“Yama: In Indian mythology, the lord of death. The Vedas describe him as the first man who died. The son of the son god Surya, he presides over the resting place of the dead. In the Vedas, he was a cheerful king of departed ancestors, but in later mythology he became known as the just judge who punished the deceased for their sins.”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
“Kamo no Chomei: (1155-1216) Japanese writer. Best known for his meditative Account of My Hut (Hojoki, 1212), which vividly describes the natural and man-made disasters he witnessed in the late Heian period. Chomei was also a prominent poet and theorist in the literary circle of Fujiwara Teika (Sadaie, 1162-1241) and principal compiler of the New Collection of Ancient and Modern Times (Shokinshu, c 1205). His Anonymous Notes (Mumyosho, 1209-10) includes the best definition of the elusive aesthetic ideal of Yugen (“mystery and depth), important in the poetry of his day but also in the later Noh theater. The Kamo family were hereditary Shinto priests at the famous Kyoto shrines of that name, but in 1204, Chomei became a Tendai Buddhist monk and adopted the life of a literary recluse. His last work is a collection of anecdotes (Setsuwa) called the Collection of Religious Awakenings (Hosshinshu c 1241).”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“Since the Islamic suppression of Zoroastrianism in its homeland of Iran, just nine temples were left to maintain the Atash Behram—the Fire of Victory that must be continuously tended. The Atash Behram is the third and highest grade of fire, above the Atash Dadgah and the Atash Adaran, and can only be created by merging sixteen different sources of fire (including that incubated by a lightning bolt) in a long ceremony that requires the participation of thirty-two priests. Eight of the nine altars are now located in India, though one remains in the Iranian homeland, at Yazd, where it was inaugurated by a Sassanian Shah in 470 AD.
The symbolism of the number 9 embedded in the number of Atash Behram evolved over the last couple of hundred years but seems well established. The number is also manifest in the nine priestly families of Sanjan who collectively form a high priesthood, as well as the Zoroastrian belief in the ninth day of the ninth month as propitious.”
Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.
“Akbar: (1542-1605) Generally considered the greatest of the Muslim emperors of India, of the Mogul Empire. Akbar unified vast areas of the subcontinent, introduced a variety of administrative and social reforms, and eventually declared a state religion, the Din Illahi (Divine Faith), which focused on himself personally. He was highly praised in historical literature, even by the Hindus, for the active propagation of communal harmony.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
[Remark, ca. 1946] “It is better to sniff the French dung for a while than eat China’s all our lives.”
Ho Chi Minh, Quoted in Jean Lacouture, Ho Chi Minh: A Political Biography (1968) (translation by Peter Wiles)
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
“Ashrama: The Sanskrit name for the four stages of life in Hinduism: (1) brahmacharin, the austere life of a student of sacred lore; (2) grhasthya, the life of a householder with wife and family; 93) vanaprastha, the life of a hermit, involving increasing separation from worldly affairs after birth of grandchildren; (4) sannyasin, the life of homeless wanderer, with all earthly ties broken. Combined with varna (‘caste’) and dharma, ashrama is integral to the basic Hindu doctrine of varnashramadharma, or sacred duty appropriate to one’s rank and stage of life.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
For the first day of the observation of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month 2021 at Mark’s Text Terminal, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Indira Gandhi. This blog will feature materials related to Asian culture, geography, politics, and personalities for the entire month of May.
By any measure, Americans of Asian Pacific descent have experienced a difficult year. At the beginning of 2020, on January 23 to be exact, the Museum of Chinese in America suffered a fire in its building at 70 Mulberry Street in Chinatown in Lower Manhattan. Fortunately, the original estimates of the devastation proved to be overestimated, and the Museum is on the mend. I attended a professional development day at the Museum several years ago. It was one of the best of such things, a twice-yearly obligation of employees of the New York City Department of Education, that I had the good fortune to encounter. Godspeed to the good people at MOCA in restoring the museum to its original state.
Unless you live in a cave, you are no doubt aware of the rising anti-Asian bigotry in the United States. This has prompted a long overdue public discourse on racism towards Asian-Americans. I particularly appreciate the inimitable Ronny Chieng’s takedown, from way back in 2016 but which has lately been trending on YouTube, of Fox News bro Jesse Watters, who visited Chinatown in that year to “report” for the execrable Bill O’Reilly show. The work of Asian feminists who are speaking frankly about the cultural and political history of fetishizing Asian women, another long overdue discussion, arrives at a propitious moment; maybe these thinkers will forge change in this area of our public life. I’d like to think that making an understanding of the term “Orientalist tropes” de rigueur for high school students before they graduate from our secondary institutions might take us some distance toward recognizing this problem in our society.
I lay the blame for much of the rising anti-Asian violence on the last president of the United States, a man who wore his bigotry on his sleeve throughout the benighted four years he malingered in the White House. Calling a virus–and the last time I talked with my friends in the academic and professional genomics community about this, they assured me that viruses, unlike humans, have no ethnicity–the “Kung Flu” is an obvious slur, intended, it appears, to bait the kind of bigots who immediately began parroting it. Likewise, COVID, caused by a coronavirus, is not a “Chinese Virus,” though that particular lie and slur has contributed to violence against Americans of Asian descent. The president bought himself a mendacious Barbie doll who stepped up to defend him and his trashy mouth. Even NBC News, not exactly an institution of the woke left, spoke up on the president’s appalling rhetoric.
Man, I am glad he is gone. I’ll stipulate that anti-Asian racism has a long and sordid history in the United States, from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the World War II internment of the Nisei, to our current ugly moment. But for a president to rile up his or her followers with racist slurs? Well, if you can defend that, I’d like to hear why. Actually, on second thought, never mind. Everyday life offers up a smorgasbord of degrading ignorance and stupidity; I don’t need to go looking for it.
Finally, my sympathies–which I understand is more or less useless–to Americans of Asian descent everywhere. And my deepest condolences to the friends and families to the victims of the Atlanta Massacre. The perpetrator, by the way, was a professing Christian (how that works escapes me) who I don’t doubt for a minute was motivated by the racist, anti-Asian rhetoric that is clearly au courant in the United States.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“What does the title of Boccaccio’s The Decameron (1350-52) mean? It means “ten days” and refers to the number of days the narrators spend telling stories. One hundred stories are told by seven women and three men during the Black Death of 1348.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
“Modernism: The philosophy of modern art. Nineteenth-century industrialization resulted in societal changes which radically altered institutions of patronage for artists. With the rise of museums and an expanding commercial art market, artists were freer to experiment with modes of expression. Art for Art’s Sake was the common credo as this avant-garde determined their own content, form, and medium. Movements and styles abounded, including: Cubism, Constructivism, Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Minimalism. Modernist art criticism was centered on significant form. Painting (especially Abstract Expressionism) was thought to progress toward purity in its refinement of color and flatness. The deconstructive critique of such formalist emphasis exposed the ‘impurity’ of meaning, that is, the possibility of multiple interpretations and a relativization of value judgements. This decentering expanded the theoretical and artistic modes of basic importance to Postmodernism. See International Style.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
“We live in a time of such rapid change and growth of knowledge that only who is in a fundamental sense a scholar—that is, a person who continues to learn and inquire—can hope to keep pace, let alone play the role of guide.”
Nathan M. Pusey, The Age of the Scholar (1963)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
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