I'm transferring some earlier materials from twitter to this platform. Here's Linda Zagzebski's amazing story at last year's Rutgers Workshop on Chinese Philosophy (virtue epistemology). It highlights the intimate body/mind connection. When she was in Dublin several weeks before the workshop, she went to the Chester Beatty Museum that has a huge collection of Asian manuscripts and paintings. The rest of this thread is a slightly edited quote from her comment of a paper on Xunzi and Aristotle. 1/
"It has on display something I would not have stopped to look at if it were not for the fact that I happened to walk by just as one of the docents was giving an enthusiastic discourse. The object on display is a small piece of stone about two inches on a side. To the naked eye it looks like there is nothing on it except perhaps some pin pricks if you look close. It is a micro-carving by the Chinese artist, musician, calligrapher, and micro-carver Chen Zhongsen. 2/
"That tiny piece of stone contains the entire Diamond Sutra, over 5200 characters in length. Chen Zhonsen is now 82 years old and lives in a remote part of China. During Cultural Revolution of the 60s and 70s he was imprisoned, and part of the time was in solitary confinement. During that time, he disciplined himself with Buddhist meditation and started carving characters so tiny they are not visible to the naked eye on small pieces of stone. 3/
"Through meditation he was able to slow his heart rate to almost nothing and stop his breathing so that he would have complete control of his hand since even a heartbeat could cause his hand to move imperceptibly. In that state he was close to clinically dead. The docent held up a magnifying glass with 40x magnification so that we could take turns looking at it. I cannot read Chinese characters, but I could see that they were there. The docent said people have examined it under a microscope, 4/
"and the characters are perfect. There are no mistakes. After carving it, Chen Zhongsen filled in the carved characters with ink, which means he had to do the whole thing a second time. He has also carved the Tao Te Ching and other major works in their entirety on small stones. He has written two Tang dynasty poems on a single strand of his wife’s hair. In my opinion, Chen Zhongsen is one of the wonders of the world, but he is human and he does in a superlative degree what all of us can do... 5/
"in a much more modest way. Zhongsen illustrates to an extraordinary degree the connection between control of biological functions and the ability to direct one’s body to create feats of artistic virtuosity, and the connection between both of these abilities and the most advanced level of hyperconscious awareness... I think that that connectedness extends from the highest level of consciousness all the way down to the most minute level of bodily functioning."/end @philosophy#philosophy
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