My Mom came to America with her family back in the 1960s. Mom was, along with her sister, brother, and mother, a Korean War survivor. Mom's sister was dating an Air Force captain at the time (my future Uncle Ed-- and as you know, every red-blooded American has to have an Uncle Ed somewhere in his family tree). The family went from Seoul to Waco, Texas, and Mom needed someone with whom to practice English. Enter Airman Ned-- my future Dad. Dad's real first name is David, but everyone called him Ned, and so did Mom. The way Mom tells it, she didn't know Dad's real name until the pastor said it at the altar.

Mom and Dad married in a Presbyterian church in 1967. I think Dad was still Catholic at the time, but he's never been the type to let dogma stand in the way of anything important, and neither has Mom. So they married in 1967; I popped out in 1969; David, the bicentennial baby, popped out in 1976, and Sean made his appearance in 1979-- the same year "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" came out.

It's not easy raising three boys, even three relatively well-behaved boys like us. Because of the age difference between me and my two brothers, I learned a good bit about baby care. At age 7 or 8, I was changing poop-filled diapers and and rocking David to sleep on the family rocking chair. At age 10, I did it again for Sean, so I've never had a problem dealing with other people's poop, pee, and vomit.

Still: changing diapers does not a parent make. Momming and Dadding, these are 24/7 jobs, as my best friends (who're married and have kids) have discovered. Somehow you have to find time to do all the parenting and still be man and wife. Somehow, Mom and Dad did that. We're very lucky sons.

So in honor of Mom's and Dad's 37th (!!) anniversary, I offer the following e-card:



And you wonder where we got our sense of humor from, eh?

Happy Anniversary, Mom & Dad! We love you!

I'm far away, in Seoul
you guys are in Virginia
if my arms could reach you
they'd be over 7000 miles long
in which case they'd be too heavy to hug you
so instead of wishing for 7000-mile-long arms
let me blow a kiss your way
then lean over, and let out a loooong bahng-goo in your honor
37 bahng-goos, one for every year of marriage!

Love,

Kevin


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I usually tout Lorianne's blog on Tuesdays, but I'll use Lorianne's membership in a Korean Buddhist tradition to pull her into the Monday lineup. Lorianne's sitting for her dissertation defense today (technically Monday afternoon, Boston time). I have no idea what the particulars will be like, but based on a daily read of Lorianne's excellent blog, I see her as dedicated and disciplined. She's done a thorough job in prepping, she's allowed herself the obligatory freakout (I had my freakout right before a big presentation in my Comparative Ethics seminar in 2001), and I think she's going to do just fine. A friend of mine suggests that the diss defense is kind of a formality-- that final ring you jump through before the committee awards you the doctorate. If that's the case, I'm doubly sure Lorianne'll do well. I can't see how any committee member would want to fail her. And besides, Lorianne knows what to wear to her defense.

Hey, Lorianne! As they say in Korea to cheer you on, "FIGHTING!"

Andi is away in the southern part of the peninsula, but this didn't stop her from penning an excellent travelogue about the temple-hopping she's been doing. "Temple-hopping" is a crude and superficial way to describe what's really going on, though; Andi's a very eloquent, very spiritual writer, and I invite you to step into her shoes (or sit on her zafu?).

Budae Chigae! Where to begin? Too much good stuff going on here.
1. The KimcheeGI notes today (Monday) is Korean Arbor Day, but it's also Hanshik-- Cold Food Day. Doesn't sound too romantic to people raised on the seared, quivering, succulent animal flesh you find at Outback Steakhouse, but give the day a chance and read the GI's post.
2. How about nuclear strategy against North Korea, circa 1978?
3. The KimcheeGI rightly concludes that there's no need to rush to the bookstore to buy a monograph by the team who brought us the failed 1994 Agreed Framework, that Meisterwerk of prolonged bullshit.
4. More NK-media material here.
5. Hell, just keep on scrolling down. The GI's got you covered.

The Infidel and Jeff both review "The Passion of the Christ," now out in Korea. I'll have to see this before it leaves Korean screens.

Kevin at IA delivers conical breasts and lesbian lust on the links.

Rathbone Press is all over the current apology circus in Korean politics. Never let it be said that America holds a monopoly on confessionalistic culture: we may have our sick family secrets revealed regularly on Jerry Springer, but here in Korea, the politicos hitch the metaphorical cross onto their shoulders and trace out their own little Via Dolorosas for the cameras. Will the gods be appeased by this ceremonial nonsense? Lemme give you a hint. Lean close. Closer.

THERE ARE NO GODS, ASSHOLE. THERE ARE ONLY PISSED-OFF PEOPLE.

The Rathbonean onslaught continues here and here.

Guess what day the DPRK begins its school year? Kirk knows.

Over at the Pythi Master's blog, an eloquent meditation on Georgia college basketball somehow morphs into a woozy spiel about greasy food. I love it.

Kathreb offers a quickie on a North Korean Nuclear Crisis Conference.

Neil Barker on "handphone obsession" and kimbap-- a staple of my childhood, which Neil is only beginning to enjoy.

What's up with high-ranking officials and car crashes? Check out NK Zone for some insight.

And now... inspired by Andi's travelogue... I present you an essay I wrote back in 2000 after spending three days at Haein-sa titled, creatively enough--

THREE DAYS AT HAEIN-SA

I fear and loathe roller coasters; it's a control thing. But there's something oddly calming about the jarring swoop and slalom of a Korean bus; it appeals to my fatalistic side. In Seoul, buses jostle for position with remarkable adroitness and maneuverability; they stop for precisely the amount of time it takes the last passenger to lift his or her foot off the ground and clear the bus's hydraulic ingress, then off they launch. Once aboard, you cannot perform hands-free "bus surfing" the way you might on a plodding DC Metro bus: letting go of your handhold is a sure way to send yourself flying either down the aisle or through a window, especially if you are, like me, 260 pounds of half-Korean jiggle beast.

Our bus driver from west Taegu to Haein-sa, though tearing across roads that offer no challenges comparable to the vehicular nightmare of Seoul, is nevertheless intent on pushing his metal destrier beyond its prescribed limits. Down valley straightaways and up great, serpentine mountain switchbacks we fly, the bus tilting dangerously as we whip around unbanked curves at blinding speed. Through it all, I am serene; my life is in the Buddha's compassionate hands. Why, then, do I hate roller coasters?

Haein-sa, a Zen Buddhist temple located on verdant Kaya Mountain, is a refuge of calm completely unlike the tourist-trodden and chaotic Pulguk-sa, the popular temple to the southeast of us in Kyungju. All Buddhist temples, however, share a certain unobtrusive quality; unlike Christian churches and cathedrals, which so often seek to impose a preconceived sacred geometry upon the landscape, Korean Buddhist temples tuck themselves into the environs like an octopus settling among coral outcroppings. They have no prescribed form; each temple is unique in its configuration. Call it feng shui (or poong soo, as it's pronounced in Korean); an effort has been made to harmonize with, and not dominate, nature.

My companion, Park jeondosa-nim, is a fellow Presbyterian, though the fervid style of his religion is more reminiscent of an American charismatic Christian's. A jeondo-sa is a preacher or evangelist; a kind of missionary. Park is my guide for this trip. I arrive at Haein-sa with no warning to the monastic community, and promptly ask if I may stay on the temple grounds a few days to learn a little about temple life and Korean Zen. Park interprets for me; my Korean, while functional, isn't refined enough for pious cajolery. The grey-robed workers at Haein-sa's administrative office are happy to oblige; we are provided with simple monk's quarters, and I am to receive free meals from the temple's refectory. I pay a small price for this remarkable gift: the proofreading of a barely salvageable English-language document about Haein-sa's current abbot. The textual surgery takes me three hours; not a bad trade-off for three days' exploration.

Park is uncomfortable from the beginning. Our first night at Haein-sa, he stays up and prays. Sitting cross-legged in a corner, his hands raised in warding or supplication, he performs what some Christians call "spiritual warfare," perhaps in an attempt to keep our little monk's cell free of evil spirits. The word "Yae-su," Jesus, appears repeatedly in his speech. I sense no spirits; our first night at Haein-sa is cool, rainy, serene, and beautiful. I shower and sit outside on the front stoop of our chambers while Park, inside, prays and prays.

Eighteen years ago, Park jeondosa-nim was a Buddhist himself. Now he is, from my perspective, a Christian zealot. Though he's a nice enough person and a hard worker, he has all the traits of what Eric Hoffer ominously termed a "true believer." But I'm here in the name of interreligious dialogue; in a sense, Park's presence, and his chary attitude toward other religions, is a blessing in disguise. Conflict will ensue; I will watch and assiduously take notes.

I make the acquaintance of three monks (seu-nim) during my stay at Haein-sa: Gahk Ahn seu-nim, Dae Oh seu-nim, and Man Gahk seu-nim. Of these three, only Man Gahk seu-nim consents to have his picture taken. The other two don't see the use; I suspect they feel a student of interreligious dialogue shouldn't act like an undignified foreign tourist. Perhaps they're right.

Gahk Ahn seu-nim meets with me the first night-- the night I'm proofing the butchered English bio of the abbot. We talk about Zen and Christianity and drink oolong tea as the monk rocks placidly back and forth. I am impressed by his calm demeanor, and come away from our talk with a pleasant feeling of gentle companionship.

The following morning, around 5am, Park leaves for Taegu and I am on my own, without an interpreter. My halting Korean will have to suffice. A few hours later, I meet Dae Oh seu-nim, who epitomizes the archetypal Zen master. Though merely a monk, Dae Oh seu-nim's eyes are bright with conviction. He doesn't appear nearly as serene as Gahk Ahn seu-nim, but his manner is more consistent with the teachers I've read about in the annals of Japanese Zen: he is quick to judge, excitable, filled with boundless intelligence. There is nothing ethereal about him; he's more like a drill instructor than a holy man. I learn that he is acknowledged as one of Haein-sa's foremost scholars.

Dae Oh seu-nim's first reaction to me is barely concealed derision: my Korean is laughable, my knowledge of Chinese is nearly nonexistent. "You have to learn all that!" he exclaims in Korean while shaking a Chinese text in my face. I quietly explain that I'm here to find out what I have to learn, that my hope is to return to Korea some years from now as part of a doctoral program, armed with more Korean, Chinese, and Sanskrit knowledge. Dae Oh seu-nim seems to understand, and he speaks with me for an hour or so. Like Gahk Ahn seu-nim, he tends to rock back and forth as he talks. Since formal Zen practice involves so much sitting, I suppose this is an almost inevitable quirk. He baits me, too: at several points, he stops his lecture and asks, "Do you understand?" This is, of course, a Zen trap. Stupidly, I fall in every time: "Yes." Dae Oh seu-nim grimaces, shakes his head violently, fans the air with his hand as if I've just passed foul wind. "No, no, no! Then you don't understand!" Of course not. Zen speaks to absolute reality, which is so completely ordinary that it lies in the realm of the nondiscursive. This is Dae Oh seu-nim's next point: "If you study Zen... all your ideas about God, Buddha-- throw them out!" We create God just as we create Buddha and the world, he says. It's all in our minds. To know truth, you have to know your true mind, which is no mind. You can go in circles if you try to approach this logically, but it's nevertheless true. To misquote the Tao Te Ching, the reality you can talk about isn't true reality.

My next visit is with Mahn Gahk seu-nim, an older monk, probably in his sixties. "Where are you from in America?" he asks in English. I tell him I'm from Virginia. Mahn Gahk seu-nim makes it clear that his English is out of practice and that he'd rather speak to me in Korean. He promises to speak simply, and the rest of the conversation is in Korean. I strain to listen. "Your body is like clothing," he tells me. "Eventually, it gets old and you cast it off." As I listen to Mahn Gahk seu-nim lecture, I nod and mutter, "Mmm. Hmm." At one point, the monk stops and gently corrects me: in Korea, it's highly rude to go "Mmm, hmm" to your elders. Somehow, I'd missed this piece of etiquette in all these years of dealing with Korean friends and relatives. I apologize, and Mahn Gahk seu-nim smiles tolerantly. From that point on, I respond with a full "yae," the formal way to say "yes." Like a little Yoda, Mahn Gahk tells me that all life is one-- we all share the same life. It's a simple sentiment, and I've heard variants of this before, but somehow it seems clearer to me just because I'm hearing it in this rarefied context.

Man Gahk seu-nim takes me over to one of the meditation halls on the temple grounds. He asks me if I'd like to join in some meditation. I tell him I'm not ready, but will probably do so in the future. I wonder at my own hesitancy. It's not as though I'm being asked to go white-water rafting. Or maybe it is. Each monk has told me, in his own way, that the only way to learn about Zen is through practice and commitment. As an old teacher of mine said, "You can shop, but eventually you either buy something or leave the store." The meditation hall is filled with adepts, none of whom have shaved heads. Haein-sa serves as a refuge for people seeking calm from the tumult of the outside world; I conjecture that most of these folks are from Seoul, Pusan, or Taegu, the big cities. The hall is more silent than the most hermetic American library. The noise of my socks against the polished floor is disturbingly loud. The monk and I watch the people for a while. Nobody moves. Nobody speaks. Fascinating.

I spend the rest of the afternoon visiting the temple's main area, noting the repeated, fractal lotus patterns in painting, woodwork, and sculpture; the small stone pagoda, the huge swastika (turning in the opposite direction from the Nazi swastika) and the "Three Jewels"-- symbolizing the Buddha, his teaching, and the religious community-- painted on the sides of some of the larger buildings. Certain ancient trees important to Haein-sa's long history have been fenced off; I stare at them for a long time and think about impermanence. Tourists are about, and I am swamped by uniformed hordes of Korean middle school girls. A particular gaggle smiles and waves at me, chanting, "Hello! Hello!" in English. I turn, smile rakishly, and wink. The girls scream in unison, clap their hands over their mouths, and cluster tighter as they move off rapidly. I watch them retreat, bemused.

That evening, Park, my absent guide, returns from Taegu, and we are led to the chambers of a fourth monk. I never learn this monk's name, but our visit with him produces the most memorable incident during my stay at Haein-sa. Before we enter the monk's cell, Park tells me dryly, "I think they going to try teach me about Buddhism." True to form, the monk incenses Park, and the debate becomes heavily theological. Within a few minutes, I am completely lost; the speed and vocabulary of the conversation surpass me. Evangelist Park and the unyielding monk go back and forth; the monk, agitated, even pulls out a text that quotes Deuteronomy to make a point; Park responds with counter-quotes from the Bible. I can't make out the contents of the conversation, but I can make out the tone, which is becoming increasingly bitter. I knew this was going to happen, because Park's theological formation makes his behavior predictable. This is a holy crusade. Another man in the room with us, a certain Mr. Kim, gangs up on Park by taking the monk's side.

Then suddenly there is a loud shout from outside the monk's cell. The disputants clam up. The silence is almost a shock to me.

"Kim! Get out here!" a voice roars. It sounds familiar. Mr. Kim bolts out the door, shutting it behind him. We listen in awed silence as Mr. Kim is upbraided in extremely foul, abusive language by a monk whose voice I finally recognize: the very calm, very placid Gahk Ahn seu-nim, with whom I drank oolong tea the previous day. I was obviously mistaken when I assessed the man as serene. He, like Dae Oh seu-nim, is capable of thunder. I smile inwardly. It's always good to see holy men with character, people who don't forget their humanity.

Later that evening, I ask Park what was going on. "Mr. Kim spoke out of turn," Park says. "He's not supposed to discuss religion with me and seu-nim." This sounds more like a Korean issue than an interreligious issue. In Confucian society, everyone knows his place. Mr. Kim forgot his; a corrective was applied; end of story.

"Anyway," I continue, "it sounded like an interesting discussion between you and the monk." Park looks at me crossly. "Not discussion! They talked to me for thirty minutes, then cut me off when I tried to speak! Not discussion! I tried to tell them the Gospel, tell them Jesus died for their sins, that only Jesus can save! They cut me off! They say Buddha is a saint, and Jesus is not."

I listen to this and find it hard to sympathize with Park's position. One thing I know: you can't initiate a dialogue with finger-pointing. Dialogue isn't a zero-sum game with a definite winner and loser. Then again, Park's goal isn't dialogue; he's an evangelist out to save souls. From his perspective, his cause is just. He may have pushed the monk too far; in my talks with Dae Oh seu-nim and the others, I mentioned Jesus a few times, quoting biblical verses that share a thematic affinity to Buddhist thought, and my answer was invariably smiles. I fail to see how beating someone over the head with holy scripture is going to win converts. What's more, I fail to understand the urge to convert. But at the very least, such debates are entertaining as hell to watch. Park falls into prayer, weeping-- weeping!-- because he is unable to untwist the perverse, misguided minds of his Buddhist interlocutors.

I've been sleeping and eating like a monk for three days. The meal is the same, no matter the time of day: watery rice gruel ladled into a metal bowl, mixed with spicy marinated vegetables and kimchi. Very tasty, but guaranteed to drive an inveterate carnivore insane. On our last day at Haein-sa, Park and I pack our belongings. We meet Gahk Ahn seu-nim on our way out; I bow to him in the Buddhist manner: palms together and close to the chest, saluting the shared life within the other. This is one of the many things the monks taught me, and I'm happy to practice it. Gahk Ahn seu-nim wishes us well, and I ask him to please pass on our thanks to the other monks I met. We stroll out; there is only one more thing to visit.

Once again entering the main area of the temple, we climb the steps to the highest level in order to view the "pal man dae jang gyong," the over 80,000 wooden printing blocks containing the entirety of the Tripitaka Koreana, the most complete version of the Tripitaka anywhere. I am disappointed to discover the blocks are closed off from the public; they can be viewed only from behind the barred wooden doors that separate me from them. Monks still use the blocks for printing and study; I can only hope that, should I come back to Haein-sa as a bona fide researcher, I will be able to see them up close. As it is, I thrust my camera between the bars and snap two pictures. Park takes a picture of me as well.

We step onto the express bus for west Taegu. Park and I argue about whether Jesus said he was God. I claim he never said any such thing, that others said it about him. Nowhere in the Bible does Jesus say, "Hey! I'm God!" Park tells me I'd better learn more about my own faith before I try to dialogue with other religions. Our bus leaps out of Haein-sa's terminal, and I think over the enormous gift I've received: this rare opportunity to live and speak for a few days with the monks of a Korean Zen Buddhist community, finding out how much I don't know. I ask myself: will I ever understand?

Heh. Be careful how you answer that.

*** *** ***

I wrote the above essay before I'd started meditating and before I'd taken my most recent set of Korean courses. There's a lot in there I'd change.

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This must be seen! The classic movie "The Exorcist" re-told in a mere 30 seconds. And by bunnies. It is great. Thanks to Minion & Lackey for the link.

Carry on.

Our favorite (and only) author at Hoarded Ordinaries will be sitting for her dissertation defense in Boston on Monday. I thought this merited a special post and have invited someone to say a few kind words of encouragement to Lorianne-- wish her luck and all that.





Obviously a believer in cosmic inevitability. For myself, I wish you the best, L. When you're done, I hope you party like it's 19-- uh, like it's 2099.


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Yes, it's true: I'm something of a political cynic. Always have been. At the same time, I'm something of an idealist, because I keep hoping the perfect politician will come along. The cynic in me belches that that'll never happen: there are no perfect politicians. In that spirit, I present you the following mug design:




And while you're at it, take a gander at my previous mug designs and other Hominid swag:




Visit my CafePress store and shop around!

Buy my filthy, gross, disgusting book of poetry, cartoons, and short stories from Amazon!

Or visit my swag blog, Only the Chewiest Tumors, and order several copies of my book directly from me at a discount!

Bowls of warm bile await you.

Oh, by the way-- for you intellectual types-- I've whipped up what I think is a pretty mean brain-teaser. It's all the way at the bottom of my sidebar. Think you have the mental balls to figure it out? Go on and give it a try. I'm thinking I might want to give away a prize to the winner... what would be a good prize? Free blogging rights to my blog for three days? $50?? Some free Hominid swag (pick any 3 items)?? I'll have to mull this one over.

If you don't see anything you like at my stores, visit the Maximum Leader's CafePress store and take a gander at the fast-burgeoning designs of the very talented Digital Pixi!

Don't forget my previous mug designs:















_

I'm trying to figure out whether S. Mark Heim might not have beaten me to the punch in developing a philosophical stance for religious pluralism that comes close to the non-philosophical, mutual-inclusivistic paradigm I'm advocating. I've critiqued his position a couple times on this blog, but I keep coming back to it and wondering whether I've done Heim justice. What follows is simply me thinking aloud.

Heim adapts a philosophical framework called "orientational pluralism" from the work of philosopher Nicholas Rescher, especially Rescher's work The Strife of Systems. The basic idea behind orientational pluralism sounds fairly simple: "one and only one position is rationally appropriate from a given perspective, but we must recognize that there is a diversity of perspectives."

I think I understand what's going on. In Salvations: Truth and Difference in Religion, Heim notes that perspectives are "one to a customer" (p. 134). If we recognize the irreducible diversity of perspectives, then it's easy to see how it's possible for people to make apparently contradictory claims: person A says he can see a train; person B says she can't.

One of the points Heim is trying to make is that our positions are the result of the interaction between our rational and evaluative faculties. Our perspective isn't informed purely by rationality: "...we necessarily assert the validity of our own perspective in exercising it." Heim writes (pp. 136-137):

The case for orientational pluralism then has two fronts. On the rational side Rescher stresses the consistency with which it can apply its principles to its own case, a consistency lacking in many competitors, including pluralistic theories. One perspective on the nature of philosophy, for instance, maintains that evidential considerations alone will lead to a single rational conclusion. But this view itself is not agreed to be the single rational conclusion of the evidence. To claim that only purely rational arguments should be allowed is to adopt one kind of value orientation. To deny that other value orientations exist can be shown by evidence to be false. But to acknowledge that the evaluative context is a crucial factor in our conclusions is to contradict one's own assertion that evidence necessarily leads to only one rational interpretation. As Rescher puts it, "If you share my values then by rational rights you should share my position. If not, you can look elsewhere... indeed you must" (Rescher 1985, 238-239). The availability of other rationally tenable views is consistent with what orientational pluralism asserts in claiming to be the most adequate account of philosophy.

On the second front, supporters of orientational pluralism make frank evaluative arguments. Philosophy struggles between a rationally rigorous practice that risks becoming largely irrelevant to primary human questions and an engagement with those great questions which is frustrated by the failure to find agreed answers. Rescher suggests that his account of the options best allows us to understand and practice philosophy as a rigorous cognitive activity which also bears on large and live human questions (Rescher 1985, 264-265). There is no determinative rational argument that philosophy must be understood in this and no other way. But if it is to be understood in this way-- if rationality and human relevance are both evaluative priorities-- then Rescher argues that orientational pluralism is the single best rational account of it. It is the true account of philosophy from this evaluative perspective, the perspective Rescher holds and commends to others.

Orientational pluralism (OP), as Heim appropriates it, supposedly allows a religious believer to simultaneously affirm the diversity of religious perspectives while arguing strongly for the validity of his own religious perspective. OP allows for the possibility that rival perspectives may in fact be wrong. It also affirms that OP itself is merely one perspective among many. Here is how Heim sums the matter up:

In summary, orientational pluralism insists there is only one reality and we are trying to know it. It is not committed to regarding other substantive views as equally valid, only as tenable from different perspectives. What is fragmented is not truth but justification or warranted assertability. The justification offered by a philosophy may be orientationally limited in appeal, but the claims themselves can be universal and unrestricted (Rescher 1985, 190). People who rationally hold contradictory views from different orientations are each justified in thinking the other wrong. "We can only pursue the truth by cultivating our truth" (Rescher 1985, 199). Philosophical positions are not opinions but judgments. And, as Rescher strikingly puts it, we are not in a position to concede that someone else's basis of judgment is superior to ours. Someone else's expertise or information may well be so. Such data enriches and expands the basis for our evaluation. But to acknowledge that others have better values or beliefs by which to judge is in effect to adopt their perspective and drop any other.

One of the major problems I have with orientational pluralism is the very notion that perspectives are discrete and come "one to a customer." Is it not possible for a person to hold to two (or more) distinct perspectives at the same time or sequentially/alternately? This might sound contradictory to people who feel that perspectives have to be logically compatible, or that a single person must necessarily possess a single perspective on reality/truth (we'll note, along with Dr. Charles B. Jones of Catholic University, that Heim, like many thinkers, conflates "truth" and "reality"), but what if, for example, you're a practitioner with a foot in two very distinct religious traditions? Does it necessarily follow that your religious perspective is somehow "unified," simply because those two traditions live within you? I don't think so. If anything, I think that such people may in fact switch religious "modes" the way others switch the hats they wear, seeing reality now this way, now that way. Among these multi-traditionalists, there may indeed be some (or many) whose perspective is seamlessly unified, but if CUA's now-deceased Hinduism expert, Father Cenkner, is right, then there are plenty of practitioners whose spirituality is "bifurcated," for lack of a better term.

I also fail to see how orientational pluralism solves the problem of hegemonic truth claims. To me, a diehard exclusivist can't become a pluralist by adopting Heim's paradigm: orientational pluralism might allow the exclusivist in question to see how it's possible for others to believe differently from him, but it doesn't prevent him from making the judgment that all other people are wrong and in need of conversion. Heim attempts to deal with this question:

Why does the recognition that diverse rational positions are appropriately held not contradict the conviction that one's own position is more valid than the others? There is a common contemporary reflex which asserts that to privilege one's own conclusions is the same as denying that others are possible or reasonable. This is clearly not so. Suppose a person lives according to conclusions we accept as perfectly rational, but whose premise-- that money is the primary end, for instance-- we do not share. If we go on to say that this premise is acceptable for that person, though it would not be for us, we make this judgment on grounds of some kind inextricably bound up with goods we value. If we affirm the appropriateness of their pursuing that end while we pursue another, we presumably regard this judgment as more valid than at least some others, made on other grounds; for instance, the judgment that the money-oriented person must be coerced in some way to conform to our view. We make a rational judgment about how to deal with differences in orientation, and we make that judgment on the basis of our orientation. In this we behave formally no differently than the person who would insist that the financier change his or her ways. One negates and the other affirms the viability of this differing evaluative orientation, but we both do so by asserting the primacy of our own evaluative orientations. This is an embarrassingly plain and unoriginal observation. But it is rather regularly disregarded. We are unable to judge our own grounds of judgment to be any anything but preferable to alternatives. This is not a legalistic but a thoroughly practical contradiction; we cannot act on two different orientations at once, even if we understand both are defensible. In the end, we are all inclusivists.

I don't think the above example addresses the problem of hegemonic truth claims. Generally, when someone claims "Christ died for our sins," they mean that claim to apply not only to themselves, but to all people everywhere. Heim is strangely silent on the issue of the nature of this value judgment. Whereas the money-oriented person might be judged in a "live and let live" manner, this kind of judgment is usually impossible for a religious exclusivist bent on converting the heathen. It's not merely a "common contemporary reflex" to "privilege one's own conclusions" while "denying that others are possible or reasonable"-- we privilege our own conclusions all the time, and this has been happening since the beginning of history. If anything, Heim's claim that the "contemporary reflex" is "clearly not so" is itself a product of modernity. The whole point of discussions revolving around pluralism is that, until now, it hasn't been obvious that we can privilege our own conclusions/perspective without denigrating others' conclusions/perspectives.

But the above quote, with its reference to inclusivism, leads me to wonder whether Heim might not be saying (or trying to say) much the same thing I am. Like Heim, I have a high tolerance for unresolved differences. My problem, though, is that Heim/Rescher's OP model still posits a single truth/reality, which renders it vulnerable to Heim's accusation, made earlier in his book against John Hick, of false pluralism. Any pluralistic model with a unitive element will necessarily fall prey to that critique.

As I said earlier, I'm also not happy with the idea that perspectives are discrete and "one to a customer." While there may be some validity in positing this at the level of the individual, the issues aren't as clear-cut when we zoom backward and start looking at traditions as a whole. Religious traditions, like other cultural phenomena, can't be adequately described as distinct and separate streams that run parallel to each other. Such an assumption seems to be implicit in both Rescher's and Heim's understanding of reality, and to my mind, that's simply too neat. No; traditions might possess a certain distinctness, but they also meld with and bleed into each other, cross-pollinating, competing, hybridizing, syncretizing, and fragmenting. A single "great" tradition contains within it a multitude of perspectives that, taken together, give the lie to the idea that it's "one [perspective] to a customer." Because of this, I question the usefulness of Heim's paradigm.

More on this later, perhaps. I need to digest this further.

_

Try this on for size:

Then, from the circle of white hair between his brows, the Buddha emitted a great beam of light called manifestation of the realizer of Thusness, accompanied by countless trillions of light beams. That light illumined all the worlds in the whole cosmos, circling ten times to the right, revealing the immeasurable powers of the enlightened, awakening countless enlightening beings, shaking all worlds, extinguishing the suffering of all states of misery, eclipsing the abodes of all demons, and showing all buddhas sitting on the seat of enlightenment attaining perfect awakening, as well as all the assemblies at the sites of enlightenment. Having done this, the light returned and circled the assembly of enlightening beings, then entered the head of the enlightening being Wondrous Qualities of Natural Origination of Buddha.*

A religious system that claims to have no cosmology of its own will eventually develop one. If it's a system that arises in India, it'll show Indian characteristics, among which are a love of assembled masses, huge cosmic spaces, and phenomena appearing in the numberless gazillions. This mentality got imported into China, and sits uneasily in the East Asian mind even to this day, I think.

Compare the above with the following, and find, if you can, what major themes these two passages have in common despite their obvious differences.

Two monks were arguing about a flag. One said: "The flag is moving."
The other said: "The wind is moving."
Hui Neng happened to be passing by. He told them: "Not the wind, not the flag; mind is moving."

*From the Hwaeom-gyeong, or Avatamsaka Sutra, core text of the Hwaeom (Hua Yen) School of Buddhism. This passage is the opening of Book 37 of the Avatamsaka Sutra as translated by Thomas Cleary (p. 975).

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Andi's very profound post (am still chewing it over) re: impermanence.

_

You might be curious to know that my SWU students didn't know who Sheik Yassin was. I should have directed them to what is perhaps my favorite Allapundit Photoshopping job.

I'm not sure I should confess the following, but here we go...

The French have a saying: Le coeur a ses raisons que la Raison ne connaît point. The heart has its reasons, of which Reason knows nothing.*

Let me modify the above to apply to my current situation: La bite a ses raisons que la Raison ne connaît point.

The dick has its reasons, of which Reason knows nothing.

Last week, on the second day of classes, a girl walked into my class-- the kind who sets off all sorts of alarms in any culture, who activates dormant glands, arouses the id, clouts the superego over the head and dumps its unconscious form into a closet. The kind of girl who, in your more lucid moments, you know is all wrong for you. You can see right away that she's high-maintenance, has a complex social life, and can have her pick of the pool of available males. She'll suck you dry and leave your husk to bleach in the desert sun.

But the dick, awash in this Aphrodite's pheromones, has taken over-- and all it sees is someone to nail. It'll probably be another couple weeks before I get all the students' names down pat, so I don't know this girl's name. It doesn't matter; the dick has targeted her for spermination. The Police took the Lolita story and gave us "Don't Stand So Close to Me," which about sums up how I feel whenever this chica either looks at me or-- as she did today-- hangs around after the end of class to ask English questions. All the dick sees is huge brown eyes; slim, curvy hips; compact, athletic figure; amazing smile; long, lovely hair.

In case you're wondering: no, I'm not going to let this go anywhere. But I'm a man, this is a blog, and if I can write a couple column-inches explaining to you the absolute evil of my diarrhea, then I think I can give you a wee bit of insight into the twisted workings of the male (or at least one male's) consciousness. For further research in this area, I highly recommend this film, which is waaay the hell over the top, but does provide an interesting glimpse of the fucked-up world of maleness.

[*NB: The negative construction "ne...point" in French is a very strong form of the standard negation "ne...pas." In truth it's "ne...rien" that usually yields the translation "nothing" in English, but I don't see an elegant way around "ne...point" in translating the above proverb. I suppose I could translate it, "The heart has its reasons, which Reason knows NOT." But using all-caps or italics to translate "ne...point" strikes me as something of a cop-out.]

I'm too damn tired to offer you more this evening. Have a day.

_

A quick roundup of my mini-blogosphere:

The Maximum Leader invites you into his time machine.

Another interesting series of photos accompanies this post over at Higo Blog. Unfortunately, the final pic looks to be of Hagrid with a boner. Gee... thanks, Adam.

A moderate liberal take on the Clarke flap at Peking Duck.

Lots of good material at Winds of Change. First: where to assign blame for 9/11? Next: a fascinating (for religion students) article by Robin Burk re: Lord Carey, the ex-Archbishop of Canterbury, who made some rather critical remarks about Islam. I might want to deal with this issue more in my Friday post.

Guest blogger CVE of Anticipatory Retaliation has comments about the Condi Rice flap. His verdict: the coverup is always worse than the scandal. I'd have to agree. Didn't anyone learn from Arnold's grope-pology? Arnold got out there fast when he learned that some women were accusing him. He issued a public, generic, largely content-free apology that left key issues unresolved but performed the strategic work of getting him in office. The more this administration hems and haws over whether Rice should testify, the worse things look. Ditto for over-defensive reactions to perceived threats (I'll let liberals jump all over that statement). Whether we're talking about domestic PR or diplomatic capital on the international scene, these are the kinds of impressions that count. "Style over substance," you say? Of course-- and I agree with you. But that's part of what politics is all about. As the old wisdom goes: Washington is Hollywood for ugly people.

Very interesting Tacitus post on Christian self-perceptions in Jordan and Israel.

Annika has me rolling with this lovely Photoshopping of the new, thickening Britney Spears.

KBJ on reasonable thinking about the Iraq war and just-war theory.

John Moore offers a decidedly different take on the Condi Rice/Clarke issue.

Instapundit sees it differently from Moore.

And now: your Hominid update.

My senses of taste and smell haven't returned yet, but I'm no longer afflicted with chills, fever, nastily sore throat, and slight nausea. I no longer cough up huge, dark blobs of congealed mucus, nor do I find it hard to swallow. Was well enough to teach on Monday, even though I looked and sounded shittier than usual. Today was an improvement over yesterday, but my nose is still stuffed and my voice still sounds much deeper (and therefore sexier!) than normal. Unfortunately, most of the SWU campus seems to have caught my illness, so runny noses, fevers, and coughs are everywhere. I guess this is a good time for... phlegmatic endurance.

Haw haw.

Ah, your silence, your eye-rolling-- they reveal much. Yes, I see I've gotten you so thoroughly conditioned to intense scatological imagery that a simple Disneyfied pun is as ineffective as giving coffee to a crackhead.

So let me tell you about my extremely productive anus, which has been especially entertaining over the past few days.

Although today's glorious jet of diarrhea smacked the toilet water hard enough to produce a sound akin to a moist thud, first prize has to be awarded to yesterday evening's diarrhea, the horrifying results of which I had the good fortune to see-- and therefore to relate to you.

Diarrhea is nature's way of reminding us that, sometimes, There Are Unscheduled Launches. Luckily, I was master of my internals for most of the day, and didn't feel any particular urge to evacuate the plumbing even while at Min-sung's place. But once I got home, the situation changed dramatically, and one of my very first acts upon entering the domicile was to lumber/waddle to the bathroom, settle myself magisterially upon my Throne of Power, and let fly a ghastly torrent of Sauron-scale filth that would have produced a thousand Uruk-hai in the breeding dens of Saruman.

You'd think a man would outgrow the urge to stand up, turn around, and look at his ass's latest attempt at a Jackson Pollock repro. What I saw yesterday was truly amazing: the shotgun splatter pattern-- more violent than usual-- was a full, deep charcoal everywhere above the level of the toilet water, and the toilet water itself was obsidian-black. Even Yoda popped his head into the bathroom and declared, "This place is strong with the dark side of the Force. A domain of evil it is."

The blackness of the toilet water wasn't what struck me: the fact that the splatter pattern above the waterline was so dark-- that's what had me worshipping myself. Normally, the splatter pattern is too diluted to be more than chocolate-brown. The fact that utter blackness speckled and splotched the inside of my toilet bowl was a testament to the absolute purity of my asshole's evil.

Shitting is one of those skills for which the compliment "I knew you had it in you" was developed. It's a skill that, like the game Othello, is "a minute to learn, a lifetime to master." At this point, NO ONE IS RATED HIGH ENOUGH TO JUDGE THE LEVEL I'VE ATTAINED.

FUCK YOU ALL!

_

Greetings, Hairy Chasms readers. Here is an interesting news headline for you. Vermont Probes Man With 70 Goats in House. It's about time the man got probed. Surely the goats are looking at this as sweet revenge.

Carry on.

I'm back this evening from my lesson with Min-sung, my nutty 9-year old. It was our first lesson since before Christmas, and it was as though nothing had changed. Min-sung shares my scatological sense of humor, so much of the hour was spent saying "DUNG!" loudly. Min-sung's English is better than that of many of my SWU students; not only is he a natural at picking up the language, but he's also not afraid to make mistakes-- a virtue I didn't possess in the early years of my French language career.

My SWU students appear to be reshuffling themselves: my first and third hours have grown in number (one class went well over the maximum of 15 today), while my second and fourth have dwindled. Same faces, different places. One pretty student, someone I didn't know, caught me in the hallway and asked whether I was teaching a 2PM class; I had to tell her that I wasn't. It's nice to know that people still want to sign up for the course. Maybe my reputation is spreading thanks to the circulation of those digital pics.

Today's survey of Koreablogs must-- MUST-- begin with Kevin of IA, who gets his rant on and lets Korean society have it yet again for its immaturity. I thought that was an interesting strategy, showing the shameful parallel between the behavior of the Norkbot cheerleaders and the crybabies who infest the South Korean National Assembly.

The Marmot reports on something we've all been watching with morbid fascination: pro-remilitarization rumblings in Japan. In this case, the specific issue is preemptive strikes against-- you guessed it-- North Korea. I can't say I blame Japan for thinking this way. It's like the Infidel has warned repeatedly: pressure needs to be on South Korea to help solve this crisis. The Japanese hawks are only thinking the obvious: "If they won't solve the problem, we need to be ready to solve it ourselves."

The Vulture proudly displays a national treasure.

Mike of SEB gets a great snapshot of me at work.

If preemptive strike talk is pissing off North Korea, NK is planning to piss off Japan by issuing stamps that show the disputed island of Tokdo as a Korean territory. (via Oranckay)

Budae Chigae and Infidel on force realignment.

The Yangban has the goods on OOP (Yeollin Uri Dang, Our Open Party) and thinks that the upcoming election might not be an OOP cakewalk.

Owen Rathbone provides some meta-commentary about the upcoming election.

I think we Koreabloggers take turns with this. Today it's Kirk's turn to plot North Korea's mood swings. Kirk, are you ever going to put up that graphic I made for you?

Nelly, ho-ddeok, and komdo over at Andi's place.

Polymath is back in the States and dealing with a whole new pile of bureaucratic bullshit from-- where else?-- the DMV.

I learned something new:

Strip clubs are pretty much standard destinations for any Korean adult male visiting the U.S.

I obviously hang with all the wrong Koreans.

Goldbrick: grudging defender of the guilty!

Kathreb surveys the current state of East Asian politics. She also bemoans Australia's choice to vote "no," alongside the US, regarding the UN High Commission for Human Rights Special Resolution condemning Israel (surprise, surprise) for continued human rights violations, including the recent "tragic" (yep, that's what the resolution says) assassination of Sheik Yassin. Kathreb sees Australia's move as little more than politically motivated "arse-kissing" of the US. Maybe; maybe not. Whatever the Aussie motives for such a vote, I think the US stance is principled. Are there human rights violations being perpetrated by Israel? Undoubtedly. But why haven't we seen an equal number of UN condemnations of suicide attacks in Israeli buses, restaurants, and shops? I'm beginning to think that the crazies might be right: the UN does have an anti-Israel agenda.

The Party Pooper will live to poop another day as he, too, prepares to leap from Blog Shitty into Farts Unknown.

Somehow, in all the election-related hubbub, I think this got missed.

_

The above was originally a birthday card design. I used to be the "official card-maker" at my old job in DC.

More hot, wet alien-human action next week. I'm sick as a dog this weekend.

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I'm blogging this from a terminal at KIX, dealing with a funky-ass keyboard, and spending money at a rate of 100 yen (about a dollar) per TEN MINUTES' USE. This reminds me of Europe. Come to think of it, the keyboard reminds me of Europe, where keyboards vary from country to country (any hope for a standardized EU? HA!). Since I'm here for a bit, and today is Saturday Swag, I thought I'd re-paste last Saturday's wares. Also, if you've got friends who're into cryptography, tell them to take a gander at the riddle sitting at the very bottom of my sidebar. No hints. See if you can discover the right decryption algorithm. For the hardcore, this should be easy beans. I'm even thinking about offering a monetary prize.

The folk understanding of karma is, "What goes around comes around." The Korean Buddhist expression for this is captured by the Sino-Korean phrase "In Gwa Eung Bo." The "in" comes from the word "weon-in," which means "cause." The "gwa" is from "gyeol-gwa," which is "result" or "effect." As a pair, "in-gwa" means "cause and effect." The next pair of syllables, "eung-bo," means something like "retribution."



In this case, I used Korean letters instead of Chinese characters.

Buy an In Gwa Eung Bo mug today!

Visit my CafePress store and shop around!

Buy my filthy, gross, disgusting book of poetry, cartoons, and short stories from Amazon!

Or visit my swag blog, Only the Chewiest Tumors, and order several copies of my book directly from me at a discount!

Bowls of warm bile await you.

Oh, by the way-- for you intellectual types-- I've whipped up what I think is a pretty mean brain-teaser. It's all the way at the bottom of my sidebar. Think you have the mental balls to figure it out? Go on and give it a try. I'm thinking I might want to give away a prize to the winner... what would be a good prize? Free blogging rights to my blog for three days? $50?? Some free Hominid swag (pick any 3 items)?? I'll have to mull this one over.

If you don't see anything you like at my stores, visit the Maximum Leader's CafePress store and take a gander at the fast-burgeoning designs of the very talented Digital Pixi!

Don't forget my previous mug designs:















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UPDATE, 11:30PM: Just got back from my 8-10PM class, which is across town. I think we're going to have to save Rescherian orientational pluralism for next week.

1. I'm off to Japan for the weekend, starting Saturday. Blogging will be light to nonexistent.

2. The family minivan was declared totalled, and a check was cut and sent to the parents, who have used the money as a down payment on a spanking new Honda Odyssey minivan. Dad sends his thanks to all the folks who contributed, and it's my understanding that he'll be sending you a personal thank-you note (this is what I'm hearing from my brother David).

3. Later today (Friday), I'll probably deal a bit with Nicholas Rescher's orientational pluralism, which lies at the heart of S. Mark Heim's neo-pluralistic answer to John Hick.

4. I get the creepy feeling (cf. previous post) that, somewhere in cyberspace, an image of my face is being passed around a giggling circle of college women.

5. Like Allahpundit, Lorianne seems to feel a little funny in the pants. It was only a year or two ago that I learned the female equivalent of the expression "sportin' wood."

Sportin' hood.

That, friends, is deliciously pink and vivid.

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Yikes. The crunch is upon me. I just acquired another private tutoring gig (actually, it's my old gig with Min-sung, my 9-year-old: he didn't go to America as planned), which promises to fill up my evenings even more.

I'm nodding off as I type this, so apologies for the mistakes that slip through my periodically malfunctioning anti-errata radar. If I had the energy (not to mention the time), I'd put together a comprehensive response to Dr. Vallicella's reply. Then again, the more I think about our respective stated positions, the more I realize that neither of us (and neither of us is a Buddhist) has actually gone into any real depth about what the anatta (no-self) doctrine truly is, from the Pali Buddhist perspective.

One of the major questions is whether a notion like "relative permanence" makes any sense from the Pali Buddhist perspective. My contention is that it doesn't, but I haven't done enough research (and don't have the requisite facts at my mental fingertips) to make the argument properly. So I'm going to table this issue until I can do some meaningful research on it and do justice to the Pali Buddhist perspective.

One quick note: Dr. Vallicella seems to think I conflated Platonic formalism and Aristotelian formal cause. Having reread what I wrote, I don't think that's the case, because I very deliberately said "or," implying that I realized these were distinct.

A comprehensive response will be a long time in the making. I consider it a welcome research project and invite help from Buddhist readers, especially those versed in Theravada thought and metaphysics.

While U Wait, here's something to feed your scandal-hunger: today in class, I passed around my old Catholic University student ID for my SWU English conversation students to see (part of the lesson was about ID cards). Two girls in the back row of the 3PM class took out their cell phones, snapped close-up shots of my photo, proclaimed me/the photo "cute," then passed the ID along to the other students.

I turned the matter into a big joke, comparing the "cute" CUA ID with my very fat and thuggish-looking driver's license pic, but to be honest, while I was amused, I was also very disturbed by the picture-snapping. As I think this over, I'm not sure why I find the girls' actions disturbing. Since I post my own pic on my blog, and people can "steal" it at will and manipulate it however they want, it's not as though the girls gained access to something previously unavailable (i.e., my image), and I'm not worried about distorted or cruelly captioned pictures of me floating around online. I don't think the girls were being malicious at all (male vanity makes me wonder whether they're planning to show the pic around to friends-- "See? This is our cute English teacher!" --oooooh, you silly, silly girlies), but the incident still bothers me.

Maybe what bothers me is that the girls even thought to do something like that. This was the 3PM class, the last class of the day, and I'd gotten through all my other classes without anyone clicking a pic. Today's young folks are quick with their technology; I'm obviously going to have to announce a "no cell phone usage" rule in all my classes-- policy that's generally assumed at the college level (yes, even here in Korea).

I'm not comfortable with what happened. I should've demanded that they erase the pics, now that I think about it.

What would the Buddha do?

_

With thanks to John Eckard, who emailed this to me, I present:



The astute reader will have noticed the sly reference to Harry Potter in the fourth line, and what appears to be a fart reference in the fifth line.

Someone WHO SHALL REMAIN NAMELESS sent the following tittie pic, which I've altered a wee bit by installing, uh, Dharma Eyes:



The Maximum Leader sends me the following pic. I thought at first that he'd found a picture of Andi, but maybe it's someone Andi knows, or knows of:



The caption of the Yahoo snippet to which this photo is appended says:

South Korean traditional art of sword-fighting 'Haedong Gumdo' master Youn Ja-kyung holds a sword in Seoul February 23, 2004. Youn, a 26-year-old woman, has practiced the art since she was 13-years-old and became a master in 1995. Picture taken February 23, 2004. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon

Ick. Grammar gripe: "13 years old" doesn't need any hyphens.

I like the pic, though. Another example of the combination of eros and thanatos.

Off to do more lesson planning.

_

Back from my first day of teaching at Seoul Women's University. Surfacing from the deep well of estrogen into which I was plunged this morning and early afternoon, I give my verdict:

Oooooooh, yeah.

But it's just as I expected: the ladies in my classes are all undergrads, and while there may be plenty of hellcats among them, there are some ground rules of human conduct every moral man of 34 must obey:

1. You do not talk about Fight Club.

2. You DO NOT BANG YOUR STUDENTS, especially when they all look "barely legal."

Upon these two greatest commandments hang the Law and the Prophets.

While there were plenty of cuties in the classes, the cutest cutie was one I saw outside while walking home from my final class. I doubt she was staring at me because she found my gut sexy; more likely she was thinking to herself, "Yet another sweaty foreigner bringing the odor of phallocracy and kyriarchy to our abode of sapphic delights. I'd bite off his hairy orchids right here if I could get away with it." I got similar stares while in the Science Building's cafeteria to get a drink. Animal attraction or simply the urge to bite off the foreigner's balls?

In any case, the cutie's lingering stare caused subterranean stirrings. She looked like a grad student, too-- should've snagged her by the elbow and asked her to marry me.

Yes, this might be an interesting semester.

In other news-- I'm experiencing a mini Marmot-lanche and... Anus-lanche? My thanks to both Robert and KBJ for their links, undeserved though they be.

One of the cool things about Anything Goes Wednesday is that I can catch up on cool links I missed on Monday and Tuesday.

Andi's blog has a whole host of posts worth reading; here's a link to the entire blog. Just keep reading. She makes me wonder if she isn't writing a second book, piece by piece.

Rathbone Press has a must-read about "the China factor."

Pythi Master's fisking of Rumsfeld-- with footnotes-- deserves a thorough reading. Woojay made the right decision to wait for his wrath to cool down and coalesce into something more precise and deadly. Rumsfeldians? Your reply? Also of note is Woojay's MoveOn.org link to Rumsfeld's meltdown on "Face the Nation," in which he had his own words quoted back to him re: the "imminent threat" issue. I suppose a defender of Rumsfeld could get nitpicky about the quotes, but watch Rumsfeld himself in that clip: he's clearly uncomfortable, and I was left cringing for him, despite being-- sorry, Woojay-- something of a Rummy fan.

I should explain my own Rummy fanitude. It's mainly because I agree with his military philosophy: slimmer, sleeker, better-coordinated armed forces, more oriented to surgical strikes and multifront conflict, with less emphasis on the ability to conduct huge, WW2-style campaigns. Aside from that, I like Rummy for the same reason others hate him: he's not very diplomatic. So yes, he comes off as an asshole; the only question at that point is your attitude toward assholes. And whether it's important for the assholes to be on your side.

Carpemundi sends me the following article (subscription to JP required), which looks at both Teh(e)ran's and Pyongyang's nuclear assholery. One great snatch from this article reads:

The nuclear weapons ambitions of both Pyongyang and Teheran beg the question: how do we reverse nonproliferation violators?

Enforcing treaties in the anarchical world of international politics is an old problem. But in the current era it is all the more important given the risk that nuclear materials can migrate into the hands of terrorists.

The solution calls for new international standards that would promise nonproliferation treaty violators sure and swift consequences. Embodied in a new nonproliferation action template, enforcement would begin within two weeks of an IAEA declaration of noncompliance. Sanctions against the violator would become progressively more intense and mount quickly:

Weeks 1 to 2, international calls for compliance "or else."
Week 3, suspension of international commerce.
Week 5, ban on international travel.
Week 7, naval and air blockades to enforce all prohibitions.
Week 9, military action.

The very next sentence had me rolling, though, because it's a good candidate for Understatement of the Year:

But there remains a practical problem: the enforcement mechanism.

The rest of that paragraph sounds just as British:

The Security Council would be the obvious candidate. It best represents the cross section of global interests. But as Iraq and North Korea cases demonstrate, the Council has the propensity to dither. Furthermore, the United Nations itself has no standing instrumentality for enforcement.

I love the 9-week calendar approach. But as Aesop asked, and it's the UN's question as well: "Who among us mice is going to put the bell on the sleeping cat?" To appreciate the actual situation, in which powerful UN member states are stymied by tiny North Korea, you have to imagine the mice are the size of Great Danes, but still afraid of the cat.

"Propensity to dither" indeed!

_

It's about 8:30-something in the evening as I type these opening lines for tonight's Worldfarts, and I still don't know what my teaching schedule is going to be like tomorrow. I received a call from the agency boss around 7:30 or so, promising that she'd call again before 10PM to confirm my schedule with me. This seems to indicate, at the very least, that I am indeed teaching tomorrow, which is a good thing, since we hominids have to earn money.

A quick housekeeping note before I inundate you with more bad haiku: you may have noticed some subtractions and additions to the Koreablogroll. First, a hearty welcome to the newcomers (none of whom is, in truth, a newcomer)-- I've blogrolled you because I should have blogrolled you a while back, or because I dropped you for some odd reason (lovely, lovely shrooms) and only just caught the oversight.

Next, while I'm at it, I should explain my blogrolling "policy," such as it is.

I want my blogroll to consist, first and foremost, of daily or almost-daily reads. You're not merely on the blogroll because I like your blog; you're on there because I actually read you. I do not engage in link-whoring, even though this would be great for marketing and Big Cheese status at Truth Laid Bear. If you're a link whore, don't take my attitude personally; it's not meant to be a judgement against your sluttish ways, you Queen of Sloppy Seconds.

Because my blogroll's gotten as long as it has, I've become more and more hesitant to stick names on there, and to be honest, I don't much like being asked for a mutual link these days (no offense to the folks who've asked, but I've probably blogrolled you, anyway, because you have good blogs, so kwi ch'o bi ch'ing asa horu!).

What it comes down to is this: I'm not a symmetrical linker. I link to people who don't link back to me (It Makes a Difference to the Sheep and Ryan's Lair, for example), and it's no big deal. People link to me, and I don't link back to them, and there, too, I hope the asymmetry is no big deal. My opinion of your blog shouldn't matter all that much, anyway: I get a bit more than 100 unique hits a day which, in the larger scheme of things, isn't very much. I'm small beans. If I haven't linked to you, who gives a shit? And lastly, because there are so many damn good blogs out there, the lack of a link isn't an indictment of your blog: you may be among the Damn Good.

End sermon. And now: Worldfart haiku.

Chinese government
like a man who coughs mid-shit
clamps anus on blogs

Thai pork for breakfast
secret ingredient was
Garlicky richness

[NB: the above is an example of "found poetry," a term I recently learned. It refers to crafting a poem out of phrases you find in other texts. A great example of "intertextuality." You PoMo folks getting stiff nipples yet? I knew you would. Let me throw some more PoMo terms at you: how about dissemination? or différance? or aporia? or semiurgy? or simulacra? Are your nipples about to vibrate right off your chesticles? Let's cool you down, then: how about the term that scares all Derridean postmodernists away: TRANSCENDENTAL SIGNIFIED??]

I have no courage
Hello Kitty ate my balls
so I won't do THIS

Adam on Taiwan:
Chinese prick-waving's a joke
and Conrad agrees

also at Conrad's
pictures of a sexy chick
no surprises here

Dan Darling on Clarke
things aren't always as they seem
"...ain't that interesting."

Naked Villainy!
A BLOG AT WAR WITH ITSELF!
No, I'm not joking.

[NB: The individual permalinks to various NV posts might not be working, so I've provided a link to the blog itself. Start with "Just a Few Brief Comments to the Foreign Minister" and scroll upwards.]

religious studies
run by Nazi stooges! Ach!
ist das Wissenschaft?

sadly, Tacitus
shaves with Occam's Razor, but
damn, it just won't cut

level-headed views
was Iraq a distraction?
go see Macallan

ah, a language rant!
yes, for once I must agree
with Burgess-Jackson!

[NB: I used to be a holy terror in the online writer's forums because I'm a language Nazi myself. I haven't done a language rant on this blog yet, and I've wondered why. Then it dawned on me: blogging isn't the same thing as participating in an online writer's forum. It always amused me when writers, stung by my rants (which were never aimed at specific people, but always at specific faux pas), would shoot back with lame and petulant replies about how they were writing for entertainment, not to be absolutely perfect. I think they were deliberately misunderstanding my position: in a writer's forum, which is about writing, people should be doing their damnedest to write well. People who suck should be ready to hear some corrections, and even we language Nazis need to be ready to take our own medicine when we make mistakes. No one's immune, after all, but there are meaningful differences between writers who tool along heedlessly and those who take the time to produce disciplined work.

For myself, I'll go over a post even after it's been stuck on the blog, and will correct mistakes as I find them, and I find them daily. I consider my blogs to be drafts; I imagine that everything I slap up here is potential material for a book or magazine article. Does it take some nerve to think that way? Yes, I suppose it does, but I also think it helps the writing. If you see a post I've just slapped up, then come back to it twenty or thirty minutes later, you might notice some slight changes-- corrected typos, patched-up locutions, etc. The process never stops, and maybe that's a sign of neurotic perfectionism. But self-expression is something I want to do well, and while some people may feel it's better to concentrate on product rather than process, I don't think those things are separable in good writing.

But going back to the language Nazi thing. I agree with Buddhist process ontology, in which you don't find foundations, and you see phenomena as dynamic. English isn't a reality written in cosmic stone. So when Keith Burgess-Jackson declares, qua fellow language Nazi, that the plural of "dwarf" is "dwarfs" and not "dwarves," I take this with a grain of salt. Or when he says that "forte" must be pronounced "fort" and not "for-tay," as many of us say, I just roll my eyes.

Languages change. Very often, this happens because a bunch of people start making the same "mistake," and the mistake propagates until it reaches some sort of threshold, beyond which the mistake becomes "common usage." Ultimately, I'm not a die-hard language Nazi: it seems silly to side with linguistic liberals or conservatives in an absolutistic manner. Conservatives have a point when they contend that some "standard" form of the language is necessary for us to understand each other and express ourselves clearly. Liberals have a point when they say that treating a grammar book as a set of absolute rules is absurd. Grammar books, dictionaries, and other language references function simultaneously as authorities and as reflections of the current state of the language. If you think this isn't true, then you have to explain why the Webster's Dictionary of the early 1900s looks so different from Webster's Third New International Dictionary.

Consider some examples of sins that grate on my ear but are bound to take over the language:

1. I feel badly that...

From the orthodox point of view, the verb "feel" is functioning as a copula (linking verb), so what comes next should be a predicate adjective, NOT an adverb modifying "feel"! I bash my head against the wall whenever I see this, but so many people engage in this sin that it's little use ranting about it.

The verb "to be" isn't the only verb that can function as a copula. Consider the difference between these two sentences:

a. The plant grew tall. ("tall" modifies "plant"-- the verb "grew" is a copula here; the plant doesn't "grow in a tall manner"-- that's just idiotic)
b. The plant grew fast. ("fast" modifies "grew"-- the verb "grew" is NOT a copula here)

And you need to be careful with "to be":

a. He is good.
b. He is well.

BEWARE!! In both cases, the verb functions as a copula. "Well" in (b) IS NOT AN ADVERB-- it's an adjective describing one's state of health!

"To feel bad" for someone is to feel pity, sorrow, etc. for that person. "To feel badly" would refer, technically, to a dysfunction in one's ability to feel (in a tactile or emotional sense), but "feeling badly" is an awkward way to describe that condition. "Nerve damage" or "post-traumatic stress disorder" might be a little better.

(Jesus, I shouldn't have started this rant-- I could go on for hours.)

Another example that grates on me:

2. Between you and I...

If only I had a gun...

What sucks immense donkey dick about the above is that the problem is so fucking easy to correct. After a preposition, you have the object of the preposition. That means your pronoun, if you're using a pronoun, needs to be in the objective case. Not he-- him. Not she-- her. Not I-- MEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.

He gave it to me. ("me" is the object of the preposition "to")
I placed the gun between her and him. ("her" and "him" are the objects of "between")
This is between you and me. ("you" and "me" = objects of "between")

FUCK!

One rule I routinely ignore isn't really a rule anymore, but people insist on perpetuating this myth: "You can't end a sentence with a preposition." This has been bullshit for many years, mainly thanks to "petrified expressions"-- i.e., expressions whose word order you can't change. For instance, the classic violation:

That is not something up with which I will put!

No one, except someone fixated on the "rule" about prepositions, would ever make a sentence like the above. "Put up with" is a petrified expression. Check a modern resource on this point, not a reference from the 1960s.

I'm also an enemy of cutesy Internet locutions:

"yanno" instead of "you know"
"butt-nekkid" instead of the original "buck naked"
"nevermind" instead of "never mind"
"underway" instead of "under way"

And as KBJ's post points out, there is indeed a difference between "everyday" (an adjective) and "every day" (a phrase functioning as an adverb of time/frequency).

I fuck sheep every day.
(adverb of time/frequency modifying "fuck")

What? You've never done that? Why, that's a pretty everyday thing for me. Try it.
(adjective modifying "thing")

Yes, I could go on for hours and hours and hours... KBJ's post opened the floodgates.

One last gripe:

The whole "punctuation and end-quote" thing bothers me, because people don't seem to remember which country they're in.

In British English, your end-quote goes INSIDE; the period goes OUTSIDE.

He said, 'Let's fuck a sheep until it explodes'.

In America:

He said, "Let's fuck a sheep until it explodes."

I wish to hell that someone would teach this to Steven Den Beste, one of the most notorious violators of the above rule, but Den Beste has already warned people not to correct his English, so I guess we'll just have to shoot him.

Wow, that felt good: my very first language rant on this blog. It makes me look even more sanctimonious than usual, I'm sure, but if you resent the rant and don't plan on changing your ways, well... bend over, butt-puppy. I've got a rifle that fires dildos.

By the way, if you're going to be even more orthodox than I am and hope to catch me on a grammar/style/usage point, you'd better cite a source for your correction. KBJ's rants re: "dwarfs" and the pronunciation of "forte" aren't supported by the dictionary. I ignore those rants, even though I wholeheartedly agree with him about other things.]

Glenn at "Hi. I'm Black!"
also has a language rant
cornROWS, not cornROLLS!

Allahu Akbar!
Paradise gets a new guest
heavenly pussy

TEACHING SCHEDULE UPDATE: It's almost 11PM now, as I finish this post up. I got a call at 10:10 this evening, just as I was typing the beginning of the language rant, and now I know that I have at least one class from 11:00 to 11:50. Hooray! Apparently, I find out the rest of my schedule just before 11AM tomorrow, as I'm supposed to meet my boss. This doesn't exactly help lesson planning and curriculum design, but lucky for me, I'm the type to over-prepare for lessons. Between you and I, there won't be any problems tomorrow, so don't feel badly for me.

It occurs to me that another myth to explode is the "don't begin a sentence with a conjunction" myth. The only time it's important to follow that rule is in academe. Even there, it's not an absolute. And you know this.

[LANGUAGE RANT UPDATE: For those keeping count, an hour has passed and I've caught about five or six mistakes in this post, some of them pretty damn embarrassing, and many of them were hiding in plain sight inside the language rant itself! So if you were planning on hurling a "Fuck off, Mr. Perfect!" my way, you can take comfort in my imperfection. Besides, I never implied I was perfect-- just more conscientious (and perhaps more linguistically neurotic) than the average hominid.]

_

If you glanced at the weekly schedule on the sidebar, you saw a slight revision: the Monday Koreablogger roundup has been replaced by Koreafarts. Part of this is a concession to upcoming time constraints: there's simply no way I'll be able to take the time to do a proper Koreablogger roundup after this coming Wednesday, so instead of committing myself to something I won't be able to fulfill, I'm going to devote Mondays to anything Korea-related, which may or may not include Koreabloggers. I hate to diss the folks on the blogroll; I'd like to think I'm loyal to them, but here as elsewhere, the rude penis of practical reality has crawled drunkenly inside the startled vagina of idealism, so I'd rather permit myself the luxury, à la the Maximum Leader, of shorter posts when necessary.

Today I visited Seoul National University to meet with Dr. Park Yoon-soo, the man who gave the keynote speech at that Korean Christmas Party I emceed in northern Virginia this past December. It's been years since I ventured onto Seoul-Dae's campus; I'd forgotten how big it was. It's a good thing I grabbed a taxi from Seoul-Dae Ipgu Station; I would've been pretty damn late otherwise.

Dr. Park, a man in his 70s, is in the grumbling phase of his new job as distinguished guest lecturer on electrical engineering and semiconductor technology. He's been in America the past few decades, and is shocked and appalled by the byzantine nature of Korean bureaucracy. "Forms to fill out and sign, always more forms!" he groused. "I thought I gave them everything they needed before I moved here, and now there are more forms!" Any expat who's had to deal with the Korean Immigration Office knows exactly how Dr. Park feels. Bureaucratic bullshit isn't unique to Korea (Exhibit A: Northern Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles), but the bullshit here is, on average, deeper and more fetid.

"Nothing I requested for my office has arrived yet!" Dr. Park said, shaking his head and chuckling cynically. His office was bare. An American laptop sat on one table; a Korean computer and printer sat on another. There was an empty bookshelf by the table with the laptop. There was a very nice-looking clock on the wall. A whiteboard hung off another wall. Two pegs, for hanging clothes, jutted out of a third. The paint was a lusterless white. The view out the window gave onto the enormous wall of another building across the way. What a soul-deadening space.

At least Dr. Park's teaching load is fairly light-- two 75-minute classes per week. His speaking and writing obligations, however, are heavier: he's expected to write short articles a few times per week and to give special lectures at various universities in South Korea, which means he'll be travelling a bit. In fact, he's off to Chejudo (poor, poor man) this Friday for a lecture. Maybe he'll lay out a Grand Unified Theory about Rocks, Wind, and Women, Chejudo's three treasures.

We ate lunch at a nearby cafeteria-- my first-ever meal of bibim-bap with brown den-jang sauce instead of red gochu-jang. At our table were three other Korean profs who'd taught for long periods in the States. One gentleman, a Dr. Kim, shook my hand and spoke in perfect, unaccented English-- a skill I'd like to attain in Korean someday, though I doubt I will. Dr. Kim, it turns out, spent many years teaching at Lehigh University, where my buddy Steve got his Ph.D.

[NB: Talk about six degrees of separation: I've mentioned this before, but it never ceases to freak me out. Jonathan Frakes, the actor who played Commander Riker on "Star Trek: The Next Generation," is the son of Dr. Johnathan Frakes, who was one Steve's profs during his grad program at Lehigh. Dr. Frakes retired not long ago; I saw him once on Lehigh's gorgeous campus, and yes, he looks like a much older (and more cheerful) version of Commander Riker. This puts me-- what-- two or three degrees of separation away from the massive Star Trek franchise, five degrees of separation from William Shatner, and six degrees of separation from Leonard Nimoy.

I can tell you're not impressed. Eat me.

Actually, I'm only two degrees of separation away from Nimoy: the Air Marshal, one of my closest friends, saw Nimoy give a talk at Virginia Tech years ago. Isn't that right?]

My meeting with Dr. Park was about getting a job at Dongguk University. He told me he'd do what he could to help, but no firm promises. I'm not really expecting much; poor Dr. Park is still dealing with the shock of Seoul-dae's dingleberry-flavored bureaucracy, and I don't think he's going to have much time to focus on my paltry hobbit-scale needs. Watching Dr. Park, who was so self-assured when I met him in the States last December, look and feel so helpless in what used to be his own culture made me pity him. His situation brought home the fact that professors here, despite their age and prestige, don't always get the red-carpet treatment, no matter what the Confucian ideal is supposed to be.

Let's hit a few bloggers, shall we? And let's try something different, both today and tomorrow: let's do this as a series of haikus.

bloggers "chafe his scrote"
Stavros has no patience for
incestuous links

Kathreb likes her pic
I admit I drool over
women with steel tits

Woojay gets pissed off
thinks Rumsfeld's a fucking prick
I'll let you decide.

topic smorgasbord
Andi rounds up all the news
how was Chiri-san?

our minds are wiped clean--
void of any history
fuck, we're stupid sheep

Al Qaeda's pissed off
claiming they have "briefcase nukes"
they can chew my balls

Chigae in da house
serving up a link buffet
thanks for the shout-out

Infidel at war
also examines China
not just once, but twice!

Oranckay on Noh
ponders Thatcher's underwear
--who's the REAL byun-t'ae?

living skeletons
starving, stultified, oppressed
response? WORK HARDER!

Fuck the Japanese!
That is what Koreans think
and say in cartoons

_

Sorry, but I don't think there's going to be a Sunday comic this week. Bad form, I know, but it can't be helped.

You have to be in a wicked mood to draw comics like mine, but I saw "T'aegeukgi Huinalli-myeo" yesterday, and just can't seem to cheer myself out of The Pit of Despair. While I didn't exit the theater a blubbering mess (my buddy's wife had to borrow my Kleenex-- she was a mess, and even my buddy was a bit misty-eyed), I did leave with a very tight throat. We three stepped out of the cinema, piled into the car, started driving-- and no one said a thing for about 20 minutes. When the silence finally broke, we found we had very little to say.

Cinematically speaking, the movie borrows the visual tricks and storytelling tropes you've seen in American war films like "Saving Private Ryan" and "Platoon." "T'aegeukgi" is a morality play that centers on two brothers. It's arguably more complex than "Platoon," in which Charlie Sheen is faced with a fairly straightforward moral dilemma personified by his two spiritual fathers, Sgt. Elias (Willem Dafoe as the good guy) and Sgt. Barnes (Tom Berrenger as the bad guy).

The symbolism in "T'aegeukgi" (and I have to give Korean filmmakers credit for their talent in making symbol-rich films) often reminded me of the yin-yang symbol at the heart of the South Korean flag. That symbol, the t'aegeuk, or Great Ultimate, shows a cosmos in process, one in which yin and yang intertwine with and imply each other. You see this cosmic tumble in the interaction between the two brothers: the elder brother, already bitter, seeks glory (and perhaps death) in combat. He'd send his younger brother off the battlefield if he could, because despite his gruffness, he loves his younger brother deeply. The younger brother, a gentler and more compassionate soul, simply wants to survive the war and desperately begs his older brother to stop risking his life. This conflict is fairly clear-cut in the first half of the film, but becomes murky and confused-- like war itself-- in the second half.

For me, as the eldest of three brothers, the film was hard to watch because I could put myself in the place of the movie's elder brother. Though I never express this to my younger brothers, I feel very protective of them, and like the older brother in the film, I'd want to send my younger brothers out of harm's way. Sorry if I'm revealing too much, but the elder brother dies to give his younger brother the chance to survive, and I was left hoping that I could be so noble. If anything ever happened to my brothers, I'm not sure what I'd do, though I know I'd feel responsible.

"T'aegeukgi" did a great job of depicting the Korea of half a century ago. It fleshed out, in my mind, many of the stories my mother told me about her own horrifying experience in that war, in which she lost two brothers, and which is still the source of nightmares for her. Mom can't watch "Taegeukgi"; I'd never recommend it to her (though I'm recommending it to Dad).

I suppose what makes this viewing experience different from watching "Saving Private Ryan" or "Platoon" is that World War II and the Vietnam War are over. Here, barely 30 or so miles from where I sit, there's still a DMZ, and technically, there's still a war going on. This isn't over for the Korean people.

Strangely enough, "T'aegeukgi" seems to support my position on Korean brotherhood. Yes, North and South were one people. There's no denying the long and deep historical ties between them. As the movie shows when the older brother loses faith (he thinks the younger brother is dead) and switches sides to fight for the North Koreans, it's possible for those ties to be severed. But if this symbolism is political, then it's also optimistic: the older brother's change of heart, when he rediscovers his younger brother and gives his life to save him, is that brothers, once cruelly separated and devastated by an act of fate, can find and love each other again. That would be my hope for the future as well.

There's a lot more going on in "T'aegeukgi" than I've described. It's a complex film. My buddy's verdict was, "Some things are more important than ideology, communist, capitalist, whatever." I can see where he's coming from. His wife's verdict was, "Sad. So, so sad."

There we are. Now you know why there's no Sunday comic. Am feeling a bit too drained and depressed to stick one up. Much of my weekend has been spent in planning lessons for the upcoming teaching gig, and I think I'll keep doing that this evening.

_

The folk understanding of karma is, "What goes around comes around." The Korean Buddhist expression for this is captured by the Sino-Korean phrase "In Gwa Eung Bo." The "in" comes from the word "weon-in," which means "cause." The "gwa" is from "gyeol-gwa," which is "result" or "effect." As a pair, "in-gwa" means "cause and effect." The next pair of syllables, "eung-bo," means something like "retribution."



In this case, I used Korean letters instead of Chinese characters.

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_

KAPLAN

See my review of Stephen Kaplan's very interesting Different Paths, Different Summits, a book that offers a creative pluralistic hypothesis based largely on the work of David Bohm. I wanted to return to this briefly today to focus on some of the properties of holograms that make Kaplan's hypothesis atypical.

1. Implicate order and explicate order. The changing holographic images you see would constitute the explicate order of the hologram. The implicate order would be the interference patterns inscribed on the surface of the material being used to create the hologram.

2. Multiple images on the same surface. You can inscribe multiple images onto the same holographic surface, thereby producing many different holograms. Religious implication: one implicate order, many explicate orders. However, Kaplan is firm in the conviction that neither order, implicate or explicate, is logically prior to the other.

3. Wholeness in fragmentation. This has to be one of the strangest properties of holograms. Did you know that, if you break a hologram into pieces, each piece will project a smaller version of the entire image? I didn't know this until I read Kaplan's book. So if you start off with a large hologram of an elephant, then cut the hologram into six pieces, you don't get sections of an elephant-- you get six whole elephants! The religious implication is that every part of reality is a reflection of (or contains within itself) the entirety of reality. This dovetails with how some Taoists used to think. It's also an intuition found in a lot of different cultures.

4. Holomovement. This isn't actually a property of current holograms, though it could become so. The concept of holomovement is necessary, however, for Kaplan's pluralistic hypothesis to hold any water. If you enter the discussion by offering up only a typical hologram as an analogy, someone's bound to come along and say, "But reality isn't static and holographic images are." So underlying Kaplan's argument is this notion of holomovement.

As I said in my review, I don't quite buy Kaplan's hypothesis because it, like all other pluralistic hypotheses, still hangs everything on a single unifying element, which makes it subject to S. Mark Heim's "pluralism that isn't really pluralistic" critique.* Kaplan's model is, as he himself freely admits in describing it, multiple ontologies within a single metaphysic. Kaplan's book is a work in progress, though; he's very good about recognizing strong theological and metaphysical objections to his hypothesis, so perhaps we'll see a revised version of the book in the years to come. It's really an intriguing idea.

[*NB: I take some issue with this critique now, partly thanks to my readings in The Philosophical Challenge of Religious Diversity-- perhaps a discussion's in order for next week?]


COBB

A few days ago, Cobb wrote about Donald Sensing's position on gay marriage. Here's the link to that post. I posted the following comment in the thread to Cobb's post:

I'm very much pro-gay marriage, and find the clinging to a specific definition of "what marriage is about" to be futile and foolish. What appeals to me about Donald Sensing's larger argument is that he says, "Look, conservatives-- we already lost this fight long ago. Once people gained the ability to divorce sex from its consequences through birth control, etc., any necessary connection between marriage, sex, love, children, etc. was broken."

Where I disagree with Sensing is on whether this is a good or bad thing. To me, it's perfectly fine. Sensing's a conservative Christian, so naturally, this isn't fine-- it's "against the will of God."

But Sensing's approach gets my respect because it's empirical. He's looking at the situation as it is, not wasting his time pining for how it should be, or making useless declarations about what marriage is or isn't.

My own point of view is very Buddhist on this: marriage is a term describing a reality in flux. You cannot reduce marriage to a so-called set of "essentials." To declare, as Keith Burgess-Jackson does on his philosophy blog, that marriage is "essentially" about children, may reflect past history but says nothing about whether marriage will continue to be this way. Sensing steps in and makes an empirical observation: "Folks, the reality underlying the term 'marriage' HAS MOVED. Deal with that."

I've seen, on your blog, the notion that marriage is "ordained of God." I think that's fine as a religious belief and I wouldn't want to take that from you, even though I disagree because I'm a nontheist. I think what Sensing offers to conservatives is a proper way of viewing the situation: beginning with the empirical and proceeding pragmatically from there, instead of beginning with an indefensible "ought"-stance that has little chance of convincing anyone.

Insistence on what marriage is and isn't is what Buddhists would call "attachment to name and form"-- a classic type of attachment, and debilitating. The best cure is true, direct seeing. I don't think Rev. Sensing is a Zennist in any formal sense (despite his blog's name), but he at least sees this situation directly and truly.

Cobb wrote the following reply:

You cannot be a Buddhist without understanding and conforming to the Buddhist way of seeing things. I've read Karen Armstrong's book on Buddha, does that make me a Buddhist? I see things in a Buddhist way when that way explains things best, but does that make me a Buddhist? No.

When I say 'ordained of God' I mean that in the context of Holy Matrimony, not marriage in the commonly understood way. As well I believe that religions appropriate the value of marriage for their own purposes. I say marriage is ordained of God, just as one could say Relativity is Einstein's idea. It is not really, Einstein merely correctly and properly understood what is right and true of nature. He articulated it in an unambiguous way through the discipline of scientific language and it resulted in the exalted Theory. I am saying this of Holy Matrimony. It is something right and true of nature that various religions have independently verified and they have exalted it through the discipline of theological thought.

What activists for the gay cause are trying to do is overload and/or water down what is meant by marriage, codified in Holy Matrimony, for their own special purposes. I say that it belongs under a separate theory because what is implicit in Marriage is the special responsibilty accorded to the raising of children.

Sensing cops out in an American way I think (if he is copping out at all instead of snidely protesting - certainly he wouldn't disavow his own marriage because of the existence of contraception) because he assumes that the technology changes the value. He accepts the inevitability of contraception in decisions to marry, whereas the Roman Catholic Church does not. This is like bringing a submachine gun to all fights and saying that the value of martial arts and hand to hand combat is meaningless and so are the codes of honor attached to them. What Sensing concedes for conservatives allows hypocrisy. I suggest that the way of the warrior, and similarly the way of traditional Marriage is not dead and remains instructive. I think the burden is on certain feminists in their reconciliation with motherhood to prove how liberating the 'sexual liberation' afforded by the advancing technology of contraception actually is.

Where are the eunuchs in all this?

As for gay couples who adopt children? They fall under the category of foster parents. So what?

I'm not really sure I understand what Cobb's getting at here; his response seems to be all over the place, which isn't usual for him. I've posted this exchange here for Religious Diversity Friday because of the religious tenor of the exchange-- two very different ways of chewing over a problem.

Cobb writes above, "I say marriage is ordained of God, just as one could say Relativity is Einstein's idea." The disanalogy here is that the claim "[the theory of] relativity is Einstein's idea" can be seen as a claim of historical fact: the history books confirm that Einstein did indeed formulate such a theory. Is the claim "marriage is ordained of God" the same kind of empirically verifiable claim? No-- it's a claim rooted in faith and not verifiable in the scientific sense. But Cobb clarifies his position by saying:

It is not really [i.e., relativity is an objective reality, not a subjective formulation], Einstein merely correctly and properly understood what is right and true of nature. He articulated it in an unambiguous way through the discipline of scientific language and it resulted in the exalted Theory. I am saying this of Holy Matrimony. It is something right and true of nature that various religions have independently verified and they have exalted it through the discipline of theological thought.

But this clarification is still disanalogous: whatever the actual reality is, Einstein's theory remains a theory: it's subject to review, verification, and falsification. It could, in principle, be tossed aside in favor of a new, better theory. A theory provides an explanation of reality. When it lacks sufficient explanatory power, a theory is bad. Holy Matrimony, to use Cobb's term, isn't viewed by anyone in this manner. People might see matrimony as a practical reality, or they might see it as infused with religious meaning, but in both of these cases, Holy Matrimony is most assuredly not being viewed as something on par with a scientific theory. Religious notions, as painful history repeatedly demonstrates, are notoriously hard to revise, especially when compared to scientific theories.

But if Cobb is trying to claim that religious notions arise from reality, and those notions are somehow on a par with scientific theory, it should be possible to revise those religious notions, as one does with scientific theories, to reflect an evolving understanding of reality. And this is where Cobb's argument fails: reality does move. As such, religious notions, if they are to retain their robustness, also have to move-- so maybe Cobb is right in spite of himself to equate religious notions and scientific theories! That's how religious notions should be: flexible, revisable, in conformity with changing reality. But at heart, Cobb would like Holy Matrimony to be a fixed a priori reality, something graven in the stone of the cosmos, something containing "essentials"-- why else use "ordained of God" language? But the cosmos isn't unmoving, so nothing can stay graven forever.

VALLICELLA

[MARCH 20 UPDATE: The link to Dr. Vallicella's response has been updated. it now leads you directly to his response, not simply to his weblog.]

Contra Hominid! For those of you who've been waiting and praying for Dr. Vallicella's reply to my critique of his paper, HERE IT IS! The BigHo gets his ten lashes. Follow the link and scroll down a bit, then look for the sea of red ink-- it's just like I'm back in grad school again! Dr. Vallicella emailed to say that he'll be appending a specific permalink to his reply for more direct access to it. When he does, I'll update my own link accordingly.

I'll want to review Dr. Vallicella's response in depth later on this blog, but I need to chew it over a bit. Some very quick & superficial thoughts:

1. I was glad to get a fuller explanation of "relative permanence," but I'm still not convinced this concept addresses the Buddhist perspective, or is in any way meaningful to it.

2. Although Dr. Vallicella ably defends his critique's narrow focus (i.e., concentrating on a specific exchange in the Milindapanha-- you'll recall that I complained about this), I think there are still problems with trying to critique the anatman (no-self) doctrine with only a single Buddhist dialogue as the focal point of critique.

Dr. Vallicella makes pronouncements about Buddhist metaphysics (series of unconnected moments, etc.) that can't have been extracted from the dialogue in question, then uses those concepts (some of which are debatable, as I argued previously) in the service of his critique of the dialogue. Is this proper? I'm not convinced it is. If you're going to bring in extra-textual concepts, you've got to pay more attention to the larger context in which the intra-textual concepts reside.

A good question to ask oneself is how much of a doctrine is being delineated in a given snatch of text before assuming one has enough data on which to base a critique. To conclude on scant evidence that a doctrine is indefensible/unpersuasive is to arrive at a potentially false conclusion. In this case: does the Milinda-Nagasena exchange in question provide the critic with enough information to understand the anatman doctrine in toto? My answer is no, it doesn't. We need to read around more. And the moment we decide to bring in data from outside of that text, we widen the scope of our critique. Fairness would require a lengthier treatment of the issues and problems: as many of the sources of a "doctrine" as possible should be considered. Anatman is a doctrine with many textual sources.

To be fair in this way is to exhibit charity in interpretation, I think. For me to crack open the Bible, read the directive of Deuteronomy 23:1 (NRSV; in Catholic Bibles it's 23:2) completely out of context, and draw negative conclusions about some doctrinal point in Hebrew/Jewish ethics might be "focused," but it would be unwarranted. By the same token, a critique of the anatman doctrine as laid out in this one dialogue strikes me as weak from the beginning. Does the dialogue in fact sufficiently "lay out" the doctrine? It's a pretty short dialogue, so I think this is a legitimate question. While holy men might be able to perform lengthy exegeses spun out of a single word of scripture, philosophers need to be a bit more attentive to issues of context, fairness, and comprehensiveness in their analyses and critiques.

[By that same token, Dr. V might argue, I need to realize that he addresses Buddhist issues in more than one research paper. That's only fair. My critique of Dr. V's paper also requires that I read more of Dr. V to get a feel for the larger context of his thought. More on this as it happens; Dr. V doesn't have many Buddhism-related papers online yet, but they're on the way.]

3. I think Dr. Vallicella has rightfully pointed out some of my own missteps in arguing against his thesis, and he's also right to ask for clarification about some of the terms I use. Part of the problem here, on my end, is a sloppiness born of inexperience. I'm woefully behind when it comes to terms and concepts in Western philosophy, and it's in discussions like these that my ignorance is in full view. This doesn't embarrass me a bit-- I engaged Vallicella because I'm a slob looking for a free education in Western philo, and I'm getting one.

There is, however, a meta-problem in discussions like these: because Buddhism arose and developed in one environment, and Western philo arose and developed in another, very different environment, there will always be the danger that interlocutors from either side of the fence will talk past each other. (I'm referring mainly to philosophical discussions like this one, but what I'm talking about is equally applicable to interreligious discussions.)

More than that, there's always the chance that arguing the Buddhist case entirely on Western philo terms is an unnecessary concession to the Western side (by parity of reasoning, vice versa is also true). Trying to make a Buddhist conceptual square peg fit into a Western conceptual round hole is bound to generate static. My point is that it's possible that one can explain a foreign concept only so well before the strictures of the discussion itself preclude further explanation. (How do you bridge the conceptual gap at that point? What role do intuitive, empathetic, and imaginative leaps play in Western philosophical discourse?)

Consider, for example, a staple of Western philo: the principle of non-contradiction. How, exactly, are you going to apply this principle to an analysis of Zen thought and discourse? You can't, and still expect coherent, useful results. People will try, of course: Mortimer Adler, in Truth in Religion, wrote a very rational but very ignorant passage about paradox in Zen thinking which, to a Zennist, would look like idiocy: Adler obviously didn't "get it." The "getting it" in Zen is nondiscursive, nonrational, and nonlogical (not irrational and illogical). If you're planning on having a meaningful Zen discussion, you're going to have to throw out the principle of non-contradiction. It's the only path to sense in Zen. Adler's approach, relentlessly faithful to his philosophical tradition, brought all the wrong tools to the table, from the Zennist's point of view.

The same is true in the opposite direction, of course, and that's the tone underlying Vallicella's response to me. I freely admit there's plenty I don't "get" about Western philo-- terms I haven't learned, concepts I haven't mastered. My hope is that this exchange, which is already very fruitful, will continue to push me to see things from different perspectives. At the same time, I do have my own perspective, a nondualistic one, that makes me skeptical of concepts and arguments that sound implausible even after a second and third hearing. Such is the case with that notion of "relative permanence," which still sounds like a fancy way of evading the fundamental issues to which the Buddhist thinkers addressed themselves.

Dr. Vallicella might be a Zen master in disguise, however. In his response to my contention that the self is constructed, he asks, "Who constructed it, then?"** That's a very Zen question!

"Who is this typing now?"

"Who is eating this food?"

Of course, the Zen master isn't asking these questions for lofty philosophical reasons. His intention is ethical: to address the issue of suffering and show you where its roots lie, and to bring you back to here and now, where you should always be.

I want to think more about Dr. Vallicella's response, and perhaps next week I'll try to formulate an answer. I begin my heavy teaching schedule next Wednesday, so I can't guarantee how long or substantive any of my future blogs will be. My thanks, in the meantime, to Dr. Vallicella for his reply.

[**NB: You'll note that, for Dr. Vallicella, this question very likely presumes a single, unified, transtemporal "who" (or what) acting as the constructing agent. Why this presumption? To me, it's not a given at all.]

_

[NB: This is a paper-- a long paper by blog standards but fairly short by academic standards-- I wrote back in 2000. Skip it if the subject doesn't interest you. In this paper (which could stand some revision; my position on some matters has shifted a bit), I'm evaluating Ray Grigg's contention that Zen is basically Taoism with a superfluous Buddhist cortex. Ultimately, I see some merit in his thesis, but am not convinced that Buddhism is superfluous. To the contrary, I find Buddhism to be quite integral to Zen, and while Grigg makes a clear distinction between "Zen" and "Zen Buddhism," I don't think the distinction holds, except maybe superficially.]

It is a commonplace among scholars and "night-stand Buddhists" alike to summarize Zen's origins with a bumper-sticker aphorism such as "Zen is what happened when Indian Buddhism went north and met Taoism in China." Usually this is uttered along with the caveat that, as in all matters Zen, such is not the full truth. It is not quite so commonplace, however, to read, as Ray Grigg so bluntly puts it in the preface to his The Tao of Zen, that "Zen is Taoism disguised as Buddhism."[1] The immediate implication is that if Buddhism is a disguise, it is not relevant to the question of what comprises the essence of Zen, to the extent that one can speak of essences in Zen.

This, in fact, is the tack Grigg takes through the rest of his book. His thesis is neatly summarized in the preface: Zen is Taoism in Buddhist clothing, and "Buddhism is the historical wedge that has separated Zen from its Taoist source."[2] While acknowledging that Taoism and Buddhism share certain thematic affinities that, together, facilitate the melding of the two into Chinese Ch'an and eventually Japanese Zen, Grigg is far more fascinated by what he perceives to be the deep affinity between "pure Zen" and "original Taoism."[3]

The rest of this discussion will proceed with an overview of the major points of Grigg's argument, passing through an examination of Grigg's possible biases when discussing original Taoism, then moving to a fuller examination of the question of what constitutes "real" Taoism, followed by a brief overview of what other thinkers have had to say on the matter of what Zen is. The discussion will conclude with a direct examination of the plausibility of removing Buddhist elements from Zen while somehow retaining Zen's Zenness.


Overview of Grigg's Argument

Zen is Taoism disguised as Buddhism. When twelve hundred years of Buddhist accretions are removed from Zen, it is revealed to be a direct evolution of the spirit and philosophy of Taoism. Indeed, the literature known as the Lao Tzu and the Chuang Tzu begins a continuous tradition that can be followed through the Ch'an of China to the Zen of present-day Japan. The formative writings of early Taoism are essentially the teachings of Zen.[4]

Thus begins The Tao of Zen. The first step in Grigg's argument is to note that, especially in the West, a curious but very telling distinction in usage has crept in between the terms "Zen" and "Zen Buddhism."[5] Westerners' "nonsectarian sense of Zen" is a "fresh and innocent response" that is "uncomplicated by the traditional interpretations and assumptions which have seen Zen as an inseparable part of Buddhism."[6] Evidence of this separation can be found in the many "Zen [and the X] of" expressions that have come into prominence in English: Zen of tennis, Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, Zen and the art of drawing, etc. While populist, this new usage harks back to a very old Zen admonition "about the folly of becoming too attached to any system of understanding-- even Buddhism, and especially the religion of Mahayana Buddhism that has housed Zen in China and Japan for centuries."[7]

It is Grigg's opinion that the "Buddhist accretions" are to blame for Zen's having moved away from its roots. The addition of rituals over the centuries "[has] created a formal practice that is stiff, austere, and monastic, qualities that are the antithesis of Zen's essentially organic identity. Once the trappings are removed, however, Zen returns to its original Taoist character."[8]

Although Taoism and Buddhism share certain similarities, Grigg's most radical assessment excludes any possibility of their equation:

...the similarities between original Taoism and pure Zen are far more striking: the simplicity, the directness, the intuitiveness, the paradoxes, the importance of being natural and the prevalence of natural images, the skepticism about words and explanations, about institutions and dogma. Zen is Taoism.[9]

The Way to which Zen refers is none other than the Way (Tao) to which Taoism refers, an idea supported by many other thinkers. Because the Tao is at heart undefinable, this very vagueness is what affords both Zen and original Taoism their robustness and richness. It is "the source of their wisdom and profundity."[10] The core writings of original Taoism are, as Zennists say of Zen, "nothing special"; they are "descriptive rather than prescriptive, instructive rather than sacred."[11] Whatever religious quality they possess is not so much inherent as imputed.

Grigg concludes his preface by focusing on functional distinctions between Buddhism, Zen, Zen Buddhism, and Taoism. He refuses to use Zen and Zen Buddhism interchangeably. Buddhism, whose original, philosophical form contains "some Zen," more usually refers to the religious tradition such as that exemplified by the Mahayana school, in which the Buddha has been deified and his teachings have become dogma. Therefore:

Zen refers to pure Zen, the practice in Chinese Ch'an and Japanese Zen that is likened to original Taoism but is wholly devoid of Mahayana Buddhism's religious allusions. Zen is also devoid of the inner analysis that is so characteristic of Indian Buddhist philosophy. Zen Buddhism, therefore, is the unlikely combination of Chinese and Indian sources; it began in Ch'an as a mixing of Taoism and Buddhism, and currently exists in Japan in the same combination. Because of the ubiquitous quality of Zen, it can be found in Zen Buddhism, but Zen and Zen Buddhism are not equivalent terms.[12]

By the same token, Grigg's operational definition of Taoism refers very specifically to Taoism in its philosophical or contemplative form as sourced in the Lao Tzu and the Chuang Tzu. "Except for their historical distinctions, Taoism and Zen are terms that can be used interchangeably."[13]

The rest of The Tao of Zen supports the thesis laid out in Grigg's preface with a twofold approach. Part One covers the historical connections between Taoism and Zen, and Part Two is devoted to an examination of their philosophically similar elements.

In Part One, discussing the historical connections between Taoism and Zen, Grigg begins with "biographies" of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu. He then briefly covers the history of Taoism and of Buddhism in China, devoting the rest of Part One to the rise of Ch'an and Zen with a nod to great figures like Bodhidharma, Hui-neng, Nonin, and Bankei.

A major theme in this historical exploration is Grigg's repeated assertion that Buddhism (by which he means those Mahayana practitioners with the most commitment to Buddhism as an institution or religion) has engaged in a constant effort over the years either to preserve or manufacture historical links with India in an effort either to justify a kind of "apostolic succession" of patriarchs, or simply to create a stronger link with Zen Buddhism's Indian roots.[14]

In speaking about Bodhidharma and Hui-neng, for example, Grigg notes that very little is actually known about either of these great figures, which made them easy targets for hindsight reinterpretation. About Hui-neng and the historical forces of the time, Grigg says:

Since the operating principles of Taoism could not integrate with either religious beliefs or Buddhist philosophy, they were overwritten by Buddhist ideology and methodology. The result has been a tangle of misrepresentations... There was a Hui-neng. He was thoroughly Chinese. But he was unlikely a Buddhist, although later efforts attempted to make him one. All the evidence suggests he was an archetypal Taoist, or at least he was invented as such by the Chinese need to express its own character through him.[15]

In his subsequent overview of Buddhism in Japan, Grigg notes that Shinto had done much to predispose the Japanese consciousness to the naturalistic themes in Taoism and Ch'an.[16] Like the Chinese, especially the Taoists whom Grigg terms "Quietists" (i.e., Taoist practitioners who remained faithful to philosophical Taoism), the Japanese prize naturalness and simplicity; accepting this new Zen "[flower] in the garden of Buddhism"[17] was, therefore, relatively easy: "It is sufficient to note that Taoism and Shinto, when they met, would have felt comfortable in each other's company."[18]

Two significant chapters conclude Part One: "Zen Without Buddhism" and "Everyday Zen." In "Zen Without Buddhism," Grigg argues that Japanese Zen Buddhism is the result of the long and sometimes uneasy coexistence between Chinese Mahayana Buddhism and Taoism, as they coexisted in Ch'an.[19] Given Taoism's this-worldly orientation and Buddhism's otherworldly alignment, how were the two traditions able to meld as well as they did? Grigg offers two basic reasons: first, the Taoism of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu was possessed of both a paradoxical and inclusive spirit, perhaps a reflection of the often syncretic nature of the Chinese mind; second, when Buddhism entered China, "it was reshaped to fit the Chinese mind." Chinese Mahayana thought "was more practical, more earthy, and more immediate."[20]

Despite the ensuing cohabitation of these two thought-systems in Ch'an, it would be incorrect to attempt to trace Zen directly to the original teachings of the Buddha. Grigg offers three reasons why: (1) doctrinally, Chinese Mahayana Buddhism is "not the austere silence of Gautama sitting alone," especially since Gautama was not Buddhist, and his search for truth had an existential motivation as opposed to a religious one; (2) stylistically, the Buddha's teachings are highly systematized, lacking the freewheeling, spontaneous, illogical tenor of Zen; and (3) historically, as mentioned above, pious fabrications have effaced most or all reliably traceable links from the Buddha to the Zen patriarchs to Japanese Zen.[21]

The Buddhism in Zen Buddhism represents all that is structural and institutional, while the Zen is nothing less than Taoism in its original or Quietist form-- the philosophical Taoism sourced in the Lao Tzu and the Chuang Tzu.

The chapter titled "Everyday Zen" is less a historical treatment than a philosophical capstone to Grigg's historical argument. (It is not the final chapter; that chapter spends some time discussing Zen's arrival in the West, initially as Japanese Zen Buddhism, but rapidly evolving-- or reverting?-- into the more originally Taoist "Zen" that has become practically a household word.) "Everyday Zen" is a more focused look at what Grigg perceives to be the Taoist temperament of Zen.

Zen, like Taoism, is natural and intuitive, so ordinary that it is easily missed. This is why Zen without Buddhism seems so close to Taoism. When stripped of formality and returned to its natural shape, Zen is earthy and ordinary, nothing special. [...] ...a total, undivided presence transcends the duality of here or somewhere else. [...] Immersion in the everyday is the essential practice of the Taoist sage."[22]

In Part Two of The Tao of Zen, Grigg systematically notes the philosophical similarities between philosophical Taoism and "pure" Zen. While this discussion occupies fully half of The Tao of Zen, it is easily summarized if one understands Grigg's approach as an explication of the qualities he feels epitomize both original Taoism and pure Zen. Those qualities are wordlessness, selflessness, softness, oneness, emptiness, nothingness, balance, paradox, non-doing, spontaneity, ordinariness, playfulness, and suchness.

Grigg's Biases and the Notion of "Real" Taoism

Grigg quotes extensively from thinkers and scholars such as Alan Watts, Shunryu Suzuki roshi, D.T. Suzuki, Philip Kapleau, Victor Mair, Christmas Humphreys, Thomas Merton, and others. D.T. Suzuki in particular is a cruel favorite; Grigg engages in posthumous debate with Suzuki at several points throughout The Tao of Zen in order to highlight Suzuki's Mahayana biases-- the better for the reader to see Mahayana Buddhist revisionism in action. But Grigg also seizes upon Suzuki passages indicating a grudging admission of Zen's Chinese tenor, so Suzuki is puppeteered into engaging in a morbid debate with himself. Alan Watts, whom Grigg avidly terms a "modern Hui-neng,"[23] is quoted mainly for his "iconoclastic" spirit and for those passages from his The Way of Zen and The Spirit of Zen that explore the temperamental incompatibility of institutional Buddhism with Zen's Taoist bent.

What is most striking in Grigg's book is his refusal to discuss Taoism's evolutionary history except in the most general of terms.[24] Grigg sniffs at what Taoism has become: namely, the religious, magical, folk Taoism that adds nothing to Grigg's thesis.[25] Implied in this refusal is the assumption that original Taoism, the Quietist, philosophical variety to which Grigg makes repeated reference, is real Taoism.

It is appropriate at this point to examine the question of what makes a thought system "real." What is "real" Christianity? Or "real" Islam? If, for example, Muslim terrorists are featured on the American news to the extent that peaceful Muslim apologists must explain that the fundamentalist strains of Islam do not represent the "real" or "true" spirit of Islam, what then qualifies as the most representative form of Islam?

If it is recognized that a religious tradition acts much as a living organism does-- growing, evolving, multiplying, fighting, dying partially or wholly, changing over time-- can one ever speak of a "real" form of that tradition? The Christianity of today is so diverse that it is no longer safe to speak of Christianity as if it were a monolithic entity. Polymorphic present-day Taoism may have strayed from its philosophical roots, as Grigg contends, but upon what grounds can Grigg treat philosophical Taoism as more "real" than its modern incarnation? By extension, how is it possible to speak of a "true" Zen?

It is perhaps safest to assume that Grigg is positing the original = real premise without seeking any deep justification for his stance. His larger point is, after all, simply to highlight the essentially Taoist character of Zen, and he is obliged to start somewhere. However, his chapter on Zen's entry into Western culture is very telling on this point: the West's egalitarianism, secularism, and individualism have acted as a paring knife to peel off the structured, ritualized, institutional cortex of Japanese Mahayana Buddhism (very hierarchically East Asian in character) and left Zen in a more or less pristine state where it can be examined à l'occidentale.[26]

Much is implied in this argument. The most important implication is that the West in recent decades has arrived at a point where its own religious explorations are at a sort of dead end, and the usual answers no longer suffice. Enter Far Eastern thought which, because it is generally devoid of an overtly (mono)theistic aspect, has been able to penetrate the Western psyche more or less quietly but steadily. Because modern Western thinking has been so profoundly shaped by scientific skepticism, Grigg may well be implying that Zen's being "nothing special" is a virtue in an age of doubt. Karen Armstrong has described the Western experience of God as "traumatic,"[27] filled with intense emotion, drama, and not a little magic. It is entirely possible that turn-of-the-century science-fueled cynicism has made such drama hard to swallow. At every turn, Zen proclaims its ordinariness and commonsense nature; for a Westerner weary of the monotheistic fireworks display, calm profundity might appear as a relief. In France, the best-selling Le moine et le philosophe (The Monk and the Philosopher) serves as an example of the French intellectual hunger for a religious answer other than a staid, moribund Catholicism.[28]

Of course, the West does not lack for a love of magic or superstition, but this love usually stands in diametrical opposition to the scientific impulse that presently occupies a position of increasing prominence in the West's collective psyche. Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World plants itself firmly against what Sagan saw as humanity's continued and disappointing fascination with self-bamboozlement:

The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance... The plain lesson is that study and learning-- not just of science, but of anything-- are avoidable, even undesirable.[29]

But his book also serves to highlight the starkness of the contrast between religious and scientific thinking that continues to haunt the Western mind. Zen and original Taoism are welcome in the West because they straddle the boundary between religion and science: there is nothing about Grigg's pure Zen or original Taoism that is antithetical to scientific thinking. Religious Taoism will probably never be as welcome in the West as original Taoism for the simple reason that its religiosity bears a recognizably magical odor to a Westerner. In this sense, it is perfectly legitimate to read Grigg as implying that original Taoism is more real... to a Westerner.

Other Thinkers On Zen

Where do other thinkers stand on the issue of Zen's Taoist nature? Do others agree with Grigg's contention that Mahayana Buddhism has done much to obfuscate the truth by forcing a link between Zen and India?

In his An Introduction to Zen Buddhism, D.T. Suzuki says the following:

Buddhism in its course of development has completed a form which distinguishes itself from its so-called primitive or original type-- so greatly, indeed, that we are justified in emphasizing its historical division into two schools... As a matter of fact, the Mahayana, with all its varied formulae, is no more than a developed form of Buddhism and traces back its final authority to its Indian founder, the great Buddha Sakyamuni. When this developed form... was introduced into China and then into Japan, it achieved further development in those countries. ...At present the Mahayana form may be said not to display, superficially at least, those features most conspicuously characteristic of original Buddhism.[30]

This seems to play into Grigg's overall argument, particularly to the idea that Suzuki is a Buddhist apologist intent on defending Zen Buddhism's Indian lineage. Suzuki's remarks also support Grigg's contention that the character of Buddhism was changed when it entered China, thus facilitating the eventual coexistence of Taoism and Mahayana Buddhism in Ch'an. But what Suzuki says next seems to undercut Grigg's thesis:

...there are people who would declare that this branch of Buddhism [i.e., Mahayana] is in reality no Buddhism in the sense that the latter is commonly understood. My contention, however, is this: anything that has life in it is an organism, and it is in the very nature of an organism that it never remains in the same state of existence. An acorn is quite different, even as a young oak with tender leaves just out of its protective shell is quite different from a full-grown tree... But throughout these varying phases of change there is a continuation of growth and unmistakable marks of identity, whence we know that one and the same plant has passed through many stages of becoming.[31]

By this reckoning, Buddhism's acquisition of Chinese qualities (of which a Taoist bent would be one such quality) would reflect an organic process that keeps its Indian traits at the core of what will eventually become Zen Buddhism. Here, Taoism is arguably the cortex and not Buddhism.

If nothing else, Suzuki's writings do not easily lend themselves to Grigg's argumentation, which explains Grigg's understandable ambivalence toward Suzuki. Moreover, what Suzuki is saying is important as a critique of Grigg's reasoning, whose weakest link resides in his repeated implication that pure Zen need include no Buddhism. If Taoism propounds an organic understanding of the world, this understanding should be applicable to a thought system's evolution through history. It is therefore possible to interpret Taoism's "uneasy" coexistence with Buddhism in Ch'an and Zen as perfectly "easy," with the tension ascribable not so much to a concerted Taoist resistance to an imposed Mahayana Buddhist structure as to Taoism's natural "squishiness." Taoism would have bumped gently against any thought system with which it had had to cohabit. Such is its nature.

Wing-Tsit Chan agrees that Buddhist meditative techniques took on a decidedly Chinese cast. In speaking about the use of shouting and beating in Ch'an, Chan says without irony, "This type of mental training is utterly Chinese."[32] Along with other scholars, and consistent with Grigg's thesis, Chan too remarks on the this-worldly character of Chinese thought as opposed to the otherworldly cast of Indian thought.[33] More: "[Ch'an] Meditation was not understood in the Indian sense of concentration but in the Taoist sense of conserving vital energy, breathing, reducing desire, preserving nature, and so forth."[34]

Alan Watts, whose quotes do in fact serve Grigg quite well, does, however, make a distinction between Taoism and Zen when he says in The Spirit of Zen, "... it must be remembered that Zen is not always a gentle breeze, like decadent Taoism; more than often it is a fierce gale which sweeps everything ruthlessly before it, an icy blast which penetrates to the heart of everything and passes right through to the other side!"[35] One senses here an emotional immediacy and urgency quite unlike the almost placid metaphor of Chuang Tzu dragging his tail in the mud like a happy tortoise.

Grigg is in good company when propounding the distinctly Chinese quality of Ch'an and Zen Buddhism, but there is some doubt as to the degree to which other scholars' and thinkers' words can be of service to Grigg's larger argument: that pure Zen is original Taoism, and that Mahayana Buddhism "is not Zen."[36] Both Suzuki and Watts make statements that can be interpreted in ways both friendly and antagonistic to Grigg's thesis, and it is difficult to see whether their writings move beyond an affirmation of Zen's Taoist roots (already acknowledged by scholars) to an active support of the outright equation of Taoism to Zen.

Zen Without Buddhism? A Concluding Critique of The Tao of Zen

Grigg's most compelling argument for Zen's being original Taoism is probably summarized in his chapter on Zen Buddhism's arrival in the West.

When institutionalized Zen Buddhism came to the West, it found itself disconnected from the stabilizing traditions of the Japanese culture. As it interacted with different attitudes and values in its new environment, it began to reconstitute itself. It relaxed its formality, and changed shape and expression. [...] This did not happen dramatically but it did happen quickly. It was evolution accelerated, the consequence of similar but different traditions from the East finding themselves in close proximity to each other in an atmosphere of open and trusting exploration. The similarities between Zen and Taoism became more apparent and their differences were defined more softly.[37]

Along with this, "...things changed because the Japanese system could not sustain itself in its new cultural context. The greatest changes took place in its formal expression: in its hierarchy, its institutional structure, and its Buddhism."[38] Zen is moving from its formalized Mahayana Buddhist incarnation to a practice that might be described as "less structured, a lay form of practice"[39] that still retains the essential Taoist spirit.

Nevertheless, the strongest critique of this view is, ironically, the organically (and perhaps inadvertently) Taoist critique implicitly offered by D.T. Suzuki in his acorn analogy. Zen Buddhism's "historical accretions" are not merely accretions; they are absorbed into and have become part of the essence of Zen. Robert Pirsig offers a brilliant example of how this is so in the idiosyncratic language of his book Lila, in a passage that deserves to be quoted at length:

...you would guess from the literature on Zen and its insistence on discovering "the unwritten dharma" that it would be intensely anti-ritualistic, since ritual is the "written dharma." But that isn't the case. The Zen monk's daily life is nothing but one ritual after another, hour after hour, day after day, all his life. They don't tell him to shatter those static patterns to discover the unwritten dharma. They want him to get those patterns perfect!

The explanation for this contradiction is the belief that you do not free yourself from static patterns by fighting them with other contrary static patterns. That is sometimes called "bad karma chasing its tail." You free yourself from static patterns by putting them to sleep. That is, you master them with such proficiency that they become an unconscious part of your nature. You get so used to them you completely forget them and they are gone. There in the center of the most monotonous boredom of static ritualistic patterns the Dynamic freedom is found.[40]

This reasoning indicates an intimate fusion of Buddhist religious structure with Taoist notions of compliance, and is still readable, without contradiction, in a purely Taoist way. Grigg may be right to claim that a crucial element of Taoism is its spontaneity, but he misses the Zen paradox that, if Zen can truly be found anywhere, it can just as easily be found in ritual practice as in any other activity or phenomenon. Taoism's natural Brownian motion guarantees a bumpy ride for whatever thought system cohabits with it, and there is nothing insurmountably antithetical to Taoism in Buddhist praxis. If anything, Pirsig's passage is an example of how nameless, formless original Taoism can meld with a fellow passenger during a long journey. Along with Suzuki, it is possible for us to affirm that Taoism's addition to and fusion with Mahayana Buddhism is part of a larger, organic, natural evolutionary process.



NOTES

1. Ray Grigg, The Tao of Zen (Boston: Charles E. Tuttle Co., Inc., 1994), xiii.

2. Ibid., xiv.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid., xiii.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid., xiv.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid., xv.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid., xvi.

13. Ibid., xvii.

14. Ibid., 9, 109, etc.

15. Ibid., 109-110.

16. Ibid., 119.

17. Thich Nhat Hanh, Living Buddha, Living Christ (New York: Riverhead Books, 1995), 9.

18. Ray Grigg, The Tao of Zen (Boston: Charles E. Tuttle Co., Inc., 1994), 122.

19. Ibid., 128.

20. Ibid., 132.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid., 167-168.

23. Ibid., 136.

24. Ibid., xvi-xvii.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid., 173-179.

27. Karen Armstrong, A History of God (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993), xxii

28. Jean-François Revel and Mathieu Ricard, Le moine et le philosophe (Paris: Editions NIL, 1997), 13.

29. Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996), 25-26.

30. D.T. Suzuki, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism (New York: Grove Press, 1964), 31.

31. Ibid.

32. A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, trans. and ed. Wing-tsit Chan (Princteon: Princeton University Press, 1969), 429.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid., 425.

35. Alan Watts, The Spirit of Zen (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1958), 59-60.

36. Ray Grigg, The Tao of Zen (Boston: Charles E. Tuttle Co., Inc., 1994), 127.

37. Ibid., 173.

38. Ibid., 174.

39. Ibid., 176.

40. Robert Pirsig, Lila (New York: Bantam Books, 1991), 440.





BIBLIOGRAPHY


Armstrong, Karen. A History of God. New York: Ballantine Books, 1993.

Chan, Wing-tsit, trans. and ed. A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy. Princteon: Princeton University Press, 1969.

Grigg, Ray. The Tao of Zen. Boston: Charles E. Tuttle Co., Inc., 1994.

Nhat Hanh, Thich. Living Buddha, Living Christ. New York: Riverhead Books, 1995.

Pirsig, Robert. Lila. New York: Bantam Books, 1991.

Revel, Jean-François and Mathieu Ricard. Le moine et le philosophe. Paris: Editions NIL, 1997.

Sagan, Carl. The Demon-Haunted World. New York: Ballantine Books, 1996.

Suzuki, D.T. An Introduction to Zen Buddhism. New York: Grove Press, 1964.

Watts, Alan. The Spirit of Zen. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1958.


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Like a penis that strays too close to a militant feminist, tonight's blogging has to be cut short. A 10-page document just arrived for proofreading, along with a request to have this done by sometime next morning. It's 10PM on Wednesday night. Guess I'd better get cracking.

Don't you just looooove when shit gets sent to you on short notice?

_

The same lady who did my hair last time was there this time. I got a look at her name tag and saw she was none other than Park Suk Kyung-- the owner of Park Suk Kyung Hair ID! Maybe this explains the extra treatment: I was being done by the Big Boss.

It's the same privilege that's coveted by X-wing pilots: if you're going to be shot down, you want your death to come at the hands of Darth Vader: "Leave him to me. I will deal with him myself." No one wants to be handled by a minion.

As with last time, she gave my brain a shampoo-lubricated deep-tissue massage, and it was all I could do to keep from sprouting a hard-on. How many women do you know who can make professional love to your scalp, eh? I ask you!

I left the place 7000 won poorer, my skull aglow from Miss Park's brutal-yet-disturbingly-sexy ministrations. And I type these words with a huge, shit-eating grin on my blubberous face.

_

Korea's got enough worries, but now, an additional one: people here are assuming that al Qaeda is targeting those who've stood with America. I think there's some merit to this. Koreans are worried. A recent Reuters dispatch says:

South Korea's acting president has ordered boosted security measures, saying the country is a major potential terrorism target because it planned to send more troops to Iraq soon.

There has been no known public threat to South Korea, where there are 37,000 U.S. troops based to deter North Korea, but acting President Goh Kun told security officials that all countries involved in Iraq needed to be wary.

"We need to be very seriously prepared," Goh stressed, his spokesman said by telephone on Wednesday.

Yes, I think caution is called for. But Korea isn't Spain or any other European country, nor is it America. Most Muslims can't blend in here. There aren't many Korean Muslims; most of the Arab/Persian Muslim population, to put it politely, stands out. Just about every non-East Asian race stands out here. So if al Qaeda is planning any shenanigans in South Korea, the hammer is going to fall on these people. Koreans aren't exactly shy about their own racism and xenophobia; unlike in America, there won't be extensive hand-wringing about racial (or religious) profiling. If anything happens here, no one will make any bones about watching the Arabs and Persians closely, as well as tracking East Asian (and other Asian) Muslims. They will all be marked people.

In the meantime, of course, the Spain Effect is likely to happen: should an attack occur (which I doubt), we yang-nom will be objects of resentment, at least in public demonstrations. I'm not too worried, though: during one of the heavily anti-American periods, I got around with no problem and didn't encounter any particularly resentful behavior. One dude at the gym would go on about how much he hated America, but that was about it. My being plump and not having a crewcut might be a saving grace at such times; I don't experience what our servicemen have to go through. So keep your thoughts for the soldiers who are more likely to endure petty and major slights.

And keep your fingers crossed that nothing will happen here. I don't say that selfishly; I genuinely like it in Seoul. Keep your fingers crossed for Korea's sake.

It's March 17th! Happy Saint Pat's, to the people back home!

Long ago, Koreans used to be called "The Irish of the Orient" for all the drinking and brawling. Maybe it's because I don't drink, but I haven't seen much brawling outside of the Chongno bar district (I used to live in a yogwan tucked inside a grungy alley by the Chongno YMCA Building back in '94-95), and I only rarely pop into Itaewon, where I've never stuck around late enough to see any "Fight Club" wannabe action.

I've seen the results of over-drinking, though. You haven't lived until you've watched a gorgeous woman in a leather miniskirt "making a ramyon flower" against an alley wall while her equally-drunk boyfriend pats her back sympathetically. The magical juxtaposition of female beauty and splattering puke is enough to activate even the dullest poet's muse. I feel a haiku coming on...

blooooooooooorrrrrrgh but wait, there's more--
raaaaaauuuuuuugh, oh shit, I see my lunch--
graaaaaaaaaaaggggghh, yup, there's breakfast.

Gotta go get a haircut. Maybe I'll deign to get them all cut. Back in a while.

_

I find myself home earlier than usual today because Mrs. Oh called to cancel classes for the whole week. Her younger daughter's in the hospital, having taken very ill; they have my sympathies and I hope she gets well soon.

Let's go for a general parcours, shall we?

I found this amusing, though I imagine Keith Burgess-Jackson would find it distressing: God hates dogs, but apparently, he loooooves boshin-t'ang. Fry that puppy up-- the grill's already there!

Anticipatory Retaliation's BravoRomeoDelta examines a Steven Den Beste post and chews on the question of whether we're engaged in a "little Cold War" with China. Very meaty post.

Winds of Change's (newly wed) Armed Liberal weighs in on the Spain issue and finds reason to fear.

Dan Darling is, as usual, on top of things. Here's a post on Spain. Read the post below it, too.

Annika takes a long view on the Spain question-- an opinion also espoused by Tacitus.

Douglas at Tacitus with a post on North Korea.

John Moore, Conrad, and others are simultaneously flabbergasted and laughing themselves crazy at France's move to perform joint naval exercises with China.

Lorianne spends approximately 1.25 posts worrying about what to wear to her dissertation defense. She's right: for us men, the sartorial decisions are among the easiest in life. My suggestion for a diss defense ensemble:

spiked Madonna-style metal cone bra
pleather corset
thigh-high boots with spiked heels
bullwhip
nothing else (except maybe a crown-of-thorns wrist tattoo)

Proper conduct: sit slouched in your chair, facing the panel. Lean over and scratch ass. Stare challengingly at each panel member in turn, then stand up ramrod-straight like Frau Farbissina of the Austin Powers series and scream, "If you don't give me the doctorate, this bullwhip is going up somebody's ass! THE WHOLE BULLWHIP!" If panel members are too petrified to respond to this display, switch into Zen master mode and shake the bullwhip in front of their faces, screaming, "WHAT IS THIS? SAY IT'S A BULLWHIP AND YOU ASSERT! SAY IT'S NOT A BULLWHIP AND YOU ALSO ASSERT! SO WHAT-- IS-- THIS, GODDAMMIT!!??"

Then open up a Tantric chapter in your Zen school and promise unholy monkey-sex ("Doin' it Hanuman-style, baby!") to the profs who pass you. I think there's an online store that sells Ganesha-shaped, patchouli-scented dildos. Want me to find it?

The Space Between: Lorianne's most recent post appears to be a down-home riff on Dave Matthews-style liminality.

I should write a post on ass-crack liminality and call it The Space Between My Buttocks.

There's a running dialogue going on at Naked Villainy regarding the rightness or wrongness of current action in Iraq. Start here, then move upward to here, then here.

[NB: The Maximum Leader has moved off Blogspot to his own site and is still moving archives into place. If the above links don't work, simply follow the link to his site on my sidebar, then scroll down until you find the post titled "Quick thoughts, just to show I'm reading." Read that one, then move upward to "Rejoinder to Propaganda Minister," then finally to "I'm not James Webb."]

My own take on this is that pulling out of Iraq at this point is folly. A pullout, and/or a UN takeover, would be one massive cluster-fuck. I was against the war, but I'm not in denial about Iraq/al Qaeda connections, for which documentation has been repeatedly found (and debunkings repeatedly attempted)-- ties that have become, if anything, all the stronger since the war, making the original debate moot. Whatever one's interpretation of the pre-war situation, the fact now is that the connection exists, and it needs to be dealt with.

Mike's interlocutor, the Propaganda Minister, also believes that Libya would have turned even if we hadn't attacked Iraq. I don't agree. While Iraq's own status is debatable (I have lingering doubts about how our project there will turn out), there's been an undeniable ripple effect in the Middle East-- even the fundamentalists' desperate grab for power in the recent Iran elections is a sign of this. The Iranian people continue to agitate, more and more loudly, for democracy. Something's going to give. Syria's current teetering (and domestic strife) is also a sign that things have changed. What liberals don't get is that force is a language these powers understand, and while it's unfortunate that we have to resort to force to make our point, we don't live in a post-historical utopia (link courtesy Analphilosopher).

The PropMin's feeling is that the war should be (or should have been) targeted more specifically against the actual terrorists. But as the MaxLdr has argued repeatedly since even before the start of the war, these organizations get their funding from states. At some point, you're going to have to deal with governments, and this is what people are balking at.

The hesitancy is legitimate. When your terrorism policy (still being formulated, I think, as conditions change) has a preemptive aspect, it already looks bad on the government-level. I had and still have real problems with preemptive policy. When your policy, on top of being preemptive, sets a whole country in its sights, there are reasons to worry about diplomatic capital and what this bodes for us, economically, politically, etc. But while hesitation to step on other people's toes is a valid worry, should it override more crucial considerations, i.e., national self-interest?

The PropMin sees John Kerry as the man to bring us back to our senses regarding Iraq policy. I think it's possible that Kerry might bring us back on track economically (anyone is more fiscally responsible than Bush at this point-- Bush has disappointed his own rank and file with some of his economic decisions), but Kerry has his head firmly up North Korea's ass when it comes to foreign policy: he doesn't even think we're in a war. That, to me, pretty much nullifies anything constructive he might say about foreign policy right there. An inability to see the current situation clearly is not a quality I treasure in a presidential candidate. The same might go for Bush, 'tis true, but that criticism applies more to economic and social policy than to foreign policy.

I've contended several times on this blog that our voting choices will come down to a decision between economics and foreign policy-- which you think is more important is what will decide your vote for Bush or Kerry (unless you're an unthinking party-liner, in which case current events don't really factor into your decision). Like my Dad, I agree that economics and foreign policy are inextricably linked, so of course the reality isn't that simple. But the nature of the two candidates' platforms pretty much forces us to make this choice. Which priority first? My contention was and remains that Americans are clever, hard-working people. We'll figure a way out of an economic mess: we'll live. Consider how fat and well-fed many of our poor are, then compare those poor folks to the real poor out in the world. No-- economic straits in America will mean, for the most part, thinner poor people, not massive death (no matter how operatic the claims of various poor-advocacy organizations) as would be the case in other parts of the world. So I think foreign policy takes priority, and if you put a gun to my head and forced me to vote only for Bush or Kerry, I would, with great reluctance, choose Bush. Bush, at least, realizes we're in a war.

The liberal side asks two contradictory questions simultaneously: (1) are we safer (usually asked mockingly)?, and (2) aren't we just jumping at shadows?

The "are we safer?" question arises from a misunderstanding of what we have and still hope to accomplish. It assumes that our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, coupled with our constant pursuit of al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, were somehow supposed to lead automatically to greater security. It's a stupid, useless question, because any observant person can see that we're nowhere near the end of this: it's going to take decades, as Den Beste contends. Whatever my misgivings about Bush, he's been quite clear that we're engaged in a long-term project. It is, effectively speaking, a new kind of war being carried out not only on many fronts, but in many modes. It involves intel, diplomacy, and the military. I'd like to think it also involves dialogue, the main point of which is, these days, to coax out the "moderate Muslims" and get them to speak out against acts which should be called by their true religious names: unholy, sinful, godless-- name your theological epithet.

The "aren't we jumping at shadows?" question isn't usually posed directly, but it's implied in a number of ways: complaints about "unnecessary" encroachment on civil rights, for example. The general feeling that, since attacks haven't happened on US soil since 9/11, they won't happen at all. The thinking that John Kerry will steer us the right way is based very much on this general feeling: we can let our guard down now, reprioritize, elect a president who understands that this isn't a war, it's only a series of police actions-- a bit like the way Vietnam has been "officially" characterized: police action, guys, not war. Besides, Bush is just using 9/11 and terrorism as a cover to push through all sorts of ugly legislation, right? The implication behind all such sentiments is that things are safer now. People who give the economy a higher priority in their thinking have also reached this conclusion.

While there's plenty of cognitive dissonance on the conservative side, liberals need to deal with this internal paradox before they can present a coherent position (and by implication, a viable choice at the polls). Figure out first whether we're safe enough to start focusing intensely on the economy. While the liberals are usually more inclined than conservatives to say, "The situation's more complicated than that" (and I suspect Kerry will be saying that a lot as president), the stark choice in November will come down to what you ultimately consider more important-- defense or the economy. Why? Because Bush is all about defense but seems to run roughshod over the economy, while Kerry might have decent plans for the economy, but keeps debating with his colon polyps about whether we're actually at war.

From where I sit in Korea, Bush looks like the better choice because he makes North Korea angry and nervous. Bush, to the Norks, is unpredictable and unstable. He has staffers like John Bolton who blurt out that North Korea is a "hellhole"-- the type of rhetoric no Democrat-sponsored diplomat would have the brass balls to say. I predict that a Kerry presidency would lead to a "deal" with North Korea in which, once again, NK gives us its assurances of good behavior, we give NK a ton of money, and NK farts in our collective face, reenergized and uppity as ever. We'll turn around, smile like the suckers we are, and call that a victory for our side.

NK is a very good metric for foreign policy. Colin Powell has been quite firm about what NK needs to do if it wants help, and as always the magic word is verification. Will Kerry insist as strongly on this point, or will his staffers let NK get away with murder yet again? Will Kerry bring us back to bilateral negotiations with NK, thereby playing right into NK (and SK) hands? I think he would. I see him completely reversing the Bush doctrine (such as it is)-- espousing radical multilateralism in the Middle East and a bilateral, NK-US approach on the Korean peninsula. (God knows what Kerry wants for Taiwan.)

The PropMin is right to say that we need to take the fight to the terrorists, but that's only one aspect of a much larger war. I don't think Kerry'd have the first clue about honing our intel and signing off on dozens of covert operations per month. I envision him as the Diplomatic President, the Great Negotiator. So long as we can sit down with some old fat guys and sign a piece of paper and shake hands, all will be fine and dandy. And hey-- flip-flopping and post hoc rationalization are just all in a day's work!

Anybody remember Clinton's early-90s "triumph," getting Arafat and Rabin to shake hands? Yeah-- see how that turned out. True: Bush's "roadmap to peace" was a big, fat, steaming turd as well-- but consider the larger picture and see whether Bush's overall priorities skew toward Clintonian diplomacy or Big Stick diplomacy. I think Big Stick is better than Limp Dick. Compare this, too, with Clinton in Somalia, Haiti (good Lord, look how that's going), and even the Balkans, where we still have troops (Clinton's leftover quagmire?). When Bush's roadmap crashed and burned, the flameout was quick and the policy's death was swift. Meantime, I'll bet there are still lefties who think Clinton's 1993 handshake moment was a real coup. Just like the vaunted 1994 Agreed Framework for the Korean peninsula. Yeah, another good one, Bill.

With a leftist reaction against conservatives here in Korea, and a huge leftist backlash in Spain, it's all the more important to make sure we have someone in office who won't lose sight of the larger project. If that means reelecting a stubborn, possibly-stupid, possibly-crazy, inarticulate guy whose main virtue is that he'll pull the hangman's lever to cut short a condemned man's final bullshit speech, then maybe, just maybe, Bush is our guy. Kerry, at that same hangman's lever, would listen raptly and forget to hang the guy. "Slightly wounded three times"-- who cares, if you're just a smarter version of the same idiot?

I'm still no fan of Bush, and since I'll have the option of writing someone in come November, I'm still quite likely to write in Daffy Duck. But you never know. If by some miracle Bush begins to see the light about the economy, backs off his asshole stance on the marriage amendment, and maintains his focus on the Middle East while keeping up the pressure on NK, then I might just be persuaded to vote for him. Kerry, in the meantime, has to prove he's not a jellyfish on all the important issues. And liberals need to answer for themselves the question about whether we're indeed safe enough to reprioritize our thinking. And answer the question that dogs Kerry: whether we're actually at war.

Some Andrew Sullivan snippets:

First--

What the Europeans refuse to understand is that there is no proximate cause for this violence. It is structural; it is aimed at the very existence of other faiths; it wishes to purge the entire Muslim world of infidels (which means the annihilation of the Jews), and eventually to reconquer Europe. You can no more negotiate with these people than you could negotiate with Hitler. And by negotiation, I don't just mean direct talks. I mean attempts to placate by occasional withdrawal of troops from, say, Iraq or Afghanistan, or withdrawal of troops from Saudi Arabia or abandonment of Israel. All such tactical shifts are regarded purely as weakness. They are invitations for more massacres. How many more will die in London and Rome and Berlin and Paris before the old continent fights to defend itself?

Replace "Europeans" with "American left" and it reads about the same.

Next--

But there's the real ironic twist: if the appeasement brigade really do believe that the war to depose Saddam is and was utterly unconnected with the war against al Qaeda, then why on earth would al Qaeda respond by targeting Spain? If the two issues are completely unrelated, why has al Qaeda made the connection? The answer is obvious: the removal of the Taliban and the Saddam dictatorship were two major blows to the cause of Islamist terror. They removed an al Qaeda client state and a potential harbor for terrorists and weapons of mass destruction. So it's vital that the Islamist mass murderers target those who backed both wars. It makes total sense. And in yesterday's election victory for the socialists, al Qaeda got even more than it could have dreamed of. It has removed a government intent on fighting terrorism and installed another intent on appeasing it. For good measure, they murdered a couple of hundred infidels.

_

[TUESDAY UPDATE: Two things I couldn't let pass by: (1) Thoroughly disgusted with the fuckwitted service that is Blog-Shitty, Jeff has "gone Marmot" and moved his Ruminations in Korea blog to a new site: http://jeffinkorea.blogs.com/. (2) Oranckay posts a piece that's music to my, uh, eyes-- North Korean defectors, mostly ex-military, are suing former SK President Kim Dae Jung for having made payoffs to North Korea and thereby aiding their nuclear program. HELL, YEAH! SUE ALL APPEASERS! Sunshine Policy, my ass. Stare into my hole-- I'll show you some sunshine. As for appeasers, there'll be plenty of them in the near future: this country's liberal backlash against the conservative-driven impeachment is going to push the national temperament Spain-ward. I blame the young folks who don't give a shit about their own history. I don't blame the young folks who do.]

First, a word of THANKS to all the readers-- friends and strangers alike-- who've expressed concern and/or sent some money to my parents (see previous post if you're wondering what this is about). You have my gratitude, on behalf of the folks.

Insurance assessment is supposed to happen on Monday, DC time. I don't think any of us is looking forward to the bad news.

Brevity is the soul of wit, they say-- a proper caution to us prolix Hominids. Unfortunately, brevity will have to become the order of the day because, as you know, my Real Job starts next Wednesday, the 24th. Yes, I'll have to bring a digital camera along at some point: I'll be teaching at Seoul Women's University, and male readers will want some PE (proof of estrogen).

For the horndogs out there: it's highly unlikely I'll be dating any of these women. First off, I'm 34 and they're barely in their 20s, which makes me Granddad to them, and try as I might, I can't be like Jerry Seinfeld, who thinks nothing of dating much younger women. Second, they're my students, people. I don't think it's a good policy to gain a reputation as a teacher who bangs his own students.

If it turns out, however, that I'm teaching down the hall from some slim and sexy prof who's 29 or older, well... we might have to arrange a private faculty meeting.

The upshot is that, since the blogging must needs be lighter in the coming months, I may as well start now with the self-discipline. So tonight's parcours will be brief. It's about 7:30PM right now; I'll finish this before 8:30.

The Marmot's got the goods on the impeachment aftermath, and presents us with a rather disturbing Photoshopped pic-- the anti-Harisu.

Check out the Yangban and Pythi Master for their impeachment takes as well.

Note to Party Pooper: I bought and ate two Triply bars. Yup. Just like Twix, but smaller. Most Korean-style Western confections are that way: same thing, but smaller. Save your penis jokes, lads, save them. Besides, no one conceives of the dick as a "confection."

KimcheeGI writes in praise of Gongja (Confucius); the Infidel (whose logo I've changed because I was unhappy with my own drawing) wants Gongja impeached.

This looks a lot like the internal (and eternal [sic]) Chinese dialogue between Gongja and Noja/Jangja (Lao-tzu/Chuang-tzu, arguably the two founding fathers of philosophical Taoism). The Infidel sounds a lot like Noja/Jangja when he offers his own conception of leadership:

My ideal leader works infrequently, mostly attending to diplomatic business, because ordinary citizens and other government officers can do most of the work. The more power invested in the leadership, the more despicable the government.

The Confucian point of view, at least early on in the history of Confucianism, didn't necessarily imply strong and powerful leadership. If anything, Confucian values had, to some extent, an interior focus-- ritual propriety, humanity/humaneness, etc., but always with the understanding that this was in the service of harmonizing oneself with Heaven or Tao, with nature, and with human society. The Confucian conception of personhood was that of a work-in-progress: one's life is about becoming human, and not, as in the West, about exploring and/or fulfilling one's personhood or personal potential.

Philosophical Taoism was in many ways a response to the calcification of Confucianist thinking: the Taoists espoused naturalness, harmony, spontaneity, and non-doing (wu wei in Chinese; mu eui in Korean), whereas Confucianists were (at least from the Taoist point of view) obsessed with ritual propriety.

The debate continues even today, I think, between the Taoist and Confucianist conceptions of how to be and act. The debate is also internal to Confucianism, because people have to strike the right balance between li (ritual propriety; yae in Korean) and jen (humanity/humaneness; in in Korean). Korea is considered "more Confucian than China" by many, but I think I see elements of that same Chinese debate going on here. Even in the West, we have our own forms of this debate as in, for example, the differences between literal, dogmatic religion and religion more liberally conceived.

[Side note: KimcheeGI's post shows a round, red dojang (stamp): the character li (yae in Korean), or ritual propriety. The left side of the character is the God/spirit radical; the right side represents some sort of altar and sacrifice-- one of the most primitive formalized conceptions of ritual around. Yae uses the idea of sacrifice to convey the meaning "ritual."]

One of my profs illustrated the battle between yae and in this way: Think of a handshake. This is a ritual gesture; in our Western culture, it's a gesture of greeting and goodbye. It takes place at specific, proper moments of social interaction; as such, it's a rule-bound gesture and very much controlled by yae, ritual propriety. But a handshake can be performed well or poorly and can, as a result, convey a good or poor impression: squeeze too strongly or too limply, and you imply something about yourself or your state of mind. Avoid eye contact while shaking hands, and here again you alter the content of the gesture. The gesture itself is still being used-- i.e., yae is still in play, but the content of the gesture, its humanity (its in), can vary. Yae channels in, but in also affects yae.

In the example of the bad handshake, we see what happens when there's too much yae and not enough in. The result is an empty gesture. Consider the opposite situation: what if I greeted you by bellowing in joy, ripping off my clothes, then running up to you and tackling you? In this case, my joy would be obvious (i.e., lots of in), but that joy, unchannelled by ritual gesture, risks misinterpretation and could even offend people. So we see that too much in and not enough yae also leads to problems.

Philosophical Taoism, as Ray Grigg argues, finds its deepest expression these days not in the magico-religious Taoism found in China, but in the hallowed halls of Zen Buddhism. Here, too, Noja/Jangja and Gongja are at war with each other. The talk with the Zen master requires Taoist naturalness and spontaneity-- ordinary mind. But the talk itself occurs in a ritualized context, so on some level you have to fight the fact that this talk, despite all the Taoist preaching, really isn't that ordinary a moment.

Maybe calling this a "war" is wrong, but in many cases, that's how these polar tendencies express themselves: as conflict, not as harmony. In the ideal, I'd say the best solution is a dynamic tension between ritual and spontaneity, order and chaos, stability and novelty. After all, from the nondualistic standpoint, these things are not-two.

Check Oranckay here and here for a protest update and more on his "find the violation" contest. Looks like some outright lying has been going on. As my Dad said, the whole thing makes Korea look bad on the world scene. Ridiculous.

And that's all, folks. Have a nipple-pinchingly lovely day.

_

My father's been in a car accident-- it happened on Friday. He's uninjured, both airbags having gone off in the minivan (I can only imagine what that must have sounded like). Unfortunately, the van's suffered major damage. Insurance is likely to cover a lot of this (costs might run into the $3000-5000 range), but there's still a $500 deductible to contend with and the increased cost of insurance in the future.

To that end, I'm putting out a humble request to my several dozen readers: if you're willing to donate some money to help my folks out with this, I'd be grateful. I've created a PayPal donation button and set the donation amount at $10. If you feel so moved, please hit the button more than once, but even a single donation will be appreciated.

Here's the ACCIDENT RELIEF donation button:

The above button routes you directly to my FATHER'S PayPal account, not to mine. Also, please note that, once you set up shipping rates on PayPal for non-donation purchases, those shipping rates also seem to apply to donations. For that reason, I lowered the donation amount to $6.00 so that the $4.00 shipping charge brings the amount up to an even $10.00.

There's another way to help my folks out: BUY THEIR RUM CAKES. Their PayPal button is on my sidebar (scroll down a bit; look for the cake image and the PayPal button below it). If you're queasy about giving donations to people you don't know, then order a cake and receive something tangible and tasty for your money. Reviews for the cake are unanimously great, with "Bombtits" being perhaps the highest praise they've received.

Thanks in advance for whatever you can do. Thanks for your constant readership, and my apologies for the inconvenience to your wallet.

_

TOTALITARIAN UPDATE: Your Maximum Leader has moved his Naked Villainy blog to the following URL:

http://nakedvillainy.com

Please update your listings!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Lest we forget-- today, March 14, is White Day in Korea: the mirror image of Korean Valentine's Day. You'll recall that Korea and Japan split the lovey-doveyness into two days to protract the torture for us single folks. On Valentine's Day, the ladies do their thang for the men; on White Day, the men sex it up for the women. A third day, Black Day, was designed for us losers. I think it's April 14th, but am not sure. How apropos that it should nearly coincide with Tax Day in America. On Black Day, we, the unattached, will chow down on jjajang-myeon (Korean-style Chinese pasta in black bean sauce) and ponder our singleness. But today is White Day, the day when yang licks, nibbles, and sucks yin, so I wish all the lovely ladies out there a beautiful, sexually rapturous twenty-four hours. Imagine you're banging Kiefer Sutherland or something. I, in the meantime, will go see what happens when I stick my dick in a red-hot waffle iron.

_

It's with no small amount of perverse pride that I unveil...

A NEW MUG DESIGN!

Here it is, inspired by last week's comic:




Now go and SHOP! Visit my CafePress store, poke around Chewiest Tumors, or buy my book from Amazon.com.

Get ready: the adventure continues tomorrow with COSMIC IMPORT, Episode 2!

By the way, here's what Dr. Larsen is getting as his logo.



_

Today is Friday, which is Religious Diversity Day at the Hairy Chasms (cf. sidebar schedule). Two things dominate the news right now: the horrific train bombings in Madrid (WashPost now requires subscription, but it's free), and the impeachment of South Korean President Noh Mu Hyon (try the Marmot, the Infidel, the Yangban's posts, and Jeff the Ruminator-- also, check out the latest Post article).

I'm not going to bother with the impeachment issue; everyone seems to have it well in hand (Polymath is positively cheering that Noh is taking it up the ass right now, though it may be too early to say goodbye). But since there are tentative signs that the Madrid bombings may have something to do with al Qaeda, I thought I'd do a brief exploration of this from the interreligious dialogue/religious pluralism angle.

There's more going on here than just religion, obviously. You can approach the terrorism question from any number of valid angles-- economic, political, technological/scientific, historical, psychological, and sociological, for example. In fact, it's hard to talk about this question without having recourse to several angles of attack. What do we see when we appraise the situation through the lens of religious pluralism?

From where I sit, the Muslim world as a whole is far, far from pluralist. Even the Muslim "center" is problematic. There's been a huge and lingering question about "moderate Islam," the so-called "silent majority" of Muslims who, we are told, decry the terrorist violence-- but seem to do so mostly in private or at largely unseen venues. The Muslim voice of outrage against the terrorists and the Islam they espouse has yet to be heard, clearly, at the (inter)national level. This fuels an awful suspicion, shared by many, that moderate Islam might not be as moderate as it looks. That, or the Muslim version of "moderation" is apples and oranges when compared to Christian or Buddhist moderation.

A fundamentalist, for me, is anyone who takes their religious doctrines and scriptures literally-- as a scientific skeptic, I use science as my guidepost for determining what "literally" means: to the extent that unverifiable claims are made about physical reality (e.g., "prayer healed my cancer," or "meditation makes you float" or "saints can teleport"), a person making such claims is being a literalist and therefore a fundamentalist. Having said this, I'll admit that there are degrees of fundamentalism, and the problem can't be viewed as black and white. Scholars note repeatedly that Christian fundamentalism in the United States rarely reaches the levels of violence seen in the Muslim world these days, so we have to make some distinctions there. But from a Buddhist perspective, the difference between angry Christian Bible-thumpers and Muhammad Atta is one of degree, not of kind (cf. my post critiquing Islam and monotheism on this point)-- both show the symptoms of upadana, attachment (in this case, the classic "attachment to name and form").

For those of us pluralists who are genuinely interested in interreligious dialogue, terrorists and others with extreme convictions pose a practical problem: whether and how to invite such people to dialogue. For a long time, the pluralist answer has been, in many cases, to write off the fundies as unworthy of sitting at the table. This attitude has come under fire for its arrogance-- and perhaps rightly so. A truly pluralist attitude has to be, paradoxically, open enough to admit even exclusivist perspectives. If religious liberals invite only fellow liberals to the table, isn't this a bit inbred?

But this is where things get murky. If we admit that there are degrees of fundamentalism, then a second practical problem faces the pluralist: how to choose among the fundies to invite to the table of dialogue. What's the metric? If a representative from a group of known murderers comes knocking at your door demanding to be heard, do you tell him to fuck off?

I'm not sure, in the end, how helpful the silent treatment is, but I'm also not sure that an undiscerning, blindly loving attitude toward "our enemies" is the best approach, either. This is one reason why I can never claim to be a pacifist. To the extent that pacifism is a yes/no question, where one is either an absolute pacifist or not, then by that standard, I'm no pacifist. I don't, however, believe that all solutions come at the point of a gun. Violence should always be a last resort.

While people like Steven Den Beste get huffy about "exploring underlying causes" of terrorism, I don't see what the problem is: shouldn't we be exploring causes? I agree with Den Beste that the primary causes currently lie more in the Muslim world than in our own, but once we reach that conclusion, what do we do? Sit back and enjoy our moral high ground? Obviously not: we have to engage. On one level, yes, this means military engagement. But if we operate only on that level, we won't be solving any issues anytime soon.

This is where people interested in interreligious dialogue come in. The current war (and don't fool yourselves: it is a war) has a very religious cast to it. The terms of the war were not of our choosing: I for one have been resisting the whole "clash of civilizations" meme as hard as I can, but it doesn't look like the terrorists will allow us to see matters any other way. While part of this war will involve military engagement, others among us have to do our part to be engaged religiously. I don't know what this means quite yet; I don't know what my own role in the big picture is. Maybe as I think out loud about it on this blog, something will come to me.

Luther said "Hier stehe ich," here I stand. My own stance, as a committed pluralist, is one that condemns the poisonous intolerance and fundamentalism of the terrorists. It also condemns the fundamentalism that seems to cling especially to people raised in monotheistic cultures. It means I affirm those aspects of Islam (and other religions) that embrace love, peace, and harmony, but reject those aspects that foster human brokenness, divisiveness, pettiness, and evil. Because I've been influenced by my studies in Asian spirituality, I also hold to the empirical notion that religions are as they are practiced. It isn't sufficient to attempt a factual claim like, "Islam is a religion of peace." I don't blame people for wanting to make this claim, though, because it does make deontological sense: Islam ought to be a religion of peace. The same applies to Buddhism in Sri Lanka: it ought to be a religion of peace. It applies to the Christianity of abortion clinic bombers in the US: it ought to be a religion of peace. It applies to the Hinduism of the anti-Muslim Hindus in India: it ought to be a religion of peace.

But not an absolutist peace. Not a notion of peace that becomes so idolized, so fetishized, that we lose our powers of discernment and prove unable to respond to the present moment, because we find ourselves so wrapped in an extreme ideal that we, too-- we pluralists or pacifists or whoever-- become, in our turn, fundamentalists.

Shanti.

_

[March 17 UPDATE: To the folks coming here from Winds of Change, welcome and thanks-- there's plenty to see, so feel free to stick around, scroll up and down, and check out the posts I've selected for permalinking on my sidebar (near the bottom, just above the archive links). When you're done, check out the people on my newly-renovated blogroll, now complete with graphics. Just a word about the following post: I'm happy it was selected for the Winds of Change roundup, but in truth, it was very much inspired by a post at Flying Yangban and another post at Overboard. I think those posts should have been linked at WoC as well, but here are the links, fo' yo' big behind: Yangban, Overboard.]

It was an effort to wait until my scheduled Buddhism/Zen day to write about this, but somehow I managed to rein in the impatience.

Over at Flying Yangban, there's a fascinating post about a trend visible on American college campuses: the Buddhist get-togethers are predominantly white, while the on-campus Christian gatherings are overwhelmingly Asian.

Andi at Overboard picked up on this and added some amazingly profound insights of her own, taking the discussion in a very internal direction.

The Yangban's blog post stems from a year-old Washington Post article that characterizes the current demographic trend as a kind of trade. In discussing two Yale students, a white student named Harvell who became Buddhist and an Asian student named Chung who converted to Christianity, the writer remarks:

In a religious sense, Chung and Harvell traded places, each one embracing the faith of the other's forebears. But neither of them noticed the irony because so many other Asian and white students at Yale were doing the very same thing. Indeed, the 120-member Christian fellowship to which Chung belonged was about 85 percent Asian, while the Buddhist meditation meetings at Yale were almost entirely white.

Yale is hardly the only university where this is occurring. Asian Americans are rapidly becoming the face of Christianity on many college campuses across the country, joining evangelical clubs in large numbers and, in some cases, starting their own Christian organizations. The trend is most pronounced at elite private universities, where Asian American enrollment is high, but it also has been evident at public colleges, including the University of Maryland and the University of Virginia. Meanwhile, in smaller numbers, white students are increasingly gravitating toward Buddhism, Taoism and other Eastern religions.

Characterizing the trend this way is disputable. Are we, in fact, seeing a trading of places? On the surface, it may appear that this is what's happening: plenty of American white folks (and not just on college campuses) are indeed coming to know Buddhism, many through the intellectual, book-centered approach known by the amusing term "nightstand Buddhism." Nightstand Buddhism (and Taoism, etc.) are freighted with certain perils, not least of which is the false idea that one is plunging wholeheartedly into a new spiritual tradition, when in fact one is only internalizing new concepts, perhaps reorienting one's metaphysics, but doing little that would be considered actual practice by more traditional adherents. Along with this is the fact that most "converts" to nonessentialist Eastern traditions never truly leave behind their Judeo-Christian essentialism, often adopting a rather evangelical Protestant, in-group/out-group attitude toward other practitioners-- a dualistic dogmatism (e.g., this is "real" Buddhism; this isn't) not often visible in actual Asian practice, where the mentality is, generally speaking, much more syncretic.

Another problem with the "trading places" notion is that America isn't really the place to look for wholesale abandonment of Christianity. The Post article deals primarily with trends on American college campuses, and to its credit, it notes that some dabblers are probably attracted to Eastern religion for faddish reasons. Whether these faddies will go on to deeper practice is another matter; at a guess, most won't. The problem, from a demographic standpoint, is that America is still robustly Christian-- a fact that Andi deals with in her post when she says:

Let me level with you about my perceptions of the majority of "Buddhists" in America as opposed to the majority of "Christians": although there are a fair number of poseurs in both camps, at least "Christians" have the benefit of a dominant culture.

That's the American situation in a nutshell. If you want to see a real wave of white folks throwing off Christianity and filling their "internal void" with Eastern spirituality, look to Europe. Here is where the trend toward Asian spirituality is most striking. There are historical reasons for this, some of which I can sketch superficially, to wit:

Other writers, in a political context, have noted the difference between American and European religiosity. In Europe these days, it's the unassimilated Muslim population that's bringing back that old-time religious fervor. European Catholicism-- European Christianity in general-- has taken major hits, the death blow arguably coming with the advent of World War 2. Sartrean and Camusian post-WW2 French existentialism, which paints a picture of an absurd cosmos in which one builds one's own truth to live authentically, was a brave yet bitter response to the absence of God as the bombs were raining down on major cities. The Europe of 1945 was, among other things, an ironic juxtaposition of cathedrals and craters. Ultimately, existentialism is life-affirming, but it rests on the basic double-conviction of cosmic absurdity and multiple degrees of alienation (from God, nature, others, and self).

So much postmodernist thinking springs from this ambivalent source, and as the European religious temperament was forever changed by the crucible of WW2, a void did appear where Christianity once stood. I remember back in the 1980s that the French statistic was something like 60% catholique non-pratiquant (non-practicing Catholic). Religious satire and irreverence are par for the course in Europe; I have volumes of comic drawings by Claude Serre, many of which involve religious tropes-- one drawing depicts Jesus winning a swimming contest by simply running across the surface of the water. I always admired how relaxed Europeans could be about their religion, especially compared to the froth and thunder of so much American Christianity.

But even before WW2, European Christianity was old. This, too, has probably played a role in the creation of the European religious void-- the mustiness of European faith. Buddhism, which has made huge inroads in France and other European countries, fills that void very neatly and is often a topic of national discussion. One French book in particular, Le moine et le philosophe (The Monk and the Philosopher), became a runaway bestseller and did much to raise French consciousness about Buddhist values, feeding la vague bouddhiste (the Buddhist wave).

The end result is that many Europeans are throwing off the old religion and embracing Asian spirituality. While Zen teachers like Lewis Richmond, disciple of Shunryu Suzuki, believe that the Buddhism wave could still fail, the number of Zen (only Zen; not other forms of Buddhism) adherents in France has tripled from about 200,000 in the 1970s to about 600,000 now. Europe is the place to look for a wider embrace of Eastern spirituality. America, while highly pluralistic, remains strongly Christian in its demographics, and mainstream American Christianity is, arguably, on the wane as evangelicals and fundamentalists pick up the drifters and capitalize on the current national temperament, a resurgent wartime conservatism.

Christian missionary work continues apace, and the Third World is where evangelical Christianity is making the most inroads: parts of Central and South America, countries in Africa and Asia. The converts in these places are the true keepers of religious zeal; many of the converts now at American universities were converted in Asia and took their Christianity to the States.

When you look at the overall demographic trends, then, you're not really seeing symmetrical movement. The motives for conversion are often very different for Christian and Buddhist (etc.) converts, and the moving geographical "footprints" of Christianity and Buddhism are very different, too.

The nature of Christian and Buddhist "evangelism" (term very much in quotes, but there's no denying that Buddhism has always been, historically, a missionary religion) is different as well. South Korea is an obvious example of this. Buddhism enjoyed prosperity for centuries in Korea, especially during the Shilla Dynasty, but eventually neo-Confucianism came to dominate, and Buddhism was pushed backwards and upwards into the mountains. Monasteries lost land, money and influence; Buddhism became less relevant to the lives of the common people. Christianity's arrival in Korea led to conflict, but it was primarily a conflict between Christians and Confucianists, not Christians and Buddhists. The Christian-Buddhist conflict/dialogue is actually a somewhat more recent phenomenon here. Korean Christianity never lost the missionary zeal of the Westerners (and Chinese, and others) who brought the Gospel to its shores. Today, neon crosses dot the nighttime landscape of Seoul; churches can be found all over South Korea. Christianity also associated itself in the Korean mind with modernity and nationalism: Bibles were printed in Hangul whereas Buddhist sutras were (and largely still are) printed in classical Chinese; Christian dissidents were active against the Japanese occupation-- and even today, Christian missionary exclusivism works hard to portray other religions as false, primitive, and superstitious. Buddhism is trying to adapt to modern times in Korea, in many cases even resorting to Christian-sounding music to keep practitioners on their cushions. Korean Buddhist societies like Bul-il Hwae (Buddha Sun Society) help spread and reinforce Buddhist teaching among the laity, grounding the young in the Dharma.

But Korean Buddhism may be losing out. Many Westerners have fallen in love with Korean Buddhism, which shares both deep and superficial traits with Chinese Buddhism, but today's South Koreans often view monks, rightly or wrongly, as lazy and selfish; many modern Koreans also see Buddhism as "a woman's religion" (demographically speaking, Korean women are on the whole more active practitioners than men) and denigrate it as superstitious.

Buddhism has historically taken on different forms depending on the country/culture in which it settles-- borrowing local rituals and cosmologies, changing its shape to suit the needs of its practitioners. Andi's fascinating post deals in some measure with the question of what many Western converts are missing out on. I'd quote her entire post here if I could, but that would be rude. Here's a snippet:

I knew a lot about Buddhism before I went to Nepal. I'd meditated with a couple different groups and I'd read a little, fluffy stuff and scripture both. But none of it lived. I was also deeply skeptical of the American Buddhist community. I'd heard too many times, "I'm not Buddhist, but..." followed by some peace, love 'n' harmony line. I didn't buy it. If there's such a [label] as "Buddhist," I wanted to know what it was before I got too deeply into something.

There is something to the religious aspect of Buddhism, that folk-level stuff. The paintings, the prayers, all the dross that "religions" get. What would [Catholicism] be without its cathedrals?--still faith in the resurrected Jesus, still love and fear of God, still the community--but something would be absent. The uplifting of the spirit, the enthusiastic aestheticism of architecture, art, and ritual... I find these are useful, though not necessary, parts of religion. And they provide a depth, a way for people no matter what level they're at (still praying for good crops or completely cut from the cycle of suffering), to engage and plug into guiding principles and morality.

Several times on my own blog, I've said, "Beware Barnes and Noble Zen!" This warning is especially applicable to people who read the likes of Alan Watts (yours truly included) and feel they've gained some deep insight into "what Zen is." I've also argued strenuously against those "Buddhist essentialists" who take their rarefied, stripped-down, essentialistic Barnes and Noble Buddhism and make declarations, usually against respectful, inquisitive Christians, about what Buddhism is and isn't. These Buddhists don't seem to get Andi's point: most Buddhism is folkloric! Here's how I dealt with the question contra Buddhists on Beliefnet who preached an essentialist gospel:

OK, maybe I do have a real critique of online Western Buddhists: Beliefnet needs some down-home folkloric Taiwanese Pure Landers-- unreconstructed East Asians without a hint of Western pollution in them. People who're Buddhist because their families have been Buddhist since the time when snaggle-toothed cave men were dragging their knuckles and drawing stick figures. People who see ghosts, hobnob with ancestral spirits, think waaaay superstitiously, factor good/bad luck into everyday living. People who, like the Taiwanese lady who sat in on my lecture about Buddhism at my church, said, "I didn't recognize a single thing you talked about," because, like so many Western Buddhists do when discoursing on Buddhism (and Beliefnet's threads provide plenty of confirmation), I reduced Buddhism to a set of rarefied academic concepts and principles, and to a very narrow set of practices that had nothing to do with how millions of people actually live their Buddhism in the Old Country.

I'm not implying that Western converts (or Western "cradle Buddhists") are somehow fake. I am saying, however, that every time I see a Western Buddhist on these boards lecture about how Buddhism "isn't about X or Y," I keep thinking to myself, "Maybe you should ask the folks back home." Not theistic? Depends. Not dualistic? Also depends. No essences? Routinely contradicted whenever the phrase "real Buddhism" pops up.

[NB: the link to the above archived post, "The Question of Religious Pluralism," is unstable. If you have problems, hit the link on my sidebar to "A Critique of a Holographic Model of Religious Pluralism" and scroll down, down, down a ways until you see the proper post.]

I think Andi is making a point that's missed by many Western Buddhists. Perhaps it's a point better appreciated by Catholics than by us Protestants, because it speaks to the organic nature of solid tradition. If Buddhism leaps to America from Asia and magically loses its skin and flesh, landing on Plymouth Rock as nothing but a skeleton of its former self, it is, I think, legitimate to ask whether something-- a bunch of somethings-- might not have been lost in translation during that leap.

To speak of the organic nature of tradition (and practice, and belief, and all the rest) is to speak of continuity. Continuity, as I noted in my critique of Dr. Vallicella's paper, isn't the same thing as permanence. Continuity is that quality we often mistake for permanence or essence. Continuity is what gives phenomena their distinctness and uniqueness, but it's also what prevents phenomena from being somehow fundamental or essential or substantive. A quiet little stream moves through the woods; you point to it, right now, and say, "That's a stream." And sure enough, that's what it is. But come back in a thousand years-- no stream there! Same with people: you see a child running around your living room and you say, "Look at that child!" But come back in fifty years-- no child there! You can do the same thing to the phenomena we call Buddhism and Christianity: zoom forward or backward in time a few billion years-- no Buddhism or Christianity there!

Thien monk Thich Nhat Hanh wrote eloquently about all this in his Living Buddha, Living Christ. He said:

When we look into the heart of a flower, we see clouds, sunshine, minerals, time, the earth, and everything else in the cosmos in it. Without clouds, there could be no rain, and there would be no flower. Without time, the flower could not bloom. In fact, the flower is made entirely of non-flower elements; it has no independent, individual existence. It "inter-is" with everything else in the universe.

[...]

Just as a flower is made only of non-flower elements, Buddhism is made only of non-Buddhist elements, including Christian ones, and Christianity is made of non-Christian elements, including Buddhist ones.

Life is a messy process which our minds are duty-bound by evolution to clean up and clarify. Life is rarely symmetrical, despite all the preaching in the West about justice, and all the preaching in the East about balance. To see the world in terms of cosmic scales is to impose yet more superstitious thinking on natural processes. So I don't view the current religious "trend" on American college campuses as an actual trading of places (and to the Post's credit, the writer notes Dr. Robert [father of Uma] Thurman's remark that Western students who engage in Eastern practice rarely want to go into the ritual aspects of that practice); that's too clean a description. Instead, what we're seeing is what we've always seen in human activity: the simple and natural eros of the human spirit.

_

Sorry. The above is a punchline to a French joke I heard from my Swiss "brother" long ago. But it may be applicable here.

Lorianne writes the following:

It's not like Kevin himself isn't prone to such wild juxtapositions: this is the man who writes thoughtful ecumenical musings, insightful analyses of world politics, etc, then mixes them up with wickedly bawdy bits about John Kerry's affection for sheep (?) and Howard Dean's resemblance to a huge erect penis. (Actually, I can't read Kevin's site at school any more: it's just too damn embarrassing trying to explain to a newly-arrived student--or Department Chair--why you have a huge erect penis on your computer.)

We aim to please, so I've redone one of the "Deanis" cartoons as an example of what you can expect from now on. I think this will make my blog work-safe for you. No student need know that you spend your office hours looking at cartoon porn.

Please scroll down to see the proposed tasteful change.





























_

News I got while reading Cobb:

Spalding Gray is dead. They found him when he washed ashore. Damn, damn, damn. I'm mighty unhappy.

_

Boorish Klingon behavior catches Kirk's attention!

Professor Kirk Larsen writes in to protest the unfairness of the sidebar logo for his very informative blog, It Makes a Difference to the Sheep:

Dear Kevin,

This is an official protest of the unjust treatment my blog has received by way of your sidebar logos. The Marmot gets an evil-eyed but very cool rodent, Oranckay gets Arnold, Flying Yangban gets, well, a Flying Yangban, many others get insightful, artistic or witty (or a combination of all three) logos, and I get . . . bestiality. It was probably naive of me to not expect some to think along those lines even though the name actually came from an innocent Stan Freberg comedy routine. I also thought the name an appropriate metaphor for blogging in general: the sheep (e.g. the masses) writing about what is interesting or important to them rather than what old fashioned big media determines to be interesting or important.

If I promise to never post anything about Hello Kitty ever again, is there any way you could make a new logo, one that I wouldn't be embarrassed to put up on my blog (after all, my mother reads the thing from time to time)?

Cheers,

Kirk W. Larsen

Kirk, to be honest, I thought your blog's title was the punchline of a dirty joke. For me, rolling around in the gutter as I do, it was hard to see your blog's title any other way, which made that image, or something like it, inevitable. The present logo would be even better if I had room for a speech balloon so the sheep could shout, "Thank God! It's RIBBED!" or "Damn, you-- are-- HUGE!"

Wait a second. Your mother reads your blog?

Ohhhh, that's low, Prof. Larsen, bringing your mother into this, laying on the guilt.

I feel like a shit because I promised myself I'd change logos without question if people complained, but I really like the current logo. So here are two possibilities for discussion:

1. I leave my logo on my blog and design a new logo for you to use on your blog. That would be my preferred solution. It presumes that your mother doesn't read my blog; an educated guess since you never blogrolled me, damn your eyes.

2. I scrap the current logo, design a new one, and we both use that one. I'll be more amenable to this solution if your mother also reads my blog.

I imagine there are other possibilities. You could, for example, design your own logo (I highly, highly recommend getting a copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements for this; it's cheap and powerful software). Or you could outsource to someone else, though they'd probably bend you over and demand pay. All I want is a listing under "Foul-mouthed Expats" on your sidebar.

(I need to see a shrink about why I'm always rude to professors.)

A request: please tell me more about that Stan Freberg comedy routine. It'll help me figure out how to redo your logo. The upshot of all this is that you WILL get a new logo for your blog, but I'm hesitant to scrap the image on my own sidebar. If you feel my sidebar needs to be changed, then I will, with much weeping and gnashing of teeth, make the change. Thanks for writing in (heeeeeeeeey, I thought you were in a crunch period and unable to write these days!), and I look forward to hearing from you again soon.


Kevin

_

je blogue
tu blogues
il blogue
nous bloguons
vous bloguez
elles bloguent

il bloguait
nous avons blogué
bloguer, c'est méga-chouette
elle n'a aucune intention de cesser de bloguer
on adore bloguer, même en se branlant
tout le monde a son putain de blog
nous sommes tous bloguériens
blogué soit qui mal y pense
l'blog, c'est moi
qui blogue tout pardonne tout

[with sincerest apologies to John Eckard; I had to get the above out of my system]

I hope Richard isn't pissed with his new logo on my sidebar. I found the pic for the world-famous Duck Chang's restaurant, which is the arguable inventor and/or popularizer of Peking Duck. Then I thought to myself, "You know, this photo would look much more exciting if we had Pinhead from the Hellraiser series serving the duck. Along with one of his victims, of course."

Richard notes that hope for China's "new and improved" openness grows dim.

Justin is worth $30.

Spam meditation and scary fuckin' topiary at Justin's brother's blog.

Over at Gweilo Diaries: Bad news for cunnilingus lovers who tongue too many crotch notches. And check out "An Min Goes Ape."

Hat tip to Anticipatory Retaliation, who links to this essay by a woman who's spent many years in France but is now having her doubts about les Français. AR also provides another crotch-related link here.

Ryan explores interesting parallels between gay marriage and Irish divorce. He's also pumped about the upcoming Buddhist Studies conference. I can only envy him.

The very conservative Bird Dog at Tacitus writes on the newly-signed Iraqi Constitution... and the evil that is John Kerry.

Happy Blogiversary, Annika!

one year at your blog
putting up with guys who shout,
"Come on! Flash dem tits!"

Annika rated "Obi-wan Kenobi" when she took the Star Wars test. I rated Qui-gon.

Dan Darling on the hijab question (among other things).

A paper by Dr. Bill Vallicella: "In the Absence of Knowledge, May One Believe?" This is relevant to some of the same epistemological issues I've dealt with (superficially) in my posts on Alvin Plantinga and Philip Quinn.

KBJ receives a letter constructing a case against Christianity. The argument against a God who allows his own son to be brutally murdered is a familiar one; I don't really dispute it because my own problems with our theological imagery-- and the question of how literally to take it-- have led me to become a nontheist (NB: not atheist!). The letter also speaks at length to the issue of the unverifiability of Jesus' existence, but it may be overstating the case. There is indeed a school of thought that forcefully questions whether Jesus existed, and their central argument is a good, scientific one: we have, at present, no direct evidence for the historical Jesus. But in the wider scholarly world, this school of thought isn't that prominent. It might become so; who knows?

But what happens if we find Jesus' body?

Read Tom Robbins's Another Roadside Attraction for the answer.

I'm sure the Maximum Leader has seen this. I saw this a while ago myself, but Jay writes a fun post about the Shakespearean insult generator and lists his three faves:

Thou churlish beef-witted foot-licker!
Thou art so leaky that we must leave thee to thy sinking.
Methinks thou art a general offence, and every man should beat thee.

I love "beef-witted." Quite redolent. But first prize goes to the third quip, which I think would serve well as a Naked Villainy tag line. In my mind, I hear this line being uttered by a thoroughly drunk Peter O'Toole. Try it out in your head:

Methinks thou art a general offence, and every man should beat thee.

The story of Lorianne as laid out in her blog is an interesting one. Having read through her archives from the beginning, I thought for a while that I was seeing a sort of gleeful morphing from Jekyll to Hyde as the "fuck" word count began to spike in more recent blogs. But Lorianne is in the final stages of her doctoral career; at the same time, she's an English teacher, journalist, naturalist, writer, blogger, wife, and of course, Zen teacher-- all these obligations doubtless weigh on her and produce a certain nuttiness during crunch periods. My own academic experience was filled with punchy moments, and I think a blog is the perfect place to give those moments voice. Lorianne gets back to original form in her most recent blog, but check her out in these two posts.

In that last link, Lorianne talks about "Kill Bill," which I have yet to see. I wrote about Tarantino (and David Carradine, and Bjork) here; my own take is very different from Lorianne's. Vive la différence! God bless variety! Variety is what makes my underwear skid marks endlessly fascinating.

Steven Den Beste captures why I can't stand Kerry. I don't love Bush, I don't love Nader... I'm probably going to vote for Daffy Duck-- but Kerry must not be allowed to wrap his moldy dick around the neck of American foreign policy.

We here at the Hairy Chasms like our posts chunky-style, so it was with some regret that we noted the Maximum Leader's new "short blogs" program. The ML's (and his guest posters') long essays on history and politics are some of the main reasons why I visit his blog-- along with the old, cobwebbed Mafia-loyalty that comes from knowing Mike since we were both 8 years old. I'll take this moment to express a fervent wish that, assuming the ML has the time and inclination, he will break away from the new program now and then to publish much lengthier screeds.

_

JOB UPDATE: No yang without yin. This morning I received a call from my agency contact telling me that the schedule isn't Monday through Friday but Monday through Thursday. However, the agency head is looking for English tutoring lessons, so this would give me another private class to go along with my already-in-place Friday evening class. Folks, you just have to roll with it. Here in Korea, schedules are subject to change without notice; items in your plan book may have to be scratched out, but other items might well have to be pencilled in. Because I have experience living in both Korea and Switzerland, I can confirm that Koreans and Swiss folks have a lot in common as fellow montagnards, but when it comes to their respective appreciations of the space-time continuum, well... the Koreans have, shall we say, a more fluid conception of space and time. This has its merits and demerits; you just have to be adaptable to the changing terrain, like a skier on a slope full of moguls.

[Note to concerned friends: TAKE NO ACTION, PLEASE. As with the previous job-related blog, this is merely me airing out thoughts-- not a frothing rant, and definitely not a call for mini-jihad. The dominant emotion here isn't anger-- just amusement and some therapeutic cynicism, as with last time. Because this job is going to be a large part of my existence as of March 24, I will be blogging about it regularly. I need to be free to blog about it without worrying about the adverse consequences of well-intentioned "corrective measures." Muchas gracias for your concern and friendship.]

Let's go through my Koreablogroll from the bottom up this time, shall we? Lots going on, as always.

One upshot of the recent 5th International Conference on NK Human Rights and Refugees in Poland was this joint statement, found at the Free North Korea! blog. Chris also wants to hear your opinion about whether Kerry would be tougher than Bush on NK, so leave comments. Chris's own stance seems to be that the hype against Kerry is unfair. I disagree. I don't think Kerry would have had the balls to make NK this nervous to begin with. NK now sweats because it's on a short list called the Axis of Evil-- a truly stupid label, but rhetorically useful, and one that a person like Kerry would be horrified to apply.

I'll grant that Bush's "actions" regarding NK haven't really been all that proactive (and as Kevin at IA recently showed, this administration isn't above coddling NK, either), but that inactivity in itself is a good thing: it's a hell of a lot better than extracting empty promises like the 1994 Agreed Framework, which allowed people to feel good about themselves without actually doing shit for either the NK people or our side. Who are the big losers at every "deal"? We are.

So I'm sorry, Chris-- love your blog, but I think you're dead wrong. Kerry's NK policy will be a massive limp dick, impressively hung but unable to fuck shit up. It'll just dangle there, flaccid, stinky, and veinless, with no more fuck-value than the meat from a can of Spam. The end result of Kerry's policies will be a slew of benefits for NK and nothing for us. John Kerry probably wouldn't allow a loudmouth critic like John Bolton to say, in public, that North Korea is a "hellhole." Kerry would be too worried about NK accusations that he's a "scumsucker." Come live here in SK a while and you'll see why so many of us expats, liberal, conservative, and otherwise, feel this way.

To us, the routinely Spam-fucked, I say: stop dealing with NK at all. Reduce the issue to its security elements and leave humanitarian responsibilities entirely in the hands of the people who claim brotherhood with the North: the South Koreans. Hold NK hostage with a once-and-forever pronouncement: a single NK warhead, a single load of WMDs, found anywhere outside NK will be cause for all-out war. The same policy applies should an American city be hit by a WMD attack, nuclear or otherwise. Then let's sit back and worry about all the other domestic and international problems we need to address.

The Party Pooper follows up his love letter to the Triply chocolate candy with a hilarious piece of "fan fiction" based, it seems, on Dungeons and Dragons and the Baldur's Gate 2 computer game. You might not get all the inside jokes if you never played D&D, but you'll nevertheless thrill to some of the pungent imagery of the Pooper's piece: "meat puppets," a Shocking Grasp spell applied to the balls, and then there's the standard "hobbit bedroom and bathroom invasion procedure," which deserves quoting here:

I do the standard "Hobbit Bedroom and Bathroom Invasion Procedure," which you should know very well if you've ever been burglarized by a halfling. Short-sheet the bed, shit in the slippers, pee in the shampoo bottle and masturbate into one of his clean socks and/or gloves. I’m not sure why we [hobbits] do this, and only this. It's just an ancient tradition that borders on the sacred for us.

The stuff Tolkien never told you...

It snowed rather heavily just before the previous weekend-- the first time in 100 years that Korea has had such weather at this time of year, from what I've heard. Thousands of cars were stuck on the road... and Polymath was in one of them.

At Overboard, we've got bath houses and the movie "T'aegeukgi." Maybe a better way to market this post is "NAKED WHITE CHICKS AND GUNS." G. Gordon Liddy would approve. Andi also has a short post on gay marriage in Korea. And she sports a tattoo... somewhere. Ahem.

Rathbone Press does its own riff on education in Korea: surprise, surprise, it appears that South Koreans don't acquire a love of learning. I think this is largely true, though I've been fortunate enough to meet Koreans who break the stereotype. The RP also registers annoyance at congratulatory Korean articles touting Korean achievements in other countries, the central problem summed up thus:

The final reason articles like those mentioned above annoy me is that the Korean media likes to bash the US and Japan, yet when a Korean does well in these countries it is viewed as a great triumph. If a Korean succeeds in the US or Japan, that is seen as real success. My question is "why"? If the US and Japan are so bad, why give so much attention to Koreans who succeed there?

Two words: subjugation mentality. One part of you wants to resent The Man. One part of you wants to be his friend. South Korea's been through hell, it's true, but it's not going through hell right now compared to the past, and the young folks seem to have forgotten most of that misery, anyway-- plumping up like Americans, listening to American-style rap, gorging themselves on fast food, skating by on the sweat of the previous generation. My older Korean relatives also shake their heads at this. For Korea to move ahead, it has to stop living the lie that it is any longer a helpless victim. A strong economy, a strong place in the field of technology, and a more-than-strong-enough military all give the lie to the notion that this is some third-world backwater. Sure, parts of Korea are still primitive by Seoul standards, but hell, parts of America are rather rusticated, too. SO?

Finally, RP is all over the recent incident in Iraq in which Korean journalists were "manhandled" by American troops during a security procedure. Yes, it's true that a broom handle up the ass isn't the best way to look for a nuclear warhead, but conditions in Iraq are delicate, so I think our troops can be forgiven their thoroughness.

[BTW, that was a JOKE. Please read the linked posts to learn the actual situation.]

The Yangban has the goods on the journalist/troops story, predicting that the Korean media will overreact. A subsequent post informs us that, yes, as predicted, people here are overreacting.

Budae Chigae covers the wrangling going on over some Korean real estate. But what's more important is that the KimcheeGI reveals what the Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have really encountered on the Red Planet's surface.

The Infidel poo-poos South Korean pseudo-capitalism. On a non-Korea-related note, the Infidel also mentions a major blind spot in our current foreign policy. This is a valid concern: if we're going to argue that the countries surrounding North Korea need to be more mindful of what's going on in their back yard, then the same applies to us and our own back yard.

Over at Oranckay (which, if you can't figure it out from my sidebar, means "barbarian" according to Mr. Schroepfer): a note about the death threats now being received by Hwang Jang Yop, the octogenarian NK defector (and former NK ideologue) whom South Koreans resent for telling the truth about what a shithole NK is. Also not to be missed: this bizarre Noh Mu Hyon impeachment flap, which Mr. Schroepfer claims to be "too !@#%(% angry" to write about coherently right now.

Aside: I have no goddamn clue about the minutiae of Korean politics. As things stand, I'm a political ignoramus when it comes to American politics, despite our relatively easy-to-understand two-party polity. In Korea, the problem is compounded by the Protestant Impulse gone mad: mitotic splits, Frankensteinian fusions, and John-Kerryish realignments. Along with that, you've got deals and dealbreaking... and the whole sordid thing is buried under the fetid ass-dandruff of corruption. I suppose an expert on Korean politics must possess acute powers of discernment-- the same powers that allow crotch fanatics to collect and categorize dingleberries (hey, each one is unique like a snowflake!).

[BTW, the snowflake contention is empirically unprovable, goddammit. The things melt too fast, and you'd have to collect all the snowflakes from the beginning of time and run them through a machine to determine whether there have been any snowflake doppelgängers. Even then, there's always the chance that a future snowflake might match a past one. As Judy Tenuta, that prophetess of stochastic phenomena, knew so well: It could happen!]

Schroepfer also notes that some Koreans-- who claim to work on behalf of human rights-- aren't happy with our North Korean Freedom Act of 2003. Read the usinkorea comment to that post as well. Yep.

Mike Ferrin's granddad passed away recently. Please leave him your condolences, especially if you are, as I am, a devoted reader of his excellent blog.

Via the Marmot: you all know by now that North Korea's government, among other unsavory governments, is eagerly awaiting the arrival of John Kerry in the White House: Oh, goody! Another dupe! And he won't ever embarrass us in public like that Bush sonofabitch and his Bolton-dog!

And quite the flame war is being waged in the comments thread of this post about the plight of female NK refugees. You might want to just stick to the post. The flame war itself doesn't remain interesting for long.

And in just a week's time, on March 15, South Korea will yet again abstain from voting against its North Korean brother at the UN Commission on Human Rights Convention in Geneva. That's moral backbone for you.

On that lovely note, I bid you... fart well. Fart long. Fart accurately.

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In case you missed it, I finally posted that essay on The Philosophical Challenge of Religious Diversity, evaluating the final chapter by Philip L. Quinn, "Towards Thinner Theologies," and adding some overall remarks about the book as a whole and the religio-philosophical discussion in general.

Scroll down to the post titled "'Towards Thinner Theologies'?"

Enjoy.

UPDATE: Dr. Vallicella wrote to say he's seen my post and is formulating a reply, which will eventually appear on his blog, though not right away. Seems like a very nice fellow, though I still suspect I'm in for a royal ass-kicking. Check out his main site as well; parts of it are still under construction, but there are plenty of interesting articles to read.

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