TLDR; Monkey Goes East restarted as ‘Sinosophy’; expect monthly essays.

There’s a famous definition of philosophy by Wilfrid Sellars, where he says that it aims ‘to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.’ If you’re a philosopher in this sense, you have a theory of how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term. That’s a positive conception of philosophy, philosophy that leads to doctrines and theories and systems. Maybe Sellars’ version is closest to it being a thought-system?

But there’s also an alternative approach to philosophy, which makes it look more like art or poetry. It’s philosophy channeled as a mood or as an atmosphere. And in the last couple of hundred years, that is the way moderners have often experienced non-Western philosophy. When we encounter Oriental philosophy - and I’m using that pejorative term deliberately - we typically encounter it in spiritualist terms, as a way of life, and not a specific theory of how the world hangs together.

The spiritualist, ‘way of life’ label was eagerly embraced by many traditionalists themselves, who were colonial subjects demeaned and dominated by Western intellectual and scientific traditions. In response, they said: “Oh, well, those guys are better about the nature of matter, but we still have monopoly over the spiritual life, and our philosophy is way better as lived philosophy than anything these scientized and alienated westerners are offering.” I don’t want to get into a debate about this being the right way to position yourself against a dominant tradition, but I see these attempts at casting Indian or Chinese or Japanese philosophy as a way of life or a spiritual philosophy - say, in the way we consume Talks with Ramana Maharshi, I am That, or the way Alan Watts wrote as a western interpreter of East Asian traditions, or Shunryu Suzuki‘s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind as an example of the East coming West - as conveying a mood or an atmosphere generated by a tradition rather than an exposition of its doctrines. The rebels against this atmospheric cause were all professors - people like Bimal Matilal who wanted to teach Indian philosophy at Oxford or Harvard in the philosophy department, and that required penance to show how rigorous and rational Indian philosophy has been over the ages.

But rigor has the stench of rigor mortis; after enormous labor, you are allowed to give a talk in some minor section of the American Philosophical Association’s annual conference. The woke have left you behind as too brahminical, and the philosophers reading Kripke for the 35th time weren’t going to let you teach logic to their students were they? And don’t even talk to me about those making outlandish claims about spaceships and plastic surgery in the Vedas.

In contrast, the atmosphere generated by these traditions has a lot of staying power; their influence continues much after the end of decolonization. It’s now shading into Chinamaxxing as the Middle Kingdom becomes the Middle Kingdom once again. Which small town in New England or California doesn’t have a Yoga Studio? If you own an iPhone you hold an object congealed from that atmosphere. Some of this influence is attributed to Indian or Chinese or Japanese culture - their musical, film-making or culinary traditions, for example - but a lot of culture itself is an atmospheric thing, isn’t it? I will continue insisting that the mood has a philosophical core, and, in that sense, the mood has traveled a lot further than any doctrine with a linear, identifiable connection to Asian philosophical traditions.

Hypothesis: for traditions that don’t have a clear historical connection to the modern world, it’s better to evoke them as a mood or an atmosphere than as defensible theory. That may be a harder task than arguing for the truth of their doctrines, because, if anything, the atmosphere of the West is even more dominant than its ideologies and doctrines.

All to say that my reading of Chinese thinkers and traditions is going to evoke a mood (a bouquet of ‘ways’) and I will not make truth claims about what those philosophers, writers and texts are saying. I’m not going to read them that way at all. I’m going to read them in the way that an artist would, the way Joyce read Homer or even as how Nolan has brought Homer to our screens than how Emily Wilson has chosen to translate the Iliad or the Odyssey.

Reading Chuang Tzu creatively isn’t a license to be arbitrary. Joyce was not accountable to Homeric philology, but he was ferociously accountable to something, and that something was the atmosphere of the Odyssey: the shape of a day, the way a wanderer’s mind keeps arriving in rooms he has already left. You can get a mood wrong. A person who lives inside that mood feels the wrongness immediately, even if they can’t point to the line where you went off. Suspension of disbelief is the standard I want to be held to.

The Atmosphere of Habitability

In January I called this “The Monkey Goes East.” Confucian Asia - Japan first, then South Korea and Taiwan, then China, with Singapore and Hong Kong as instructive cousins - has produced a form of modern existence that we keep describing in borrowed terms. We club Meiji with Hiroshima and then with the American security umbrella. We file China under the communist revolution and its aftermath. That carving up worked while we all lived inside the Liberal International Order and it works badly now that we don’t. I wanted to look at the period from Meiji onward as though it had its own logic, its own drivers, its own principles, and to do it with the metabology I stumbled into last year while reading Machiavelli in a planetary frame.

Kaiser Kuo and Adam Tooze supplied the provocation that China is the master key to understanding the future of modernity. But these days I am a one-trick pony, and everything I think and write about has to do with the planet in some fashion. China may not be the master key to understanding Planetarity, but it’s an essential key nevertheless, and Sinosophy is the atmospheric counterpart to the analytic investigation of Habitability I restarted a couple of weeks.

Habitability, as I set it up a couple of weeks ago, asks three questions. Who maintains the metabolic order, across what durations, and in the face of what otherness. Those are engineering questions and I want them answered in protocols. But each of them has an atmospheric background, which is the question of what it feels like to live inside a planetary order. Sinosophy is going to work in that background.

Sinosophy: Planetarity with Chinese Characteristics.

PS:“With Chinese characteristics” is Deng’s formula for swallowing a foreign universal without asking the original owners for permission, and then daring anyone to say the result isn’t the real thing. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics.” It’s ideological metabolism: something comes in from outside, gets broken down, and comes out as fresh conceptual muscle. Planetarity is my reigning universal, and I want to see what happens when it’s digested by China. The Chinese planet doesn’t have to be the same as the American planet…

There’s an ancient precedent. Qi 氣 gets translated as vital energy, which is how it ends up in wellness brochures next to yoga mats, but the character also connotes steam, breath, air, weather. Qi is atmosphere in the literal sense before its atmosphere in the figurative one. And the vernacular art built on it, Feng Shui, wind and water, is a body of practice about where to put a house given the slope of the land, the direction the cold comes from, the way water moves and where it pools. A pattern language for habitability, roughly two thousand years older than Christopher Alexander’s (though if you read his “Timeless Way of Building,” you will see the Chinese inspiration). ‘Prana’ in Sanskrit has some of the same resonances, connecting breath, atmosphere, animality and life.

I’m not going to claim Feng Shui works, no more so than I am going to claim Vastu works or Ayurveda is better than Allopathy. I don’t know whether it works and I’m not equipped to find out. I am quite fine with admitting that Ayurvedic remedies often haven’t been validated in clinical trials. What interests me is that a civilization built a transmissible, quasi-technical practice whose whole subject is the habitability of a site, and built it without a concept of nature standing in contrast to a concept of society. The house, the hill, the prevailing wind and the dead ancestors sit in one system.

Journey to the West is a road story in which the road is populated by beings who are not human, sometimes demonic, and mostly indifferent to the monk’s errand. Mountains that object to being crossed. Rivers with residents. A landscape you negotiate with rather than traverse. Spivak says the planet is in the species of alterity and we inhabit it on loan. The Monkey knows that in his bones, and keeps reminding the monk about it.

The Yang of Habitability has many patterns - instruments for making a concept executable such as the Field Note, the Institutional Prototype, the Draft Protocol and the Speculative World. The Yin of Sinosophy approaches the same problems of Governance, Time and Space, and Alterity without adding atmospheric patterns. I’m suspicious of my urge to invent patterns, because the moment I do, I’ve turned a mood into a system, but I am open to the possibility that such a Sisyphean task is part of the deal.

Downside: I don’t know whether this atmosphere is believable. I might end up assembling a flattering mood, call it a Confucian Planetarity, and end up with a pitiful version of Chinamaxxing. A person born and brought up in China should be able to read this without wincing, even while thinking I’ve got every detail wrong.

Monthly, then, alternating with habitability. An essay that engineers followed by an essay that evokes. Xuanzang went west and came back with sutras that took the rest of his life to translate. I’m going the other way without the Tang emperor paying for my travels. No sutras. I’ll settle for a few weather reports.

Developed in the 2026-08 essay Sinosophy.

Emperor Wu of Liang asked the great master Bodhidharma, "What is the highest meaning of the holy truths?" Bodhidharma said, "Empty, without holiness." The Emperor said, "Who is facing me?" Bodhidharma replied, "I don't know."

First pass, 10 Aug 2026

Whether the Emperor is asking a question or making a claim, and whether "I don't know" is a refusal or an answer.

Forgive me for a very long essay. This article is going out on the first Monday of the year, but for reasons I explain at the end, the project outlined in it will take a while to go public.

TLDR: 👇🏾 check out the infographic 👇🏾

The Musician and the Professor

I’ll start with two names: Kaiser Kuo and Adam Tooze.

Chances are, you haven’t heard of either, but of the two, Adam is by far the better known. Even if you haven’t heard his name, you might have heard the concept he’s made famous: “Polycrisis.” Tooze is an acclaimed historian at Columbia, a writer of thick books, who pivoted to being perpetually online and has become the resident liberal sage on Twitter.

One of the few academics who has become a celebrity on Twitter.

Kaiser Kuo, is best known for his Sinica podcast, though he has also had avatars as a musician - having fronted a band called ‘Tang Dynasty’- and a writer. I had heard a couple of Sinica episodes but Kuo’s name stuck in my head after I read a remarkable essay written by him: The Great Reckoning: What the West Should Learn From China. Very early on in that essay, Kuo quotes Tooze saying:

“China isn’t just an analytical problem,” he said. It is “the master key to understanding modernity.” Tooze called China “the biggest laboratory of organized modernizations there has ever been or ever will be at this level [of] organization.”

Both Kuo and Tooze are obsessed with the possibility that the future of modernity is in China, not the West - a disorienting thought. Confucian modernity, centered on China, but with distinct East Asian variants is an emerging reality, one whose idioms and reflexes aren’t widely understood. Now pair Tooze’s and Kuo’s sober assessments with this take from Afra Wang’s recent essay in the Ideas Newsletter:

His China did not arrive through the frameworks I inherited from college professors, journalists, or scholars. It came through other channels: viral videos of synchronized drone shows, TikTok montages of Shenzhen’s skyline, tech bloggers’ analysis of DeepSeek’s efficiency, Cantonese rap circulating through global youth culture, hardware tutorials filmed in Hangzhou studios by Chinese tech influencers. For Aadil, China is more than a geopolitical puzzle. China is modernity itself.

Note the last line!

Besides Afra’s (or rather, Aadil’s) pronouncements, there are many signs there’s a distinctly Confucian modernity that can’t be reduced to a history of Capitalism or post-war growth. Take the crudest measure of success: GDP growth figures of Japan, Singapore, South Korea,Taiwan and China since 1945. Pretty remarkable isn’t it? Seen from a Western lens, these societies are quite different - some are officially “Communist,” some are American protectorates and one is a city state. Nevertheless, they have something in common. After all, if you took a picture of Europe since 1945, you would also see city states, communist societies and American protectorates, but you wouldn’t want to deny their collective European-ness would you?

How might we understand Confucian modernity on its own terms?

What does Confucian modernity mean for the rest of us, those who don’t belong to either engine of history, West or East?

I want to understand the metabology underlying this remarkable rise, the combination of political, economic and material order that makes Confucian Asia the (likely) most important part of the globe in the 21st century. And just to be clear: this future isn’t all rosy - the social control and hierarchical order we see across today’s China, and especially its metastasized versions in Xinjiang and Tibet, are as disturbing as the alienated dystopias we inherit from the West.

Some of us as CONFUCED

I want to spend some time exploring this question, but not as a Whig history of Confucian modernity starting with Kongzi and ending with Xi Jingping. Therefore, I can rule out certain outcomes right away:

1. A scholarly account of China, whether modern or ancient. I am not going to be a historian, a philologist, an intellectual historian or anything that scholars in the “Letters” part of the “School of Letters and Sciences” tend to do.

2. An ethnographic account of China, based on extensive personal travel and time spent with communities there. Not going to happen this year or any year in the near future. No Breakneck in the Dan Wang style either.

3. A technology analyst who looks at Chinese advances in AI and renewables or someone who reports on China’s emerging leadership in Climate Action.

4. A new cold war analysis of China versus the US and their relative strengths. Is China winning? Will the US back China into a corner? Nope, not me.

These are important functions, but they are all being done by people way more knowledgeable than I am. I would rather write murder mysteries with a Chinese detective as the main protagonist than an academic text. More seriously, I believe:

1. There’s such a thing as the Confucian Metabology, with historical continuity and a modern avatar.

2. Modern Confucian metabology is distinct from other metabologies but mutually comprehensible to the others. It’s not exotic at all; in fact, it’s familiar. This is most certainly not the ‘Clash of Civilizations,’ but it’s not convergence to the liberal ‘End of History’ either. That’s what’s fascinating about our current moment.

3. Discerning the (idealized) architecture of Confucian metabology is as much the task of the Cognitive Scientist as it is that of a historian.

4. That idealized architecture is never going to be found in some pure form in actual Confucian societies, but it’s the norm that the rest of us can learn from the most.

The rise of Confucian Asia - first Japan, then South Korea, Taiwan and China (including Hong Kong) and also Singapore - is a bigger story than the first Cold War or the second Cold War. Between them, they have metabolized democracy, capitalism and Leninist communism. In combination, they present the biggest challenge to Western ideas, ideals and institutions in five hundred years.

Confucian modernity isn’t exotic or unintelligible - no more so than France is to Americans - but it’s a distinct form of modern existence.

We are used to explaining this emerging Confucian alternative in western conceptual terms. Japan’s rise from the Meiji restoration onward is always clubbed with its defeat to the US, the dropping of the nuclear bomb and then subsumed under the US empire. In this recounting, Korea is part of the American empire too. And then China’s rise is seen as part of the communist revolution and its aftermath. That’s carving up Confucian modernity along Euro-American Cold War lines, which was fine as long as we were living inside the Liberal International Order, but surely it’s a bad schema for describing Confucian modernity itself! I want to explore Confucian modernity on its own terms, where the period from the Meiji restoration onwards has its own logic.

What is that logic? What are its drivers? What are its principles?

Those are my questions. Also, on the fun side of this exploration, I want to understand why embodied AI (robotics, industrial automation etc) has been so much bigger in Confucian Asia than in the West with geopolitical consequences, but I am less interested in the politics around Embodied AI than in understanding if there’s a strain of Confucian Intelligence that can be contrasted with the Cartesian Intelligence that dominates western thinking and engineering around AI. Way back when I was a kid, my brother and I were major fans of this Japanese TV show called The Giant Robot, and it never struck me until now that the humanoid imagination arising out of Japan and now led by China might have deep cultural roots. Think about it as the Embodied Mind with Chinese Characteristics.

We - and by “we” I mean “all of humanity” - face unprecedented challenges in the 21st century. So far, we have assumed, despite loud protests in some quarters, that the way out of our Polyconflicts will be grasped on terms set by WEIRD people. That time has come to an end. Our planetary future will not only be dictated by WEIRDs (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democracies, it will be influenced by the CONFUCED (Confucian Eastern Dominions) too.

I don’t expect the ascent of the CONFUCED to end for any reason besides demographic ones - TFRs ~ 1.0 is a bigger problem than tariff, sanction or war.

Chindia

An aside on a matter of personal concern

Twenty years ago, it was common to combine China and India into a single emerging conglomeration called “Chindia.” We were the poster children of neoliberal development - growing at a fast clip, destinations for outsourced manufacturing (China) and outsourced services (India).

Chindia feels quaint, if not laughable. China is no longer emerging. It has emerged. As infrastructure goes, it is a ‘developed’ country. India, meanwhile, is stuck in a deadly combination of crony capitalism and authoritarian politics. As I write this piece, Delhi’s AQI is 279. Beijing’s is 26. A lot of India is unbreathable and unlivable in comparison to most places East of it.

Steve Jobs famously said that “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” You could say the same about Development. It has to work. I am not a fan of high energy and material use models of growth, or a single party state for that matter, but most of the Indian elite has bought into both. They want the trains to run on time, and they want the masses to do what they are told. And self serving as they are, that elite hasn’t delivered the outcomes they themselves desire.

Take a cab from Bangalore’s airport to the city center, and you will pass hoardings of real estate developments that promise a Singapore (or Shanghai) life in your private bubble. What happens outside the gates of that bubble isn’t their concern.

The fact is, even our elites are dispensable. Our most important export - software - is getting eaten alive by AI. India, as a credible alternative to Western modernity, is a pipe dream and the culture that has replaced it is unattractive to everyone besides those who have drunk the kool-aid. Absolutely no one thinks we are a hedge against China, and any romance about the Ramakrishna-Tagore-Gandhi-Ramana alternative to muscular modernity is long gone. Instead, we have been consumed by political Hinduism, aka Hindutva, which is repulsive. Let’s not forget about caste either, which has to be annihilated. A lot of our problems are due to (mostly upper caste Hindu male) Indian elites preferring to lord it over their small pond while ignoring the ocean that’s knocking on our doors. No wonder the rupee is in free fall (breached 90/dollar while I was writing this essay).

We have self-serving elites, who would rather protect their social and economic position than to let the rising tide lift all boats: both during the license raj and post-liberalization.

Let me illustrate this claim with six points derived from this interview with Ha-Joon Chang:

1. We started about the same as our Confucian counterparts, but they made better investments and better choices.

2. We have a ‘trader’ mentality that would rather make a quick buck via finance than invest in manufacturing.

3. We don’t invest in the future or think in the long term: our investments in human capital development and R & D are shockingly small.

4. The few advantages we have are going to be swallowed by AI, which is a bigger threat to us than to most others. The same is true of climate change, but that’s a story for another day.

5. Our elite fights tooth and nail to keep its relative position, even if it means weakening us relative to the rest of the world.

6. We need to spread the wealth if we are to stand a chance.

1. We started about the same

South Korea was a very poor country until the early 60s. In 1961, India’s per capita income was $88 and South Korea’s was $94. Essentially, the same level of development.

South Korea also protected its fledgling industries:

In 1976, Hyundai produced 10,000 cars. That year, Ford produced 1.9 million cars. General Motors was approaching 4.8 million cars. Now if South Korea had free trade in cars back then, Hyundai would have disappeared overnight… This is what is called infant industry protection. They developed automobile, electronics, shipbuilding, all these industries through similar measures.

India was only superficially similar:

In India, until the 1980s, protection was used to preserve existing producers rather than giving them the space to accumulate production capabilities and go out in the bigger world to fight…That kind of protectionism doesn’t work. Protection only works when you use it to develop your own infant industries, so that they can export to the global market.

2. We want to make a quick buck

The business elites are either in the financial sector or, even if they are in the industrial sector, they still have very strong links with financial capital which doesn’t like industrialisation because, for them, the most important thing is the rate of return….Your elites do not want to wait for 10 or 15 years and sacrifice short-term financial returns to build productive capabilities.

3. We don’t invest in the future

You need to invest in worker skills, infrastructure, and research and development (R&D). I looked up the latest data on R&D in India, and as a proportion of GDP, it is barely 0.6 per cent, compared to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) average of 3 per cent, and South Korea’s 5.2 per cent.

which is why we don’t build the future:

Secondly, India has been touted as a success story of services-based development. But this strategy, when compared to what China has achieved in the last 25 years, pales into insignificance….

4. AI is going to eat our lunch

I am not one of those people who think that AI will completely change the world in the next five years…India will be one of the biggest casualties of AI. It needs to get out of there, it needs to industrialise.

5. We don’t take care of our own

Consider East Asian countries where, despite all kinds of bad things happening, military dictatorship, one party rule, repression of worker rights and everything, they sustained their growth trajectory because they shared that growth with the poorer people. All of them had land reforms and, even though they had very small welfare states, they had a lot of protection for the weak guys.

6. But we absolutely need to

So, this extensive concentration of wealth at the top in India is a huge problem…. Even if you belong to the elite, it is in your long-term self-interest to share some of your wealth with the poorer segments of the society. Because otherwise, they will destroy the system.

I can’t stress how precarious a moment this is for India. We got lucky for the first 75 years after independence. We had exceptional leadership for the first two decades, and even after Nehru’s death, the Cold War gave us maneuvering room and then, when the Soviet Union collapsed, we had our niche in Pax Americana.

None of those conditions hold anymore.

The liberal international order has collapsed and the new multipolar world is a dangerous place. One in which we have no friends or well-wishers because we are bereft of kindness ourselves. Indian social media personalities gloating over Palestinian children getting killed en masse is all you need to know about the state of our public discourse. AI is automating the few good jobs we created, though as coolies, and if that weren’t enough, climate change is going to devastate large parts of the sub-continent.

We are heading towards a civilization crisis - if not collapse - and the only thing we are capable of doing is building temples upon the ruins of mosques and calling it justice for centuries of humiliation. When a bully claims to be the victim, you know that:

• truth is the real victim

• you invite bigger bullies to show who is the real boss

When you don’t matter, others can choose to be patronizingly generous, or bully the fuck out of you. In today’s world, the latter is our lot. Cue the immense uptick in anti-Indian racism in the West and tariffs picked out of a hat.

Ever since the anti-colonial independence struggle, Indians have thought that they offer an alternative modernity. Dream on. Meanwhile Confucian Asia, with China at its center - is showing its fleshed out and increasingly attractive alternative. We may not like it or want to emulate it, but Indians need to introspect and change, and studying the idealized metabolite of CONFUCED societies is a necessary component of that introspection.

I am not naive in thinking China is a friend in the making; that’s unlikely to be true in my lifetime. But we can learn from our adversaries can’t we? Isn’t that what the Japanese did when Commodore Perry came knocking on their door?

I will never want to give up our diversity, our resistance to uniformity, our love of argument and metaphysical speculation, the genuine religiosity and the deep acceptance of the non-human world. But we need to open the windows of our house to the winds of the world.

The “Great Reckoning,” as Kuo calls it, demands intellectual honesty. The West must acknowledge China’s successes without dismissing them or clinging to outdated narratives that expect China to fail or conform to Western norms. The same goes for India - there’s no need to surrender our civilizational strengths, but we should learn from China’s achievements and strengthen our institutions through clear-eyed self-examination.

We have to understand both the good and the bad parts. I really like these lines from an amazing conversation between Jordan Schneider and Dan Wang:

you have four decades of astonishing growth from China, in which the country was growing at a rate of 8 or 9%. That created tremendous wealth, alleviated poverty, and made a lot of Chinese right now feel really good about what the country was able to accomplish. This is where I really want to grapple with both the good aspects as well as the bad aspects of China. Yes, it’s absolutely the case that the wealth creation here was astonishing. That has been much more impressive than what any other developing country was able to achieve — India, Indonesia, Brazil have not had the economic takeoff that China enjoyed that brought so many people out of misery and poverty.

At the same time, we have more novel forms of political repression that humanity has never seen before. Both of these trends are real, and they both have to be acknowledged.

And

Xi comes off as someone who is a little too eager for groveling respect from the rest of the world, which is exactly why he’ll never get it.

Modi and Trump are cut from the same cloth, but Xi has the greatest leeway of the three to impose his whims. We will do well to understand the maximalist version of authoritarianism.

Charting a Course

How can we learn from the CONFUCED? What does Planetarity look like if it emerges from CONFUCED societies? WEIRD culture beams into our homes and screens 24/7, but we have very little exposure to the Middle Kingdom. Here’s my plan:

1. Read some ancients: Kongzi, Mengzi, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Xunzi, Hanfeizi, Mozi etc.

2. Read some moderns: Hui Wang, Wang Huning, Dan Wang…

3. Read some old novels: Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, Dream of the Red Chamber…

4. Read some new novels: Lu Xun, Mo Yan, Jin Yong, Liu Cixin…

5. Read some Tang dynasty poetry: Li Bai, Du Fu, Han Shan…

6. Read some Indian things that went East: Buddhist literature in particular, and Chan Buddhist literature to be even more precise.

7. Read some India → China things that went even further East: Dogen comes to mind, but also more contemporary figures such as Nishida Kitaro.

That’s an assortment of things that have struck my fancy. And a drop in the Confucian ocean. And these are the big names.

At some point I will tire of the superstars and start exploring lesser known figures. There’s also the flow of contemporary events - a steady drip of ongoing news about what’s going on in China today, whether politics, economics, tech, business or art, with many contemporary guides: I have already mentioned Kuo and Tooze, but let me also acknowledge Yuen Yuen Ang and her work on Polytunity.

Then what?

Not this, Not that

I don’t know what will come out of this exercise.

Not this

The outcome shouldn’t insult a Chinese citizen or scholar. I am not interested in producing a hagiography in the “Making China Great Again” genre. I am not interested in showing how India used to be great and how we did China a favor by exporting Buddhism across the Himalayas.

Yes, but

On the plus side, the writing should feel true and insightful to a person born and brought up in China - even if it’s not true and insightful about China, like how Gobi Manchurian isn’t a Chinese dish at all, but can be a delicious snack when prepared well in an Indian restaurant.

Not that

It should be a work of philosophy, but not one that can be produced in academia, or its opposite - by an ‘organic intellectual’ either. It shouldn’t be scholarly or popular. Neither factual nor fictional. And if that’s not enough: all of it should be written under the condition of Planetarity; I am trying to understand Confucian Metabology after all.

And…

I want to grok China as China, without being reductive. I’m OK mistaking the Dragon for a Dinosaur, but I don’t want to be a blind monk that grasps the tail of the Dragon and thinks it’s a snake.

Most importantly, as a complete beginner to this exercise in metabolic and cultural understanding, I want to write in the simplest and most easily understandable language. I want to ELI5 myself, and then share that understanding with others. This essay is far from ELI5, so forgive me this one time and hold me to that standard from now on.

Wall Staring

There’s a semi-mythical South Indian route through these paradoxes; it’s sometimes said that Bodhidharma, the monk who founded Chan Buddhism (Chan = Zen, both being derivatives of the Sanskrit Dhyan) was a Pallava prince from Kanchipuram, not too far from my ancestral home. South India has a long history of contact with China; among other things, the wealth that funded Raja Raja Chola’s spectacular Brihadeeswara Temple came from trade with China via Srivijaya. There’s a Ramayana connection too - Anthony Yu points out in his translation of “Journey to the West“ that there are many similarities between the Monkey character in Wu Cheng’en’s Epic and Hanuman in Valmiki’s Ramayana.

Correlation? Causation?

I don’t know.

That don’t know mind is also in operation in the first case of the Blue Cliff Record:

Emperor Wu of Liang asked the great master Bodhidharma, “What is the highest meaning of the holy truths?” Bodhidharma said, “Empty, without holiness.” The Emperor said, “Who is facing me?” Bodhidharma replied, “I don’t know.” The Emperor did not understand. After this Bodhidharma crossed the Yangtse River and came to the kingdom of Wei.

Did Bodhidharma actually say so to Emperor Wu? Did he actually meditate for nine years facing the Shaolin Temple Wall after cutting off his eyelids? His trip East might have ended in tragedy: in one account, Bodhidharma was killed by the banks of the Luo river in the mass executions at Heyin. Is that true?

I don’t know.

But the koan gives us an opening to lay a mythical road from India to China and back. They say about Chan that it is “a separate transmission outside the scriptures.” I don’t know if a separate transmission is possible under conditions of Planetarity. Or desirable. I hope so! But failure is always an option - my efforts can join a long line.

Buddhism - both its conceptual categories and its historical trajectory - gives us a rope to hold on to as we travel to the East and back.

In Parting

Towards the beginning of this essay, I mentioned that I want to understand Confucian Modernity in China with Japan and Korea as sister exemplars; but that project requires a continuous thread from Kongzi to Xi Jinping. Nation states love to invent historical continuity, but is it real?

I don’t know.

I am biased towards a positive answer, but that doesn’t mean I will take it for granted. Even if the continuity is a fact, one has to do a lot of work to show that today’s investments in Embodied AI are of a piece with the Laozi and the Blue Cliff Record. I am not sure it’s possible to show metabolic continuity across the centuries, and even if it’s possible in principle, whether I am the right person to explore that question.

I will be happy with the Gobi Manchurian version of China’s intellectual history.

Wu Cheng-En’s “The Monkey Goes West” is a fictionalized, mythical account of Xuanzang’s long pilgrimage to India. Is it an accurate account of Xuanzang’s travels? Nope. Does it capture the essence of Xuanzang’s pilgrimage and why it was considered a landmark event? Absolutely.

It’s time for the Monkey to go East.

There’s continuity with last year’s intent. If you remember, I started by reading Machiavelli’s The Prince in a planetary frame and over the course of the year meandered into metabolics and metabology. There’s no way I could have predicted the ending from the beginning. In retrospect, I wasn’t reading the Prince for reading the Prince, but to open up new planetary pathways. Perhaps this year will be the same. I will start with reading Chinese texts in translation, give them a planetary reading and see whether I can monkey Confucian metabology as I go.

It’s going to take a while for me to make these Sinological musings public. In the meantime, I will continue with planetary and metabological analyses, both of my own as well as reviews of contemporary texts.

In his book on the Propensity of Things, Francois Jullien starts his discussion of Shi (the Chinese concept that’s the main concern of Jullien’s book) with an analysis of military strategy. He talks about how a good general senses the natural order of the terrain, his weapons and other resources and arranges them in a manner that assure victory. It’s not victory due to heroism or clever battlefield maneuvers - the standard fare in Indo-European myth as well history - but due to the general being at the right place at the right time.

Thinking about this tension in Indian terms, it’s as if the Mahabharata war wasn’t won by Arjuna but by Krishna - the former merely placed the arrow in his bow when he was told to, but it was the latter who arranged the situation such that the war happened in the circumstances that it did. The Chinese might say the war was won by the only non-combatant.

Since these texts were written in the Warring States period, battle metaphors migrated into other parts of the Chinese intellectual tradition, becoming the order of things as such. Today, there’s a similar metaphor that penetrates all human activity, the generator of all order: the market. We have money as money of course, but we also have social capital, human capital, natural capital and moral capital. We can’t grasp the world unless we impose a market on it. The GND is no exception.

Al Gore wears that economic hat as he introduces Biden’s task ahead, including what might become the GND (without naming it as such).

Gore’s Vision of the Future

Gore starts thus:

The pandemic was Trump’s downfall and a successful response to the second phase - vaccine distribution, followed by a strong economic recovery - could be the making of Biden’s presidency. Note how Gore frames the most important problems facing Biden - he starts with the economy and ends on a high note with climate. That’s the universality of the market speaking right there: you can’t talk about climate without talking about how to put bread on the table.

And then he talks about the climate crisis is an opportunity to renegotiate the basic contract of society, of building ‘a more just and equitable way of life.’ It’s easy to laugh this off as propaganda, but if liberalism isn’t able to offer this possibility as a genuine and likely outcome of its method, it will fail. The architects of the liberal order know that. But that requires a recognition of the fact that the real battle has moved to a higher and more treacherous terrain:

In other words, liberalism has to expand to include ecology. That’s both exciting and daunting and opens itself to a range of challengers - deep ecologists who say we need to privilege the rights of nature first, degrowth proponents who think the economy should not just be transformed, but reduced. At the other end are the fossil fuel authoritarians who will continue to build coal plants and prospect for oil.

Deep ecology might not be in contradiction with this vision - a transfer of regime argument might say we need to scale liberal institutions rapidly and create the infrastructure to draw down carbon by 2050 but once that task is done, we should manage a final transition to an ecological rather than economic regime. Perhaps a utopian dream that reminds you of the Marxist idea that capitalism development is needed before a society is ready for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

That’s the what. Tomorrow I will cover Gore’s ideas of how the liberal order could win the climate battle. I will leave you with a hint - a short list of the most important agents of transformation according to Gore.

I am beginning to read the French Sinologist, Francois Jullien’s ‘The Propensity of Things.’ It’s a book on a single Chinese idiogram/concept: Shi, which denotes the power of things, but imprecisely so.

I won’t say too much about the book itself, but juxtaposing a polysemic Chinese term next to more strictly defined Aristotelian terms strikes me as a successful intellectual strategy - it destabilizes both sides and opens up new terrains for inquiry.

Instead of writing about ‘Biden’s route to power’ I could call this entire series of T2B posts “The Shi of Biden;” that shift in perspective might reveal insights about how Biden will rule.

Moving on

This is the last post in the Xiden series. I am feeling pleased with myself for reading the tea leaves for an A- grade. Biden just gave an interview to Tom Friedman (Tom is back!), in which he says about China and trade:

On China, he said he would not act immediately to remove the 25 percent tariffs that Trump imposed on about half of China’s exports to the United States — or the Phase 1 agreement Trump inked with China that requires Beijing to purchase some $200 billion in additional U.S. goods and services during the period 2020 and 2021 — which China has fallen significantly behind on.

and how he’s going to create an international coalition that

gets every one of our — or at least what used to be our — allies on the same page. It’s going to be a major priority for me in the opening weeks of my presidency to try to get us back on the same page with our allies.

and back home he will

developing a bipartisan consensus at home for some good old American industrial policy — massive, government-led investments in American research and development, infrastructure and education to better compete with China

Bill Bishop at Sinocism says:

Building a “united front” on China will not be easy, but it will be a lot easier in 2021 than it would have been in 2019 given the pandemic and the PRC's behavior over the last year. Such a united front is something that could cause Xi and his CCP real problems. They know that and have been trying to forestall it, but somehow the diplomats who have armed their minds with Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy seem to be flailing at their attempts, at least among traditional US allies

Remember the Cold War strategy of Containment was a liberal strategy. Watch this space….

Raincheck

Too late to talk in this series, but I discovered that Xi spent several days with Biden in 2011-12 when he was one step removed from the pinnacle, like Biden.

I also discovered this essay on “Ideological Security as National Security” a bit too late to cover it in the Xiden series. Along with another essay by Tai Ming Cheung, we are beginning to see a coherent articulation of the Chinese National Security State.

China under Xi Jinping is seeking to establish itself as a leading power on the international stage, and the development of a more capable and assertive national security state is a critical component in this grand endeavor. This has meant that the country’s national security posture is in transition from being primarily defensively minded to combining both defensive and offensive elements. Xi talks about pursuing a "new type of international relations with win-win co-operation at its core,” forging a “community of destiny for humanity” that emphasizes peace, shared security, and common prosperity, and taking the “road of peaceful development.”

While I am as cynical as the next guy, I tend to take such pronouncements at face value - i.e., that Xi Jinping can simultaneously create a National Security State and see his historical destiny as taking the world on the road to peaceful development, just as the US was likely sincere about bringing freedom to Iraq.

The mismatch isn’t between overt truth and covert lie, but something else. A discussion for another day. Here’s what Lee Kuan Yew has to say about Xi 👇🏾

Can someone have iron in his soul and in Nelson Mandela’s class of persons? LKY thinks so. But it may also be that a National Security State has broad acceptance. In this essay on Xi, Andrew Nathan says:

Xi holds office at a time when the regime has to confront a series of daunting challenges that have all reached critical stages at once. It must manage a slowing economy; mollify millions of laid-off workers; shift demand from export markets to domestic consumption; whip underperforming giant state-owned enterprises into shape; dispel a huge overhang of bad bank loans and nonperforming investments; ameliorate climate change and environmental devastation that are irritating the new middle class; and downsize and upgrade the military.

And the system might well decide that such a complex moment needs a son of the people:

his two immediate predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, exercised these roles within a system of collective leadership….This model does not produce leadership sufficiently decisive to satisfy Xi and his supporters. So Xi has sidelined the other members of the Politburo Standing Committee, except for the propaganda chief Liu Yunshan and the anticorruption watchdog Wang Qishan.

Modi is making similar moves in India. There’s nothing foregone about creating an authoritarian National Security State even in China but the possibility has opened worldwide and becoming more attractive by the day.

Correlating China and Climate

Let me end this exploration of China and the US with a quote about ‘shi’ from Jullien:

This is of course correlative thought at work - if you recall, I started the Xiden series with a hat tip to correlative thought.

Intuitively, it was clear to me that the transition (and any history or philosophy of the present) will benefit from correlative thinking, for the present moment forces us to move across domains - from climate to covid to national security to cabinet appointments and so on. I am hoping the ‘shi of Biden’ will give us the correlative conceptual tools to understand the transition in greater depth.

We typically use visual metaphors while discussing of intellectual cultures, but I am proposing an alternative, digestive approach to thought: of eating the ideas of cultures past and present, being nourished by them and then responding to the world we find ourselves. Jullien says:

That shift away from teleology is important for us, for it’s all too easy to read conspiracies, grand strategies and other teleological devices into the Trump to Biden transition (typical example: ‘Last hope for liberal internationalism’) but the present has too many possibilities to be reduced to a single teleological narrative. It has liberal internationalism, but it also has China, Climate and COVID and other minor planets that still exert a gravitational pull.

A few days of tidbits before I turn to climate.

Rachel Lopez has been taking taxis in Mumbai and photographing herself inside them. Turns out that they are the destination inside the journey.

But once you've scored a taxi, get in and look up. You'll notice a canvas that holds the most unusual art. Approximately half the city’s cabs decorate their ceilings and doors in some kind of colorful plastic or vinyl sheeting.

If you’re lucky, you might get the common fruit design — photos of melons, berries, kiwis, even a sliced papaya, all cobbled together…. There are neat geometrics, subtle two-tone filigree patterns, delicate cherry blossoms, garish zebra prints and monstrous bouquets. The truly fortunate may even see the unicorn of taxis: a fully mirrored ceiling with a chandelier affixed just behind the driver’s head.

Enjoy.

Capitalist Theology

The political philosopher and jurist, Carl Schmitt coined the term ‘Political Theology’ to understand the conduct of politics within a theological frame. The best modern example is Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ thesis that said that human history has ended not with the day of judgment but with the victory of liberal democracy and capitalist economics.

Fukuyama was half-right: thirty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, it’s clear that liberalism is no longer the fulfillment of our political hopes but capitalism has entrenched itself as the only economic system worth considering. It’s day of judgment will also come, but for now, we are in the realm of Capitalist Theology.

However, now that capitalism has swallowed the world, we are seeing older debates returning in digested form, as debates within the capitalist system rather than debates about the capitalist system and its rivals. Of those, neoliberal capitalism is the dominant theological system but confucian capitalism is fast emerging as an upstart dogma. LKY thinks China still has a ways to go before it can truly become an international empire, which will mean accepting and promoting a select group of outsiders to positions of power in its own system.

Which is as good a point as any to remind everyone that immigration and emigration are imperial tools - why raise walls when you can bomb people wherever they are?

China suffers from English being the language of global commerce and culture, but it’s possible that might change with sufficient investment over the coming decades. I don’t see how the US and China can avoid theological competition after Trump and COVID. Will it be another cold war? Will it take some other shape? I don’t know, but it’s no longer possible to deny that there’s a theological difference alongside all the other reasons for China and the US to be on a collision course.

Many Fronts

What are the points of conflict and what are the avenues for cooperation?

Conflict

1. Trade - deficits, tariffs…

2. Natural resources - oil, minerals…

3. Military/Political hotspots - Taiwan, Hong Kong…

Cooperation

1. Shoring up the capitalist system!

2. Climate change

The conflicts are easier to document since there’s plenty of press about them. I will start with them tomorrow.

Afterword

There are many wack jobs in this world and a surprising number of them have found their way into Trump’s legal team. One of them - Sidney Powell - was found to be too extreme even for that team.

Tweet by @oneunderscore__

There’s this romantic belief in Popperian science where all scientific theories have to be falsifiable. Scientists rarely submit themselves to falsification, but at least they have to respond to their critics. At some point, lack of evidence leads to theory change.

Conspiracies are the exact opposite. If you can’t find evidence, it’s because the Devil or the Deep State is hiding it. If evidence doesn’t turn up after systematic efforts to uncover it, well, isn’t that actually evidence for the Devil/Deep State’s overwhelming power? Who else would be able to plant their moles everywhere and erase all traces of criminality?

If anything, Trump’s loss is the perfect hatchery for QAnon culture, which will now fester in ‘alternative’ social networks such as Parler. Trump will abet these conspiracies without any constraints on his behavior.

Biden is in a tough spot - tackling Trump and QAnon head on might inflame the conspiracy but letting it fester is not bound to end well either.

The infamous term ‘POC,’ People of Color, might be a political oxymoron, in that it doesn’t describe a group of people who share anything besides not being white. For example, California voted overwhelmingly for Biden and yet equally emphatically defeated Proposition 16, which (somewhat confusingly) was a proposition designed to end the ban on affirmative action. Asian (and increasingly Hispanic) communities are in conflict with African Americans (and other Hispanic) communities on the value of affirmative action in higher education.

However, in a twist upon the twist, Proposition 17 (voting rights for previously incarcerated people) was passed overwhelmingly, which, given the racist politics of incarceration, is clearly to the benefit of African Americans. Moral, economic and racial interests are all intertwined in POC politics.

This article is a good overview of POC politics

Confucian Capitalism

First, a hat-tip to Cliden: John Kerry has been appointed climate czar, a cabinet level appointment with the National Security Council. Kerry himself was a presidential candidate in 2004, a long term Massachusetts senator and a Secretary of State under Obama. Which means he has the heft needed to start making climate deals with China (you knew there was going to be a link to Xiden didn’t you?). Climate may become a bigger part of the US trade negotiations and if combined with a Green New Deal (or something similar without that name, which is a lightning rod on the right) might signal a massive shift in the US economy.

Let’s first ask how China got to re-embrace Master Kong. In my reading, it was born out of failure rather than success. The two prongs of that fork:

1. The failure of the Maoist revolutionary state - from Deng onward, the CCP has considered the Maoist era as one of chaos and turbulence, certainly not the harmonious society that Xi talks about today. Exporting revolution was no longer state policy.

2. The failure of the communist economy with the end of the Soviet Union. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, there was no alternative left to capitalism as Branko Milanovic has argued persuasively.

So the CCP has a branding problem: how do you retain the legitimacy of a one-party state while shifting the economy to a mode of production that’s famously cyclic and prone to bubbles and busts. Further, how to do so in a globalizing world in which knowledge industries and cognitive capitalism are increasingly decisive?

In case you were wondering whether China is capitalist at all, seeing as it’s run by the Communist Party

Tweet by @BrankoMilan

How about embracing a philosophical system that’s the most important tradition in Chinese history:

• a tradition that emphasizes hard work, personal virtue and filial piety

• a tradition that affirms material production but tempers it with personal virtue

• a tradition that places great value on scholarship and knowledge

In other words, Confucian Capitalism strikes me as the perfect Chinese counterpart to the Weberian ‘Protestant Ethic’ that’s the supposed backbone of Northern European-American capitalism.

China wasn’t the first Confucian Capitalist state - that would be Singapore, and while I don’t like being caned for spitting on the sidewalk (not that I spit on sidewalks) the Singapore model is considered such a universal success that it’s a good model to emulate if you want to create an authoritarian, prosperous society. Some choice quotes from the Godfather of Singaporean success:

Investment in education, but of the practical kind that won’t turn people against the state. That state faces plenty of problems of its own:

I had to read that passage a couple of times. He’s not saying ‘the rule of the emperor’ is the problem, but its exact opposite - that in China, the rule of the law is the rule of the emperor. Explains Xi’s increasing emperorization.

I would take these view with a grain of salt. Yew’s views reflect his personal commitment to Confucian capitalism and he was a man of the past, not the future. Still, there’s so much overlap between Yew and what I have read about the Chinese leadership and portions of the intelligentsia that we have to take them seriously.

Some of these views are dogwhistle politics:

and some are outright racist

This could just be the opinions of an old man who hasn’t been told he’s wrong in a long time. But, unfortunately, LKY’s ideas seem to be echoed by the Chinese liberal intelligentsia (let alone their conservatives).

In today’s America, being a "centrist" who is both outraged at the murder of ordinary Black citizens and also finds political correctness frightening is actually quite awkward.  At this moment of division, when both sides are already fighting mad, neither side has an empathetic understanding of the other.  It’s easy to say that solidarity is important to a country, but BLM activists might well answer:  What do we base this solidarity on?  Liberal discourse is nothing but fake universalism.  This is why the movement’s slogan is “Black lives matter” and not “all lives matter.”

— from Xu Jilin, et. al., "Black Lives Matter." though also see Lin Yao, "I Beg to Differ" for a rebuttal.

I wouldn’t be surprise if Xi held similar views, though I have no way of knowing what he thinks. The star of vigorous protest politics has never been this low in Asia, India included. East Asia has handled the COVID crisis better than most other parts of the world, and China has done better than the United States. Then there’s the chaos of the election and the transition.

The backdrop to Xiden might well be a China that’s at once wary of American power and feeling like its Confucian capitalist state is a fundamentally better solution to the problem of political life than liberal democracy.

Note that China didn’t acknowledge Biden’s victory until November 13th. Modi did so (personally, unlike the formal acknowledgement by the Chinese foreign ministry) on November 7th.

Tweet by @narendramodi

Every part of this unfolding relationship suggests a cautious and strategic approach by China. They want to compete with America but get into direct conflict. They don’t want to become American but aren’t ready to turn the world Confucian either.

Biden’s challenges are different. He has a fractured mandate and in order to appear as the candidate of national unity, he will be pressured to resume a policy of ‘American Exceptionalism,’ a policy that both Obama and Clinton (H as well as W) supported but that’s best captured in Gore Vidal’s famous slogan:

Perpetual war for perpetual peace

Here Trump might have gotten something right precisely because he considers all relationships to be transactional. According to this interesting take on Trump by Branko:

In the America First policy, US will always, because of its size and importance, punch more than others but it will have no desire or illusion that it has to rule others or tell them how they should order  their internal affairs. It will behave transactionally which is indeed a policy that makes war much less likely. Interests can be negotiated, ideologies cannot.

I can’t state how amazing it is that a Republican president didn’t start a new war or escalate an old one. The Soviet Union was like the US in that it too wanted its way of life to be everyone’s way of life. China seems to be OK admitting there are genuinely plural ways of living, a proposition that was the historical norm but has never been tested under globalization with its implicit belief in American exceptionalism.

Your weekly reminder that sharing is caring. Liking ❤️ ain’t so bad either.

Share

Newslet

Tejal Rao is a food critic for the NY Times, not a section to which I pay a lot of attention. But she did this subtle takedown of French Laundry which reaffirmed my distaste for Gavin Newsom’s maskless behavior at that famed restaurant. Tejal has this new piece on a Museum of Smells, which is more a memory palace of smells - a notebook of smell memories that move people after many years. My favorite:

I recently used my soldering iron to repair some damaged wiring, and, as the soldering wire melted and released its intense odor of rosin, which is used as a flux, I was transported back to my father’s backyard shed where, for a hobby, he repaired radios and TVs.

If I could pen an entry in the museum, it would be: growing up in North India, I remember these guys who would come in a bicycle and clean large pots and pans - covered with grime after months or years of cooking - with a combination of steam and chemicals that I can never forget.

Oh, and this picture of fragrant flowers that my mom & dad just sent me.

Xiden

These updates have meandered from election data to Trump’s behavior to people worth watching and back. I want to settle down a bit and cover a few topics in depth. I will be covering Biden’s relationship with China for the next two weeks. That’s the first topic to be covered in some depth followed by climate and COVID

1. Next two weeks: Xiden, aka Biden meets China

2. Then two weeks of Cliden: Biden and Climate

3. And a final two weeks of Viden - Biden and COVID

Perhaps not in that order - Viden and Cliden could be switched if there are developments about the vaccine or case loads that need immediate attention.

These three are truly wicked problems that Biden needs to address.

Six weeks from now, we will know a lot more about the transition - who knows, Trump might have even conceded. I hope to have more to say about the shape of his administration in January.

Some apologies in advance. I have too shallow an understanding of China and its history to take on a ‘native’ perspective. So the next two weeks will be an Indian-Chinese concoction - the way Hakka Noodles are an Indian dish pretending to be from China.

I have a specific goal. One of the central features of the Chinese tradition is what’s called ‘correlative thought’ - best exemplified in the Yin-Yang symbol.

Correlative thought has correlates in India as well - the famous Upanisadic Mahavakya, ‘Tat Tvam Asi,’ comes to mind. My goal is to get a grip on the tradition of correlative thinking in China while analyzing Xiden.

The canonical references are:

1. Angus C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China,

2. Robin R. Wang, Yinyang: The Way of Heaven and Earth in Chinese Thought and Culture.

David Zilberman’s work on Modal Thought based on analogical thinking in the Indian tradition might also be useful. Zilberman is a fascinating character: a Kabbalist-Buddhist-Rationalist who also worked on sociology, anthropology etc

Zilberman died too young “in July 1977 after a car-bicycle collision while returning home from his last seminar with his students at Brandeis.” Perhaps we can build upon the modal methodology he inaugurated with a Chinese layer on top. Let’s also not forget the Roberto Calasso’s magical summary of Indian thought in Ka and the cognitive linguistic approach to correlative thinking in Lakoff and Johnson’s Philosophy in the Flesh.

Just to be sure, the marker of success isn’t to fix correlative thought inside an Aristotelian frame, but to think and write in the correlative style so that the thinking and writing feels ‘right’ to a contemporary reader.

It’s to do correlative thought. That success is a long ways away.

Quick summary of the next two weeks — In the background: correlative thought in China & India. In the foreground: Xiden.

Carving or Leaving?

I just finished Roel Sterckx’ Ways of Heaven, a one volume summary of Chinese thought. At the very end, he says:

That tension between carving and leaving alone is playing out in China’s approach to the world isn’t it? Is Xi a carver or a leaver? My bet’s on the former, for Xi is a man of his times, casting himself as the ‘son of heaven’ the traditional Chinese phrase for the Emperor, and more generally, there’s an explicit attempt in China to draw a connection between today’s China and the China of the axial age of Kong Fuzi (Confucius) and Laozi (the founder of Daoism). Unlike the USSR, which saw itself as the true inheritor of the European enlightenment (the US being the other), China is now recasting itself as having digested the enlightenment and returned to its Confucian roots. If that’s correct, China poses the first serious alternative to ‘Western civilization qua Western civilization’ in a long time. There are three possibilities here:

1. There’s genuine, unbroken continuity between the Confucian civilization of the past and the China of the present, and it’s time for the Middle Kingdom to become great again.

2. There isn’t real continuity but there’s enough imagined continuity projected back into the past to sustain the claim it’s time for the Middle Kingdom to become great again.

3. There’s neither real nor imagined continuity and the Middle Kingdom can’t be made great again.

Xi is banking on 1 & 2. Lee Kuan Yew, the famed Singaporean statesman agrees with him. In this book (next on my reading list), Yew says:

It’s not just an economic alternative; the Middle Kingdom poses a political alternative as well - the everlasting empire as Yuri Pines calls it. Of course, the Middle Kingdom can’t be a literal kingdom, while he’s a metaphorical princeling, Xi is not a hereditary ruler. Which means that we have to replace the son of heaven, with the son of the people. If that becomes a succesful model with a well defined transition, China will be an experiment in expanding the idea of sovereignty. The son of the people will have to content with the people of heaven - the desire to make China great again is widespread, perhaps the one thing all Chinese agree about, independent of how it’s done. Back to Yew:

Still when you raise expectations, you have to deliver. How easy is that going to be?

It’s seven years since that interview and we have a better sense of how they are going to fry the small fish. The temptation to go for gold must be overwhelming. I mentioned the Thucydides trap in a previous essay. We will seat the Greek general next to Master Kong in a train compartment for fourteen days and ask them to send reports of the passing scenery.

References

More for my benefit than yours, here are the references that will come in handy over the next two weeks:

1. Sterckx, R. (2019). Ways of heaven: an introduction to Chinese thought. Basic Books.

2. Allison, G., Blackwill, R. D., & Wyne, A. (2013). Lee Kuan Yew: the grand master's insights on China, the United States, and the world. MIT Press.

3. Allison, G. (2017). Destined for war: Can America and China escape Thucydides's trap?. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

4. Pines, Y. (2012). The everlasting empire: The political culture of ancient China and its imperial legacy. Princeton University Press.

5. Benite, Z. B. D., Geroulanos, S., & Jerr, N. (Eds.). (2017). The Scaffolding of Sovereignty: Global and Aesthetic Perspectives on the History of a Concept. Columbia University Press.

6. Graham, A. C. (2015). Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical argument in ancient China. Open Court.

7. Wang, R. (2012). Yinyang (Vol. 11). Cambridge University Press.

8. Zilberman, D. B. (2006). Analogy in Indian and Western philosophical thought (Vol. 243). Springer Science & Business Media.

9. Zilberman, D. B. (2012). The birth of meaning in Hindu thought (Vol. 102). Springer Science & Business Media.

10. Calasso, R. (1999). Ka: Stories of the mind and gods of India. Vintage Books.

11. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to western thought (Vol. 640). New York: Basic books.

Epilogue

If you’ve come this far, you might as well leave on a high note by

Share

We all know the internet is full of listicles. “The Top Hacks to Make America Great Again” might have well gotten Trump elected. I can assure you, however, that my lists are wholesome, GMO free and likely to enlighten you in this world and the next. Without further ado, here’s the list of readings that went into this week’s essay:

India in the World

If you want to know where India is coming from and where it’s going, you are going to have to visit the country for months if not years, talk to a lot of people, read a lot of books and stay away from the mainstream media as much as possible. However, if you only want superficial knowledge, click away at:

1. While Bengal Is in Turmoil, Men Explain Marxism to Me in which the author explains why the traditional left sucks.

2. Ashish Kothari argues that citizens need to escape the twin pincers of the state and the market in Even More Starkly, We See How Liberal Democracies are Unjust

To China with Love

India and China go way back. Of the many things I find surprising about that relationship, the most jarring is seeing India referenced as the “Western Regions.” I am sure a Chinese scholar will write (or has written) a history of western world which starts with Assam. Reminds me of:

Chan Buddhism (Zen in Japanese, Dhyan in Sanskrit) supposedly came to China from South India, via Bodhidharma who was variously a Pallava prince and a Brahmin. Bodhidharma kept going east and arrived in San Fransisco, where he gave talks on Zen that are reported in:

1. Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice

2. I also mentioned David Hinton’s translations of Classical Chinese Poetry.

3. There’s also the delightful Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei

The Form of Life

Success is almost assured if you start life with a name such as D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson. He also had the advantage of being

over six feet tall, with the build and carriage of a Viking and with the pride of bearing that comes from good looks known to be possessed

at a time when most people were short and not in possession of good looks. It was only five minutes ago I learned that

He died at his home in St Andrews after flying home from India in 1948, at the age of 87, having attended the Science Congress at Delhi, and staying in India for some months. Upon returning, "he suffered a breakdown in health, from which he never fully recovered."

Who invited him to India and why? Perhaps J.B.S Haldane if he was already there. And what was an 87 year old man doing flying to India from Scotland in 1948? I will have to follow up on this story. Anyway, more on the man here:

1. Stephen Wolfram’s surprisingly warm essay about D’Arcy Thompson. I say surprising because Wolfram isn’t known for writing about other people.

2. On Growth and Form, DAT’s magnum opus.

Phenomenology

Is the philosophical discipline inaugurated by Edmund Husserl. I like his ideas though the man himself was infected with the prejudices of his times:

Unfortunately, phenomenology starts hard and quickly goes into impenetrable territory. If you want to learn more, start with:

1. The Stanford Encyclopedia’s article on the subject.

2. Dan Zahavi’s clear presentation in a short book.

That’s it for this week. If you have made it this far don’t forget to click on the

♡ sign below.

India has a renewed government with a few new faces, the most unusual of whom is the new minister for external affairs, Subramanyam Jaishankar, a career diplomat who is now in the Cabinet Committee on Security, which instantly makes him one of the most powerful people in the country.

He's known to be an incisive thinker, an important quality at a time when India faces many external challenges - from the vagaries of the Trump era to the rise of China to international negotiations on Climate Change. It's a tough neighborhood that's only going to get more complicated.

I was reading an article about the challenges the new MEA faces when I ran into:

China sees Modi as a decisive leader and supported him by throwing him two pre-election lifelines. First, a day before the commencement of the Second Belt and Road Forum held in Beijing on April 25-27, China removed the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir in the north and Arunachal Pradesh in the northeast of India from the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) map on its website. New Delhi has boycotted the forum since China launched the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which New Delhi says violates India’s territorial integrity.

Second, China reversed its decision to oppose the designation of Masood Azhar as a global sponsor of terror, which is an emotional issue for Indian voters. Azhar, the founder and leader of the Pakistani militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed, has been active mainly in the Pakistani-administered part of Jammu and Kashmir.

I am not a fan of the current Indian PM, or of Xi Jinping, but the Chinese "adjustments" reinforced my belief that the 2019 election was an international event. If you set aside the specific governmental structures - multiparty (authoritarian?) democracy in India and single-party authoritarian rule in China, what I see is a return to the historical norm where the Eurasian landmass is governed by one of four civilizational configurations: China, India, the Middle East and Western Europe. If you add Russia as a distinct configuration different from Western Europe (being Orthodox rather than Catholic-Protestant) you get five.

Surely each configuration has its theory of statecraft; both the formal institutions that guide the configuration (constitutions, parties, elections etc) and the day to day intuitions through which decisions are made. Should we make a deal with the protestors on the street or send men in tanks to shoot them? History matters while making these choices. Of course, configurational influences are only one among many - the psychology of individual leaders matters, who they trust matter. The configurational culture is just one among many influences.

Whatever happens in one of these configurations impacts the others. Russia, China and India straddle the old and the new - they are civilizational configurations that also happen to be nation states. Western Europe was inching towards that goal for a while but recent events are working against increasing political unity. Like every other aspect of the networked era, size matters when it comes to geopolitics. It's not clear that the nation-state is a viable political unit in the long run, but to the extent it is, India, China and Russia have an advantage over the other two in that they have the political heft to resist the vagaries of globalization and climate change.

A configuration is a loose unity: its parts come and go. They are also porous - both historically and contemporaneously - and by marking these distinctions, we aren't committing ourselves to a clash of civilizations thesis. Nevertheless, each configuration gives us access to distinct perspectives on the pursuit of life and liberation. I believe the keystone concepts of every configuration are of importance to the others. Equally importantly, every configuration can use its engagement with other configurations to develop and transform its keystone concepts. Kautilya would have learned a lot by reading Aristotle. Aristotle would have learned a lot by reading Kautilya.

We can learn a lot by reading both of them. Like Gandhi said:

I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the culture of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible.

He also ended that quote with

But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any

We will ignore that ending; it’s OK to be blown off our feet every once in while. But not at gun point and not for five hundred years. European domination saw certain keystone concepts such as democracy and capitalism spread across the world. Has the time come for keystone concepts and ideas from other configurations to travel the world? If so, which ones?

I am keeping my eye on two Indian concepts circumnavigating the earth:

1. Dharma.

2. Samsara.

Perhaps I should say: navigating the world once again, since both of them are central to Buddhadharma and have inspired poets, philosophers and yogis from India to Japan for a couple of thousand years. We can learn a lot from that era of globalization of Indian ideas during which Buddhadharma was transformed through its encounter with China and Japan.

Photographer: Ray Hennessy | Source: Unsplash

Beginner’s Mind

It's a pity that Indians don't know much about China. We keep looking west. I wasn’t exposed to Chinese ideas or literatures growing up: no Romance of the Three Kingdoms, no Dream of the Red Chamber, not even Journey to the West, despite it being a mythologized version of Xuanxang's (Hiuen Tsang) trip to India way back when. I had a vague impression that Vikram Seth had translated Chinese poetry and that the beat poets were inspired by Zen, but that was the extent of my understanding.

I read Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind sometime in the mid nineties, a couple of years after I left India for graduate school. It blew my mind. Here was a book written in precise, modern language talking about ideas originating in my part of the world, ideas that I had imbibed as a child but didn't know how to articulate as an adult. Suzuki Roshi taught me that Dharma has a way of transcending its spatial and temporal boundaries. Since then Zen has been replaced by Tibetan Buddhism in the march of Buddhadharma in the modern world. While I deeply appreciate Tsongkhapa, I like the beginner's mind even more.

ZMBM also introduced me to an East Asian sensibility, the cultural watershed of Chinese civilization. That aesthetic has a long shadow from literature to painting to the design of the Mac. I am particularly attached to classical Chinese poetry. These lines of Tu Fu (in David Hinton’s flowing translation here) keep speaking to me:

So different from the images in classical Indian texts, spare rather than flowery, minimalist design a millennium before the Mac. Buddhadharma’s encounter with China birthed a subtle beauty. Makes me think it's smart to use another tradition's classics to clean my glasses than to wipe the dust on my own.

But you need a lineage worth reorganizing first. I am fortunate in having two. From my grandmother I inherited India, faith and stories. From my grandfather - numbers, bookkeeping and argument. They were both obsessed with form: the shape of things, sitting up straight and when to eat a ripe mango. More than enough material even after the dust is removed.

I believe philosophy is created in the street, in the hustle of ideas. Some of those ideas make their way into the tower where they are bottled and sold to the whole world. Indian philosophy has spent too many years in the tower. It needs to travel to China and America, but not to Harvard and Tsinghua but the streets of Shanghai and San Francisco.

Photographer: Ismael Paramo | Source: Unsplash

Samsara

Inherited words bite you young and recruit your brain into singing their tune. The womb precedes the street. I have a couple of those: Dharma is one, Samsara is another. More may be lying dormant, waiting for the right moment to capture a brain area.

Samsara is an interesting term. It's simultaneously concrete and abstract. Concrete because it's a word for the world around us, the world of heart breaks and passion and dew drops reflecting the morning sun. Abstract because the word comes packaged inside a theory that claims a cyclical pattern of existence trapping us for eternity.

Why was I born human in this lifetime? Now that I am here, what will make me thrive?

Those are some questions about Samsara people from my part of the world have asked over the years. They are natural questions; questions about our fate, about the human condition. You may not be interested in multiple lifetimes. Fine, stick with this one. Still: why the human birth? What makes the ape go nuts?

Photographer: Danielle | Source: Unsplash

Which is why Samsara is eminently suited to replace the universe as the object of intellectual concern.

• Why eminently suited? Because it is a collective term for all the beings who occupy a portion of our reality.

• Why replace? Because the universe is the world seen through the eye of god, the view from nowhere. The universe belongs to no one. Samsara, on the other hand, is our world. It belongs to all of us.

Here’s this rather wild idea I have: why not study the form of the world, i.e., the contours of Samsara just as scientists have studied the forms of the universe, especially through mathematization?

It’s not an outlandish idea if I may say so myself. I can even think of a couple of reasons why it’s an idea worth exploring. . A line from the Heart Sutra ( Prajnaparamitahrdya Sutra in Sanskrit) says:

Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is form.

Let me offer a quick pointer as to why I find this phrase an important entry into the form of the world. Consider how "form" is used in two important modern knowledge systems:

1. Form as in formal, as in the formal sciences such as logic and mathematics.

2. Form as in information.

In both of these uses, form denotes a way of "capturing" the world, or what's known as carving the world at its joints. In formalizing the world, we believe we have distilled its essence. That's the dream behind the physicist's "theory of everything" isn't it, of a small set of laws that captures everything there is. It's the human version of god, who doesn't need laws because he can see the whole universe. We get the second best experience: as his chosen species, humans are allowed to grasp the code of creation. 

But emptiness in the Buddhist usage of that term points to an entirely different insight: that there's no possibility, even in principle, of capturing everything. It says that nothing exists on its own; it's always dependent on something else. Combining emptiness and form leads to a radical claim: not only is it impossible to capture everything in a single law or set of laws, it's in the very nature of form to be elusive.

Photographer: Jeremy Bishop | Source: Unsplash

The formal sciences fail at the task of capturing the world not because they have reached their limits but because form resists capture at its core. And form eludes capture because the world eludes capture - the view from nowhere can never succeed. The Buddha used that argument to deny the existence of the self. We can use a variation of the same argument to undercut the foundations of the formal sciences and venturing further, to undercut the foundations of all science. 

I find that interesting. 

The first sign that forms might be empty is noticing how many there are. In Darwin’s famous words:

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Traditionally, biology is a science of form, of which there are many even as all organisms share a genetic code. Why are there are so many forms? What makes some thrive and others disappear? How does a form of life fit its circumstances? This is the question of Samsara in evolutionary disguise. As far as I know, there are two deep, scientifically grounded approaches to these questions:

1. Statics. The approach favored by D'Arcy Thompson in his monumental "On Growth and Form." Thompson's approach is to explain the form of an organism (say, the shape of an Amoeba) as an equilibrium of forces that impinge upon the organism. The static theory is centered on matter and forces.

2. Dynamics. This if of course the far more famous answer, the one initiated by Darwin in his Origin of Species. Darwin focuses on change, i.e., how does one type of organism arise from another? In the gene centric view, the theory of change is primarily one of information and how it's transmitted.

So there you go: two theories of form, one privileging matter, the other privileging information. Can the two be combined? If so, how? That's the question. 

Photographer: LYCS Architecture | Source: Unsplash

Forms show up in the social sphere too, where they manifest as new institutional structures: startups, networks, companies, platforms and variations on those themes.

If anything, we underestimate the diversity of social forms, confusing labels for the underlying structure. Consider the all too common question: why do some companies thrive while others fail? Why did Microsoft beat IBM? Why did Google beat Microsoft? And so on. The assumption being that all companies have the same form, like teams playing a cricket match.

Is asking "Why did Microsoft beat IBM?" the same as asking "Why did CSK beat KKR?" Of course not. Sports teams are constrained to having the same form. We don't have eleven member cricket teams playing twenty one member cricket teams. Companies aren't like that; neither are organisms. They differ in size, shape and structure. Amazon is a company, Walmart is a company and Costco is a company but one is a platform while the other two are not.

What happens when two forms collide? Who wins? Is it possible for multiple forms of social organization to thrive simultaneously?

Photographer: Pop & Zebra | Source: Unsplash

The Road Ahead

That's it for today's tour of endless forms most beautiful. I am not interested in finding the one form that rules them all; much better to sketch the forms of the world and trace their connections with a light pencil.

Sorry if it meandered from one topic to another and even more sorry if it introduced abstract arguments without substantiating them. There's a method behind the madness. Imagine phenomenology if it arose in Gaya instead of Gottingen and you are halfway there.

I wanted to give you sense for the landscape I am going to cover over the next few months - future essays won’t be as scattered. I also expect to add a podcast at some point; Substack gives me that option.

Next week: Samsaric Media. Background reading: McLuhan and media forms.