Years of Poems and Spirits

SL told me of a possible assignment to Dharamsala. That got us started talking about Dalai, Tibetan Buddhism and others. He brought up the idea that Dalai, in a different setting, could have been a spiritual leader for Han Chinese. It certainly struck a chord with me and a lot more.

Wrote another lengthy reply to him. I think it is worth keeping here:

First, why there isn’t a vibrant Tibetan community? Second, can we say a culture is backward? If so, how do we make a comparison? Third, how much do we Chinese need spirituality?

On the first point, I always thought that any major religion ought to be communal. You know, the Catholics, the Lutherans, the Muslims and the Jews, etc. But if what you said is true, then Tibetan Buddhism seems to be a prominent exception. I just wonder why this is the case?

An “obvious” explanation points to the fact that the terrain in Tibet prevents large community to congregate. But that is not entirely plausible. After all, when Islam started from the Arab Peninsular, the region wasn’t a metropolis built on oasis.

Therefore, it seems there is something in the Tibetan Buddhism itself that is unique. Maybe it is not an organized religion after all. Or even a major religion. But a highly stylized (e.g. full of rituals) spiritual movement. I am not trying to split hair here. What I see in the difference b/w Spirituality and Religion is precisely in the communal part.

In other words, unlike Catholicism, for example, Tibetan Buddhism never tried to build a world parallel to the secular one. In Catholicism, for example, the Church hierarchy always existed along side the secular rulers, be that Emperors or Prime Ministers. One can be a corrupt civil servant and a pious Catholic at the same time. But in Tibet, I don’t think there was such a separation.

If looked this way, there is little wonder why, in exile, Dalai still assumes dual roles. And naturally so. I remember it was reported that not long ago, in order to temper internal tension, Dalai threatened to quit as the head of the government. And his threat seemed to have worked.

I guess this realization (i.e. Tibetan Buddhism’s scope) doesn’t change anything. But it is a “aha” moment for me.

On the second point, you mentioned that you are not sure whether we are in a position to judge, or whether we are too arrogant. I had similar misgivings before. But I didn’t want to fall into the other extreme: nihilism (we just can’t tell who is superior) or relativism (we are not better, we are just different). I don’t think either one is Rational, or fair to the other side.

What I now think is, there IS a way to compare two cultures or two peoples. And it is pretty simple – just compare the breadth and depth of “meta-concepts” in their vocabularies, and you can tell which one is more sophisticated or superior than the other.

The so-called “meta-concept” means level of abstraction. If “blue” or “red” is a concept, then “color” is a meta-concept on top of that. And “attribute” (as in “color is a kind of attribute for an object”) is yet another level deep.

An example of the breadth of meta-concept would be the word “deja vu”. There is actually no good original Chinese word that corresponds to this concept, which implies the French “know” something we didn’t. Of course, there are many things in Chinese that are not translatable.

Jean Piaget was a pioneering child psychologist. He observed a similar (or parallel) pattern in children’s cognitive development (but that is at an individual level). Chomsky’s natural language theory also has some influence on me: he sees a “tree-like” structure being essential in all human languages. I believe it is so because such a pattern mirrors knowledge structure.

All I am trying to do is to answer my own doubts – are all cultures really all equal but just different? As a liberal minded person, it is tempting to think that way. But I just can’t reconcile this statement with all the stereotypes I was brought up with At the end of the day, I’d rather live with an explainable bad thinking than an unexplained good thinking.

But that doesn’t mean the Tibetans are inherently inferior. There are all kind of meta-concepts. Some are in science, technology (West beats out all East). Some in social relationship (East Asia beats out the rest of the world combined). And some in Spirituality. I always wondered why during the peak of the Roman empire, a tiny minority of the Jewish people were able to start a religion that converted almost the rest of the Empire. Maybe this can be explained by the asymmetry in meta-concepts in Spirituality. In this sense, your hunch that Tibetan Buddhism may one day fill the void in Chinese Spirituality is not far fetched. At least it has historical precedence.

Now the last point (if you have not been bored by now) – how much do we Chinese need spirituality? That is a question I have been struggling mightily with recently. It is a large topic, I haven’t really thought it through. So what I say here may not all make sense.

I would interpret the pursuit of spirituality as the “seek of meaning”. In an vernacular sense, we further imply “spirituality” as “seek answers in super-natural”. But at the end of the day, it is an Existential quest: why do I exist? What do I live for?

What I see as the fundamental difference between China and the West may be **simplistically** summarized as,

Whereas a Westerner live to seek meaning, a Chinese seeks meaning to keep on living.

I think the first half is easy to see – starting from Plato on-down, the Western culture was driven by “zealots”. Most of those zealots were religiously inspired, but there are plenty who were not. There is a movie currently showing about Darwin’s own struggle once he realized what he discovered. Also think of those who devoted their lives for public causes, from Green Peace to the Red Army (as the German terrorist group in the 60s) … They are nuts because they believe they live for a reason.

For a Chinese, it is almost the other way around. I was talking to a lady in her fifties who grew up in a collective farm on a deserted island in JiangXi. Her parents were both university professors and were 下放 there for many year. What struck me was not only the hardship they lived through, but the absurdity. For example, they had a 10-day week (so a week goes from 星期一 to 星期十) and many things like that.

So I asked her what she think of those ridiculous things now. She laughed and said “they were soooo funny, even back then”. It was a pretty revealing moment.

In a way, either by necessity or by habit or tradition or education, Chinese people learn to seek meaning, or something valuable, in daily life—regardless it is in the form of banality or extremity, to console themselves and to live on. I guess I am not saying more than what the movie “活着” was trying to tell us, but I certainly have a very new appreciation of this aspect recently.

There was a brief moment in Chinese history where we felt just “to live” wasn’t enough. When Tan Sitong said, “let me be the first to shed blood for Reform” it was the beginning of a new ethos. But after the Cultural Revolution, people are tired of the new, foreign way of seeing life’s meaning (and June 4th certainly was the last nail in the coffin). Together with the rise of economy and personal well being, the Chinese people start to embrace whole-heartedly of their old selves.

So to answer my own question – how much do Chinese need spirituality? At this point, I don’t think there is a whole lot.

Not sure if I am ready to write this … but just so that I won’t forgot some of the thoughts before they are lost to the dark ether.

1. Watched the Coen Brothers’ latest movie, “A Serious Man”. Not sure I really get it, but it certainly isn’t a stranger. While “The Man Who Wasn’t There” reminded me of “The Stranger”, this one feels like reading Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. Or to be more precise, it is the anti-Underground Man that proves the Underground Man’s point. A Serious Man is one that does what the community and the tradition expected of him. He follows the law, trusts the authority and believes in reason. Yet absurd events follows him like air. But what are the Coen’s up against? Conformity? Isn’t that a bit too old a theme? Or Conformity with a Jewish twist?

2. Talking about the Underground Man: I didn’t know one can write a novel like that. The first part is a manifesto of some sort. It reminded me of an encounter about ten years ago. We just bought the house and decided to replace the carpet on the main floor. So I was at home in this empty space, it was a sunny afternoon and I had the whole afternoon off. Then came with this young carpet guy. He was an unusually energetic guy and very talkative. We started chatting about carpets, house, cabinets, etc. But before long the topic wandered into the Bible and his born-again experience. The whole setting just struck me as somewhat odd and funny: we were both crawling on the floor, him hammering down nails and knifing off carpet edges. In the whole time, he never stopped talking about Jesus and the Gospels! The Underground Man struck me in somewhat a similar way: since I was listening to an audio book on the bus to work, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the late evening. There was always something on my mind. Then suddenly the voice of a retired, grumpy Russian civil servant, full of anger and spite, rose up in my ear buds and condemning the tyranny of mathematics or lamenting the lack of free will.

3. My Existential anxiety, if there is such a thing, I came to realize, is that how to live with the Irrational. I am a Renaissance Man in many ways, and being a devotee of Reason perhaps defines me more than anything else. Yet that is not how the world operates, nor the history developed or the future is heading. Not long ago, having given up on the Main Street, I still hold on to the thought that Wall Street is a place where reason triumphs. Then the financial crisis hit. Now that the crisis is barely over (but before the European debt crisis fully blooms), the very people who live on mathematics everyday, whose fortune depends on cold-hearted calculation of facts, suddenly refused to recognize what happened and started to become politicians.

4. Suli wrote about Beidao. I did some Googling and was stunned to find several stories about Beijing No. 4 High during the Cultural Revolution. One of the guys died for the ideal he held true in the jungles of a forsaken land (fighting for Burmese Communist Party). His last letter to his brethren back home was an extraordinary mixture of self-denial and self-consciousness, each with the kind of clarity that can be ascribed to a martyr or an Existentialist. He seems to marvel at the fact that he’s able to face death everyday. And I marveled at the fact that this very choice of his (i.e. facing death everyday) is sustained by a faith he’s willing to test, with his own life and he knows it! Apparently, he’s never read Kierkegaard. (keywords: 张玉海，四中，缅共)

5. I also wrote to Suli about my own ambivalence toward “universality” of humanity. There is nothing specific to that thought since I don’t even know how to articulate either way. But a conversation with a lady in her mid-50s (about 10 years older than us) really changed a lot of my thinking. It is a long story about her living with her university professors parents on a bug-infested island during the Re-education Campaign. Not sure I can write everything down. But what struck me was how “humanity” takes different shapes in different places. In China, for example, people did find all kinds of ways to “process” absurdity imposed upon them. They didn’t internalize the absurdity as some assumed a docile Chinese People would under a suppressive power. Nor did they reject it. They just found ways to live with it, however ridiculous a situation they found themselves in. In so doing, they created subtle and non-subtle ways to express themselves: being creatively conforming is in itself an art of living. A some kind of “humanity”.  It is getting late now. And I am sure I will get back to this topic sooner or later. It is one of those most recent revelations.

1. The iPad-hype

I think the iPad will flop. If some recent reports on WSJ are to be believed, Apple is trying to use iPad to change the media landscape altogether, I think it is a tail-wags-dog scenario.

• At least the book pricing model (e.g. on par with hardcover price) won’t fly
• Having an iPod to listen to music and an iPhone to make calls is quite a different user experience from using an iPad primarily for stationary use
• Holding a Kindle is not the best feeling for my hands (after a long reading). Holding something even bigger and stiffer is out of question
• I don’t have a whole lot use for my NetBook already. The super thin MacBook Air didn’t fly either

IN short, depends on how much Apple has invested in this, not only the device will flop, it may even backfire. Love to see how this prediction pans out in a year.

2. Reading  Failure of Capitalism

Feels like reading my car’s owner’s manual – too many things are already clear to me, the interesting parts are so disparate that I can hardly piece them up into a larger narrative. Some thoughts and things learned:

Can we use the spread b/w returns from diversified assets over that from non-diversified assets to gauge whether we are in a bubble or crash?

In other words, I am still mesmerized by the transition from a stable system to an unstable one (e.g. need major correction) I don’t think I will be at peace until the transition can be modeled mathematically. Posner suggested using Chaos Theory. But I am not sure. C.T. is that random events may cause unexpected, large impact, but you can’t tell that from the “last-straw-breaks-camel-back” syndrome. For example, a large commercial real estate project failed in Houston caused commercial paper market to freeze, they seem to be unrelated, but which model do you use?

What I am looking for is a model that can describe how/when, triggered by an endogenous change, diversification suddenly fails across the board.

3. Innovation, Expectation, and Bubble

One thing I thought of, and is confirmed by Posner, is that financial bubble almost always follows a sustained burst of productivity gain, either as a result of technological innovation or factor injection. The former is easy – railroad, electricity, automobile and the Great Depression; Computer, Internet and the dot-com boom. The latter is China opening and globalization before this bubble.

This can be explained perfectly well if we consider “liquidity”, in its most general sense, as an indicator of market participant’s confidence in profitability. And it is positively correlated to credit boom and ease of financing. In other words, the bubble is the result of a heightened expectation that is gradually decoupled from real productivity growth. Naturally, crash is the result of a over-shot correction.

This may also help to explain the global glut theory forwarded by Bernanke. By the way, it is clear to me, he is the Rudy Giuliani in the financial world – the right guy at the right moment. But a so-so manager otherwise. Saw a picture of CYC with him in a ballpark. She is a fan of him, I am a fan of her but definitely not a fan of him.

4. Somehow, I find myself back to 1993: suddenly finding the computing world not so boring after all. It was quite an intense experience dealing with the WordNet stuff. But it somehow led to a deeper understanding of linguistics and knowledge. Good stuff.