Planetarity with Chinese characteristics & an Indian twist.
Confucian Asia — Japan first, then South Korea and Taiwan, then China, with Singapore and Hong Kong as instructive cousins — has produced a form of modern existence that we keep describing in borrowed terms. We club Meiji with Hiroshima and then with the American security umbrella. We file China under the communist revolution and its aftermath. That carving up worked while we all lived inside the Liberal International Order and it works badly now that we don't. The intent was to read the period from Meiji onward as though it had its own logic, its own drivers, its own principles.
The title came from Wu Cheng'en. Journey to the West is a fictionalised account of Xuanzang's pilgrimage from China to India. It is not accurate about that pilgrimage and it catches its essence completely. So it was time for the Monkey to go the other way.
I'll be happy with the Gobi Manchurian version of China's intellectual history.The Monkey Goes East, January 2026
Sellars says philosophy aims to understand how things in the broadest possible sense hang together in the broadest possible sense. That yields doctrines, theories, systems. Philosophy also travels as mood, and for two hundred years that is how non-Western traditions have reached the modern world: as a way of life, a spiritual supplement, matter for them and spirit for us. Both sides took the deal. The professors rebelled and did penance in rigor, and rigor has the stench of rigor mortis.
Meanwhile the atmosphere went everywhere without asking anyone's permission. Which small town in New England or California doesn't have a yoga studio? An iPhone is an object congealed out of that air.
For traditions that don't have a clear historical connection to the modern world, it's better to evoke them as a mood or an atmosphere than as defensible theory.The working hypothesis
So the reading here is an artist's reading. Joyce on Homer, or Nolan bringing Homer to a screen, rather than Emily Wilson translating him. Which is not a licence to make things up. Joyce was not accountable to Homeric philology but he was ferociously accountable to the atmosphere of the Odyssey, and a mood can be gotten wrong. Someone who lives inside it feels the wrongness immediately, even without being able to point to the line where you went off.
China may not be the master key to understanding Planetarity, but it is an essential key, and Sinosophy is the atmospheric counterpart to the analytic investigation of Habitability.
A drop in the Confucian ocean, and these are the big names. At some point the superstars run out and the lesser-known figures start.
Notes between the essays. Qi means steam, breath, air and weather before it means vital energy, so the short form takes the literal sense.
Feng shui is a tacit two thousand year old pattern language. Alexander's Timeless Way of Building shows its Chinese sources, which makes the parallel a genealogy rather than a coincidence.
One passage, taken up more than once. The dates matter: what changes between takes is the record of a mood settling, or failing to.
Emperor Wu of Liang asked the great master Bodhidharma, "What is the highest meaning of the holy truths?" Bodhidharma said, "Empty, without holiness." The Emperor said, "Who is facing me?" Bodhidharma replied, "I don't know." Blue Cliff Record, case 1
Whether the Emperor is asking a question or making a claim, and whether "I don't know" is a refusal or an answer.
Long, researched, and slower than the weather. Each one is published and mailed at Ranganaut; these are the reading copies.