SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture
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The Philosopher Li Zehou
His Thought And His Legacy
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Li Zehou (1930–2021) was one of China's most prominent contemporary philosophers, transforming Confucian philosophy into a resource for positive change. From a critical rereading of the Analects to a formulation of his own aesthetic theory, Li reinterpreted the tradition from earliest times down to the present day. In this effort, he was inspired by Marx and Kant but was neither a Marxist nor a Kantian. Nor was he a Confucian. He was, and remains, an original: the philosopher Li Zehou.
In this volume, Chinese, European, and US scholars explore Li's contributions to Chinese philosophy and culture, deepening our understanding of his philosophy and its significance while also celebrating the intellectual diversity and richness of Chinese philosophical thought. In a passionate and dedicated endeavor to ensure that Li's philosophy endures and continues to inspire scholars, particularly the younger generation of academics, both in China and around the world, the volume aims to serve as a catalyst for ongoing scholarship and discourse on the work of the philosopher Li Zehou.
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Celestial Signs and Classical Rhetoric in Early Imperial China
by Jesse J. Chapman
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
“Celestial Signs and Classical Rhetoric in Early Imperial China” considers how the reading of celestial signs-including comets, strange clouds, halos, rainbows, and planets in retrograde motion-fit into broader understandings of the human and cosmic worlds in Han times. Advancing a cultural studies approach to celestial signs, Jesse J. Chapman traces the theory and practice of sign-reading across a range of genres, including technical manuals, historical narratives, and memorials to the throne. Moving from variegated materials in an early tomb to historical treatises compiled over several centuries, Chapman demonstrates that rhetoric and ideals drawn from classical texts gradually became fundamental sources of authority for interpreters of celestial signs. Sign-reading in practice proved both flexible and context-dependent, and interpreters of celestial signs rarely, if ever, read omens in isolation. Celestial signs became meaningful in the context of historical understanding, personal experience, the state of the empire, and the life of the court. Reading omens meant reading the state of the world at a particular moment in time.
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Fundamentals of Comparative and Intercultural Philosophy
by Lin Ma
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Discusses the conditions of possibility for intercultural and comparative philosophy, and for cross cultural communication at large.
This innovative book explores the preconditions necessary for intercultural and comparative philosophy. Philosophical practices that involve at least two different traditions with no common heritage and whose languages have very different grammatical structure, such as Indo-Germanic languages and classical Chinese, are a particular focus. Lin Ma and Jaap van Brakel look at the necessary and not-so-necessary conditions of possibility of interpretation, comparison, and other forms of interaction and how we can speak of similarities and differences in this context. The authors posit that it is necessary to dissolve the question of universalism versus relativism by replacing the ideal language paradigm with a paradigm of family resemblances and that it is not necessary to share a common language to engage in comparison. Numerous case studies are presented, including many comparisons of Western and Chinese concepts.
Lin Ma is Associate Professor of the School of Philosophy at the Renmin University of China and the author of Heidegger on East-West Dialogue: Anticipating the Event. Jaap van Brakel is Professor Emeritus in the Higher Institute of Philosophy at the University of Leuven and the author of Philosophy of Chemistry: Between the Manifest and the Scientific Image.
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From Comparison to World Literature
by Longxi Zhang
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Reintroduces the concept of "world literature" in a truly global context, transcending past Eurocentrism.
The study of world literature is on the rise. Until recently, the term "world literature" was a misnomer in comparative literature scholarship, which typically focused on Western literature in European languages. In an increasingly globalized era, this is beginning to change. In this collection of essays, Zhang Longxi discusses how we can transcend Eurocentrism or any other ethnocentrism and revisit the concept of world literature from a truly global perspective. Zhang considers literary works and critical insights from Chinese and other non-Western traditions, drawing on scholarship from a wide range of disciplines in the humanities, and integrating a variety of approaches and perspectives from both East and West. The rise of world literature emerges as an exciting new approach to literary studies as Zhang argues for the validity of cross-cultural understanding, particularly from the perspective of East-West comparative studies.
Zhang Longxi is Chair Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation at the City University of Hong Kong. He is the author of several books, including Unexpected Affinities: Reading across Cultures and Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West.
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Music, Cosmology, and the Politics of Harmony in Early China
by Erica Fox Brindley
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Explores the religious, political, and cultural significance attributed to music in early China.
In early China, conceptions of music became important culturally and politically. This fascinating book examines a wide range of texts and discourse on music during this period (ca. 500-100 BCE) in light of the rise of religious, protoscientific beliefs on the intrinsic harmony of the cosmos. By tracking how music began to take on cosmic and religious significance, Erica Fox Brindley shows how music was used as a tool for such enterprises as state unification and cultural imperialism. She also outlines how musical discourse accompanied the growth of an explicit psychology of the emotions, served as a fundamental medium for spiritual attunement with the cosmos, and was thought to have utility and potency in medicine. While discussions of music in state ritual or as an aesthetic and cultural practice abound, this book is unique in linking music to religious belief and demonstrating its convergences with key religious, political, and intellectual transformations in early China.
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Red Genesis
The Hunan First Normal School and the Creation of Chinese Communism, 1903-1921
by Liyan Liu
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Looks at the role of the Hunan First Normal School in fostering a generation of founders and key figures in the Chinese Communist Party.
How did an obscure provincial teachers college produce graduates who would go on to become founders and ideologues of the Chinese Communist Party? Mao Zedong, Cai Hesen, Xiao Zisheng, and others attended the Hunan First Normal School. Focusing on their alma mater, this work explores the critical but overlooked role modern schools played in sowing the seeds of revolution in the minds of students seeking modern education in the 1910s. The Hunan First Normal School was one of many reformed schools established in China in the early twentieth century in response to the urgent need to modernize the nation. Its history is a tapestry woven of traditional Chinese and modern Western threads. Chinese tradition figured significantly in the character of the school, yet Western ideas and contemporary social, political, and intellectual circumstances strongly shaped its policies and practices. Examining the background, curriculum, and the reforms of the school, as well as its teachers and radical students, Liyan Liu argues that China's modern schools provided a venue that nurtured and spread new ideas, including Communist revolution.
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Zhuangzi's Critique of the Confucians
Blinded by the Human
by Kim-chong Chong
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Looks at the Daoist Zhuangzi's critique of Confucianism.
The Daoist Zhuangzi has often been read as a mystical philosopher. But there is another tradition, beginning with the Han dynasty historian Sima Qian, which sees him as a critic of the Confucians. Kim-chong Chong analyzes the Inner Chapters of the Zhuangzi, demonstrating how Zhuangzi criticized the pre-Qin Confucians through metaphorical inversion and parody. This is indicated by the subtitle, "Blinded by the Human," which is an inversion of the Confucian philosopher Xunzi's remark that Zhuangzi was "blinded by heaven and did not know the human." Chong compares Zhuangzi's Daoist thought to Confucianism, as exemplified by Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi. By analyzing and comparing the different implications of concepts such as "heaven," "heart-mind," and "transformation," Chong shows how Zhuangzi can be said to provide the resources for a more pluralistic and liberal philosophy than the Confucians.
Kim-chong Chong is Professor Emeritus at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He taught at the National University of Singapore from 1980—2003 and is the author of Early Confucian Ethics: Concepts and Arguments.
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Moral Cultivation and Confucian Character
Engaging Joel J. Kupperman
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
A consideration of Confucian ethics that employs the work and concerns of the eminent comparative ethicist Joel J. Kupperman.
In this volume, leading scholars in Asian and comparative philosophy take the work of Joel J. Kupperman as a point of departure to consider new perspectives on Confucian ethics. Kupperman is one of the few eminent Western philosophers to have integrated Asian philosophical traditions into his thought, developing a character-based ethics synthesizing Western, Chinese, and Indian philosophies. With their focus on Confucian ethics, contributors respond, expand, and engage in critical dialogue with Kupperman's views. Kupperman joins the conversation with responses and comments that conclude the volume.
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Daoism, Meditation, and the Wonders of Serenity
From the Latter Han Dynasty (25-220) to the Tang Dynasty (618-907)
by Stephen Eskildsen
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
An overview of Daoist texts on passive meditation from the Latter Han through Tang periods.
Stephen Eskildsen offers an overview of Daoist religious texts from the Latter Han (25—220) through Tang (618—907) periods, exploring passive meditation methods and their anticipated effects. These methods entailed observing the processes that unfold spontaneously within mind and body, rather than actively manipulating them by means common in medieval Daoist religion such as visualization, invocations, and the swallowing of breath or saliva. Through the resulting deep serenity, it was claimed, one could attain profound insights, experience visions, feel surges of vital force, overcome thirst and hunger, be cured of ailments, ascend the heavens, and gain eternal life.
While the texts discussed follow the legacy of Warring States period Daoism such as the Laozi to a significant degree, they also draw upon medieval immortality methods and Buddhism. An understanding of the passive meditation literature provides important insights into the subsequent development of Neidan, or Internal Alchemy, meditation that emerged from the Song period onward.
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These Bones Shall Rise Again
Selected Writings on Early China
by David N. Keightley
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
David N. Keightley's seminal essays on the origins of Chinese society are brought together in one volume.
These Bones Shall Rise Again, brings together in one volume many of David N. Keightley's seminal essays on the origins of early Chinese civilization. Written over a period of three decades and accessible to the non-specialist, these essays provide a wealth of information and insights on the Shang dynasty, traditionally dated 1766—1122 or 1056 BCE. Of all the eras of Chinese history, the Shang has been a particularly elusive one, long considered more myth than reality. A historian with a keen appreciation for anthropology and archaeology, Keightley has given us many descriptions of Shang life. Best known for his analysis of oracle bones, he has looked beyond the bones themselves and expanded his historical vision to ponder the lives of those who used them. What did the Shang diviner think he was doing? The temerity to ask such questions and the insights they have provided have been provocative and, at times, controversial. Equally intriguing have been Keightley's assertions that many of the distinctive features of Chinese civilization were already in evidence during the Shang, 3000 years ago. In this collection, readers will find not only an essential reference but also the best kind of thought-provoking scholarship.
David N. Keightley is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Ancestral Landscape: Time, Space, and Community in Late Shang China (ca. 1200—1045 B.C.) and Sources of Shang History: The Oracle-Bone Inscriptions of Bronze Age China, and the editor of The Origins of Chinese Civilization. Henry Rosemont Jr. is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at St. Mary's College of Maryland and currently Visiting Scholar of Religious Studies at Brown University. His books include Rationality and Religious Experience: The Continuing Relevance of the World's Spiritual Traditions and, with Roger T. Ames, The Chinese Classic of Family Reverence: A Philosophical Translation of the Xiaojing.
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Red God
Wei Baqun and His Peasant Revolution in Southern China, 1894-1932
by Xiaorong Han
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
The career of communist revolutionary Wei Baqun, one of China's "three great peasant leaders" and man of the southern frontier.
Robin Hood–style revolutionary Wei Baqun is often described as one of China's "three great peasant leaders," alongside Mao Zedong and Peng Pai. In his home county of Donglan, where he started organizing peasants in the early 1920s, Wei Baqun came to be considered a demigod after his death-a communist revolutionary with supernatural powers. So much legend has grown up around this fascinating figure that it is difficult to know the truth from the tale. Presenting Wei Baqun's life in light of interactions between his local community and the Chinese nation, Red God is organized around the journeys he made from his multiethnic frontier county to major cities where he picked up ideas, methods, and contacts, and around the three revolts he launched back home. Xiaorong Han explores the congruencies and conflicts of local, regional, and national forces at play during Wei Baqun's lifetime while examining his role as a link between his Zhuang people and the Han majority, between the village and the city, and between the periphery and the center.
Xiaorong Han is Professor of History at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. He is the author of Chinese Discourses on the Peasant, 1900–1949, also published by SUNY Press.
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Reconstructing the Confucian Dao
Zhu Xi's Appropriation of Zhou Dunyi
by Joseph A. Adler
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Discusses how Zhou Dunyi's thought became a cornerstone of neo-Confucianism.
Zhu Xi, the twelfth-century architect of the neo-Confucian canon, declared Zhou Dunyi to be the first true sage since Mencius. This was controversial, as many of Zhu Xi's contemporaries were critical of Zhou Dunyi's Daoist leanings, and other figures had clearly been more significant to the Song dynasty Confucian resurgence. Why was Zhou Dunyi accorded such importance? Joseph A. Adler finds that the earlier thinker provided an underpinning for Zhu Xi's religious practice. Zhou Dunyi's theory of the interpenetration of activity and stillness allowed Zhu Xi to proclaim that his own theory of mental and spiritual cultivation mirrored the fundamental principle immanent in the natural world. This book revives Zhu Xi as a religious thinker, challenging longstanding characterizations of him. Readers will appreciate the inclusion of complete translations of Zhou Dunyi's major texts, Zhu Xi's published commentaries, and other primary source material..
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The Deep Ecology of Rhetoric in Mencius and Aristotle
A Somatic Guide
by Douglas Robinson
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Discusses philosophers Mencius and Aristotle as socio-ecological thinkers.
Mencius (385-303/302 BCE) and Aristotle (384-322 BCE) were contemporaries, but are often understood to represent opposite ends of the philosophical spectrum. Mencius is associated with the ecological, emergent, flowing, and connected; Aristotle with the rational, static, abstract, and binary. Douglas Robinson argues that in their conceptions of rhetoric, at least, Mencius and Aristotle are much more similar than different: both are powerfully socio-ecological, espousing and exploring collectivist thinking about the circulation of energy and social value through groups. The agent performing the actions of pistis, "persuading-and-being-persuaded," in Aristotle and Zhi, "governing-and-being-governed," in Mencius is, Robinson demonstrates, not so much the rhetor as an individual as it is the whole group. Robinson tracks this collectivistic thinking through a series of comparative considerations using a theory that draws impetus from Arne Naess's "ecosophical" deep ecology and from work on rhetoric powered by affective ecologies, but with details of the theory drawn equally from Mencius and Aristotle.
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Embracing Our Complexity
Thomas Aquinas and Zhu Xi on Power and the Common Good
by Catherine Hudak Klancer
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Using the thought of Christian thinker Thomas Aquinas and Neo-Confucian Zhu Xi, explores how to exercise and limit authority.
This book discusses what a religiously grounded authority might look like from the viewpoints of the European Catholic Thomas Aquinas (1225—1274) and the Chinese Neo-Confucian Zhu Xi (1130—1200). The consideration of these two figures, immensely influential in their respective traditions, reflects the conviction that any responsible discourse on authority must consider different cultural perspectives. Catherine Hudak Klancer notes that both Zhu Xi and Aquinas conceive wisdom as including, yet surpassing, human reason. Both express an explicit faith in the moral order of the cosmos and the ethical potential of human beings. The systematic, idealistic approach common to both provides the cosmic, anthropological, and ethical elements needed for a comprehensive exploration of how to exercise and limit authority. Ultimately, Klancer writes, authority requires a particular virtue, hitherto latent in both scholars' work and in their lives as well. A person with this virtue-humble authority-is properly grounded in the sacred order, and fully cognizant in theory and in practice of the parameters of human nature and the responsibilities attendant upon the human role.
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Crossing the Gate
Everyday Lives of Women in Song Fujian (960-1279)
by Man Xu
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
In Crossing the Gate, Man Xu examines the lives of women in the Chinese province of Fujian during the Song dynasty. Tracking women's life experience across class lines, outside as well as inside the domestic realm, Xu challenges the accepted wisdom about women and gender roles in medieval China. She contextualizes women in a much broader physical space and social network, investigating the gaps between ideals and reality and examining women's own agency in gender construction. She argues that women's autonomy and mobility, conventionally attributed to Ming-Qing women of late imperial China, can be traced to the Song era. This thorough study of Song women's life experience connects women to the great political, economic, and social transitions of the time, and sheds light on the so-called "Song-Yuan-Ming transition" from the perspective of gender studies. By putting women at the center of analysis and by focusing on the local and the quotidian, Crossing the Gate offers a new and nuanced picture of the Song Confucian revival.
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The Heir and the Sage
Dynastic Legend in Early China
by Sarah Allan
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
A comprehensive analysis of the transformations of ancient history in early Chinese texts.
This book presents a comprehensive analysis of the accounts of change of rule in Chinese texts from 600 to 100 BC, including the core philosophical works of the Chinese tradition attributed to Confucius, Mozi, Mencius, Xunzi, Hanfeizi, and Zhuangzi. Drawing from the early structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Sarah Allan demonstrates that similar motifs repeat in every period, and argues that they serve, like myth, to mediate the inherent social conflict between kinship relations and that of the larger community. This conflict is embodied in the idea of a dynastic cycle, founded by a virtuous sage king and passed down hereditarily until a last evil ruler is again replaced, and played out at regular intervals in legends of kings and ministers, heirs and sages, ministers and recluses, regents and rebels. Each philosophical text transforms the legends in a systematic manner to reflect its own understanding of the patterns of history that inform the present.
In this revised and expanded edition, Allan has added translations and original Chinese texts, as well as a new introduction further analyzing structuralism and discussing how the book remains relevant to ongoing sinological arguments. An earlier article by Allan, with supporting evidence for this book's thesis, is included as an appendix.
Sarah Allan is Burlington Northern Foundation Professor of Asian Studies in Honor of Richard M. Bressler at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Buried Ideas: Legends of Abdication and Ideal Government in Early Chinese Bamboo-Slip Manuscripts; The Way of Water and Sprouts of Virtue; and The Shape of the Turtle: Myth, Art, and Cosmos in Early China, all published by SUNY Press.
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Ritual and Religion in the Xunzi
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Challenges traditional views to consider Xunzi as a religious thinker.
Xunzi, a founding figure in the Confucian tradition, is one of the world's great philosophers and theorists of religion. For much of the last century, his work has been seen largely as critical of religion, particularly the popular beliefs and invocations of supernatural forces that underpin so many religious rituals. Contributors to this volume challenge this view and offer a more sophisticated picture of Xunzi. He emerges not as critic, but rather as an adherent of religion who seeks to give religious practices meaning even though many religious beliefs are mistaken or self-serving. Each essay offers a powerful illustration of Xunzi as both a religious devotee and as a philosopher of religion, drawing on a wide array of disciplines and methodologies.
T. C. Kline III is an independent scholar and the coeditor (with P. J. Ivanhoe) of Virtue, Nature, and Moral Agency in the Xunzi. Justin Tiwald is Associate Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University and the coeditor (with Chung-ying Cheng) of Confucian Philosophy: Innovations and Transformations.
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In Pursuit of the Great Peace
Han Dynasty Classicism and the Making of Early Medieval Literati Culture
by Lu Zhao
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Examines the Great Peace (taiping), one of the first utopian visions in Chinese history, and its impact on literati lives in Han China.
Through an examination of the Great Peace (taiping), one of the first utopian visions in Chinese history, Zhao Lu describes the transformation of literati culture that occurred during the Han Dynasty. Driven by anxiety over losing the mandate of Heaven, the imperial court encouraged classicism in order to establish the Great Peace and follow Heaven's will. But instead of treating the literati as puppets of competing and imagined lineages, Zhao uses sociological methods to reconstruct their daily lives and to show how they created their own thought by adopting, modifying, and opposing the work of their contemporaries and predecessors. The literati who served as bureaucrats in the first century BCE gradually became classicists who depended on social networking as they traveled to study the classics. By the second century CE, classicism had dissolved in this traveling culture and the literati began to expand the corpus of knowledge beyond the accepted canon. Thus, far from being static, classicism in Han China was full of innovation, and ultimately gave birth to both literary writing and religious Daoism.
Zhao Lu is Assistant Professor of Global China Studies, NYU Shanghai and Global Network Assistant Professor, NYU. He is the coauthor (with C. A. Cook) of Stalk Divination: A Newly Discovered Alternative to the I Ching.
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Ironies of Oneness and Difference
Coherence in Early Chinese Thought; Prolegomena to the Study of Li
by Brook Ziporyn
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Explores the development of Chinese thought, highlighting its concern with questions of coherence.
Providing a bracing expansion of horizons, this book displays the unsuspected range of human thinking on the most basic categories of experience. The way in which early Chinese thinkers approached concepts such as one and many, sameness and difference, self and other, and internal and external stand in stark contrast to the way parallel concepts entrenched in much of modern thinking developed in Greek and European thought. Brook Ziporyn traces the distinctive and surprising philosophical journeys found in the works of the formative Confucian and Daoist thinkers back to a prevailing set of assumptions that tends to see questions of identity, value, and knowledge-the subject matter of ontology, ethics, and epistemology in other traditions-as all ultimately relating to questions about coherence in one form or another. Mere awareness of how many different ways human beings can think and have thought about these categories is itself a game changer for our own attitudes toward what is thinkable for us. The actual inhabitation and mastery of these alternative modes of thinking is an even greater adventure in intellectual and experiential expansion.
Brook Ziporyn is Professor of Chinese Philosophy, Religion, and Comparative Thought at the University of Chicago Divinity School and Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the National University of Singapore. His books include The Penumbra Unbound: The Neo-Taoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang, also published by SUNY Press.
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Confucian Propriety and Ritual Learning
A Philosophical Interpretation
by Geir Sigurðsson
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
A reconsideration of the Confucian concept li (ritual or ritual propriety), one that references Western philosophers as well as the Chinese context.
Geir Sigurðsson offers a reconsideration of li, often translated as "ritual" or "ritual propriety," one of the most controversial concepts in Confucian philosophy. Strong associations with the Zhou period during which Confucius lived have put this concept at odds with modernity's emphasis on progressive rationality and liberation from the yoke of tradition. Sigurðsson notes how the Confucian perspective on learning provides a more balanced understanding of li. He goes on to discuss the limitations of the critique of tradition and of rationality's claim to authority, referencing several Western sources, notably Hans-Georg Gadamer, John Dewey, and Pierre Bourdieu. An exposition of the ancient Chinese worldview of time and continuous change further points to the inevitability of li's adaptable and flexible nature. Sigurðsson argues that Confucius and his immediate followers did not endorse a program of returning to the Zhou tradition, but rather of reviving the spirit of Zhou culture, involving active and personalized participation in tradition's sustention and evolution.
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Witchcraft and the Rise of the First Confucian Empire
by Liang Cai
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Contests long-standing claims that Confucianism came to prominence under China's Emperor Wu.
When did Confucianism become the reigning political ideology of imperial China? A pervasive narrative holds it was during the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty (141-87 BCE). In this book, Liang Cai maintains that such a date would have been too early and provides a new account of this transformation. A hidden narrative in Sima Qian's The Grand Scribe's Records (Shi ji) shows that Confucians were a powerless minority in the political realm of this period. Cai argues that the notorious witchcraft scandal of 91-87 BCE reshuffled the power structure of the Western Han bureaucracy and provided Confucians an opportune moment to seize power, evolve into a new elite class, and set the tenor of political discourse for centuries to come.
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Confucianism for the Contemporary World
Global Order, Political Plurality, and Social Action
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Discusses contemporary Confucianism's relevance and its capacity to address pressing social and political issues of twenty-first-century life.
Condemned during the Maoist era as a relic of feudalism, Confucianism enjoyed a robust revival in post-Mao China as China's economy began its rapid expansion and gradual integration into the global economy. Associated with economic development, individual growth, and social progress by its advocates, Confucianism became a potent force in shaping politics and society in mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and overseas Chinese communities. This book links the contemporary Confucian revival to debates-both within and outside China-about global capitalism, East Asian modernity, political reforms, civil society, and human alienation. The contributors offer fresh insights on the contemporary Confucian revival as a broad cultural phenomenon, encompassing an interpretation of Confucian moral teaching; a theory of political action; a vision of social justice; and a perspective for a new global order, in addition to demonstrating that Confucianism is capable of addressing a wide range of social and political issues in the twenty-first century.
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Self-Realization through Confucian Learning
A Contemporary Reconstruction of Xunzi's Ethics
by Siufu Tang
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Confucian philosopher Xunzi's moral thought is considered in light of the modern focus on self-realization.
Self-Realization through Confucian Learning reconstructs Confucian thinker Xunzi's moral philosophy in response to the modern focus on self-realization. Xunzi (born around 310 BCE) claims that human xing ("nature" or "native conditions") is without an ethical framework and has a tendency to dominate, leading to bad judgments and bad behavior. Confucian ritual propriety (li) is needed to transform these human native conditions. Through li, people become self-directing: in control of feelings and desires and in command of their own lives. Siufu Tang explicates Xunzi's understanding of the hierarchical structure of human agency to articulate why and how li is essential to self-realization. Ritual propriety also structures relationships to make a harmonious communal life possible. Tang's focus on self-realization highlights how Confucianism can address the individual as well as the communal and serve as a philosophy for contemporary times.
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Beyond Oneness and Difference
Li and Coherence in Chinese Buddhist Thought and Its Antecedents
by Brook Ziporyn
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Continues the author's inquiry into the development of the Chinese philosophical concept Li, concluding in Song and Ming dynasty Neo-Confucianism.
Beyond Oneness and Difference considers the development of one of the key concepts of Chinese intellectual history, Li. A grasp of the strange history of this term and its seemingly conflicting implications-as oneness and differentiation, as the knowable and as what transcends knowledge, as the good and as the transcendence of good and bad, as order and as omnipresence-raises questions about the most basic building blocks of our thinking. This exploration began in the book's companion volume, Ironies of Oneness and Difference, which detailed how formative Confucian and Daoist thinkers approached and demarcated concepts of coherence, order, and value, identifying both ironic and non-ironic trends in the elaboration of these core ideas. In the present volume, Brook Ziporyn goes on to examine the implications of Li as they develop in Neo-Daoist metaphysics and in Chinese Buddhism, ultimately becoming foundational to Song and Ming dynasty Neo-Confucianism, the orthodox ideology of late imperial China. Ziporyn's interrogation goes beyond analysis to reveal the unsuspected range of human thinking on these most fundamental categories of ontology, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.
Brook Ziporyn is Professor of Chinese Philosophy, Religion, and Comparative Thought at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is the author of several books, including The Penumbra Unbound: The Neo-Taoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang and Ironies of Oneness and Difference: Coherence in Early Chinese Thought; Prolegomena to the Study of Li, both also published by SUNY Press.
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Dubious Facts
The Evidence of Early Chinese Historiography
by Garret P. S. Olberding
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
An innovative approach to historical records assesses how evidence claims and policy arguments were put forth in the royal courts of early China.
What were the intentions of early China's historians? Modern readers must contend with the tension between the narrators' moralizing commentary and their description of events. Although these historians had notions of evidence, it is not clear to what extent they valued what contemporary scholars would deem "hard" facts. Offering an innovative approach to pre-modern historical documents, Garret P. S. Olberding argues that the speeches of court advisors reveal subtle strategies of information management in the early monarchic context. Olberding focuses on those addresses concerning military campaigns where evidence would be important in guiding immediate social and political policy. His analysis reveals the sophisticated conventions that governed the imperial advisor's logic and suasion in critical state discussions, which were specifically intended to counter anticipated doubts. Dubious Facts illuminates both the decision-making processes that informed early Chinese military campaigns and the historical records that represent them.
Garret P. S. Olberding is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma.
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Li Zhi, Confucianism, and the Virtue of Desire
by Pauline C. Lee
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
A philosophical analysis of the work of one of the most iconoclastic thinkers in Chinese history, Li Zhi, whose ethics prized spontaneous expression of genuine feelings.
Li Zhi (1527—1602) was a bestselling author with a devoted readership. His biting, shrewd, and visionary writings with titles like A Book to Hide and A Book to Burn were both inspiring and inflammatory. Widely read from his own time to the present, Li Zhi has long been acknowledged as an important figure in Chinese cultural history. While he is esteemed as a stinging social critic and an impassioned writer, Li Zhi's ideas have been dismissed as lacking a deeper or constructive vision. Pauline C. Lee convincingly shows us otherwise. Situating Li Zhi within the highly charged world of the late-Ming culture of "feelings," Lee presents his slippery and unruly yet clear and robust ethical vision. Li Zhi is a Confucian thinker whose consuming concern is a powerful interior world of abundance, distinctive to each individual: the realm of the emotions. Critical to his ideal of the good life is the ability to express one's feelings well. In the work's conclusion, Lee brings Li Zhi's insights into conversation with contemporary philosophical debates about the role of feelings, an ethics of authenticity, and the virtue of desire.
Pauline C. Lee is Assistant Professor of Chinese Religion and Culture at Washington University in St. Louis.
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Whose Tradition? Which Dao?
Confucius and Wittgenstein on Moral Learning and Reflection
by James F. Peterman
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Considers the notable similarities between the thought of Confucius and Wittgenstein.
In an incisive work of comparative philosophy, James F. Peterman considers the similarities between early Chinese ethicist Confucius and mid-twentieth century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Their enduring legacies rest in no small part on projects to restore humanity to healthy ways of living and thinking. Confucius offers a method of answering ethical questions designed to get his interlocutors further along on the Dao, the path of right living. Struggling with his own forms of unhealthy philosophical confusion, Wittgenstein provides a method of philosophical therapy designed to help one come into agreement with norms embedded in our forms of life and speech. Highlighting similarities between the two philosophers, Peterman shows how Wittgensteinian critique can benefit from Confucian inquiry and how Confucian practice can benefit from Wittgensteinian investigations. Furthermore, in presenting a way to understand Confucius's Dao as concrete language games and forms of life, and Wittgenstein's therapeutic interventions as the most fitting philosophical orientation toward early Confucian ethics, Peterman offers Western thinkers a new, sophisticated understanding of Confucius as a philosopher.
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Moral Relativism and Chinese Philosophy
David Wong and His Critics
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
A wide-ranging consideration of the work of contemporary ethicist David Wong.
Original, influential, and often controversial, ethicist David Wong defends forms of moral relativism. His 1984 Moral Relativity was a study of this concept, and his 2006 Natural Moralities presented a new and sophisticated account of it. Wong's vision is of a pluralistic moral relativism; he does not defend all forms of relativism but evaluates what moralities may be true. His singular philosophy reflects his deep knowledge of Confucian and Daoist thought.
In this book, moral philosophers and scholars of Chinese thought debate ideas central to Wong's work and Wong responds to them. The discussion ranges widely, including exploring Wong's thought on naturalism, criteria for moralities, the principle of charity, moral authority, and the concept of community, and looking at his readings of Xunzi and Zhuangzi. Wong's nuanced and forceful responses clarify and develop further arguments in his work. These engaging and critical exchanges between Wong and his critics illuminate not only Wong's thought, but also contemporary ethical theory and Chinese philosophy.
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The Many Lives of Yang Zhu
A Historical Overview
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
This volume presents the most important portrayals of an ancient Chinese master, Yang Zhu, throughout Chinese history, from the fourth century BCE till today. Due to the striking scarcity of reliable textual testimony regarding his life and thought, all these portrayals are to a large extent inspired by their own historical contexts: Mencius's criticism in the late Warring States, the creation of a Confucian orthodoxy during the imperial era, and the establishment of a Chinese philosophy in the Republic. This volume adopts a historical approach, tracing the most important portrayals of Yang Zhu in their own contexts and mutual connections. It yields new insights not only into the figure of Yang Zhu, but also into the stages of China's intellectual history. Scarcity of reliable textual support is, to varying degrees, a common predicament in the study of ancient Chinese masters, but the case of Yang Zhu is particularly illuminating. The remarkable dearth of textual material represents the almost "nothing" out of which early Chinese philosophers such as Yang Zhu have been fruitfully "created."
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Communication and Cooperation in Early Imperial China
Publicizing the Qin Dynasty
by Charles Sanft
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Challenges traditional views of the Qin dynasty as an oppressive regime by revealing cooperative aspects of its governance.
This revealing book challenges longstanding notions of the Qin dynasty, China's first imperial dynasty (221—206 BCE). The received history of the Qin dynasty and its founder is one of cruel tyranny with rule through fear and coercion. Using a wealth of new information afforded by the expansion of Chinese archaeology in recent decades as well as traditional historical sources, Charles Sanft concentrates on cooperative aspects of early imperial government, especially on the communication necessary for government. Sanft suggests that the Qin authorities sought cooperation from the populace with a publicity campaign in a wide variety of media-from bronze and stone inscriptions to roads to the bureaucracy. The book integrates theory from anthropology and economics with early Chinese philosophy and argues that modern social science and ancient thought agree that cooperation is necessary for all human societies.
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Why Be Moral?
Learning from the Neo-Confucian Cheng Brothers
by Yong Huang
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Explores the resources for contemporary ethics found in the work of the Cheng brothers, canonical neo-Confucian philophers.
Yong Huang presents a new way of doing comparative philosophy as he demonstrates the resources for contemporary ethics offered by the Cheng brothers, Cheng Hao (1032—1085) and Cheng Yi (1033—1107), canonical neo-Confucian philosophers. Huang departs from the standard method of Chinese/Western comparison, which tends to interest those already interested in Chinese philosophy. While Western-oriented scholars may be excited to learn about Chinese philosophers who have said things similar to what they or their favored philosophers have to say, they hardly find anything philosophically new from such comparative work. Instead of comparing and contrasting philosophers, each chapter of this book discusses a significant topic in Western moral philosophy, examines the representative views on this topic in the Western tradition, identifies their respective difficulties, and discusses how the Cheng brothers have better things to say on the subject. Topics discussed include why one should be moral, how weakness of will is not possible, whether virtue ethics is self-centered, in what sense the political is also personal, how a moral theory can be of an antitheoretical nature, and whether moral metaphysics is still possible in this postmodern and postmetaphysical age.
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Returning to Zhu Xi
Emerging Patterns within the Supreme Polarity
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
A reconsideration of Zhu Xi, known as the "great synthesizer" of Confucianism, which establishes him as an important thinker in his own right.
Zhu Xi (1130—1200), the chief architect of neo-Confucian thought, affected a momentous transformation in Chinese philosophy. His ideas came to dominate Chinese intellectual life, including the educational and civil service systems, for centuries. Despite his influence, Zhu Xi is known as the "great synthesizer" and rarely appreciated as a thinker in his own right. This volume presents Zhu Xi as a major world philosopher, one who brings metaphysics and cosmology into attunement with ethical and social practice. Contributors from the English- and Chinese-speaking worlds explore Zhu Xi's unique thought and offer it to the Western philosophical imagination. Zhu Xi's vision is critical, intellectually rigorous, and religious, telling us how to live in the transforming world of li-the emergent, immanent, and coherent patternings of natural and human milieu.
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In the Shadows of the Dao
Laozi, the Sage, and the Daodejing
by Thomas Michael
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Challenges standard views of the origins of the Daodejing, revealing the work's roots in a tradition of physical cultivation.
Thomas Michael's study of the early history of the Daodejing reveals that the work is grounded in a unique tradition of early Daoism, one unrelated to other early Chinese schools of thought and practice. The text is associated with a tradition of hermits committed to yangsheng, a particular practice of physical cultivation involving techniques of breath circulation in combination with specific bodily movements leading to a physical union with the Dao. Michael explores the ways in which the text systematically anchored these techniques to a Dao-centered worldview. Including a new translation of the Daodejing, In the Shadows of the Dao opens new approaches to understanding the early history of one of the world's great religious texts and great religious traditions.
Thomas Michael specializes in early Chinese religion, philosophy, and shamanism, and is the author of The Pristine Dao: Metaphysics in Early Daoist Discourse, also published by SUNY Press.
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The Commentarial Transformation of the Spring and Autumn
by Newell Ann Van Auken
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Shows how the text evolved from a non-narrative historical record into a Confucian classic.
The Spring and Autumn is among the earliest surviving Chinese historical records, covering the period 722—479 BCE. It is a curious text: the canonical interpretation claims that it was composed by Confucius and embodies his moral judgments, but this view appears to be contradicted by the brief and dispassionate records themselves. Newell Ann Van Auken addresses this puzzling discrepancy through an examination of early interpretations of the Spring and Autumn, and uncovers a crucial missing link in two sets of commentarial remarks embedded in the Zuǒ Tradition. These embedded commentaries do not seek moral judgments in the Spring and Autumn, but instead interpret its records as produced by a historiographical tradition that was governed by rules related to hierarchy and ritual practice. Van Auken's exploration of the Zuǒ Tradition and other early commentaries sheds light on the transformation of the Spring and Autumn from a simple, non-narrative historical record into a Confucian classic.
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Chinese Thought as Global Theory
Diversifying Knowledge Production in the Social Sciences and Humanities
by Leigh Jenco
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Using Chinese thought, explores how non-Western thought can structure generally applicable social and political theory.
With a particular focus on Chinese thought, this volume explores how, and under what conditions, so-called "non-Western" traditions of thought can structure generally applicable social and political theory. Reversing the usual comparison between "local" Chinese application and "universal" theory, the work demonstrates how Chinese experiences and ideas offer systematic insight into shared social and political dilemmas. Contributors discuss how medieval Chinese understandings of causal heterogeneity can relieve impasses within contemporary historiography, how current economic and social conditions in China respond proactively to the future configuration of world markets, and how hybrid modes of cross-cultural engagement offer new foundations for the enterprise of learning from cultural others. Each chapter works from Chinese perspectives to theorize the location of knowledge, its conditions of production, and the modes through which its content or adequacy is legitimated, challenged, and sustained. Rather than reproducing Eurocentric knowledge production in Chinese form, the mobilization of Chinese thought as a generally applicable body of theory actually breaks down clear boundaries between Chinese and non-Chinese thought.
Leigh Jenco is Associate Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is the author of Making the Political: Founding and Action in the Political Theory of Zhang Shizhao and Changing Referents: Learning Across Space and Time in China and the West.
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Buried Ideas
Legends of Abdication and Ideal Government in Early Chinese Bamboo-Slip Manuscripts
by Sarah Allan
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Four Warring States texts discovered during recent decades challenge longstanding understandings of Chinese intellectual history.
The discovery of previously unknown philosophical texts from the Axial Age is revolutionizing our understanding of Chinese intellectual history. Buried Ideas presents and discusses four texts found on brush-written slips of bamboo and their seemingly unprecedented political philosophy. Written in the regional script of Chu during the Warring States period (475—221 BCE), all of the works discuss Yao's abdication to Shun and are related to but differ significantly from the core texts of the classical period, such as the Mencius and Zhuangzi. Notably, these works evince an unusually meritocratic stance, and two even advocate abdication over hereditary succession as a political ideal. Sarah Allan includes full English translations and her own modern-character editions of the four works examined: Tang Yú zhi dao, Zigao, Rongchengshi, and Bao xun. In addition, she provides an introduction to Chu-script bamboo-slip manuscripts and the complex issues inherent in deciphering them.
Sarah Allan is Burlington Northern Foundation Professor of Asian Studies in honor of Richard M. Bressler at Dartmouth College. She is the author of The Way of Water and Sprouts of Virtue and The Shape of the Turtle: Myth, Art, and Cosmos in Early China, both also published by SUNY Press.
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Ziran
The Philosophy of Spontaneous Self-Causation
by Brian Bruya
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Ziran, an idea from ancient Daoism, defies easy translation into English but can almost be captured by the term "spontaneity." It means "self-causation," if "self" is understood as fundamentally plural, and "causation" is understood as sensitivity and res
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The Sage Returns
Confucian Revival in Contemporary China
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
An interdisciplinary exploration of the contemporary Confucian revival.
Until its rejection by reformers and revolutionaries in the twentieth century, Confucianism had been central to Chinese culture, identity, and thought for centuries. Confucianism was rejected by both Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong's Communist Party, which characterized it as an ideology of reaction and repression. Yet the sage has returned: today, Chinese people from all walks of life and every level of authority are embracing Confucianism. As China turned away from the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and experienced the adoption and challenges of market practices, alternatives were sought to the prevailing socialist morality. Beginning in the 1980s and continuing through the years, ideas, images, behaviors, and attitudes associated with Confucianism have come back into public and private life. In this volume, scholars from a wide range of disciplines explore the contemporary Confucian revival in China, looking at Confucianism and the state, intellectual life, and popular culture. Contributors note how the revival of Confucianism plays out in a variety of ways, from China's relationship with the rest of the world, to views of capitalism and science, to blockbuster movies and teenage fashion.
Kenneth J. Hammond is Professor of History at New Mexico State University. He is the author of Pepper Mountain: The Life, Death, and Posthumous Career of Yang Jisheng, the editor of The Human Tradition in Premodern China, and the coeditor (with Kristin Stapleton) of The Human Tradition in Modern China. Jeffrey L. Richey is Associate Professor of Religion and Asian Studies at Berea College. He is the author of Confucius in East Asia: Confucianism's History in China, Korea, Japan, and Viet Nam and the editor of Teaching Confucianism.
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The Shaman and the Heresiarch
A New Interpretation of the Li sao
by Gopal Sukhu
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
The first book-length study in English of the Chinese classic, the Li sao (Encountering Sorrow). Includes translations of the Li sao and the Nine Songs.
The Li sao (also known as Encountering Sorrow), attributed to the poet-statesman Qu Yuan (4th—3rd century BCE), is one of the cornerstones of the Chinese poetic tradition. It has long been studied as China's first extended allegory in poetic form, yet most scholars agree that there is very little in the two-thousand-year-old tradition of commentary on it that convincingly explains its supernatural flights, its complex floral imagery, or the gender ambiguity of its primary poetic persona. The Shaman and the Heresiarch is the first book-length study of the Li sao in English, offering new translations of both the Li sao and the Nine Songs. The book traces the shortcomings of the earliest extant commentary on those texts, that of Wang Yi, back to the quasi-divinatory methods of the highly politicized tradition of Chinese classical hermeneutics in general, and the political machinations of a Han dynasty empress dowager in particular. It also offers an entirely new interpretation of the Li sao, one based not on Qu Yuan hagiography but on what late Warring States period artifacts and texts, including recently unearthed texts, teach us about the cultural context that produced the poem. In that light we see in the Li sao not only a reflection of the era of the great classical Chinese philosophers, but also the breakdown of the political-religious order of the ancient state of Chu.
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Translating China for Western Readers
Reflective, Critical, and Practical Essays
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY in Chinese Philosophy and Culture series
Explores the challenges of translating Chinese works for Western readers, particularly premodern texts.
This book explores the challenges of translating Chinese works, particularly premodern ones, for a contemporary Western readership. Reacting against the "cultural turn" in translation studies, contributors return to the origin of translation studies: translation practice. By returning to the time-honored basics of linguistics and hermeneutics, the book inquires into translation practice from the perspective of reading and reading theory. Essays in the first section of the work discuss the nature, function, rationale, criteria, and historical and conceptual values of translation. The second section focuses on the art and craft of translation, offering practical techniques and tips. Finally, the third section conducts critical assessments of translation policy and practice as well as formal and aesthetic issues. Throughout, contributors explore how a translation from the Chinese can read like a text in the Western reader's own language.
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