Beyond Oneness and Difference: Li and Coherence in Chinese Buddhist Thought and Its Antecedents

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments The acknowledgments section is the customary place in books such as this where the reader, perhaps out of some benevolent combination of default ritual indulgence and behind‑the‑music curiosity, is prepared to let the author rattle off an invocation of all his or her debts to those persons, places, and things that made the book possible. This is an author’s opportunity to reflect a little on how humblingly enormous a portion of what has come about in his or her work has depended on unpredictable external factors, the seemingly almost infinite chain of encounters and supports necessary to bring any finished thing into the world. Though wary of the cringe‑making awkwardness that seems likely if not inevitable in such public displays of the private, I will gladly comply with this custom. In addition to those specific persons and institutions I thanked at the beginning of the previous volume, Ironies of Oneness and Difference—and whom I thank anew, with renewed fervor, here and now, adding to the list also Jonathan Sim and Hiromi Okaue for their help preparing the manuscript—I feel these days an ever more insistent impulse to honor this noble tradition of acknowledgment in a more expansive or even global way; for there are so many more acknowledgeable facts and circumstances and things and fortuities left out of such specificities, and though these abstract inanimates and accidents don’t care, I still want to acknowledge them, to thank them, to extend some kind of gratitude, or whatever is the equivalent of gratitude when applied to unintentional and inanimate abstract quasi‑entities, to the whole mysterious and random concatenation of forces that has made it on the one hand possible and on the other hand permissible for me to write books such as this at all. Gratitude, however misplaced, is also a fact to be acknowledged. I can only gape in wonder at this seeming stroke of dumb luck, the fact that, having somehow against all odds stumbled upon something I feel both inclined and able to do, I’ve so far also been permitted to continue to do it, even to get paid for it, rather than being arrested or lynched or tarred and feathered for it. How many lifeforms ever get so fortunate, to find themselves seemingly unchangeably and unjustifiably constituted in a certain way, and yet also to live in a time and place in which that way of being is viewed as an acceptable way to be, rather than as an atrocity that warrants community wrath, destruction, quarantine, or ridicule? Imagine a person xi xii acknowledgments who, for reasons as yet unanalyzed but quite possibly mildly pathological, seems to have always had some kind of ironclad mental block in every situation against doing “the assigned reading,” as it were—who was too autistic or distracted or arrogant or cowardly or shy or contrarian to listen to anything any living person was trying to teach him, especially persons such as teachers in classrooms. Some kind of nonnegotiable resistance to the very idea of receiving instruction—rooted in an obscure but unshakeable doubt that human minds are alike enough for any single mind’s desires and truths to be likely to be applicable to those of another—drives him to the written word, where the sample size is larger and the distance is greater. But the ban falls quickly also even on books written in the past hundred years or so, in any language he has heard spoken in the flesh; the familiarity of the methods and assumptions of the authors make them too easily imaginable as living presences, and therefore repellent. Here is this person who can only listen to and learn from people who have long been safely dead for a long time, who don’t remind him of anyone he knows (i.e., of anyone who, as he sees it in his paranoia, assumes it’s perfectly fine to try to impose their ideas of what is true and what is good, their facts and values, on him), a person who can only dialogue with people who are far enough away from him in every sense. In the self‑imposed intellectual isolation that comes with this condition, after many dismal experiments, it turns out there is only one thing that brings intellectual enlargement and some mental companionship: walking around in solitude, preferably in a city or country where no one knows who he is, reading classical Chinese texts, looking...