Throughout his career, the T’ang poet Li Po wrote thirteen poems in which affectionate references were made to the Southern Chi poet Hsieh Tiao. These poems are here treated as examples of what Mencius called shang-yu ot “to go back in time and make friends with the ancients.” The passionate language used in these poems is found to be similar to that used in Li Po’s poems addressed to a contemporary friend Tu Fu. Li Po’s friendship with Hsieh T’iao was established on the basis of their shared poetic sensibility. The acquaintance through an intimate dialogue with the writings of an ancient can form a friendship as strong as that for a living person. When Li Po visited the places associated with Hsieh T’iao, the Southern Ch’i’s poet’s moments of experience as recorded in his poems came to life again in the T'ang poet’s mind. Hsieh Tiao then became Li Po’s “spiritual companion” in moments of loneliness. Li Po’s friendship with Hsieh T’iao illustrates the unique form in which Chinese of the past experienced eternity. This experience was not a mystical vision of the divine element in secular life or of a person’s unity with God. Rather, it was a perception of the enduring presence of moments of human experience.

Parallelism which consists in the similar form of construction rather than in content is called by Robert Lowth as synthetic parallelism. It exemplifies correlative episteme which constitutes a universal mode of understanding and poetic expression in ancient folk traditions and which provides modern Western poets, critics, and philosophers with models of non-rational thought for their revolts against the representational episteme. It is a matrix of modem literary criticism in the sense that its multiple dimensions have been used in different ways by philological, Imagist, Romantic, Jungian, and Structuralist critics to vindicate their fundamental arguments on literature and truth. With little mutual encouragement, John F. Davis, Ezra Pound, Roman Jakobson hail xing (hsing), the Chinese synthetic parallelism, as an ideal model of non-representational thinking.

The addresser in the poetic text speaks, simultaneously, to himself or herself, to the persuaded object, and to the reader, and three modes of the addressee are thus produced, namely, the reflexive addressee, the addressee proper, and the reader addressee. Then basing on Peirce’s mediative, semiotic model, the addressee is taken as a space of mediation via which the speaking subject discourses on something, and the mediative space of the addressee eventually affects the speaking subject and the discoursed object by its particularities. The addressee space thus defined proves to be essential to the understanding of love poetry as a genre. The focus of the present investigation has been the addressee space and the traditions of love poetry in terms of the addressee space. I have established what we may call “courtesan iove” and “courtesan love poetry” from the Tzu-yeh Songs of Yueh-fu as a counterpart and opposition to the “courtly love” and “courtly love poetry” of the West. The aim of my paper has been a general poetics of love poetry, Chinese and English, and this general poetics is based on Todorov’s triadic model of genre; therefore, my effort has been to synthesize rather than differentiate. Nonetheless, I believe that all the traditions and variations involved in love poetry have become more perceptible when they are set side by side in my study.

With the core tenet of Buddhism—the Law of Dependent Origination—as the basis, the Hua-yen sect worked out an intricate philosophy to elucidate the vision of the world arising from the Buddha’s dhyâna experience described in the Avatamsaka Sûttra, which is essentially pragmatic and nonverbal. Hua-yen philosophers expound the relationship between the noumenon and the phenomenon as interdependent, paradoxically identical, and interchangeably reducible. These patterns of relationship are also seen in the phenomenal world: One phenomenon and the other phenomenon or one phenomenon and the rest of the phenomena not only reciprocally interact as both cause and effect but are identical and interpenetrative. The world is ultimately presented as an integrated whole. During his stay in Japan receiving Zen training, Gary Snyder became acquainted with the Hua-yen world view. His pragmatic Zen experience together with his grasp of the Hua-yen world view facilitates the forming of his ecological consciousness, which is the ideological foundation of his oeuvre. Snyder is in this sense an apt example for a philosophical interpretation of non-philosophical dhyâna visions of the world.

This essay takes a close look at the portrayal of “Chinese” characters in American cinema in the twentieth century. It begins with the Harte-Twain play Ah-Sin (1877) and moves through the silent films “Broken Blossoms” (1919) and “The Thief of Bagdad” (1924) to such classic Hollywood talkies as “The Hatchet Man” (1932), “The Phantom of Chinatown” (1940) and, pre-eminently, the Charlie Chan series (especially popular to American viewers during the World War II years). The point is to show the use and abuse of racial stereotypes: the heathen and poker-faced Ah-Sin, the one-dimensional Oriental males—the too-passive and immasculated Yellow Man of “Broken Blossoms,” the evil Fu Manchu, Chan’s cerebral detective—and females (subservient and sexually vulnerable or “dragon ladies.”) Even more insidious than the cardboard characterization of a Charlie Chan, whose intelligence and wit made him well-liked by the American film audience, is perhaps the superficial “Confucian” wisdom of Chan’s “proverbs” (in demystified reality just American wisecracks); this may be more insidious because more subtle than the Hatchet Man’s “Buddhism” of violence and revenge in the name of (a pagan) god. Chan’s “fortune cookie” Confucianism, unlike “Hatchet Buddhism,” still abounds in Chinese restaurants across the United States. The essay concludes with a glance at Chinese-American films of the ’80’s, which show a refreshing and much-needed turn, in the presentation of Chinese-American life, toward realism, honesty, moral ambiguity and complexity, the breaking down of stubborn stereotypes which have lain deep—and no doubt linger still—in the American psyche.