Blogging will be intermittent for the next two weeks.  My wife and daughter and I are going on a two week tour of China.  It should be fun.  For me, it will take me back to Beijing and Xian and Guilin and Shanghai, places I have not been for over ten years (my more recent trips across the Pacific have taken me to Hong Kong and Guangzhou and Taiwan).  For my wife, it will be her first time back since 1989, when we lived and worked in Nanjing.  For my daughter, it will be her very first time to China and I look forward to taking her around some of the great sites as well as some of the back alleys.

    The trip is a group tour, arranged by the Williams Alumni Association.  My job is to give a few lectures on various topics and be generally available to discuss whatever questions might arise among the group.  It will be a great way to get to know an earlier generation of Williams people.

    The high point of the trip will be Dunhuang, site of the great Mogao caves, carved into sheer rock cliffs and containing some of the most wonderful Buddhist statuary and paintings in the world.  The oldest printed book in the world was discovered there, along with many other significant Chinese texts (i.e. very early texts of the Tao Te Ching, the Analects, and other classics).  And Dunhuang’s location, in western Gansu, will give us a socio-political perspective far from the central capitals of Beijing and Xian.  I look forward to it, and will post pictures when I return.

     As for blogging, what I will do today (to the extent that I can find time from packing chores) will be to arrange for short passages from the classics to appear every so often over the next two weeks.  If I can post from China (I think I will not be able to, since Typepad is generally blocked there), I will.  But regular blogging may not resume until about the 24th. 

   Here is a saying from the Tao Te Ching (47) on how travel is not really necessary to apprehend Tao – a passage I have never fully agree with:

You can know all beneath heaven
though you never step out the door,
and you can see the Way of heaven
though you never look out the window.

The further you explore, the less you know.

So it is that the sage knows by going nowhere,
names by seeing nothing,
perfects by doing nothing.

 So, I guess that, by going, I am showing that I am not really a sage.  But that’s OK.  I’ll go anyway….