Spiritual Biography (O Phoenix, O Phoenix....)

This from Stephen Walker, who continues to be unsure whether to be impressed at the apparent relevance of person formation and self-cultivation in the extended Chinese tradition, or to hang it all and go play the qin in the company of cultivated and affected geese far away from Brahmins, Mandarins, and assorted odd-balls.

"O Phoenix, O Phoenix, how your virtue has declined," says Stephen.



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No serious skeptic can cite natural causes and ignore supernatural ones. A special footnote of thanks to Dan Hoffman for originating the theory that I am a reincarnation of Zhuangzi. Apparently Zhuangzi decided that the distortion and misunderstanding of his doctrine had gone on long enough and needed a missionary. What better than to use the barbarian system? He chose rebirth in the Rocky plateau of the High Uintah mountains of Utah where one can grow to outward maturity acquiring a minimal cultural endowment. (My ninth-grade English teacher read Horton the Elephant to us aloud for cultural enrichment!) It also provided an institution that would send the scion to Hong Kong in this relatively unformed state. So from a place where our nearest neighbors were three miles away I found myself whisked to a place where I saw more people in fifteen minutes than I had seen in my whole life. There I quickly learned there was more gospel to learn than to teach.
Of course in order for Zhuangzi's plan to work, one had to have such a religious institution. Zhuangzi had such a plan. A Vermont farmer possessed of his New England Yankee independence could create a religion. But he needed the impetus. History used the Chinese ginseng root. A mysterious stranger proposed to Joseph Smith, Sr., that he plant his farm to ginseng and sell it to China. I don't know if it was ever delivered, but no money came back and Smith lost his Vermont farm. He fell back on his mystical Vermont tradition of water dowsing but added the special claim that he could douse for gold. His son learned the trade as they wandered to Upstate New York. There Joseph Smith, Jr., continued his fascination with finding buried gold and an interest in ancient, exotic cultures and people. He found gold plates with a theory of the American Indians. Based on this book, he founded his iconoclastic, freethinking, quintessentially American religion. The chain of events leading to [the] founding of the Mormon empire in Utah and my own eventual return to Vermont is all fairly ordinary history. Those who sense a continuity with Mormonism in my thought patterns, despite my professed atheism, don't have it all wrong.
I do not intend to put much weight on this story. I shall rest my case on the explanatory power of the interpretive theory. I offer it here for those more impressed with pedigree and credentials than argument.
...

I wrote [a certain] article using the then current technology--Perfect Writer on a CP/M Kaypro II. Originally the appendix was included as a footnote in the text--the next footnote following the one expressing and explaining my skepticism about the alleged discovery of the sentence [adumbrated by Graham]. It was a much longer footnote since I was trying to show that the use of ci ("phrase") in Names and Objects was perfectly consistent with its normal meaning and in several places could not reasonably have been interpreted as "sentence". Perfect Writer, however, could not handle long footnotes. After several failed attempts to format the article, I finessed the problem by deleting the second long footnote and making it an appendix. Graham has since complained repeatedly to me in person and in print that I wrote a whole appendix rejecting his claim that never mentioned his case for the theory that they discovered the sentence...Of course, I mentioned, cited, and criticized his claim that they discovered the sentence in the first footnote. The second footnote addressed the subsequent question of whether they had changed the meaning of ci ("phrase") and begun to use it deliberately to refer only to sententials. If the appendix had remained a footnote, the two footnotes would have been consecutive and Graham's complaint would presumably have focused on the content of the issue rather than the perceived slight. As it was he could not get over that the appendix itself did not contain the argument in the footnote. He has never forgiven me and has passed the robe of transmission to Harbsmeier...Naturally, I have never forgiven Perfect Writer--which is [a] shame since it was otherwise a rather good word-processing editor. This text is being prepared in Word Perfect, which, as the reader will note, allows very long notes.<<
quoted from Chad Hansen, A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought.

Stephen says that Chad Hansen is proud to have taught at Pittsburgh philosophy. You see, we are coming out, Stephen says. This is Hansen's passport photo:



and this,