured 'Wicket' office.

More common than the completely nonsensical signs, however, are the aforementioned high-falutin ones - something like a drunken Thomas Hardy writing ad copy.

"Follow the trend," instructs a package of sweet potato flavored granola bars. "The quintessence of the five cereals is rich in the meal fibre, urge to digest, help and arrange the poison, making people relaxed all over, vigor doubles all over."

"It would be impossible for me not to want you as a friend," says my whole bean coffee package. Like a good, classical Chinese poem, the coffee package draws one in by refusing to identify its speaker. If, on the one hand, I am being prompted to praise the coffee as an irresistible friend, then it is just a cheap ploy, a bully play for my affection. But if the coffee really feels so strongly about me, I must say I am quite flattered.


"Children are forbidden to enter a mansion," says a sign at the entrance to my gym, complete with a prohibitory halved circle with the line going right through the clasped hands of a mother and daughter. The sign at the other end of the counter urges clients to register their concerns by "leaving a massage to the clerk." Yet a third advises, "If you have health problems, before joining the workout class please consult a coctor."

These are but a few examples of the many English neologisms, malapropisms and just plain absurd usages which I get to enjoy every day. Sure enough though, what goes around comes around, and I have not been free of linguistic mishaps myself.

A few days after my arrival, I took a cab to meet my roommate, Tom, for dinner. The cabbie understood my intended destination right away, and, pleased about that, I proceeded to engage him in a light conversation. We talked about the weather, about the traffic, about where I'm from and why I'm in Chengdu. By the time I got out at the restaurant, I was flush with linguistic confidence from what had been my most successful exchange yet in Chinese.

As at most of the restaurants we've been to in chronically over-staffed Chengdu, Tom and I were surrounded by several waiters as we sat down. They hovered over us as we perused the menu. "Jiachang doufu," - homestyle tofu - said I, and again I was happy to be understood right away. But the waiters, instead of rushing away to register the order, began pointing excitedly at an item at the top of the menu. It had a spot of its own and appeared to be some sort of restaurant special. Tom and I debated what it could be. The waiters kept describing it, but neither of us could make it out. I figured it was probably some kind of special liquor or something and, thinking 'how bad could it be?', I ordered one. Not two minutes later a steaming bowl of something was headed our way. The smiling waiter set it down on the table, and Tom, having been in China before, filled me in on the grayish-pink mass that loomed ominously in the middle of the bowl.

"Pig's foot soup."

Fresh off eight years of vegetarianism and a stint in Israel, I didn't quite have it in me.

"Bu yao," I said. "Don't want it. Sorry sorry."

(I have since been informed by a pair of very pretty and dainty Chinese women, however, that there is simply nothing better for the skin than the occasional pig's foot.)

The waiters looked a little deflated, but they took the soup away and soon brought us our meals. After a minute my confidence returned, and I decided to try my Chinese once more. I waved over the waiter to ask for some soy sauce for my rice.

"Black water," I said. "Salty black water."

He looked confused.

I mimicked pouring it over my rice.

"From Japan. Salty black water from Japan."

After a minute or so of this, the waiter seemed to get an idea. He said something which I did not understand, and I nodded. It wasn't clear to me if I had been understood, but I remained hopeful. Tom and I sat and chatted for a minute, and then the waiter reemerged from the kitchen with a small bowl and set it down on the table.

It was pig's foot soup broth.

"Thanks," I said. "Thanks. Great."