LUNAR NEW YEAR  農曆除夕(2020)

Posted January 24, 2020

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 Cultural Record:

Buson juxtaposes the two birds so that the female on the bough above seems to peer with a critical eye at her mate below (who is self-absorbed in the joy of his own song).

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” … Street Scene (with Anonymous Inscription) … Vancouver Chinatown, 2013 …”. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans.)

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Yang Hsiung

(53 BCE – 18 CE)

□ Someone asks: “If there are no immortals in the world, why do people talk about them?”

□ I reply: “Isn’t all this talk hubbub? Because it is hubbub, it can make what is nonsense seem to exist.”

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(TRANS-INDIVIDUAL) DIALOGUE /(NON-DISCRIMINATORY) WISDOM:

Zen master Ungen (d. 841 BCE) and fellow practitioner Dogo (d. 835 BCE) …

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Dogo’s question [when Ungen is making a cup of tea]:

To whom are you going to serve the tea you are preparing?

Ungen: There is the person who wants it.

Dogo: Can’t the person who wants it make the tea himself?

Ungen: I am here to do it for him.

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Lightning flash, crash …

Waiting in the bamboo grove

See three dew-drops fall

— Yosa Buson (1716-1784)

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BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS: 2020 Doomsday Clock Announcement (Washington, D.C. ▪︎January 23, 2020▪︎

Humanity continues to face simultaneous existential dangers –nuclear war and climate change– that are compounded by a threat multiplier, cyber-enabled information warfare, that undercuts society’s ability to respond. The international security situation is dire, not just because these threats exist, but because world leaders have allowed the international political infrastructure for managing them to erode.

…

Today, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock from two minutes to midnight to 100 seconds to midnight.

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YEAR’S END

Matsuo Basho
(1644-1694)

Year’s end, all

corners of this

floating world, swept.

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Posted January 17, 2020

Tung Chung-shu (c. 179 – c. 104 BCE):

What is meant by wisdom? It is to speak first and then act accordingly. It is to weigh with one’s wisdom whether to act or not and then proceed accordingly. When one’s weighing is correct, what he does will be proper, what he handles will be appropriate. … When one’s weighing is wrong, what he does will be improper, what he handles will be inappropriate … injuries will gather around him … his posterity will be cut off.

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Kenneth Roth, Executive Director, HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH, 4 January 2020:

To maintain its grasp on power at home, the Chinese Communist Party has constructed an Orwellian high-tech surveillance state and a sophisticated Internet censorship system to monitor and suppress public criticism. Now, China has begun to use its growing economic and diplomatic clout to that censorship abroad, silencing critics and carrying out the most intense attack on the global system for enforcing human rights since its emergence in the mid-twentieth century. If it is not challenged, Beijing’s actions portend a dystopian future in which no one is beyond the reach of Chinese censors, and an international human rights system so weakened that it no longer serves as a check on government repression.

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The world should recognize that Xi Jinping’s lofty rhetoric about a “community of shared future for mankind” is really a threat –a vision of rights worldwide as defined and tolerated by Beijing. Unless we want to return to an era in which people are made pawns, to be manipulated or discarded according to the whims of their overlords, we must demand that our governments resist the Chinese government’s attack on the international human rights system. Decades of progress are now at stake. So is our future.

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Note:

Roth spoke at the UN Correspondents Association in New York –after being denied entry to Hong Kong, where he had been scheduled to release a ‘World Report’ from HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH (the NGO headquartered in New York City).

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George Orwell (1945):

Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity.

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” … ‘Humanity and Wisdom’…”. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans.)

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Tung Chung-shu (c. 179 – c. 104 BCE):

Love without wisdom means love without discrimination. Wisdom without humanity means knowledge not translated into action. Therefore humanity is to love mankind and wisdom is to remove its evil.

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Niki J.P. Alsford, Director of the Asian Pacific Studies Institutes, University of Central Lancashire (13 January 2020):

The re-election of Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen is a remarkable moment for global progressive politics in the face of continued populism, fake news, and voter manipulation.

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In her 2020 new year speech, Tsai emphasised that Taiwan is not willing to accept the “one country two systems” relationship with China –a reference to the system currently in place in Hong Kong. The election result proves her point.

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Statement from the People’s Republic of China Foreign Ministry (12 January 2020):

“No matter what changes there are to the internal situation in Taiwan, the basic fact that there is only one China in the world and Taiwan is part of China will not change.”

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Luo Ping … hanging scroll (ink and colour on paper), 1764. The Cleveland Museum of Art. (Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund.)

inscription:

SCHOLAR WATCHING THE WATERFALL.

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Substance and function come from the same source, and there is no gap between the manifest and the hidden.

—  Ch’eng I (1033 – 1107)

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Posted January 10, 2020

Confucius (d. 479 BCE)

Words are like wind and waves; actions are a matter of gain and loss. Wind and waves are easily moved; questions of gain and loss easily lead to danger.

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DARK TAIPEI (TAIWAN) 5:00 AM SUNDAY (CST) AND SAME TIME 1:00 PM SATURDAY (PST) VANCOUVER (CANADA) LIGHT

[  N E THING COMPANY Project Dept., 1969 … IAIN BAXTER&/CAUSA, 2020…. ]

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Editorial … THE GUARDIAN (London), 9 January 2020:

Whatever happens, when Taiwan’s voters go to the polls on Saturday, its president, Tsai Ing-wen, has made a truly remarkable comeback. … A year ago, her prospects of re-election looked so dim that senior [Democratic Progressive] party figures urged her not to run again. Yet for months, polls have given her a hefty lead over her main challenger.

Ms. Tsai can take some credit. … Yet her resurgence is also due to the man she faces: Han Kuo-yu of the Kuomintang (KMT); in the election, and in the broader sense, Xi Jinping, the Chinese president.

Han, a socially conservative, populist figure … has impaired the KMT’s positioning….  Han calls for closer ties with Beijing have been toned down as he slides in the poles. … Her [Tsai’s] party has campaigned on the slogan “Resist China, Defend Taiwan”.

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“China must be united, which is an inevitable requirement for the historical rejuvenation of the Chinese nation in the future. … We do not renounce the use of force and reserve the option to use all necessary measures.”

— Xi Jinping (President of the People’s Republic of China/Secretary-General of the Communist Party of China), 1 January 2020.

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” … ‘Passing On/Remaining’…”. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans.)

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Although there are a thousand paths and a variety of tunes, they all converge at one point.

—  Seng-Chao (384-414)

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Mao Zedong (1938):

All wars that are progressive are just, and all wars that impede progress are unjust. We Communists oppose all unjust wars that impede progress, but we do not oppose progressive, just wars.

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Posted January 3rd, 2020

All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of posssible causes of future experience.

— William James (1891)

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‘Ema’ (wooden prayer tablet) –at Meiji (Shinto) Shrine, Tokyo– offering a message of support for the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong.

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UKU NEZUMI [white mouse] is the messenger of DAIKOKU … the deity of great darkness … and one of the Seven Lucky Gods (Fukujin).

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Soga Shohaku, DAIKOKU POUNDING MOCHI, ca. 1772-81. Hanging scroll –ink on paper. (Feinberg Collection … promised gift to the Harvard Art Museums, Boston.)

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Curatorial Record:

Daikoku was originally introduced to Japan as a member of the Buddhist pantheon; along with Ebisu, he became widely worshipped in the early Edo period (1625-1781), as a god of success and happiness, particularly among merchants and urban commoners.

Depicted with his sleeves rolled up, and his head covered in its usual black cloth, Daikoku is about to swing his enormous pestle into the rice in the round mortar. He is making a sticky paste prepared as a treat to celebrate the New Year.

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” … ‘Emptiness’ Is Real…”. (Photo: M. Cynog Evan’s, 2020.)

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Right and wrong are temporal, but time is neither right nor wrong.

— Eihei Dogen (1240)

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Posted December 4, 2019

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” … ‘Near Future’ …”. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans)

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The consciousness is merely like a mirror, in which what seems to be an external sphere appears.

— Hsüan-tsang (596-664)

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“Our war against nature must stop. And we know that that is possible. … The point of no return is over the horizon. It is in sight and hurtling towards us.”

— António Guterres, UN Secretary-General (1 December, 2019)

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Posted November 29, 2019

THE NUCLEAR AGE in which the human race is living, and may soon be dying, began for the general public with the dropping of an atom bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

— Bertrand Russell (1961)

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Nicole Winfield, JAPAN TODAY, 23 November 2019:

[Aboard The Papal Plane]

Pope Francis managed an airborne diplomatic dance by sending telegrams [‘diplomatic cables’] to the leaders of China, Hong Kong and Taiwan as he flew through their airspace on his way from Thailand to Japan.

Francis made sure not to offend Beijing in the telegram, Saturday, making no mention of the Vatican’s continual diplomatic relations with self-ruled Taiwan or the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests, now in their sixth month, though he did appeal for “well being and peace” in the semi-autonomous Chinese territory.

Papal protocol requires these telegrams … and Francis has used them in the past to reach out to the Beijing government, which severed relations with the Holy See over five decades ago.

The Vatican is one of the last “countries” to maintain diplomatic relations with Taiwan, which China claims as its territory to be reunited by force if necessary.

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Nicole Winfield and Haruka Nuga, JAPAN TIMES, 24 November 2019:

NAGASAKI

Pope Francis urged world leaders to renounce atomic weapons and the Cold War-era doctrine of deterrence, saying Sunday the stockpiling of nuclear arms decreases security, wastes money and threatens humanity.

Francis blasted the demise of arms control treaties while visiting Nagasaki, the site of the second of the two 1945 U. S. atomic bombings in Japan.

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KONGOYASHA MYO-O, Japan, 12th century. Hanging scroll –ink on paper. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Curatorial Record:

Kongoyasha Myo-o is one of the Five Great Guardian Kings in Esoteric Buddhism. His ferocious aspect is a manifestation of the wrath of the Five Wisdom Buddhas of brightness, against evil.

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Gary Lee-Nova, ELECTRIC SPEED TETRAD #2, Ver. 3.0, 2019.

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It is our task to presentiate the past in ourselves, not to lose the present to the transient power of the past. This we can achieve by recognizing the balancing power of the latent “future” with its character of the present, which is to say, its potentiality for consciousness.

— Jean Gebser (1949)

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” … ‘Degrees of Distance’ …”. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans, 2019)

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There is nothing in the universe without principle, nature, and destiny.

— Shao Yung (1011-1077)

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Posted November 22, 2019

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□

A former employee of the UK’s Hong Kong consulate has told the BBC that he was tortured in China and accused of inciting political unrest in the city.

Simon Cheng, a Hong Kong citizen who worked for the UK government for almost two years, was deterred for 15 days on a trip to mainland China in August.

“I was shackled, blindfolded and hooded,” the 29-year-old tells me.

UK government sources say they believe his claims –of being beaten and forced to sign confessions– are credible.

Following our interview, the British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab summoned the Chinese ambassador.

“We are outraged by the disgraceful mistreatment that Mr Cheng faced when he was in detention in mainland China … and we’ve made clear that we expect the Chinese authorities to review and hold to account those responsible,” Mr Raab told the BBC.

But on Wednesday [20 November] a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson told the BBC they “absolutely cannot accept the UK government’s interference in this case” –and would in return summon the UK ambassador to “express opposition and anger”.

“We hope the UK will be prudent and stop interfering in Hong Kong and in China’s domestic affairs because it will, eventually, only harm the UK’s own interests,” the spokesperson added.

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The claims he makes –including that he saw other Hongkongers in Chinese custody– are likely to fuel protestors fears that their city’s freedoms are being eroded under Chinese rule.

“They said they work for the secret service and that there are no human rights,” he tells me  “Then they started to torture.”

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As a trade and investment officer at the UK consulate, Simon Cheng’s particular brief was to drum up interest in investing in Scotland among the Chinese business community.

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Questions [from China’s National Security Police] focused on his involvement in protests with the aim, he says, of forcing him to confess to fomenting unrest [in Hong Koon behalf of the British state. … He says he was made to hold stress positions –squatting against a wall for hours on end, and beaten if he moved. … He claims he was subjected to sleep deprivation, with his interrogators forcing him to sing the Chinese national anthem to keep himself awake.

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There is no longer a gap between business and culture or military and civilian life.

— Marshall McLuhan (1969)

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” … ‘Near Future’ …”. (Photo: M. Cynog Evan’s, 2019.)

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So far as physical conditions are concerned, there seems to be no good reason why life, including human life, should not continue for many million years. The danger comes, not from man’s physical or biological environment, but from himself. He has survived, hitherto, through ignorance. Can he continue to survive now that the useful degree of ignorance is lost?

— Bertrand Russell (1962)

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ON THE CRITICAL ATTITUDE

Bertolt Brecht

(c. 1938)

The critical attitude

Strikes many people as unfruitful

That is because they find the state

Impervious to their criticism

But what in this case is an unfruitful attitude

Is merely a feeble attitude. Give criticism arms

And states can be demolished by it.

Canalising a river

Grafting a fruit tree

Educating a person

Transforming a state

These are instances of fruitful criticism

And at the same time instances of art.

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Question: How many kinds of correctness are there?

Answer: … The first is correctness in substance and the second is correctness in function. Correctness in substance means that it is neither absolute nor worldly, and correctness in function means being both absolute and worldly.

— Chi-tsang (549-623)

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Posted November 5, 2019

The consciousness is merely like a mirror, in which what seems to be an external sphere appears.

— Hsüan-tsang (596-664)

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Gary Lee Nova, ELECTRIC SPEED TETRAD #5, Ver. 3.0, 2019.

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Yu Wensheng (Beijing-based human rights lawyer), 2017:

The Communist Party of China claims to support freedom of speech, democracy, equality and the rule of law. But China has no such freedom, no democracy, no equality, no rule of law, only bigwigs and rampant corruption.

[Open letter, released on 18 October 2017 –opening day of the National Congress of the Communist Party of China.)

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Lily Kuo [in Beijing], THE GUARDIAN, 29 October 2019:

China has released new “morality” guidelines for its citizens on everything from civic education and how parents should teach their children to rubbish sorting and the appropriate etiquette for raising the national flag.

The “Outline for the Interpretation of the Moral Construction of Citizens in the New Era” calls on Chinese citizens to be honest and polite, to be “civilised” when dining, travelling, or watching a sports competition, and “defend China’s honor” while abroad.

Most important among the guidelines is for citizens to treat Xi Jinping Thought as the “core” of their civic moral compass.

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President Xi Jinping (2019):

You can’t understand China unless you understand its path to development, which is linked to globalization. China will never close its opening to the world.

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If we inquire into the manner and style of the totality of phenomena, we should bear in mind there are many worlds everywhere.

— Eihei Dogen (1200 – 1253)

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Tani Buncho (Japan), LANDSCAPE WITH WATERFALL, 1828. Hanging scroll — ink on paper. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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” … DOKAN (WAY RING) …”. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans, 2019)

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” … DOKAN (WAY RING) …”. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans, 2019)

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” … DOKAN (WAY RING) …”. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans, 2019)

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Posted October 30, 2019

Tao Yuan (11th Century):

After returning from his study-pilgrimage, a disciple drew a circle in front of the Master [Huineng, Sixth Ancestor of Chan], stood within it, and bowed. The master asked, “Do you wish to make of it a Buddha or not?”

The monk answered, “I do not know how to fabricate the eyes.”

The Master remarked, “I cannot do any better than you.”

The disciple made no response.

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Causes are complex and have different time scales. The efforts of the individual are not the sole determining factor in the individual’s condition in life, because everyone is part of the nexus of society and nature and the continuum of time. It is common for people to attribute causes wrongly because of misperception of real relationships.

Every cause is the effect of something else, and every effect is the cause of something else. What may seem a curse may be a blessing, and what may seem a blessing may be a curse. Hardship is a blessing when it spurs effort and development; ease is a curse when it increases complacency and self-indulgence.

— Muso Soseki (1275-1351)

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Japanese Emperor Hirohito … JEWEL VOICE (RADIO) BROADCAST, 15 August 1945.

Max Fisher, THE ATLANTIC, August 15, 2012:

On 15 August 1945, one week after atomic bombs had obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, radios across Japan crackled with another shocking announcement, one that would come to change the course of Japanese history perhaps as much as did the atomic bombs Little Boy and Fat Man. At noon, Emperor Hirohito spoke directly to his subjects for the first time in his reign. His announcements would shock Japan, but it would also transform it, altering in a few short minutes the entire mission of the Japanese nation in ways that it, and the world, still feel today.

Hirohito was more than Japan’s head of state. He was its divine monarch and the personification of both the nation and its spiritual imperative for imperial expansion.

The Pacific War [1941 – 1945] was, in the ultra-nationalist ideology that gripped Japan for the first half of the 20th century, a “holy war,” and waged in Hirohoto’s name.

“To strive for the coming prosperity and happiness of all nations, as well as the security and wellbeing of our subjects, is the solemn obligation which has been handed down by our imperial ancestors and which lies close to our heart,” he explained [in his four-minute radio address].

He declared [via radio broadcast] that the military would be disarmed, suggesting this would happen not because disarmament had been forced upon the Japanese (it had), but because Japan had made the difficult choice to privilege peace. It wasn’t wholly true, but it helped replace the imperial ideology of war with an ideology of peace that persists to this day.

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Radio affects most intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener.

— Marshall McLuhan (1964)

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” … ‘Absolute Compassion’ (1) …”. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans, 2019).

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” … ‘Absolute Compassion’ (2) …”. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans, 2019.)

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” … ‘Absolute Compassion’ … (3) …”. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans, 2019.)

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” … ‘Absolute Compassion’…(4)….” (Photo: M. Cynog Evans, 2019.)

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Chan Master Huang Po (9th Century):

Mind is the Buddha, while the cessation of conceptual thought is the Way.

[ … ]

Anything possessing ANY signs is illusory.

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Giovanni Anselmo, VERSO L’INFINITO (TOWARDS INFINITY), 1969.

Incised iron, varnish, grease. 36 x 19.5 16.2 cm.

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Mind is beyond measure. Things given are beyond measure. Moreover, in giving, mind transforms the gift and the gift transforms mind.

— Zen Master Dogen (1200-1253)

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Marshall McLuhan (1971):

The planet is now the content of the new spaces created by the new technology. Instead of being an environment in time, the earth itself has become a probe in space. That is, the planet has become an anti-environment, yielding new perception of the new man-made environment.

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Posted October 24, 2019

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THE NEW YORK TIMES, March 5, 1959:

An American Leftist Negro scholar, Dr. W. E. B. Dubois, has called for Africa to look to Communist China for leadership.

Chinese Communist propaganda organs made a major event of Dr. Du Bois’ celebration in Beijing last week on his ninety-first birthday.

“Come to China, Africa, and look around,” Dr. Du Bois [a civil rights activist educated at Harvard University and Humbolt University of Berlin] declared in a speech broadcast over Beijing radio. … “China is flesh of your flesh and blood of your blood. China is colored, and knows to what the colored skin in this modern world subjects its owner.”

Dr. Du Bois [a Pan-Africanist and founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] summed up his bitterness at the United States by saying in his speech that “in my own country for nearly a century I have been nothing but a nigger.” He and his wife have been visiting the Soviet Union and Communist China in recent weeks. Their home is in Brooklyn.

[  Note:

On March 10, 1959 (four days after  Professor Dubois had made his widely dispersed public remarks praising Communist China’s leadership) the Tibetan Rebellion/Uprising was sparked in Lhasa –capital city of the Tibet Autonomous Region. (Tibet had been under control of the People’s Republic of China since 1951.)

— CAUSA Research Curators ]

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ELEVEN-HEADED AVALOKITESHVARA, Tibet, ca. 1800. Silver, gilded silver, gilded copper, paint and semiprecious stones. H: 43 in. (109.3 cm).The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.

Curatorial Record:

More than 200 years ago, a Buddhist abbot (head monk) or lama, sealed dozens of tightly rolled scrolls with sacred texts within this hollow sculpture. The offering of these texts was part of a multi-step ritual to consecrate the sculpture so that the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, the Lord of Compassion, would inhabit it.

Avalokiteshvara is portrayed with eight arms, representing the eight directions, and eleven heads, which also signify the eight directions as well as the three vertical divisions of top, middle, and bottom. The heads are arranged in pyramids with three rows, ten of the heads peaceful and one ferocious representing Avalokiteshvara’s angry form, which is capped by the peaceful Buddha head of Amitabha.

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” … ‘Without Shape’ …”. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans, 2019.)

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We are, in fact, living the last days of a larger technological destiny that involves simultaneous impulses towards acceleration, drift, and crash … the whole sweep of digital posthumanism.

— Arthur Kroker (2012)

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“His brain has not only been washed, as they say, it’s been dry-cleaned.”

— Dr. Yen Lo, in THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (film by John Frankenheimer), 1962.

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Harold Innis (1947):

The danger of shaking men out of the soporific results of mechanized knowledge is similar to that of attempting to arouse a drunken man or one which has taken an overdose of sleeping tablets.

Harold Innis (1947)

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Evelyn Cheng (Beijing), CNBC, October 1, 2019:

In a speech commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party’s rule, Chinese President Xi Jinping [speaking on Tuesday, 1 October] said that no force could sway China’s development.

“There is no force that can shake the foundation of a great nation,” Xi said in Mandarin, according to an official translation broadcast through state media. “No force can stop the Chinese people and the Chinese nation forging ahead.”

“Long live the great Communist Party of China. And long live the great Chinese People!” Xi concluded his speech, which lasted less than 10 minutes.

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Chinese President Xi Jinping, centre, with South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa, centre left, and other leaders behind, attending the 2018 Beijing FOAC (Forum on China Africa Cooperation) summit.

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Adam Withnall, THE INDEPENDENT, September 4, 2018:

Representatives from almost every country in Africa dined with Xi Jinping on Monday night as they attended what is believed to be the largest gathering of African heads of state ever staged outside the continent.

They had plenty to toast, after China’s President Xi pledged new infrastructure investments in their countries worth $60bn.

China now far outstrips the economic clout and engagement in Africa of either the US or Europe, and its involvement has inevitably sparked criticism.

Malaysia’s prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, warned against what he called a “new version of colonialism” last month [August 2017] when he cancelled a $20bn Chinese-backed rail project.

And in his speech addressing leaders at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, Mr. Xi appeared to acknowledge these concerns, saying Chinese investment came with “no political strings attached.”

“More than 1.3 billion Chinese people and more than 1.2 million African people have always pursued a shared future.

“We respect Africa, love Africa and support Africa.”

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