By Any Other Name…

Tiberiu Weisz contends that contact between the Hebrews and the Chinese started probably sometime around 980BCE. If this is true, Israelite presence would have left traces in the historical records kept by the Chinese since their earliest dynasties.

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Exiled – A Tibetan’s Tale

“I was concerned about the many differences between India and China — the ways of thinking, for one — and India was not really up to confronting China. If I stayed in India, maybe I wouldn’t be able to do the kind of things I really wanted to do to help Tibet.” He eventually set his sights on Japan, with its own brand of Buddhism and spirituality, as his next home in exile.

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Glimpses of Wutai–shan

In August 2018, KJ managing editor Ken Rodgers visited Shanxi Province, particularly Datong and Wutai-shan, motivated by having read the 9th century Japanese monk Ennin’s travel journals (Ennin’s Diary: The Record of a Pilgrimage to China in Search of the Law, Edwin O. Reischauer translation) and John Blofeld’s account of his time there in the…

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The Manchurian Bodhisattva

In 772 the Tang dynasty emperor Daizong decreed that, for the welfare of the empire, Manjusri should be worshipped in every Buddhist monastery in China. Each of the five peaks (or ‘terraces’) of Wutaishan became associated with a different manifestation of Manjusri; accounts of visionary encounters and apparitions abound.

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Left Behind: A Selection of Poems by Xu Lizhi

Xu Lizhi Eleanor Goodman Chinese factory worker Kyoto Journal poetry Zhan You Bing

Xu Lizhi’s work is steeped in the vocabulary and experiences of the factories, a world in which he himself lived. The selection of poems presented here show his sense of desperation and acute observations of his internal psychology and the larger world.

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Talking Yunnan

Baihualing-yunnan

KJ’s director Lucinda Cowing spoke to Matt Dagher-Margosian, CEO at Asia Art Tours (www.asiaarttours.com), about Yunnan Province, China, where both have spent considerable time. Bordering Tibet to the north, Myanmar to the West and Vietnam to the South, the region has been exposed to the cultures of continent in ways that the rest of the…

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Hope for the East Asian Peace Process

hope east asian peace process Kyoto Journal Japan China Korea

With the human race as a whole increasingly threatened by global climate change, overpopulation and food scarcity, our very survival depends on our ability to overcome history-based animosities…

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Framing China

In the 1950s and the 1960s, the “frame” was of China as little blue ants or automatons. In the 1970s, following the Nixon administration’s opening, the frame was of the virtuous (entertaining, cute) Chinese…. In the 1980s, the frame was that China was “going capitalist.”

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An Interview with Yiyun Li

“My characters are always very stubborn.  One thing all my characters want is connection with the world.  With other people.  But that connection, often times, is either disrupted or not provided or somehow messed up by the world…”

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