Daily Archives: May 20, 2014

Julie Lee Wei’s Translation of Nineteen Lectures Now Available

Julie Lee Wei, who has been embroiled in a long-running copyright dispute over her translation of Mou Zongsan’s Nineteen Lectures on Chinese Philosopy, has decided to post her complete, 490-page translation on the internet:

http://nineteenlects.com

(One technical note: for reasons I cannot explain, sometimes the links on this site have not worked for me, but I find that if clicking on a link gives you a url of this form — http://ninteenlects.com/page.php?p=Titlepage — then changing that to this form (note the “nine” instead of “nin”) will work — http://nineteenlects.com/page.php?p=Titlepage)

As Ms. Wei explains there, a few years ago her translation was accepted for publication by Columbia University Press, but the copyright dispute has put that on indefinite hold. During a stretch of time when she and Columbia believed that they had secured permission, though, I was asked to write an Introduction to the translation, which I did. That essay has languished along with Ms. Wei’s translation, and I have chosen to make it freely available on my own website:

Stephen C. Angle, “Mou Zongsan and his Nineteen Lectures on Chinese Philosophy”

I hope that my essay, and especially the translation, prove useful to those who would like to engage more deeply with this extremely important twentieth-century Confucian philosopher.

Malik’s Piece on Buddhism and Bigotry in the NYT

I thought this was interesting, though Malik clearly undermines his own implied connection between Buddhism and the bigotry late in the article. Worth a quick read perhaps? Here’s a little bit to get you started:

There is perhaps no religion that Western liberals find more appealing than Buddhism. Politicians fawn over the Dalai Lama, celebrities seek out Buddhist meditation, and scientists and philosophers insist that Buddhism has much to teach us about human nature and psychology.

Even some of the so-called New Atheists have fallen for Buddhism’s allure. For most of its Western sympathizers, Buddhism is a deeply humanist outlook, less a religion than a philosophy, a way of life to create peace and harmony.

The Rohingya people of Myanmar take a very different view of Buddhism. The Rohingya are Muslims who live mostly in Rakhine, in western Myanmar, bordering Bangladesh. Early Muslim settlements there date from the seventh century. Today, in a nation that is 90 percent Buddhist, there are some eight million Muslims, of whom about one in six is Rohingya.

For the Myanmar government, however, the Rohingya simply do not exist…