The Useless Tree

Oh Mr. Lee, Your Legalism is Showing...

     Tin hat dictator Lee Hsien Loong, fronting for his unable-to-let-go-of-power dad, Lee Kuan Yew, is doing his Legalist dance again.  They've gone and banned the Far Eastern Economic Review for the unacceptable crime of reporting truthfully about opposition leaders Chee Soon Juan.  Can't have anything like a free and open press to get in the way of Lee family power.

     It used to be that the Lees would try to invoke Confucianism to rationalize their authoritarianism.  It was always a weak claim, when their methods of rule so obviously call upon Legalism to a much greater degree.  And banning publications is right in line with the legacy of the first Qin emperor.  When his Prime Minister, Li Si, proposed destroying books (scroll down to "Qin Empire") that challenged the Emperors authority, Qin thought it was a capital idea :

Li Si then complained that scholars study antiquity and criticize their own age to mislead and confuse people. This discussion of the Emperor's laws causes problems and should be prohibited. Li Si therefore recommended that all historical records other than Qin's be burned. Anyone other than approved academicians with literature or writings of the philosophers must turn them in to be burned within thirty days or be subjected to tattoo and "wall dawn" labor. Books on medicine, divination, agriculture, and forestry were exempt, apparently because they were considered of practical value; but they could only be studied under the tutelage of a law official. Furthermore anyone who used antiquity to criticize the present was to be executed along with his family.

     Practical knowledge, which may have the indirect political effect of boosting the image of the Lees, is fine.  But critical political or cultural or social thinking, forget about it.

      I wonder when they will start tattooing journalists there....

UPDATE: just had to add this image, via Singabloodypore:

On Confucius' Birthday: Modernizing his Thought

     Today is the birthday of Confucius - or at least it is recognized as such in Taiwan and celebrated as "Teacher's Day."   A ceremony was held in Qufu, China, his birthplace.  Happy 2557th!  Interesting how the modern performance:

    

     looks rather like ancient rituals (picture thanks to Frog in a Well):

   

    

     I guess they are doing their homework for the Confucian revival on the mainland.

    It should also be noted that the Kong family - the surname in Chinese of the descendants of Confucius - has finally gotten right with gender equality, formally announcing today (this had come out a few months ago) that women descendants will now be considered true heirs of the great sage. 

    And that brings me to what I really want to talk about: how to make the writing of Confucius himself (i.e. before it was revised in the Han dynasty and after) relevant to modern life.  Here are three easy steps:

     1.  Go all the way with gender equality.  Perhaps the most pernicious effects of Confucianism stemmed historically from the ways in which it was interpreted and used to subjugate women.  His own time was certainly one of patriarchy, which was not peculiar to China.  And for most of Chinese history following his time, and most of world history for that matter, women were culturally and politically subordinated to men.  But times have happily changed.  And Confucian thought, if it is to be useful in a contemporary context, must now assume that there is no moral distinction between men and women on gender grounds alone.  When we refer to "elders" and "parents" in Confucian thought, these days we must refer to men and women together.  Children owe their mothers the same sort of respect and consideration due their fathers; and elder women must be held in the same regard as elder men.  There, that's easy.

     2.  Detach Confucianism from Legalism.  The great sleight of hand of the Han dynasty was to declare "Confucianism" the state ideology, create a curriculum to study his thought, but all the while maintain the stern, un-Confucian political practices of the Qin dynasty. (follow the link and scroll down to "state Confucianism").  The Han were not as brutal as Qin.  However, they "legalized" Confucianism, using law and punishment as means to enforce a Confucian-esque public and political morality.  This was, of course, a break with Confucius himself, who believed that the proper way to engender morality was through exemplary behavior of ethically aware gentlemen (and women, we will now say).  It is only because of the Han revision that a place like Singapore could possibly be considered "Confucian."  We need to throw off the Legalist yoke and get back to the Confucius of gentler persuasion.

    3.  Think of Ritual in everyday terms.  I get this from Fingarette, who talks about how a handshake is a form of Confucian ritual.  What I like about this notion is that it requires us to think carefully about the most mundane daily tasks: if we put our heart into those, and cultivate them to preserve our closest loving relationships, we are then moving toward Humanity.  Ritual is not just about Births and Weddings and Funerals; it is also about doing the myriad daily tasks that hold our families and social networks together.  This makes Confucian morality more demanding, but it also brings it down to a concretely human level.

     I could probably come up with more "easy steps" but I have to get back to the demands of my day job.  Anyone have any further suggestions?

Cracking Down on Corruption - not really

    A lot of attention has been paid in the last couple of day to high profile Chinese politicians being arrested for corruption.  Most prominently, Chen Liangyu, Shanghai Party boss, has been detained.  Leaders in charge of Party discipline promise that those feathering their own nests will be dealt with "seriously:"

“This case may implicate more people,” Gan Yisheng, secretary general of the party’s Central Discipline Inspection Commission, told a news conference in Beijing. “Any party member who violates party discipline, no matter how high or low his rank, will be thoroughly investigated and seriously dealt with.”

Since Mr. Hu authorized investigations into corrupt activities in several places last spring, the central authorities have detained ranking officials in Beijing, Tianjin, Fujian, Hunan and the Chinese naval forces, as well as in Shanghai.

    And China Daily reports this evening that two high level officials in Henan province have also been nabbed.

    Good.  Corruption has been a crushing problem for China for many years now.  It has exacerbated economic inequalities and contributed to a growing sense of injustice among the poor and powerless across the country.  But a few  high level arrests are unlikely to solve the problem fundamentally.  As Pei Minxin argues today in the Financial Times, corruption is systemic:

According to official figures, corruption is getting more costly and increasingly infecting the upper echelons of the government. "Major" corruption cases, measured in terms of the money involved, accounted for 23 per cent of all corruption cases prosecuted in 1990, but rose to 43 per cent in 2002. Officials with the rank of county magistrate and above were prosecuted in 6.1 per cent of the corruption cases in 2002 - compared with only 1.7 per cent in 1990.

....

Rampant corruption threatens China's economic performance. It is pervasive in some of China's most vital economic sectors, such as banking, financial services, mining, energy, real estate and infrastructure. It distorts market forces and allows the well-connected to line their pockets at the expense of the public. Corruption results in huge economic losses due to fraud, theft and waste. Moreover, corruption corrodes critical public institutions, such as the courts, law enforcement and public pension administrations, undermining property rights, public confidence and social stability. As a result, corruption has dramatically increased China's systemic risks. In addition to dangers to the financial sector, corruption is responsible for numerous environmental, public health and public safety disasters. Widespread abuse of power by local officials has been a big source of tension between the Chinese state and its people, as shown by rising incidents of anti-government riots and protests.

    In an odd sort of way, the Communist Party's approach to corruption has a Confucian ring to it: they tend to emphasize the moral failings of individuals, not the broader institutional context.  Confucian morality is, at its most basic, rooted in personal responsibility for recognizing and doing the right thing.  As such it is not, it seems to me, a very good template for designing political institutions, a project that requires something more than individual conscience to check abuses of power.

     The Party constructs its own brand of "socialist morality," and expects members to abide by it.  It also has internal organizations, the discipline inspection system, to police ne'er-do-wells.  The the problem is political.  The current rash of arrests is obviously linked to the continuing political succession from the former Party General Secretary, Jiang Zemin, to the current top man, Hu Jintao.  Jiang left a lot of his appointees in important positions, and maintained a strong base of political influence, even though he had retired.  Hu has been careful and methodical in building up his own personnel, always showing respect to his predecessor, but slowly gaining greater personal control over the sprawling party-state apparatus.

    The "socialist" moral code is always interpreted politically.   

    To be fair to Confucius, this is not what he had in mind.  He - perhaps naively - believed that gentlemen would look inside themselves and do the right thing, even when it might work against personal material interests: better to be honest and poor than corrupt and rich. 

    That sort of idealism is insufficient to construct and control political institutions.  What is needed is a source of supervision external to the powerholders themselves.  That doesn't exist in the PRC.  There may be a lot of talk about "supervision by the masses," but in reality the Party is a power unto itself.

     When Hu Jintao starts enacting political reform, changes that would allow people from outside the party to remove powerholders from office, then we can say he is getting serious about corruption.  Until then, he is just taking down political enemies while allowing systemic corruption to continue.

Taoist Cosmology

    I have written about string theory before.

    But I am drawn back to it today after having read Jim Holt's review of two books on the subject in this weeks New Yorker.  (I have gotten into trouble in the past when people have criticized me for simply responding to a review instead of reading the books; so, I state here clearly, that is what I am doing: responding to Holt's discussion, not the books themselves, which I have not read).  I had almost raised string theory here last week, when I saw these same two books reviewed in the NYT Book Review, but it slipped away.

    Long story short: both books are critical of the effort to develop a grand unifying "theory of everything."  The authors - Lee Smolin and Peter Woit - are serious math-science guys who know the arguments from the inside out.  Holt, as usual, gets off some funny lines.  In describing Smolin's career he says:

Smolin, a reformed string theorist (he wrote eighteen papers on the subject), has helped found a sort of Menshevik cell of physicists in Canada called the Perimeter Institute...

 "Menchevik cell" tells us something of the perceived dominance - dare we say Leninist ascendancy - of string theory in many physics departments.

      Given my own orientations, I am most open to the critiques offered by these books, at least in Holt's rendering.  But here's a line that jumped out at me:

The closest thing to an enduring mark of beauty is simplicity; Pythagoras and Euclid prized it, and contemporary physicists continue to pay lip service to it. All else being equal, the fewer the equations, the greater the elegance. And how does string theory do by this criterion? Pretty darn well, one of its partisans has facetiously observed, since the number of defining equations it has so far produced remains precisely zero. At first, string theory seemed the very Tao of simplicity, reducing all known particles and forces to the notes of a vibrating string. As one of its pioneers commented, “String theory was too beautiful a mathematical structure to be completely irrelevant to nature.”

      You didn't think "Tao of simplicity" would get past me did you?

      It seems that defenders of string theory like it because it is simple - parsimonious in the language of philosophy of science.  But it should not be taken as an analogue of Taoist simplicity.  A Taoist would reject the ersatz, manufactured "simplicity" of an overly broad "explanation of everything."

      There is a notion of simplicity in Taoism (excerpt from passage 32):

Way is perennially nameless,
an uncarved simplicity.  Though small,
it's subject to nothing in all beneath heaven.
But when lords or emperors foster it,
the ten thousand things gladly become their guests...

     Way is, of course, the grand totality of all things at once now. It is the "everything" that string theory aims at explaining.  But the simplicity of Way comes not from our effort to impose a singular explanation upon it, which is, for a Taoist, simply impossible.  Rather, its simplicity comes from its straightforwardness: it is everything.  And since each thing has a certain integrity unto itself (Te), the totality of all things (Tao) is simply the numberless summation of everything.  We might say Tao is all Te.  Its unity is simply a matter of coincidence; that is, the simultaneity of all things at this moment.  It is beyond our description and, certainly, beyond our explanation.

     Happily, Holt makes a passing reference to a truer Taoist sentiment (as opposed to his misused "Tao of simplicity" - which suggests a Taoist would be satisfied with explanatory parsimony) when he says:

Of course, it is possible that a final theory will never be found, that neither string theory nor any of the alternatives mentioned by Smolin and Woit will come to anything. Perhaps the most fundamental truth about nature is simply beyond the human intellect, the way that quantum mechanics is beyond the intellect of a dog.

 I can hear Chuang Tzu chuckling at that last canine image.

Profiting from the Anti-Profit Sage

     The China Confucius Foundation is, I think (I don't know much about them), the organization that runs the temple at Qufu, Shandong province, the birth place of the ancient sage himself.  They have taken it upon themselves to come up with a "standard image" of Confucius (I wrote about these efforts here).  Yesterday they unveiled a statue of the new "standard image:"

 

 

   

     They seem quite happy with their work:

The amended portrait highlights the ancient philosopher's kindness in appearance as well as his cultured and gentle characteristics, said professor Hu Xijia, a member of the sculpture design group.

"We want to show a Confucius that exists in people's minds, who is a kind, sagacious and respectful person," said Hu, who started the work in January.

 But not everyone agrees that we need a "standard image;" some even question the motives behind the effort by the China Confucius Foundation:

"Statue of Confucius sparks trademark dispute in China
(AFP) Updated: 2006-09-25 15:46

"BEIJING - The unveiling of a statue of Confucius, China's patron philosopher, in his hometown has ignited a debate over whether anyone can claim the rights to the sage's image, state press has said.

The statue was put up on Sunday in Qufu, eastern Shandong province, by the China Confucius Foundation, which hailed it as the "standard" image to be used at home and abroad, the Beijing Youth Daily reported

But academics have been angered with the concept, saying the foundation is seeking to develop a "Confucius" trademark to cash in on growing tourism and publishing markets surrounding the philosopher.

    Some marvelous ironies here: the foundation that claims to be protecting the ancient image and ideals of Confucius is positioning itself to profit from a copyrighted "standard image."   It's a branding strategy!  Maybe they can make a jingle out of these Analects passages:

The Master said: "If profit guides your actions, there will be no end of resentment." (4.12)

The Master said: "The noble-minded are clear about Duty.  Little people are clear about profit." (4.16)

    They could sing it all the way to the bank.

Sun Tzu on Intelligence and the Failure in Iraq

    This story ran on the front pages of both the NYT and the WaPo this morning:

The war in Iraq has become a primary recruitment vehicle for violent Islamic extremists, motivating a new generation of potential terrorists around the world whose numbers may be increasing faster than the United States and its allies can reduce the threat, U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded.

A 30-page National Intelligence Estimate completed in April cites the "centrality" of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the insurgency that has followed, as the leading inspiration for new Islamic extremist networks and cells that are united by little more than an anti-Western agenda. It concludes that, rather than contributing to eventual victory in the global counterterrorism struggle, the situation in Iraq has worsened the U.S. position, according to officials familiar with the classified document.

    From an ancient Chinese philosophical perspective, many things could be said here.  We could discuss the ways in which this reflects the Taoist notion that "trying to take hold of the world and improve it" is bound to fail.  Or, we could delve into the general Confucian-Mencian anti-war argument.  Or, even, turn to Han Fei Tzu, who believed that foreign policy is not the way to secure domestic political dominance (are you listening Mr. Rove?).  But I want to bring Sun Tzu into the conversation.

    Sun Tzu understood well the importance of intelligence gathering and analysis for the conduct of foreign policy and war (excerpt here is from the Giles translation):

Thus, what enables the wise sovereign and the good general to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men, is FOREKNOWLEDGE. 

1. That is, knowledge of the enemy's dispositions, and what he means to do.

Now this foreknowledge cannot be elicited from spirits; it cannot be obtained inductively from experience,  nor by any deductive calculation.

Knowledge of the enemy's dispositions can only be obtained from other men.

    He obviously had a preference for "human intelligence" (I wonder what he would have to say about the advanced technology - "national technical means" - available today), but he knew that using spies was a complex and difficult business:

Spies cannot be usefully employed without a certain intuitive sagacity.   

They cannot be properly managed without benevolence and straightforwardness.   

Without subtle ingenuity of mind, one cannot make certain of the truth of their reports.

    And it is here that the Bush administration has failed so utterly and damaged US interests so fundamentally.  Intelligence was politicized and manipulated in the run-up to the Iraq war.  Virtually all of the key points that rationalized the US invasion - the existence of WMD stockpiles; the ties with al-Qaeda - were false.  The Bush administration has attempted to blame the CIA and other agencies; but the fundamental failure was the President's, along with the Vice President and Secretary of Defense.  They wanted to go to war against Iraq and when the intelligence did not offer sufficient support they twisted and spun unsubstantiated assertions to invent a rationale.  This is not to say the CIA is blameless - George "Slam Dunk" Tenet certainly bears some responsibility.  But it is the center of the executive branch that pushed the country to war, regardless of the facts. 

    So, now we have this new report on how the Iraq war has exacerbated global terrorism.  Some may suggest that this National Intelligence Estimate is pay-back of sorts: the professional spies are hitting back at Bush, undermining the Iraq effort just in time for the Fall election, in retaliation for the damage the White House did to the intelligence community earlier.  The timing of the leaks to both the NYT and the WaPo certainly suggest a political motive. 

    Beyond the politics, however, we should also recognize that this could be an effort by exasperated intelligent professionals to stop the awful national damage that Bush has done.  He - and Cheney and Rumsfeld - have already created a deep, deep problem in Iraq.  They must be constrained before they can expand their failures elsewhere: to Iran, North Korea, where-ever.

    The political push-back on the part of the intelligent establishment tells us just how bad a president Bush has been.  As Sun Tzu might point out, he does not possess the "intuitive sagacity" or "ingenuity of mind" to manage effectively the subtle play of intelligence and spies.  He has misused intelligence to mire the US in a costly and morally degrading war.  And he will almost certainly not do the right thing: which in this case would be an explicit acceptance of the failures in Iraq and an honest consideration of how to improve the situation.  He will not do that, however.  He will try to find a way to politically crush anyone associated with the truth that Iraq has made the global war on terror worse.

    And that is how lost wars stay lost.

Still looking for enlightened rulers

     This story, about China's nouveaux riches, has been getting some attention around the internet today:

A generation ago, when people still dressed in monochromes and acquiring great wealth, never mind flaunting it, was generally illegal, the route to success was to join the right Communist Party youth organization or to attend one of the best universities.

Now the race starts early, with an emphasis not on ideology but on the skills and experiences the children will need in the elite life they are expected to lead. In addition to early golf training, which has become wildly popular, affluent parents are enrolling their children in everything from ballet and private music lessons, to classes in horse riding, ice-skating, skiing and even polo.

  

    

     It contrasted sharply with this other story, a portion of which is translated by CDT (full Chinese text of this story, here):

At 9:20 yesterday morning, Chen Xiaoying, a 42-year-old migrant worker in Zengcheng City, Guangdong Province, inadvertently scratched the tail of a white Toyota car while she was crossing a street. 

What followed this small incident was disastrous. The driver got out, dragged Chen to the roadside, and slapped her twice, then left her on the ground. When Chen was lying on the road, a heavy truck, which was going backward, crushed her head. Chen died immediately.

Chen's husband, who was standing across the street, watched hopelessly as his wife died.

  

    

     "Dickensian" comes to mind to describe this contrast in fortunes.   The tragedy of Chen Xiaoying highlights this paragraph from the other story:

“At the top of the pyramid will be exceptionally strong graduates from top American or European universities who become a sort of ‘international freemen,’ ” said Qiu Huadong, an author and editor who has written about the new elite. “They work several years in China, and then they go abroad for a while, shifting locations every few years. At the bottom of the pyramid will be those who didn’t get such an outstanding education, and they’ll be sweating and bleeding for China and globalization.”

   Bleeding, indeed.  At a general societal level the terrible human consequences of growing economic inequality in China is not a new story.  It has been getting worse for years now.  We are left, then, with the usual question: what is to be done?

   Mencius would tell us to attend to the Chen Xiaoying's of China, not the nouveaux riches:

Therefore, in securing the people's livelihood, an enlightened ruler ensures that they have enough to serve their parents and nurture their wives and children, that everyone has plenty to eat in good years and no one starves in bad years. (17)

     That is what good government would do.  And it it precisely what is most lacking in the world today.

So...Is he a Taoist?

 Seems like he is to me:

Wandering artist finds his own way to live
By Xu Jitao (China Daily)
Updated: 2006-09-20 09:00   

For 11 days beginning September 3, Ye Fu stayed in a cage in a community in Shanghai's Pudong.

During that time, he did not talk with anyone, including the visitors that came to his exhibition. All he could do was sleep and meditate.

Ye completed the task as part of his Urban Survival Experience series. He took part in two previous projects in Beijing last year.

Some people consider him a madman and think of his projects as rubbish, but others believe he is an honest artist who only wants to reveal the loneliness of all human beings.

As a controversial artist and poet, the 28-year-old always attracts a lot of attention.

Ye was born in 1978 in Linyi of Shandong Province. As with most youngsters who rebelled against the traditional education system, Ye said that he did not think he learnt anything from school.

"I think I'm always a pupil. I do not think that I benefited from so-called education from the schools. When I was alone, I liked to read anything about art and poetry, and gradually, I found I was deeply attracted by them, he said.

   He rejects social conventions, he has given up on "learning," and he wanders "boundless and free" (the title of the first chapter of Chuang Tzu).   He has all the right Taoist qualities:

But for Ye, it's not easy to return to family life. An artist with avant-garde ideas, he gave up a smooth and steady life and became a wandering artist and poet.

"It was in 1999 that I became a wanderer,"he said. "I left home and started to wander around the country."

Ye said he chose to live like a vagrant because he did not like the lifestyles that his other family members expected him to have.

"All of them hoped that I would get married and have babies, but I did not like such things. It was not a good environment for me to carry on my artistic projects in my hometown, so I escaped from that environment,"he said.

After he left his hometown, Ye tried all kinds of jobs in different cities.

"I was a journalist, a salesman, a secretary for the president of an old university, a model for students at fine arts schools, and a chef. I even sold slippers in the bazaar and sold pictures I drew on the street. Sometimes I was a wandering singer," he said.

 So, why doesn't he make the obvious connection to Taoism?  Why is the only cultural referent here Borges?

"Last year when I went back to my home, my father told me that he was rather excited because he had just read all of Jorge Luis Borges' (an Argentine writer and poet) works. He even wrote 30 poems and asked me to amend them," he said.

According to Ye, he is still greatly influenced by his father's ideas. When Ye meets his father, he will often exchange his ideas with him.

    I am tempted to guess that Chuang Tzu and the Tao Te Ching and Lieh Tzu are just so far out of the contemporary popular cultural scene in China these days that even performance artists who are obviously resonating with certain Taoist ideas do not think to make the connections.

    Or maybe he is deeply rooted in Taoist thought but the China Daily reporter never picked up on it....

A Confucian-esque Coup d'Etat?

     Thailand, of course, has never been a "Confucian society."  Its culture is shaped by Buddhist and indigenous beliefs and practices.  But yesterday's coup d'etat in Bangkok, while not inspired by Confucian ideology, can be seen as consistent with Confucian principles: if extra-legal means are necessary to remove a corrupt leader and open the way for a more virtuous politics, then a coup may be justified.

     Here is Mencius:

Emperor Hsuan of Ch'i asked: "Is it true that Emperor T'ang banished the tyrant Chieh, and Emperor Wu overthrew the tyrant Chou?"
"Yes, according to the histories," replied Mencius.
"So is the murder of a sovereign acceptable?"
"A thief of Humanity is called a thief," replied Mencius.  "A thief of Duty is called a felon.  Someone who's both a thief and a felon is called a commoner.  I've heard of the commoner Chou's punishment, but I've never heard of a sovereign's murder." (33)

    The clear implication here is that a ruler must maintain a certain moral behavior - being neither a thief of Humanity or Duty - in order to keep office.  If he acts badly, if he abuses the powers of his office for personal political or economic gain, then he has lost his right to rule, he is merely a commoner.  In the context of the question asked, Mencius is saying that bad rulers can be overthrown or, in extremis, killed.

    The problem, obviously, is who decides, and how is the decision made, that the ruler is corrupt?   Liberal democrats (of which I would count myself one) worry that this power of decision itself is prone to corruption: better to create institutionalized political processes for the removal of a bad leader than leave the decision to a small group of powerful people who might act on their own interests.  The difficulty of liberal democracy is that a bad leader may be able to game the procedures and remain in office.  Berlusconi in Italy?  Here's one Italy-Thailand comparison. 

     But there are many, many coups that start out with assertions of "virtue" and descend into corruption and tyranny worse than the regimes they overthrew. 

     At the end of the day, we must be very careful in accepting a Confucian-like tolerance of  extra-legal, coercive means to settle political problems.   We can never be sure of promises of ethical behavior to come.  We must judge the new leaders by their actions.  Will they really serve the interests of society at large - and in this case that would include those social forces that benefited from and supported Thaksin's government: rural people?  Will they resist the temptation to use their new found power to line their own pockets? 

    Let's wait and see, then, before we celebrate the demise of the corrupt, whether or not the new leaders of Thailand actually perform their virtue and not just declare it.

Six months

     Today I noticed a flush of red-orange leaves in a tree still predominantly green.  There are many such hints of the coming autumn here in the northeastern United States.  A few trees are losing their cover; colors are sneaking into view.  The changes call to mind other seasonal passages.  And I am reminded that it is six months since Aidan died.

    He died on the last day of winter, the day before the first day of spring.  When I realized the timing then, I found some solace:

  It was almost as if he was reassuring us that, with time, our grief would pass, the darkness would yield to light, we would find joy in life again.   The days are longer now, even if it is likely to snow today here in Western Massachusetts, and we are finding our way.  Laughter is possible.

 But now we are on the other side of the divide, close to the last day of summer, the first day of fall.  Things are slowly dying.  You can see it everywhere.  The underbrush along the back of my yard is thinning out as tall weeds succumb to the shortening days and falling temperatures.  In front of the house, tiger lilies are long past their flowers.  The hummingbirds are already gone from our feeder on their way south.  Geese mournfully declare their departure.

    It can be a sad time of year, if all you see is decay and demise. 

   But one of the things Aidan taught me, through our daily routines, was to look past the limitations and disability and sadness, and see the beauty that surrounds us: the beauty in his eyes and fair-skinned face; the beauty of his silent presence; the beauty of the regular rise and fall of his breaths in peaceful sleep. 

   And so today I look past the gray sky and tearful rain that highlights the natural sadness of the dying flora all around.  I see the brightness in my students' eyes; the love in my daughter's heart; the myriad happy comings and goings of the town.  And I see Aidan's continuing presence in my life.  It is a new season, but not simply a sad one.

The master came in time with his own season and then followed it away.  If you're at peace with such seasons, if you're at home following them, then sorrow and joy can never touch you.

           - Chuang Tzu (42)