I recently spent a week at my son's campground in the countryside outside Dallas. While there, I was elated to espy a sizable dodecahedron made of twelve substantial wooden panels tightly wrapped in brown, buff leather. It had been constructed by a local artist about a dozen years ago.
Contemplating that cosmic shape, it brought back all those vibrant discussions of geometry, linguistics, and metaphysics from a year and a half ago. Esthetically and intellectually satisfying to commune with my old friend the dodecahedron, I fell into a reverie beneath those shaggy-scraggly-barked eastern red cedars that seemed to draw me up into their spreading branches that connected to the universe emanating from the dodecahedron that I held at my waist.
Our colleague and teacher, Prof. Matsumoto Akirō, passed away on January 6, 2026, at 82 years of age.
Prof. Matsumoto graduated from Waseda University in East Asian history in 1966, received his Master’s degree, also from Waseda, in philosophy in 1972, and thereafter studied at Ferdowsi University in Mashhad, Iran. He taught at International University of Japan and at St. Thomas (Eichi) University and held visiting professorships at Durham University (UK) and the University of Virginia (USA). He originally specialized in Islamic theology, working in Persian and Arabic texts under the mentorship of Prof. IZUTSU Toshihiko (井筒 俊彦) in Japan and Prof. Sayed Jalaluddin Ashtiani at Ferdowsi. His research included the mystical thought of Ibn ‘Arabi, Ibn Sina, Jami, Rumi, and Mulla Sadra and the 20th century Twelver Shi’ism of Ayatollah Khomeini. He also published numerous translations of Persian philosophical works into Japanese.
Wolfgang Behr, "Towards a Conceptual Prehistory of 'Brainwashing' / xinao 洗腦". (pdf here and here)
In Jessica Imbach, Justyna Jaguścik and Brigit Knüsel Adamec, eds., Re-Thinking Literary China, Essays in Honor of Andrea Riemenschnitter. [Welten Ostasiens / Worlds of East Asia / Mondes de l’Extrême Orient; 40] Berlin: DeGruyter-Brill, 2025, pp. 7-66.
A year and a half ago, we learned of the initial AI-assisted decipherment of a charred scroll that had been buried for two millennia under the volcanic ashes of Mt. Vesuvius (eruption 79AD) in the city of Herculaneum: "AI (and human ingenuity) to the rescue" (2/6/24).
Since then, researchers have continued to work on the scroll until now they have identified the precise text on it:
A Sino-Indo-Iranian literary-religious-mythic nexus, with a focus on J. C. Coyajee
Für Professor Patrick Dewes Hanan, meinen Doktorvater
People often ask me what the meaning of the morpheme biàn 變 in the disyllabic term biànwén 變文 is. The reason they come to me is because I spent the first two decades of my Sinological career focusing on this genre of medieval popular Buddhist prosimetric (shuōchàng 說唱) narrative.
Wén 文, of course, means "writing; text". No sweat there. But biàn 變 is a thorny problem. It has the following basic meanings:
Kid's T-shirt in a Carrefour, downtown Taichung. (I think an English-speaking kid wouldn't be seen dead in it.) [VHM: American English: "wouldn't be caught dead" — usually, in my experience]
…an article on philosophy / human rights and how a Chinese translation of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (available online from Philosophy Now, 118 [February-March, 2017], 9-11, and also available here from the website of one of the authors) raises some questions of hermeneutics.
The debate was covered in an article by EL PAÍS after Gianluca Misuraca, Vice President of Technology Diplomacy at Inspiring Futures, introduced the concept of “hypnocracy” — a new form of manipulation outlined in a book by Jianwei Xun called Hypnocracy: Trump, Musk, and the New Architecture of Reality. However, this Hong Kong philosopher does not exist, as revealed by Sabina Minardi, editor-in-chief of the Italian magazine L’Espresso.
Two colleagues noticed that the PRC government often rebukes other countries for lacking sincerity, and they asked me if Chinese had a different understanding of sincerity that permitted / encouraged them to do so. "Sincerity" is so front and center in Chinese negotiations with other nations that one soon comes to realize, if you want smooth relations with the PRC, you must needs demonstrate to the Chinese representatives that you are utterly sincere, i.e., that you are willing to do exactly what they want you to do. Anything less opens you to the charge of being insincere.
My colleagues asked me if there is something special about the Chinese conception of sincerity, i.e., does it have special Chinese characteristics" (jùyǒu Zhòngguó tèsè 具有中国特色)? Just as it is an article of faith for the CCP that socialism in China comes with special characteristics (Zhōngguó tèsè shèhuì zhǔyì 中国特色社会主义).
ABSTRACT: This paper comparatively examines the propaganda of the first emperors of China and Rome, Qin Shi Huangdi and Augustus. Focusing on the interplay between divine support and claims of world conquest and utilising the Qin stelae and the Res Gestae Divi Augusti as case studies, this paper will argue that both early imperial Chinese and Roman propaganda shared extremely similar rationales and methods. Divine support and military victories were intimately linked and mutually dependent. As such, the emperors' claims to unprecedented levels of divine support also impelled them to claim successful world conquest, lest the very ideological foundations of their regimes be called into question.
