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佳作推荐 || 《中国绿色宗教:道教与探索可持续发展的道路》

2017-09-18 苗建时 国际汉学研究与数据库建设

 编者按


加拿大女王大学道学研究专家、汉学家苗建时(James Miller)教授最新力作《中国绿色宗教:道教与探索可持续发展的道路》已于2017年5月中旬由哥伦比亚大学出版社出版发行。此次林苑君有幸获得苗教授的亲自授权在林苑公众号发布该书的中英文简介(如下文)。特此感谢。欲知本书的详细内容,还请读者前往哥伦比亚大学出版社网站购买(点击左下角‘原文阅读’链接,即可进入官网,之后如欲购买,输入密码: CUP30 可享受7折优惠,具体参看如下宣传图片)。此中英文简介为原创内容,未经许可,不得转载。








China's Green Religion:

Daoism and the Quest for a Sustainable Future

中国绿色宗教:道教与探索可持续发展的道路

 

 

One Sentence Summary

 

Insights from China’s indigenous religion, Daoism, can provide the aesthetics, ethics, politics and spirituality that address the root causes of the contemporary ecological crisis and can help construct a flourishing and sustainable ecological civilization for China and the world.

 

一句话概括

 

道教,为中国的本土宗,能从根源上为解决当代生态危机提供了美学、伦理、政治、精神等方面的洞见,并且有助于中国及世界构建繁荣的、可持续的生态文明。

 


Short Summary

 

The origins of the contemporary ecological crisis lie in the bifurcation of nature and culture in the ideology of modernity: human societies, cultures and economies are not oriented around the scientific reality that human flourishing is ultimately embedded in the flourishing of the natural world. As a consequence human societies pursue goals that undermine the ecological foundations that make life possible in the first place. The solution lies in overcoming this bifurcation so as to embed human cultures more fully in the capacity of the natural world to support the flourishing of human life.

 

简短概要

 

当代的生态危机源于自然与文化在现代性的意识形态上的分歧:人类社会、文化及经济忽略了人类的繁荣最终依赖于自然世界的繁荣这一科学事实。故此,人类社会所追求的目标才会破坏了使生命首先得以存续的生态根基。解决之道就在于超越这一分歧并将人类文化更多地置于自然的承载力之内,从而达到人类社会的繁荣昌盛.

 

Daoism, China’s indigenous religion, offers four key insights into how to do this. It offers:

(1)  a vision of nature not as an object that lies outside human bodies and experience, but as a subjective power that indwells and informs human life;

(2)  an anthropology of the porousbody based on the sense of qi flowing through landscapes and bodies;

(3)  a tradition of knowing founded on the experience of transformative power in specific landscapes and topographies;

(4)  an aesthetic and moral sensibility based on the affective experience of the world pervading the body and the body pervading the world.

 

道教,中国的本土宗教,对于如何达成这一目标提供了四个重要的见解,包括:

(1)    一种视角:自然不是孤立于人类躯体及经验的客体存在,而是一种孕育并影响人类生活的主体能量

(2)    一种人类学观点:人体具有多孔性,气在天地与人体之中流动渗透。

(3)    一种基于体验的传统知识:特定的山形地势间存在着能量转换

(4)     一种基于感性体验的美学及道德上的敏感性:宇宙渗透身体,身体浸漫宇宙


These insights are relevant to three groups of people.

(1)  They are relevant to contemporary environmentalists, because of the broad failure of the environmental movement based on a quasi-Christian concept of “saving theearth.” Instead environmentalists should promote the idea of how the earth indwells and supports human life and livelihood.

(2)  They are relevant to those interested in China, because of China’s current quest to create an “ecological civilization” that does not depend on Western forms of culture and politics and at the same time transcends the problems of industrial modernity.

(3)  They are relevant to those interested in religion, because the book promotes a method of seeing religion not from the standard framework of tradition versus modernity, but from the perspective of a paradigm of sustainability.

 

Together these insights offer an aesthetics, ethics, politics and spirituality of flourishing that can re-integrate nature and culture and lay the foundations for a sustainable future.

 

这些见解关乎三类群体。

(1)    它们与当代的环境学家息息相关,由于基于伪基督教理念的“拯救地球”环保运动在各处相继失败,故此,环境学家应该转而强调地球如何孕育和供养人类生命和生活。

(2)    它们与渴望了解中国的人士息息相关,因为中国当前建设生态文明的探索独立于西方的文化及政治,与此同时也超越了工业现代化所带来的问题。

(3)    它们与对宗教感兴趣的人士息息相关,因为本书提倡从可持续性的视角来看待宗教,而非传统与现代对比这一标准框架。

 

这些见解能够为人类繁荣提供美学、伦理、精神上的洞见,能够重新整合自然和文化的二元对立,为可持续发展的未来奠定基础。

 

Chapter Summaries

 

Chapter 1. Religion, Modernity and Ecology

Previous scholarship has approached the relationship of religions andecology by examining how those traditions might be relevant to addressing environmental problems. Instead, a decolonial approach to the study of Daoism leads to insights that challenge the very framework of modern categories of religion and nature. These insights, teased out over the course of the book, inspire a practical alternative to the framework of modernity, one that can help produce the optimal flourishing of human life on earth.

 

章节概要

 

第一章:宗教、现代性及生态

以往的学者通过研究传统与解决环境问题两者间存在何种关系来探讨宗教与生态的关系。然而,一种对道教采用去殖民化的研究方法为我们提供了不一样的见解,挑战了宗教与自然的诸多现代研究范式。这些见解将在本书中一一呈现,并预示着另一种可行性的现代性理论框架,即一个有助于实现人类最繁荣地生栖居在地球上的方案。

 

Chapter 2. The Subjectivity ofNature

Daoism proposes a radical reversal of the way that modern human beings think about the natural world. Rather than understanding human beings as “subject” who observe the “objective” world of nature, Daoism proposes that subjectivity is grounded in the Dao or Way, understood as the wellspring of cosmic creativity for a world of constant transformation. As a result theDaoist goal of “obtaining the Dao” offers insights into the ecological quest to transcend the modern, Cartesian bifurcation of subject and object, self and world. From this follows an ideal of human action not as the projection of agency onto a neutral, objective backdrop but as a transaction or mediation between self and world.

 

第二章:自然的主体性

道教提出了一种与现代人思考自然截然不同的方式。道教并不将人类视作观察“客体”世界的“主体”,而认为主体性植根于“道”,因为“道”被认为是这一不断变化的世界创造力的来源。因此,道家的“得道”目标也就为追求生态文明提供了许多洞见并且超越了主体-客体、个体-世界这些现代的、笛卡尔式的二元对立观。从这一角度出发,可见理想的人类行为应当被视为个体与世界的交换或协调,而非将主体施事力作用于客体。

 

Chapter 3. Liquid Ecology

The Chinese term qi denotes flow of life through the cosmos, landscapes and bodies. Daoist metaphysics is not based on an understanding of things as solid substances. Confucian traditions emphasize the genealogical flow of life from one generation to the next. Daoist traditions emphasize the contextual flow of life between the body and the world understood as a complex, fluid process formed by the circulation of qi in a binary (yinyang) pattern of ebb and flow. Just as water flows in and through mountains, so also qi flows in and through human bodies, connecting the liquid vitality of the body to the liquid vitality of the landscapes it inhabits.

 

第三章:液体生态学

汉字“气”表示生命在宇宙、山川及身体间的流动,道家的形而上学思想并不将事物视为封闭的固体。儒家传统思想强调生命在家族中代代相传。然而道家传统思想则强调生命在人体与世界之间交互流动,可以看作是一个基于阴阳盛衰交替而形成的复杂而富有动态的气体循环过程。就好像水穿行在山川之间,气也运转于人体间,将身体的流动生命活力和所处环境的流动生命活力紧紧相连。

 

Chapter 4. The Porosity of the Body

Daoist visualization meditations offer an insight into how the divide between body and world can be overcome. They evoke an intimate, even erotic, connection between the inner landscape of the body and the outer landscape of mountains and rivers. This connection is captured by the Daoist term “pervasion” which denotes the fundamental connective process by which the cosmos floods into the body and the body into the cosmos.

 

第四章:身体的渗透性

道家的视觉化冥思就如何克服人体与世界间的割裂提供了独特见解:他们唤起了人们对人体内在结构与外在山川河流形态之间紧密甚至充满激情关系的认识。这种关系道家称之为“渗透”,意指宇宙的生命力涌进人体,人体的生命力进入宇宙这样一基本的交融过程。 

 

Chapter 5. The Locative Imagination

Schools of Daoist practice have traditionally been formed aroundspecific mountain sites in China partly because Daoists value the experience ofparticular configurations of qi flowing through the unique topography of each location. This suggests that nature should not be understood as a generic, universal resource that is more or less the same everywhere. Rather Daoists have valued nature in particular ways in particular places for particular reasons. A problem in environmental ethics is whether to consider the “environment” as a cosmological universal, or as the sum of specific, local issues and practical problems. Daoism emphasizes the local, but as the way to approach the universal. 

 

第五章:地域空间想象

道观通常建在中国一些独特的山上,部分原因在于道家重视相关地域独特的山形地势之间的气体流动。这就意味着自然不应该被视为在类属上四海皆同的一种资源;相反,道家在特殊的地域出于特殊的原因用特殊的方式看待自然。环境伦理学中存在这样一个问题,即是将“环境”看作整个宇宙还是作为特殊的、局部的议题以及实际问题的总和。道教重视局部,但是把局部当作通往宇宙的方式。

 

Chapter 6. The Political Ecology of the Daoist Body

The Daoist experience of the world in the body and the body in the world is fundamentally an aesthetic experience, but one that must be trained through disciplines of body cultivation. Daoist body cultivation traditions are thus relevant for the task of overcoming the bifurcation between body and world, and mind and body, two insights that are explored in relation to the contemporary phenomenology and embodied cognitive science respectively. The Daoist aesthetic experience is connected to community ethics based on the principle of producing the optimal flourishing of the body and the world.

 

第六章:道体的政治生态学

道家本质上将‘身体交融世界,世界交融身体’视为一种美学体验,但这一体验只有通过严格的身体修炼方能达到。因此道家的身体修炼说与消除身体-世界、精神-肉体的二元对立紧密相关。这两大观点也分别会从当代现象学和具身性认知科学两个视角得到剖析。道家美学体验也与社群伦理学紧密相联,因为后者是基于优化人体与世界的繁荣的原则。

 

Chapter 7. From Modernity to Sustainability

Modernity tends to frame religion as private spirituality and nature asobjective materiality, each divorced from the other. Sinological scholarship onDaoism has tended to work within this framework and as a result has produced understandings of Daoism based on the categories of religion, philosophy, nature and culture that are external to the tradition itself. An alternative to the ordering framework of modern scholarship on China and Chinese religions is scholarship produced from a paradigm of sustainability.

 

第七章:从现代性到可持续性

现代性倾向于将宗教看作个人的精神追求,将自然视为客观的物质存在,两者互不相关。研究道教的汉学家往往倾向于在此框架内开展研究,故而他们对于道教的理解大体上是基于宗教、哲学、自然和文化的范畴分类,但这些分类却并非传统本身。因此,基于可持续性范式的学术研究为当前研究中国及中国宗教的秩序框架提供了一个可替代的方案。                                                                                                                                                                              

Chapter 8. From Sustainability to Flourishing

An ecological civilization is one in which the social, cultural, and political order is rooted in the capacity of nature to promote the flourishing of the human species. The Daoist tradition offers four insights that can help promote this: (1) an aesthetics of flourishing founded on the practical experience of the world in the body; (2) an ethic of flourishing founded on the mutual porosity and vulnerability of the world and the body; (3) a politics of flourishing founded on a democracy of local contexts; (4) a spirituality of flourishing founded onreligious themes of consumption, violence, death, and transcendence. Altogether this produces a vision of flourishing based on overcoming the modern dichotomies of self and world, matter and spirit, nature and culture.

 

第八章:从可持续性到繁荣

生态文明是指社会、文化、政治的秩序建立取决于大自然促进人类繁荣的能力。道家传统提供了有利于生态文明建设的四个洞见:(1)一种美学——应当将繁荣建立在‘身体交融世界’ 的实际体验的基础之上;(2)一种道德体系——应当将繁荣建立在世界与身体相互渗透性和脆弱性的认识基础之上;(3)一种政治观点——应当将繁荣建立在符合当地国情的民主基础之上;(4)一种精神追求——应将繁荣建立在对消费、暴力、死亡和超脱的宗教认识基础之上。综合以上四个观点,可见,本书所述的繁荣观超越了现代社会关于个体与世界、物质与精神、自然与文化的二元对立观点。


苗建时教授莅临班戈大学孔子学院作‘双龙研讨会:中国生态哲学与安格鲁·威尔士文学’主旨发言暨新书发布会

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