From: xu@hydra.maths.unsw.oz.au
Newsgroups: aus.culture.china
Subject: CND Books and Journals Review, January 24, 1993
Date: 24 Jan 93 01:22:31 GMT
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Organization: school of Mathematics UNSW


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            |  \/___| |/    China News Digest     | |/__/  |/
             \_______/  (Books & Journals Review) |_______/
                            
                            January 24, 1993

    CND Books and Journals Review staff would like to wish our readers

              *****     A Happy Chinese New Year     *****

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1. "Tao Te Ching" by Lao-tzu ........................................... 37

2. "A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought --
    A Philosophical Interpretation" by Chad Hansen ..................... 68

3. "Chinese Roundabout:
   Essays in History and Culture"  by Jonathan Spence .................. 57

4. Taiwan Series (3)
   "The Great Transition: Political and Social Change
   in the Republic of China" by Hung-mao Tien .......................... 63

5. "Tsung-mi and the Signification of Buddhism" by Peter Gregory ....... 50

6. "Challenging the Past:
   The Paintings of Chang Dai-Chien" by Shen C.Y. Fu ................... 35
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Editor's Note:  We welcome all CND readers to contribute to this column. If 
                you encounter any China-related books  or journals that you
                would like to share with  other CND readers, please send in  
                comments, newspaper reviews, journal articles, and excerpts
                etc to  cnd-editor@Sdsc.edu   Thank you.

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1. "Tao Te Ching" by Lao-tzu ........................................... 37
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Forwarded by: Jian
Source: Choice Book Reviews

"Tao Te Ching" by Lao-tzu, 4th Century B.C.
University of Washington Press, 1992, 328 pages,
$70.00; paperback $35.00)

[Editor's note: "Lao-tzu" in pinyin is "Lao-zi"]

The eighty-one sections of this evocative and practical classic (Ching) of
Chinese philosophy outline a way of living in harmony with the Tao, or
natural order.  The most widely translated work of Oriental literature, this
book is as stimulating, popular, and useful today as ever.

For Lao-tzu, the legendary author of the enigmatic aphorisms in this brief
work, the Tao is the name for ultimate reality, yet the eternal Tao defies
all names and descriptions. Images can only suggest its vast and mysterious
creative potential.  It is like water, giving and sustaining life, always
moving, yet never striving.

While the essence of the Tao remains elusive and beyond our comprehension,
we may observe the Tao as it reveals itself in the natural development of
things.  By stripping away our selfish desires and fears and accepting the
world as it is, we can imitate the Tao and discover in ourselves Te, or
natural virtue and moral strength.

The person at one with the Tao gives unselfishly and effortlessly to others
without trying to control their actions.  Modest, yielding, tolerant,
impartial, and patient, the sage lives a simple and tranquil life and
realizes the principle of wu-wei, working without effort, accomplishing
without concern for reward or results.

Written during the age of political anarchy and social decadence known as
"The Period of Warring States" (5th-3rd centuries B.C.), the TAO TE CHING
addresses problems of wise government as much as right personal conduct.
Humility is the mark of a wise leader, who rules by virtuous example rather
than by interference with other countries or in the lives of the people.
With a minimum of laws and regulations and without fear of punishment and
harsh taxes, people will order themselves according to their own nature and
innate virtue. Ruled with a light hand, they will live long lives of few
needs and in peace with their neighbors.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
2. "A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought --
    A Philosophical Interpretation" by Chad Hansen ..................... 68
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Written and forwarded by: Gary Gach (ggach@pandora.sf.ca.us)

"A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought - A Philosophical Interpretation"
Chad Hansen.  Oxford University Press.  448pps. w. notes, Chinese glossary,
bibliography, and index.  $65.00.

Professor Hansen contributes a much-needed re-assessment of Chinese
philosophy.  What's new about his interpretation is his Daoist (Taoist)
perspective, and his solid grounding in both English and Chinese.  As such,
this tome provides a welcome addition to fertile ground prepared by Waley's
perdurable classic "Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China".  Professor
Hansen sheds valuable insights into Confucianisn and NeoConfucianism, and
gives equal treatment to schools of thought (e.g., Legalism, Mohism, etc.)
as well as personalities (e.g., Mo-zi, Lao-zi, et al.).  But it is his
central premise as to the superiority of Daoism, that is the most compelling
of all.

Fortunately, Prof. Hansen is fluent in both English and Chinese, and thus
avoids the pitfalls of deficiency in either.  The phenomenon of the recent
English-language best-seller edition of "the Tao" rendered by Stephen
Mitchell, for example, resembles nothing so much as those Egyptian
hieroglyphs translated by scholars working from dictionaries three
generations removed from an original based on missionary interpretations.

Mr. Mitchell's scholarly collation of English translation and commentaries
is admirable, yet the fact that he does not know Chinese shows tellingly, as
when he reads "penis" for "penis" but "valley" for "vagina."  As Prof.
Hansen would probaly argue, Mitchell derives his experiential interpretation
of dao-ism from Buddhism (albeit Ch'an/Zim/Zen), which is to say grounded in
an Indo-Grecian canon, rather than a decidedly Chinese one.

And, on the other hand, Prof. Hansen has no difficulty in commanding the
vagaries of English, an equally difficult, complex language capable of
either great obfuscation or precision.

Prof. Hansen is refreshingly revisionist as his hermeneutic lays waste
to such misconceptions as "THE Tao," transcendence, and unsayableness
associated with dao-ism, as well as fundamental misconceptions about Chinese
language and thought.  In a nutshell, his dao, (as opposed to some Platonic,
quasi-godlike Dao), is not only rigorous but also refreshingly pluralist,
evolving, and empirical.  His twin fortes are an almost surgical, positivist
linguistic precision, cutting away at fat and exposing the bare bones, plus
a holistic approach.  This latter bent enables the reader to understand how
dao-ism has been obscured not only by well-intentioned, bumbling translators
and JudeoChristian-centric westerners, but also by native misinterpretation
by a dominant Confucianism.  With a redeemed interpretation of both Dao and
Confucianism, the reader cannot help but come away with a richer
appreciation of the whole of classical Chinese thought. Overall, the
author's polysemous grasp of Chinese history makes his magnum opus an
interdisciplinary resource, sure to be of interest to all students and
scholars of comparative literature, philosophy/ religion, and intellectual
history.

The reader prepared to spend a week or more with Prof. Hansen will also be
forewarned of inherent residual eccentricities.  While Prof. Hansen's style
veers towards the colloquial rather than the textual, he augments his
seemingly spoken flow, dually, with both footnotes at the back of the book
plus equally copious footnotings at the bottom of the page, lending a
dizzying, but delightful, kind of polyphony.  If only once or twice Prof.
Hansen seems to chatter more than get to the matter, on balance, it might be
attributed finally not so much to the vagaries of wordprocessing over
scribal technologies, but, rather, to an exuberant, positivist passion for
his material, evidenced by the following citation, towards the close of his
*five*-page acknowledgments:

       "My thanks to the primates, large mammals, the plant kingdom,
        and the unfathomable natural forces on which they rest.  The
        electromagnetic field coursing through my computer no doubt flows
        from the Big Bang."

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
3. "Chinese Roundabout:
   Essays in History and Culture"  by Jonathan Spence .................. 57
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Forwarded by: Gu Zhen (june@acs.bu.edu)

Source: The New York Review of Books 11/5/92
Review written by: Jonathan Mirsky

"Chinese Roundabout: Essays in History and Culture"
by Jonathan D. Spence; Norton, $24.95

How can the historian approach so old and vast a subject as that of China?
In his introduction to "Chinese Roundabout," Jonathan Spence, the Yale
historian, compares his essays collected in the book to a roundabout, or
traffic circle, that "attempts to sort out, with some kind of logic, the
conveyances converging on a given point from many directions." For the most
part, he brilliantly succeeds in doing so.

In one of the essays in "Chinese Roundabout," Jonathan Spence concentrates
on the events of Tiananmen; he had already used its name in English, "The
Gate of Heavenly Peace," as the title for his book exploring revolutionary
movements in China between 1895 and 1980. His essay (originally published in
1990) starts in 1420 and doesn't reach 1989 until its final paragraph. It
was the early Ming rulers, Spence writes, who constructed the first
Tiananmen -- the Gate of Heavenly Peace into the imperial quarter and the
Forbidden City -- from which imperial edicts were lowered to kneeling
officials who then had them circulated to the whole country. This was the
very place, on the Golden Water Bridges at the base of the Gate, where the
Armed Police beneath a huge portrait of Chairman Mao clubbed and shot
demonstrators on the nights of June 3 and 4, 1989.

Tiananmen Square, the ninety-square-acre space just south of the Gate, is
less than a hundred years old; there on May 4, 1919, university students
gathered to protest the sellout of China at the Versailles Conference, thus
beginning the May 4th Movement to modernize the country. There, too, on
March 18, 1926, troops fired into a crowd of students and workers protesting
the warlord government's yielding to Japanese demands. Fifty people were
killed --- the first Tiananmen massacre, Spence notes, about which the
essayist Lu Xun wrote, "Lies written in ink can never disguise Facts written
in blood. Blood debts must be repaid in kind; the longer the delay, the
greater the interest."

Although Mao reestablished the square as an "official space" for huge,
officially sponsored demonstrations of loyalty to him and to the Party,
Peking citizens occupied it yet again in April 1976 to express their grief
at the death of Premier Chou Enlai and their hatred of the Gang of Four.
This gathering was broken up violently by the police. In April 1989, when
demonstrators once more took over Tiananmen Square, Spence says,
 
    [it] became the people's space in a way it had never been before.
         Until June 4.

Spence's essay is the work of a particularly skillful historian, sure of his
sources, and expert in the languages necessary to use them. He tells us in
the first sentence that the killings of 1989 occurred in in the "most
emotionally and historically charged urban space in China." Spence's
approach -- introducing a large problem, setting the scene and its
historical background, providing illustrative details, and a brief but
convincing conclusion -- can be seen in most of the essays in "Chinese
Roundabout."

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
4. Taiwan Series (3)
   "The Great Transition: Political and Social Change
   in the Republic of China" by Hung-mao Tien .......................... 63
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Edited and forwarded by: Gu Zhen (june@acs.bu.edu)

Source: The New York Review of Books (10/22/92)
Review written by: Jonathan Spence

"The Great Transition:
Political and Social Change in the Republic of China" by Hung-mao Tien
Hoover Institution Press, $22.95

A useful way to see how the doubly despairing worlds of repressed Taiwanese
natives and of economically depressed and intellectually alienated mainland
refugees somehow were brought together in a long-range pattern of
astonishing growth, is presented in Hung-mao Tien's recent book "The Great
Transition." Tien shows clearly how the Kuomintang in Taiwan was able to
accomplish virtually everything that it had refused to do, or been unable to
do, in the long years of its attempts to unify mainland China between 1928
and 1949.

In the economic sphere, for instance, the new government proceeded to push
through land reform, to end inflation, and to develop an indigenous
Taiwanese industry backed by high tariffs, import quotas, and rigorous
prohibitions of imported luxury goods. Japanese competition was curbed by
these policies.

With advice from the American Agency for International Development, Taiwan
embarked on an aggressive strategy of increasing exports. Despite the oil
crisis of the early 1970s, the loss of the Nationalist seat in the United
Nations and the end of diplomatic recognitions by most other countries, and
dislocations as the economy changed the directions, the overall result was
remarkable.

The annual economic growth rate between 1951 and 1984 was 8.9 percent and,
after a dip in 1985, recovered and rose to 11 percent in both 1986 and 1987.
The share of profit of those Tien identifies as the 2699 most "influential
industrial and commercial entrepreneurs" was not unfairly divided, with
about 30 percent being mainlanders, and about 70 percent being Taiwanese.

This extraordinary growth was achieved in a strongly coercive political
atmosphere. Political opposition whether by dissatisfied mainlanders, or
disenfranchised Taiwanese, was hardly allowed. The few attempts at moderate
liberal reformism were suppressed by Kuomintang police agencies who arrested
the dissidents for their alleged Communist contacts. Only after 1977, in
number of elections, did the opposition learn to hold their ground. It was
only in 1986 that Democratic Progressive Party was able to hold its first
Party Congress. As recently as 1988, two outspoken advocates of an
independent Taiwan were sentenced to 10 and 11 years respectively for their
views. All these events show clearly that the government did not yield power
so easily.

Taiwan's gradual moves toward democracy and the heightened complexity of
economic planning coincided with the presidency of Chiang Ching-kuo and his
successor Lee Teng-hui. As Tien points out, Lee symbolizes the transition
from the old generation mainlanders to a younger generation of Taiwanese
leadership. Son of a rice farmer in Taiwan, Lee went four universities:
Kyoto, Taipei, Iowa State, and Cornell, receiving a Ph D in agricultural
economics.

After a few years as university teacher in Taiwan and a consultant at a US
funded "Commission of Rural Reconstruction," Lee began his rise with the KMT
in 1978, the same year Chiang Ching-kuo succeeded his father. Lee's career
was promoted by Chiang Ching-kuo, who saw him as an invaluable and honest
middleman between the Taiwanese and the mainlanders. After serving a
successful term as mayor of Taipei and "governor" of Taiwan province, he was
promoted to the central Standing Committee of KMT, and as Chiang's
vice-president in 1984. When Chiang died in 1988, Lee succeeded peacefully
to the presidency of Taiwan. A new chapter of Taiwan's progress toward a
more open and democratic system began.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
5. "Tsung-mi and the Signification of Buddhism" by Peter Gregory ....... 50
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Forwarded and Extracted by: Yao Xinzhong (yao@lampeter.ac.uk)
Source: "Asian Philosophy---Volume 2 Number 2, 1992"
Review written by: Whaken Lai

"Tsung-mi and the Signification of Buddhism" by Peter N. Gregory, 1991
Princeton, Princeton University Press; 366pp., US$49.50

Kuen-feng Tsung-mi(780-841AD) is a patriarch of both the Hua-yen and the
Ho-tse Chan school, the last of the Tang schematisers of the Buddhist Dharma
whose "Inquiry into the Origin of Man" bridged Buddhism and neo-Confucian
anthropology.

The introduction puts Tsung-mi in both the Hua-yen and the Chan lineage. It
recalls how the cultural shift to the 'New Buddhism' of Sui and early Tang
occurred... The fluid situation as well as Tsung-mi's less fluid claim to
defending the good of the Ho-tse lineage against the antinomian activism of
the Hung-chou lineage headed by another Sichuan immigrant are, however, well
told in the life of Tsung-mi (Chapter 2).

Chapters 3 to 6 deal with the logic and logistics of the classification of
doctrines of P'an-chiao. After a short but dense overview, the author
introduces the major Hua-yen schemes and then turns to a finer analysis of
the changing perception on the Sudden and the Perfect Teaching.

Chapters 7 to 9 deal with "The Ground of Practice". Practice is one of those
words too often used narrowly by some scholars-in-practice to limit
discussion to insiders. But so-called Hua-yen theories are supposed to lack
practical values when actually they just underwrote a different type of
practice -- grand communal rites instead of private meditation. Fortunately,
Tsung-mi happened to be a scholar monk who did not disdain public discourse
on the ground of practice. Tsung-mi's reading of the "Awakening of Faith"
and its impact on the `moon and crescent' diagrams depicting
enlightenment/delusion taken from the Chan Preface; the `cosmogonic'
classification of doctrines in the "Preface" and the "Inquiry", the place of
Emptiness and the critique thereof by the positive TATHAGATAGARBHA that
underwrites this notion of a perpetual Awareness in Tsung-mi; and the
classification of Chan schools and Tsung-mi's critique of the major options
in the "Preface".

The last two chapters are on the "Inquiry". Chapter 10 is an analysis of
this work; Chapter 11 reviews Chu Hsi's controversy with the Buddhists. The
author sees structural parallels. Both Chu Hsi and Tsung-mi were wary of the
antinomian potential of the Hung-chou school. To make that case better, the
author should have noted that the passage from the "Ching-te Ch'uan-teng Lu"
cited by Chu Hsi as an example of Chan license comes directly from a
Hung-chou text. PRAJNATARA, the 27th patriarch, was so postulated by this
school's text, the "Pao Lin Chuan", that he might prophesy, over the head of
Bodhidharma(the 28th), that the true heir of Chan is not Hui-neng but a wild
horse (Ma for Ma-tsu) that would one day `trample the world'. The Hung-chou
ideology of `anything you do is Chan' -- even the blinking of an eye -- has
already found its way into the "Platform Sutra" and is identified by
Nan-yang Kuo-shih Hui-Chung as the `the Southern Principle' that corrupted
this text of the Sixth Patriarch. However, despite the fact they shared
distrust of antinomianism, Chu Hsi and Tsung-mi could never see eye to eye
on this matter of cultivation. Tsung-mi's premise about `gradual cultivation
predicated upon sudden enlightenment' is not how Neo-Confucian Chu Hsi would
style his moral programme.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
6. "Challenging the Past:
   The Paintings of Chang Dai-Chien" by Shen C.Y. Fu ................... 35
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Forwarded by: Jian
Source: Choice Book Reviews
Review written by: John Wilson

"Challenging the Past: the Paintings of Chang Dai-Chien"
by Shen C.Y. Fu, with major contributions and translated by Jon Stuart
University of Washington Press, 1992, 328 pages, $70.00; paperback $35.00

[Editor's note: "Chang Dai-Chien" in pinyin is "Zhang Da-qian"]

A beautifully produced survey of the work of a painter whom many regard as
the foremost Chinese artist of the twentieth century.

In his long life, Chang Dai-chien (1899-1983) mastered all of the forms and
genres of traditional Chinese painting. A calligrapher and poet as well, he
was also a connoisseur and collector of Chinese art on a vast scale. And one
more thing: He was a consummate forger, so expert and so prodigal that the
full extent of his forgeries may never be established.

Chang's life was almost as rich and complex as his work. Both are admirably
treated in this volume, which was published in conjunction with an
exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution's Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. Shen
C.Y. Fu, senior curator of Chinese art at the Sackler and Freer galleries,
opens with a monograph-length essay surveying Chang's tumultuous and
extraordinarily productive career (he is estimated to have painted some
thirty thousand works in his lifetime). A chronology of Chang 's life
follows this introductory essay.

The heart of the book consists of a catalogue of eighty-seven works by
Chang, each of which is accompanied by Fu's analysis. (In all, the volume
includes 240 illustrations, 125 in color.) Appendices, a bibliography, and
an index complete the volume.

Chang's ability to move at ease among a dazzling array of styles is readily
apparent. Some of the most striking paintings reproduced here are late works
which Chang created using a "splashed-ink-and-color" technique that revealed
affinities with contemporary Western art (e.g., "action painting") and at
the same time constituted an homage to Tang dynasty artists who had employed
a similar technique, though in a less radical form. In their bold
appropriation of diverse traditions, these paintings exemplify Chang's
genius.

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