Podcasts about confucians

An interview on the contrasting views of Mohists and Confucians on ethical duties and warfare.

Disagreements between the Mohists and the Confucians: is seeking benefits the right way to approach life? What motivates us to act morally, care for our loved ones or a doctrine of impartiality?

The story of Mulan might be the best known piece of Chinese folklore. In China the story has been around for over 1500 years and has inspired dozens of poems, songs, plays, and films. Thanks to Disney, Mulan has become an international icon. The story of a young girl disguising herself as a male soldier to save her father from the military draft has proved to be surprisingly sturdy. However, many in China have complained that western adaptations of the tale misunderstand the source material. Some wonder if western creators are capable of capturing the "real" Mulan. This raises the question: is there a real Mulan? Is one version of this story more authoritative than another? Was there a real person who inspired this legend? Tune-in and find out how teenage siege-breakers, army buddies, and flexible Confucians all play a role in the story.

Morality is what makes us humans, for the Confucians. But does morality come from inside us, outside us, or both?

Several ancient Chinese texts speak of an egoist and hedonist known as Yang Zhu: did he pose a coherent challenge to the Confucians and other ethicists?

Early Chinese philosophers were deeply aware of a world that is constantly changing: we look at how Confucians, Legalists, and Daoists responded to this challenge.

The invention of an easily learned Korean alphabet in the mid-fifteenth century sparked an "epistolary revolution" in the following century as letter writing became an indispensable daily practice for elite men and women alike. The amount of correspondence increased exponentially as new epistolary networks were built among scholars and within families, and written culture created room for appropriation and subversion by those who joined epistolary practices. Focusing on the ways that written culture interacts with philosophical, social, and political changes, The Power of the Brush: Epistolary Practices in Chosŏn Korea (U Washington Press, 2020) examines the social effects of these changes and adds a Korean perspective to the evolving international discourse on the materiality of texts. It demonstrates how innovative uses of letters and the appropriation of letter-writing practices empowered elite cultural, social, and political minority groups: Confucians who did not have access to the advanced scholarship of China; women who were excluded from the male-dominated literary culture, which used Chinese script; and provincial literati, who were marginalized from court politics. New modes of reading and writing that were developed in letter writing precipitated changes in scholarly methodology, social interactions, and political mobilization. Even today, remnants of these traditional epistolary practices endure in media and political culture, reverberating in new communications technologies. The Power of the Brush is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) and the generous support of Emory University and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a Research Assistant Professor at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. She can be reached at sarahbr@hku.hk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

The invention of an easily learned Korean alphabet in the mid-fifteenth century sparked an "epistolary revolution" in the following century as letter writing became an indispensable daily practice for elite men and women alike. The amount of correspondence increased exponentially as new epistolary networks were built among scholars and within families, and written culture created room for appropriation and subversion by those who joined epistolary practices. Focusing on the ways that written culture interacts with philosophical, social, and political changes, The Power of the Brush: Epistolary Practices in Chosŏn Korea (U Washington Press, 2020) examines the social effects of these changes and adds a Korean perspective to the evolving international discourse on the materiality of texts. It demonstrates how innovative uses of letters and the appropriation of letter-writing practices empowered elite cultural, social, and political minority groups: Confucians who did not have access to the advanced scholarship of China; women who were excluded from the male-dominated literary culture, which used Chinese script; and provincial literati, who were marginalized from court politics. New modes of reading and writing that were developed in letter writing precipitated changes in scholarly methodology, social interactions, and political mobilization. Even today, remnants of these traditional epistolary practices endure in media and political culture, reverberating in new communications technologies. The Power of the Brush is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) and the generous support of Emory University and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a Research Assistant Professor at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. She can be reached at sarahbr@hku.hk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The invention of an easily learned Korean alphabet in the mid-fifteenth century sparked an "epistolary revolution" in the following century as letter writing became an indispensable daily practice for elite men and women alike. The amount of correspondence increased exponentially as new epistolary networks were built among scholars and within families, and written culture created room for appropriation and subversion by those who joined epistolary practices. Focusing on the ways that written culture interacts with philosophical, social, and political changes, The Power of the Brush: Epistolary Practices in Chosŏn Korea (U Washington Press, 2020) examines the social effects of these changes and adds a Korean perspective to the evolving international discourse on the materiality of texts. It demonstrates how innovative uses of letters and the appropriation of letter-writing practices empowered elite cultural, social, and political minority groups: Confucians who did not have access to the advanced scholarship of China; women who were excluded from the male-dominated literary culture, which used Chinese script; and provincial literati, who were marginalized from court politics. New modes of reading and writing that were developed in letter writing precipitated changes in scholarly methodology, social interactions, and political mobilization. Even today, remnants of these traditional epistolary practices endure in media and political culture, reverberating in new communications technologies. The Power of the Brush is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) and the generous support of Emory University and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a Research Assistant Professor at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. She can be reached at sarahbr@hku.hk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The invention of an easily learned Korean alphabet in the mid-fifteenth century sparked an "epistolary revolution" in the following century as letter writing became an indispensable daily practice for elite men and women alike. The amount of correspondence increased exponentially as new epistolary networks were built among scholars and within families, and written culture created room for appropriation and subversion by those who joined epistolary practices. Focusing on the ways that written culture interacts with philosophical, social, and political changes, The Power of the Brush: Epistolary Practices in Chosŏn Korea (U Washington Press, 2020) examines the social effects of these changes and adds a Korean perspective to the evolving international discourse on the materiality of texts. It demonstrates how innovative uses of letters and the appropriation of letter-writing practices empowered elite cultural, social, and political minority groups: Confucians who did not have access to the advanced scholarship of China; women who were excluded from the male-dominated literary culture, which used Chinese script; and provincial literati, who were marginalized from court politics. New modes of reading and writing that were developed in letter writing precipitated changes in scholarly methodology, social interactions, and political mobilization. Even today, remnants of these traditional epistolary practices endure in media and political culture, reverberating in new communications technologies. The Power of the Brush is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) and the generous support of Emory University and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a Research Assistant Professor at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. She can be reached at sarahbr@hku.hk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The invention of an easily learned Korean alphabet in the mid-fifteenth century sparked an "epistolary revolution" in the following century as letter writing became an indispensable daily practice for elite men and women alike. The amount of correspondence increased exponentially as new epistolary networks were built among scholars and within families, and written culture created room for appropriation and subversion by those who joined epistolary practices. Focusing on the ways that written culture interacts with philosophical, social, and political changes, The Power of the Brush: Epistolary Practices in Chosŏn Korea (U Washington Press, 2020) examines the social effects of these changes and adds a Korean perspective to the evolving international discourse on the materiality of texts. It demonstrates how innovative uses of letters and the appropriation of letter-writing practices empowered elite cultural, social, and political minority groups: Confucians who did not have access to the advanced scholarship of China; women who were excluded from the male-dominated literary culture, which used Chinese script; and provincial literati, who were marginalized from court politics. New modes of reading and writing that were developed in letter writing precipitated changes in scholarly methodology, social interactions, and political mobilization. Even today, remnants of these traditional epistolary practices endure in media and political culture, reverberating in new communications technologies. The Power of the Brush is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) and the generous support of Emory University and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a Research Assistant Professor at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. She can be reached at sarahbr@hku.hk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

The invention of an easily learned Korean alphabet in the mid-fifteenth century sparked an "epistolary revolution" in the following century as letter writing became an indispensable daily practice for elite men and women alike. The amount of correspondence increased exponentially as new epistolary networks were built among scholars and within families, and written culture created room for appropriation and subversion by those who joined epistolary practices. Focusing on the ways that written culture interacts with philosophical, social, and political changes, The Power of the Brush: Epistolary Practices in Chosŏn Korea (U Washington Press, 2020) examines the social effects of these changes and adds a Korean perspective to the evolving international discourse on the materiality of texts. It demonstrates how innovative uses of letters and the appropriation of letter-writing practices empowered elite cultural, social, and political minority groups: Confucians who did not have access to the advanced scholarship of China; women who were excluded from the male-dominated literary culture, which used Chinese script; and provincial literati, who were marginalized from court politics. New modes of reading and writing that were developed in letter writing precipitated changes in scholarly methodology, social interactions, and political mobilization. Even today, remnants of these traditional epistolary practices endure in media and political culture, reverberating in new communications technologies. The Power of the Brush is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) and the generous support of Emory University and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a Research Assistant Professor at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. She can be reached at sarahbr@hku.hk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/korean-studies

It's Tuesday, January 24th, A.D. 2023. This The Worldview in 5 Minutes heard at www.TheWorldview.com.  I'm Adam McManus. (Adam@TheWorldview.com) By Kevin Swanson Former homosexual faces prison over Christian testimony A Christian man in Malta, an island near Sicily, faces five months in prison and/or a $5,000-euro fine for giving his testimony on PMNews Malta last April, reports Fox News. Matthew Grech told the news outlet he had become a Christian and turned away from the homosexual lifestyle. This may be the first case of this form of Christian persecution in the Western world.   For the record, this is what Matthew said on the broadcast. “In the Bible, homosexuality is not an identity as we make it nowadays. And neither is it a feeling, but a practice. This means that no matter what sexual feelings a man or a woman is experiencing, if they have sexual relations with a person of the same sex, they commit the homosexual act in God's eyes, and that is a sin. Just like every other sin, one can repent from it and ask God for forgiveness and ask Him for strength to overcome.” Malta became the first nation in the European Union to ban conversion “therapy” for homosexuals in 2016.   ChristianConcern.com notes that the homosexual lobby in Malta has an end goal in mind. It's “aggressive campaigning is aimed at criminalizing Christian beliefs on human sexuality and silencing any opposition.” Muslims killed 14 Christians, wounded 63, during Congo baptism More Christian martyrdoms in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa where Muslim extremists are suspected of bombing a Church of Christ baptismal service, reports Morning Star News. At least 14 died and 63 more were wounded in the blast in Kasindi. A church elder reported that two men entered the church building and left a bag, which contained an improvised explosive device that soon detonated. Discrimination against churches in Indonesia Indonesian churches are increasingly finding it hard to find places to worship in the 86% Muslim- majority nation, reports Morning Star News.   A church in North Sumatra was kicked out of the mall where they worshiped, and prohibited from worshiping outdoors near the Medan City Hall.    Ironically enough, International Christian Concern documented that Indonesian President Joko Widodo recently addressed the National Coordination Meeting of Regional Head. He said “those who are Christians, Catholics, Hindus, and Confucians have the same rights in worship and freedom of religion.”    Biden applauds abortion on 50th Roe v. Wade anniversary The president of the United States took the opportunity to issue an official proclamation on the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade to commemorate the record of abortions.  Not only did President Biden call on the Congress to pass legislation to encode abortion as ”the law of the land,” but he committed to use “Executive Power” to enforce abortion in the U.S. He also commended the American voters for approving “the right to choose” in recent elections, including Kansas, California, and Michigan.  Surgical abortions, abortifacients, the IUD, Day After Pill, and the Kill Pill Over 65 million children have been murdered by abortion in the United State since 1973 -- up through 2022, reports the American Life League.   Unknown millions of other children have been killed by abortifacients, the IUD, the day after pill, and the undocumented use of Mifeprestone (the Kill Pill). Psalm 106:36-40 warns of this. “They even sacrificed their sons and their daughters to demons, and shed innocent blood, the blood of their sons and daughters, whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan; and the land was polluted with blood. … Therefore, the wrath of the Lord was kindled.”  Russian leader: U.S. involvement in war with Ukraine dangerous More saber-rattling from Russia. Dmitry Medvedev, the nation's deputy chairman of the security council (and former President), threatened that, "The world has come close to the threat of World War III due to impending U.S. aggression against the Russian Federation,” reports Sky News Arabia. Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, told a South African audience over the weekend that the war is shifting from a proxy war (on the part of the European Allies) to “almost a real one” with Europe and America. Lab-grown meat coming soon Lab grown meat is soon to be on the market in the United States as early as this year, reports Reuters. Singapore has been selling the fake meat since 2021. Scientists have taken a few cells from real meat, and submitted the cells to intense anabolic growth hormones. A company called UPSIDE has the capacity of an annual production of 400,000 pounds of what they call “cultivated meat.” Home sales have dropped 44% Let us not forget that “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils.” (1 Timothy 6:10) Home sales are tanking in the U.S. — and its worse in the West. Sales have dropped 44% in the Western states. Median prices are off 11.3% from their peak last June, almost entirely reversing year-on-year increases.   The worst decrease was seen in the San Francisco Bay Area — thus far, a 33% decrease in price from its April 2022 peak. 57,000 layoffs in tech firms this month And finally, so far in January, almost 57,000 layoffs have been announced for the tech industry, reports Business Insider.   That's in addition to 159,000 layoffs last year. The states claiming the highest percentage of tech jobs are Washington State, Virginia, and Colorado. Close And that's The Worldview in 5 Minutes on this Tuesday, January 24th, in the year of our Lord 2023. Subscribe by iTunes or email to our unique Christian newscast at www.TheWorldview.com. Or get the Generations app through Google Play or The App Store. I'm Adam McManus (Adam@TheWorldview.com). Seize the day for Jesus Christ.

What different views on human nature inform ethical theory in the Confucian tradition? What kinds of rituals do Confucians think we need to engage in to achieve flourishing lives or high levels of well-being? What kinds of rituals today might be inhibiting our flourishing and moral growth? -- a Discussion with Richard Kim about his book Confucianism and the Philosophy of Well-being.

In the middle to late part of the Yuan Dynasty the former Confucian ruling class came back with a vengence and started a downward spiral that would ultimately lead to the fall of the dynasty. In this episode we examine how and why this happened, which will set the context for the important events at the end of the dynasty in the next episode.

It's time again for our guiding seasonal podcast with Tahnee and Mason, where they tune into the energetics, undertones, and wisdom of the season within Daoism. With 30 days of Jing in full swing, and people easing back off stimulants, this episode couldn't have landed at a better time. In Daoism, the season of Winter is associated with the element of water and the wonderful Kidneys. The Kidneys are the bedrock of our yin/yang energy, a storehouse for our Jing, and govern the regulation of fluids in our body. Of all the seasons, Winter is the most Yin. The beauty to be found in this season comes from allowing space for introspection, reflection, restoration, and the inner alchemy of the kidneys, transforming fear into wisdom. As with all the seasons we move through, Tahnee and Mason translate a fluent foundation of what embodying this season looks like; The warming foods to eat, herbs to have on hand, and practices that best support us, both in this season and in this point in time collectively. Dress for the elements, protect your Qi with layers and woolies, observe Mother Nature; And as the sun sets early and rises late, so should we flow with her motion and allow our bodies to rest, and consolidate our essence into Jing. Tune in~     "I can feel the depth of that Kidney energy and the untapped potential within it. That's where the Jing lives, in the Kidneys. But when it comes down to fear, it's the wisest organ because it's the most practical".  -Mason Taylor   Mase and Tahnee discuss:   The energetics of Winter. Why rest is crucial in Winter. Herbs and foods for Winter. Observing fear-kidney related. Transforming fear into wisdom. Balancing Yin and Yang energy. The esoteric nature of the Kidneys. The Water element and the Kidneys. What menstruation blood says about our Jing essence. Practices and meditations to support us through Winter.   Tahnee and Mason Taylor Tahnee and Mason Taylor are the CEO and founder of SuperFeast (respectively). Their mission with SuperFeast is to improve the health, healing, and happiness of people and the planet, through sharing carefully curated offerings and practices that honour ancient wisdom and elevate the human spirit. Together Tahnee and Mason run their company and host the SuperFeast podcast, weaving their combined experience in herbs, yoga, wellness, Taoist healing arts, and personal development with lucid and compelling interviews from all around the world. They are the proud parents of Aiya and Goji, the dog, and are grateful to call the Byron Shire home.   Tahnee Taylor Tahnee Taylor is the CEO of SuperFeast and has been exploring health and human consciousness since her late teens. From Yoga, which she first practiced at school in 2000, to reiki, herbs, meditation, Taoist and Tantric practices, and human physiology, her journey has taken her all over. This journey continues to expand her understanding and insight into the majesty (that is) the human body and the human experience. Tahnee graduated with a Journalism major and did a stint in non-fiction publishing (working with health and wellness authors and other inspiring creatives), advertising, many jobs in cafes, and eventually found herself as a Yoga teacher. Her first studio, Yoga for All, opened in 2013, and Tahnee continues to study Yoga with her teachers Paul + Suzee Grilley and Rod Stryker. She learned Chi Nei Tsang and Taoist healing practices from Master Mantak Chia. Tahnee continues to study herbalism and Taoist practices, the human body, women's wisdom, ancient healing systems, and is currently enrolled in an acupuncture degree and year-long program with The Shamanic School of Womancraft. Tahnee is the mother of one, a 4-year old named Aiya.   MasonTaylor Mason Taylor is the founder of SuperFeast. Mason was first exposed to the ideas of potentiating the human experience through his mum Janesse (who was a big inspiration for founding SuperFeast and is still an inspiration to Mason and his team due to her ongoing resilience in the face of disability). After traveling South America for a year, Mason found himself struggling with his health - he was worn out, carried fungal infections, and was only 22. He realised that he had the power to take control of his health. Mason redirected his attention from his business degree and night work in a bar to begin what was to become more than a decade of health research, courses, education, and mentorship from some of the leaders in personal development, wellness, and tonic herbalism. Inspired by the own changes to his health and wellbeing through his journey (which also included Yoga teacher training and raw foodism!), he started SuperFeast in 2010. Initially offering a selection of superfoods, herbs, and supplements to support detox, immune function, and general wellbeing. Mason offered education programs around Australia, and it was on one of these trips that he met Tahnee, who is now his wife and CEO of SuperFeast. Mason also offered detox and health transformation retreats in the Byron hinterland (some of which Tahnee also worked on, teaching Yoga and workshops on Taoist healing practices, as well as offering Chi Nei Tsang treatments to participants). After falling in love with the Byron Shire, Mason moved SuperFeast from Sydney's Northern Beaches to Byron Bay in 2015. He lived on a majestic permaculture farm in the Byron hinterland, and after not too long, Tahnee joined him (and their daughter, Aiya was conceived). The rest is history - from a friend's rented garage to a warehouse in the Byron Industrial Estate to SuperFeast's current home in Mullumbimby's beautiful Food Hub, SuperFeast (and Mason) has thrived in the conscious community of the Northern Rivers. Mason continues to evolve his role at SuperFeast, in education, sourcing, training, and creating the formulas based on Taoist principles of tonic herbalism.   CLICK HERE TO LISTEN ON APPLE PODCAST    Resources: Jing Tonic Chaga Deer Antler 30 days of Jing Sleep-Our Top 10 Tips Yoga Nidra    Q: How Can I Support The SuperFeast Podcast?   A: Tell all your friends and family and share online! We'd also love it if you could subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes. Or  check us out on Stitcher :)! Plus  we're on Spotify!   Check Out The Transcript Here:   Mason: (00:00) Hello, everybody.   Tahnee: (00:01) Hi, everyone.   Mason: (00:02) It's wintertime.   Tahnee: (00:03) Brr.   Mason: (00:03) Ready to jam about the water season.   Tahnee: (00:07) So excited.   Mason: (00:08) Are you?   Tahnee: (00:09) Always.   Mason: (00:11) Excited about winter? That's a transformation now.   Tahnee: (00:13) I like winter. I know it is. I'm from far North Queensland so I don't like winter historically but I have grown to love winter and I think the kidneys are my favourite organ system to talk about if one can have a favourite.   Mason: (00:29) Yeah. My favourite child's Aiya.   Tahnee: (00:31) You only have one child.   Mason: (00:32) Yeah. That's true. You only have five organ systems. Yeah. I definitely feel you. Do you just want to jump straight in and let us know why you love talking about it so much?   Tahnee: (00:43) Sure. Being interviewed on my own podcast. Our podcast.   Mason: (00:48) Yeah. It's still just my picture on the ... No, we're rebranding because that was from a long time ago.   Tahnee: (00:55) I hijacked it. Yeah. Why do I like the kidneys? So I think I like it on an esoteric level because it's all about the karmic blueprint of the organism as it comes in. But on a more practical level, I think the kidney's governed regulation of the fluids in our body and our on a Western lens that hormonal axis of relationship and I've just come to really appreciate how important it is to nurture that system. One thing I'm really conscious of is how esoteric we go on this podcast so I want to try and keep it practical for a little bit at least. I think when we talk about kidneys we're really talking about the ability of the body to be in integrity and to have integrity through the joint systems, through the organ structures as well. So the spleen's really responsible for the meatiness and the integrity of the muscles and their ability to be harmonious and responsive and full of blood and all those things.   Tahnee: (02:02) But the kidneys provide this consolidation and lifting and holding energy so when we talk about things like prolapse or joint issues we really see that as a kidney problem. I'm someone who has had a lot of bad stuff a couple of times in my life and I've really come to appreciate how much working with the kidney meridian has benefited that. On a psycho-emotional level, I really like how it speaks to transforming fear into wisdom which I think it's really difficult but I think it's a really worthwhile thing. When you look at the things in your life that really scare you whether it's death or financial like lack of finances or all of those primal... Yeah. Even your sexuality a lot of people have a lot of fear of sexuality. These are all really deeply connected to the kidney story.   Tahnee: (02:55) If you look at the chakra system as well it's connected to that second chakra and also to the base chakra with the adrenal glands so it's really around all of those foundations of our human existence which is somewhere to live, someone to love us, enough money in the bank to survive, purpose and meaning in our lives. Using the journey of life to become wise. So a running joke in our house that I'm going to be really cool when I'm 60 but I think about instead of being I'll have to achieve something about when I'm 20 or 30 or whatever it's like take the long view and look at life as this opportunity to grow and develop and become wise, become... I guess let life shape you a little bit and that really aligns for me with the kidney essence because you think about what water does, it corrodes through rock to form these beautiful gorges and rivers.   Tahnee: (03:48) If you've ever been in a plane flying over the earth and you see a river meandering through a desert or through a forest it's such a beautiful metaphor I think for life. Because it's not like a straight line to the sea. It twists and turns and bends and that's literally what kidney energy points to. Remember that water finds a way no matter what. There's always a path to the sea and we're meandering through life following the flow of life. So it points very much the Dao to me and I guess especially as I get older I'm really feeling into that new way, effortless effort, that sort of grace that comes through trusting in life. I think the kidney really invites that in. That was a long answer to your question.   Mason: (04:37) Yeah. I'm just interested. I'm always interested to see what you bring up in the beginning because that sets me off. The fee one sets me off. We've talked about journaling as a practise in autumn-   Tahnee: (04:49) It's good for all seasons.   Mason: (04:51) It's good for all seasons. I find at the moment I like the confrontation around fear. I like the awareness and the appreciation and gratitude for fear as a feeling because naturally if everyone just goes in you can feel how much that fear has kept you alive. It's kept you safe. It's kept you... Maybe at times, you've gone to a Tony Robbins conference and he's told you to explode beyond your fear and you've gone out and done something exceptional. It's really great to have that heart energy all the time but if anyone who owns a business or who has their own whatever, just has a job if you constantly explode outside of what your body is telling you is reasonable like 100% of the time eventually you burn out. There's a little bit of reasonableness around some of the fears that you have.   Tahnee: (05:41) Yeah. Well, I just want to jump in because you said courage which is really one of those values of the heart and the lungs. The upper dantian organ systems and again to get a little bit esoteric but if you're constantly draining the kidney essence before its really cultivated and naturally bubbling up-   Mason: (06:02) What's that process?   Tahnee: (06:04) Well, this is inner alchemy so this would be Neigong practise which is probably a little bit out there for the podcast but it's the cultivation practises. So if you're working with the water wheels in the body which are basically like energy currents in the body you're starting to consolidate your essence into jing. You're using chi drawn from the earth so that on the very base of the foot you can't see me I'm touching my hand as if it were afoot but if you go from your middle toes to the little divot underneath the pad of your foot just before the arch of your foot there's a kidney point called the bubbling spring. In QiGong when you place your feet on the earth after a certain amount of practise in the Wu Chi stance a way of leaning forward into the balls of the feet really resting them on the earth and connecting to the earth.   Tahnee: (06:55) You start to feel almost as if bubbles or water bubbles are pressing up against the sole of the foot and it's called the bubbling spring point literally because you can feel the chi of the earth drawing up into the body through this point. A lot of the practises that I've learned through the Daoist arts are really around drawing earth chi up and into the body because that grounds us and it balances and it harmonises us and it reminds us of where we come from which is the earth so we're safe. We're safe here. We're not not here for a reason kind of thing. It gives us that grounding and connection. It's also very healing because earth chi is really healing for us especially those of us in device land all the time getting back to the earth is really important.   Tahnee: (07:41) Then that chi we can draw that into the body and we can use that in the initial stages it's to clear tension and a lot of the stuff Benny does, Benny Fergusson the Movement Monk. His work is around this. It's releasing the superficial stages of tension which is built up through emotional suppression and life. Then as we clear that we start to get into cultivation so that's when we're storing energy instead of spending energy so most of us the moment we get an inch we take a mile and I'm talking about myself as well here. I always start to get enough rest we start to get a good diet. We start to get on the herbs, we start to do the practises, we start to feel really good so then we go and push ourselves really hard and do something crazy. So we haven't reached the stable place where we're actually really grounded and that's what you're talking to. You've got one course and suddenly you're inspired to take on the world but you don't have any foundations to actually tackle it.   Mason: (08:40) Yeah. I think it's all done without a real appreciation and gratitude of that fear. Everyone's like feel the fear and do it anyway. I like to feel the fear and now I do. I think I've burnt myself out quite a lot with that personal development. Hardcore hostile entrepreneurial scene and now talking about the journaling I do it sometimes, I journal. I'll even counterintuitively do it on my phone if it strikes me but the whole reason I like winter as well. I like this kidney energy at all times of life as well as I start to get hopefully a little bit wiser and I'm not just going go, go, go at all times of the day. I'm appreciating that once you get to three to five o'clock in the organ wheel you can move into bladder time. Then five to seven you're moving into the kidney time and you can gauge how well you're able to adjust to a convalescence accumulating yin energy.   Mason: (09:35) I bring this up just because it's a really nice gauge for everyone going forth to know well, am I enjoying this wintertime? What does it actually mean? It's like that time of day when you're winding down how successfully can you do it? How successfully can you go into the blackness of night and the blackness of sleep? It's definitely been a big struggle for me over the years and that's why I'm really with you. I can feel just the depth of that kidney energy, just the untapped potential and that's what the jing lives in the kidneys and that's our potential. But when it comes down to fear it's the wisest organ because it's the most practical. It's like if you're going for that walk, I went for a walk with Benny actually the other day and we were walking pretty close to a cliff and there was a big drop-off. I felt the fear and I felt that part of me judged that fear just being like come on then. Just get closer, you're fine. You can trust yourself. Then I was like all of a sudden that wisdom. It's wisdom. I'm-   Tahnee: (10:35) Don't be stupid.   Mason: (10:36) Yeah, don't be stupid. I was like, okay. I caught just how much my body was like it seized up even though I was in a safe position and I trusted my body and I was like okay, I can ease up here. Then in terms of going that little bit closer like my mind was telling me, no, go closer. Dance right on the edge. I was like I got really grateful for that fear right now probably I don't need to go closer to the edge now. Then from there, I get a cascade of different thoughts and different feelings. That's a very simple example but that sparked a lot of-   Tahnee: (11:07) No, it's a great example. It's ego and all these things playing off in your mind and you're able now to take... This is literally the point of spiritual practise is to step out of the bullshit on that lower level of mind. I'm going to lean into the Ayurvedic text because I think they explain this very beautifully where it's like yeah, you've got ahamkara. You've got the ego itself who's saying I want to look a certain way and be a certain way in the world and that means I can handle this challenge. Then you've got Buddhi the wise mind going, really? Watch the emotions, watch what's playing out right now. Watch... We could get into these are scars which are habits of conditioning that you've got from what does it means to be a man. It means that I challenge myself. I push myself to go to the edge and this is literally the gift of the kidney is to go all of that stuff playing out. How do I rise above that? Be still, notice what's happening and make a wise decision which is important. I think it's a really useful life skill.   Mason: (12:11) Lots of big decisions come about. There's a lot of fear right now. There's fear of people who aren't vaccinated, who are vaccinated. There's fear of never being able to travel again.   Tahnee: (12:20) Governments. I think literally we're in a time of collective base chakra blasting because the systems that people have relied on forever are coming apart and this is where it helps to have a practise that grounds you back to the earth and says we're right here right now in this moment I'm okay. Does that mean I don't take action? Of course, not. But it means that I have a touchpoint or a reminder or a place to come to that's safe within me that's not provided by something external. So when the government collapses or when the economic system falls down or when you can't travel again you're not going to freak out because you know that you're okay right here where you are. You don't need to travel to validate your existence. I think these are the things that lack in our culture at this time.   Mason: (13:09) Well, it's nice when you look down into the pools of water within you. That's why it's nice to rest because if you don't rest you don't accumulate water. If you don't have downtime you don't-   Tahnee: (13:20) You don't accumulate chi. The whole point of this stuff is if we keep going 100% all the time you're never going to a yin state which is what kidney is, it's ultimate yin. Then we age, we lose our chi, we start to degenerate and that's not of service anyway to ourselves, our families, the planet.   Mason: (13:40) We are back on the journal once more. It's just a useful thing if you've got these crippling fears about your children or what's going to happen to your parents or so on and so forth. I sit there sometimes and I go through all the hypotheticals which I don't know if anyone... It's not a common practise in our-   Tahnee: (13:59) Scenario planning.   Mason: (14:00) ...culture. Oh, exactly in business it's scenario planning and it's really scary to go through what are the absolute worst scenarios that could play out in the business. It's like it's better just to keep them there but it's not wise to. So I've been doing that just whether it's in the shower or that's why it's really nice to have that downtime again on the earth and go for a walk. I go for a walk with a mate every week and I talk about them openly all these... You can get trapped in the doomsday ness of it.   Mason: (14:29) But if the intention of the practise is to, I just want to see what's real. I want to feel into that. You're feeling into the water within yourself and that's chi within yourself. So it's got a particular formation. You want to go about perceiving and exploring that chi as it's expressing within you and you'll find the wisdom within okay, that fear, where does that go to? What's the intention? It becomes 3D, 4D, 5D. It's not just I'm scared because I want to stay alive. You can start feeling the story and the metaphor playing out around that if you play that fear out to the end. Okay. At that point, that's good fear. Really like it. Gosh grateful that we have that fear of whatever it is, social anxiety, being judged, losing all your money, never being able to travel, having forced medical stuff upon you, having people not doing medical things.   Mason: (15:14) Whatever it is, whatever your fear is it's all valid. So your experience and you just go. That's really reasonable. Ah, at this point there's a grey zone and murkiness and then you sit in that murky zone because it's not just a fear. You don't allow that fear to give... Don't have an aversion to that area and go and sink into that area. Okay. That's when you rest, you accumulate all this chi, you accumulate those deep waters and those reservoirs of water. If you don't have those you have nothing to explore and you become a shallow person. You can't get that action. You become shallow, you become externally driven, you need identities, you need dogma. Don't think because we're talking about kidneys that people need to be sick or completely tapped out on their kidneys or of their adrenals. It could be a slight dysfunction but people these days, even young people they're not honouring this process and therefore you see there's an extreme amount of people acting in shallow ways and having shallow belief systems.   Mason: (16:16) Therefore they're outside of themselves. There's no wisdom in what they're saying. They're just given a rough document of the ideology that they're following and then they go and just regurgitate that and repeat that and go and gather evidence. So that's all kidney water systems. So it's nicer to be in flow with nature and create those deep reservoirs of water and if you feel the fear then feel that murky zone and then you move towards that experience and wisdom engagement. Then what you'll see is there's a real constant opportunity for transformation and change to occur there.   Tahnee: (16:51) Yeah. I think what you spoke to there I mean it's not even on an individual level. I don't think it's an individual problem, I think it's a collective problem that we aren't... The Neijing which is where a lot of our philosophy comes from really. Which is one of the oldest pre-TCM text classical medicine texts to basically sleep until the sun rises high in the sky basically. You're supposed to sleep a lot in wintertime. I know for me we're both feeling sleepy around seven or eight o'clock at the moment and we're in bed really early at the moment.   Tahnee: (17:54) I'm sleeping until seven most mornings and I'm really feeling this deep nourishment from sleep at the moment. Obviously, we have a business and children so we still end up burning the candle but how many of us push through winter not getting that hibernation time, that deep rest of restoration in the chi and the organs. Then oh, we get sick, and then oh, we're suddenly like I'm crook all the time. It's like it's not because as a culture we keep the momentum going all year round. We don't have this time of acknowledging and even making sacred the rest and the sleep that we require. I think the Neijing they had this foundational text that was an understood part of the culture. I guess I'm making a broad assumption so maybe I'm wrong but we don't grow up with that. I grew up in the tropics where you have wet and dry seasons basically. If it's cold you wear a light jumper and that's it-   Mason: (18:48) Aussies are on. The mittens are on. The [inaudible 00:18:49] are on.   Tahnee: (18:50) But we never had any real... I remember my mum saying keep your kidneys covered but that was about as far as it went. I really was shocked when I moved to a cold climate. I had no idea. I think I'm 35. I've just learned how to layer and how to stay warm, like wearing UGG boots in my house and all these kinds of things. It's really taken me a long time to understand cold and cold invasion. These ideas in Chinese medicine that seem really foreign to us as Westerners because cold isn't something that can invade you but in Chinese medicine, it's literally it can. It's a pathogen and it enters your body. If you think about homeostatic processes, your body is trying to maintain its temperature. If it's constantly being punished by cold air and it's having to push back and try and stay warm enough that's going to drain your resources. It's going to drain your reserves. It's going to drain your chi.   Tahnee: (19:38) You're going to be more susceptible to getting sick. Now is the cold a pathogen or are you now more susceptible to viruses and bacteria? I don't know the answer to that but I would assume that it makes a lot of sense to stay rugged up against the cold to prevent your body from having to be stressed out by this thing. We live in an area where barefoot is common. You see kids running around barefoot all the time. I really make my kid wear shoes and socks with warm things on her feet in winter even though I believe that barefoot is best. It's like at some point we also have to maintain the health of the body. I think it's a really interesting... I'm not saying I have the answers but it's something I find really interesting how little respect our culture has for the elements and respecting the elements and being really conscious and mindful of cold and its effect on us as an organism. Yeah.   Tahnee: (20:34) I think also when we think about the Neijing saying we need this inner time it's very transpersonal in that collectively if we all slow down and we all turn our attention in and we spend this time in reflection and restoration and then we come back collectively. That's a really powerful shift in our culture that we've spent time in this yin state that isn't outward and isn't... I guess that's probably never going to happen but I think it's really interesting because what you're talking about with the depth of water we've all seen the movies, we've all seen Jaws and [inaudible 00:21:13] and deep water is scary. Deepwater brings up our deepest most primal fears around what's lurking underneath the surface. That's why meditation is hard for so many people. That's why being still is hard for so many people because when you stop moving you start to feel all of the things that are hidden beneath the surface that you've been moving to stay away from. So meditation to me is one of the ultimate kidney practises in terms of connecting to that inner world and connecting to the subconscious under the surface narrative that goes in all of us. I feel like the season is a really big invitation to slow down and meditate more and be less active but maybe more internal.   Mason: (21:58) Mm-hmm (affirmative). I've got a little bit of an idea I just want to explore. Hopefully, it lands but you're just triggered by the fact you were saying it's such an introspective time. So we go in and we view what is ourselves and we get really intimate with self-agency, feeling ourselves on more I would say of an infinite nature. I'm feeling our spiritual nature and closing off from the world a little bit. We close off a little bit socially. We're not as socially engaged, we're not taking input outside but it's something I just realised for myself running in spiritual circles so much. It's probably a lot around here in what we do wave as the superior is staying within. Staying yin and not going out and interacting heavily with other people and allowing your personality to form and develop. This is something that happens in the yang. It happens in springtime, it happens in summer. It happens in high activity times in business.   Mason: (23:09) I'm thinking about it because I'm thinking a lot about feedback and it's something I don't... I don't enjoy feedback. I like being a part of a team but I've got this... This is no, I'm in touch with who I am on the inside and the way that I am. I'm introspective and I don't often then go and take that and then run out into my community and allow for there to be feedback that I really take on about the way that I'm interacting with the world. The way my mannerisms, my temperament. I sit in that yin introspective place a lot of the time. I'm just realising, by the way, this is very conceptual everybody but remembering that kidneys are the source of yin and yang. So if you are excessively yin in your life. If you're excessively in that space of I'm just staying inside of myself.   Mason: (24:09) I'm not accepting input. I'm not going out and allowing the daggers to be thrown that occur within an interaction especially in those high summer times. Then what happens is you don't actually allow that yang energy to cultivate within the kidneys as well. So the yin becomes a little bit more shallow as you go along. I'm really in my internal world and being selfish and talking about my own process here but I hope that just talks a little bit to the experience of remembering that this time a lot of people really love the yin when you get to shut off from people and you don't have to be forced to interact and take feedback and really be an interactive force. But remember you're going to be able to go deeper the more you go out and allow the judgement in, the people refining who you are, all that be socially engaged. I bring that up because if you can do that if you can stay within that wheel of cultivating yin and yang within the kidneys and you do that by staying within the circulation of the seasons and the days so you're going between yin and yang, yang and yin.   Mason: (25:13) You're going to have very significantly differently expressed parts of yourself coming out all the time. Then the kidney water can cultivate because kidney water is potential. What happens if you have water? You have life, you have lots of water in an arid land you're always going to be able to have potential to create food and survive. Eventually, you want aquifers. You want aquifers that are pure and able to give you a real solid store of water. Then what happens is the yang comes in, that fire comes in and heats up that water so the water can move around your body. So this is just bringing the significance of why it's so important to go into this cultivation time but also be in and respect the difference between yin and yang and those parts of yourself.   Mason: (25:57) If the yang can really be expressed within yourself as well then you heat up all that potential, you heat up that water. It becomes a vapour, goes up, and allows the germination within the liver to happen and you're basically keeping the body nice and supple. You're circulating the water in. The part of that is if you're constantly introducing water to an ecosystem you never know what's going to germinate at different times as you go along. I think there's a subconscious fear there even of going really I understand myself and I want to stay right here. If you keep going along the wheel of the year between yin and yang as you go along different aspects of your personality, different parts are going to germinate and take seed.   Mason: (26:42) You're going to have to have the wisdom to go cool, this is an identity. I know that there's a part of myself that's really beautifully expressed in that but I'm actually going to go and explore a different part of myself. So kidneys are always so tied in with who am I? If you can look into the deep dark waters you can realise it's a little bit more fluid than you think it is.   Tahnee: (27:05) Well, the deep connection to I am universal really. It's the [inaudible 00:27:12] fire and this whole concept of where we even come from that's kidney essence. It's kind of like Shakti and yogic texts but it's literally how each cell knows on this higher consciousness level what to become. If you're the sperm and the egg uniting you know how to make a human. Well, how does that even happen? How is that information, that data transferred and interpreted? Where does this blueprint come from and this is kidney energy, this is jing, this is that primordial essence? So there's this really deep connection to ancestry to all of creation really through the kidney essence. I think if you think about the archetype of the kidney it's the magician or the wise sage. So it's this person who's connected to more than just... It's the shaman really.   Tahnee: (28:13) It's the person who can bridge worlds. So I think that sense in the kidney what you're speaking to with going up that kind of happens naturally. The Daoist practise is the whole point is you cultivate enough jing that the expression coming up through the shen is pure. You're consistent and you're authentic because it's what you radiate is aligned and so it's not this inner process that happens through. Meditation is the start of that process but at a certain point in meditation, you're not going through your shit anymore. You're accessing that stillness and then in that stillness, you're starting to feel the prana. In the prana, you're starting to understand that you can use your awareness to bring prana into the body or chi into the body.   Tahnee: (29:11) Then you're starting to cultivate that and then you're using your practises to integrate this kind of experience into... It's getting kind of esoteric. sorry. But that's when shen radiates and there's this very strong relationship between the depth of winter and the peak of summer and there has to be to have your full expression out into the world. You have to have the opposite. That's the polarity I suppose of the yin and yang expression of those organ systems and in Daoism, we do meditations where we unite the heart and the kidneys and we bring the cold energy from the kidneys up to the heart and cool the heart because you're always expressing your heart gets hot, it gets overheated. If you're never bringing your shen and your authenticity and your expression and yourself down back to the kidneys to warm them up the kidneys get cold and they start to get exhausted.   Tahnee: (30:05) So that's this unifying function of the heart and the kidney meridians and the meditation's really beautiful. You're imagining the heart is the lotus and the kidneys is the lotus bulbs and then the legs are the roots down to the earth. Then the lotus is opening up to the universal energy above. That's a really nice metaphor I think for how we've got the energy provided for the flowering of our life from the kidneys. Then the heart provides that flowering expression. I think when we think about what happens in wintertime if you're flowing with the seasons you feel you want to cultivate quiet. You want to reflect. You want to be still. You want to stay warm, all of these things. The moment some of us your energy's different. You're up, you're out and by the time peak summer's coming you're on your own fire. So you want to have the reserves that you've cultivated in winter available to you in summer.   Tahnee: (31:01) It's like having resources to draw from so I think that's where we don't take that opportunity to slow down and winter's really about that. It's about closing off and storing and I don't see that as a negative thing. I've come to really enjoy that about winter, that I'm less social and I'm less concerned with the outside world at this time. I just want to be with my family and in my home and we're making soup and we're slowing down and my daughter's taking a thermos to school. It's all very cute. I think that's really what I have learned is to yield to the changes the season brings and that trust that the full expression will come. That's my take on all of that. I don't know if we wanted to talk to herbs and how we would work with them at this time of year.   Mason: (31:57) Yeah. I might just quickly talk about what the kidney's associated with. If you think about its water. If you think about the story within your body of water, bringing the germination its fertility. If you want to stay fertile if you want to maintain potential you need to have that water. Just imagine that water chi. Yes, there's all these hormones and it's like there's a huge association of the sex hormones with the kidney water energy. So if your mind needs that, really go with that and really make that association. Then sometimes it's nice to just fall into the metaphor of the elements as well. So think if you've got water sitting there with reservoirs and you're doing a really good job at sustainably releasing that water up so that it can make the tissue nice and moist and nice and lubricated then you're going to have fertility all over your body.   Mason: (32:47) That means regeneration of cells and that's why quickly touching on herbs like the yang herbs especially which increase the yang within the body which mobilises the water and allows germination that happen. That's why when that happens what do you have when you're fertile when you have fertility? Obviously, you have new life. Obviously, you have regeneration going on. From that yang there's stamina and potential that comes about so therefore it's the deer antlers and eucommia barks and Cordyceps that are associated with that. But just for your own fertility look at the water management and look at sustainability in your own lifestyle. Look at how if you're unsustainable with your energy if you're unsustainable with your money. I really hope that everyone knows that when I say these things I don't have them all sorted out in my life. I'm definitely-   Tahnee: (33:47) Does anyone?   Mason: (33:48) No. Some of these things I talk about like I'm really struggling with myself and just hope everyone's able to just take this as theory basically or something that we can all work within. Work not necessarily towards. But it's really nice to look at even again and go back to that journal. What aspects of your life are really sustainable? Look back on how you partied. Look back on how you didn't party and express that summer because that's another thing for those of you who want to get the most out of this season. Maybe it's knowing harmony. Maybe you didn't go full fire which we always assume it's the other. We always assume that people aren't resisting the winter months but of course, it's going to be the other way around. Look at sustainability within your life. That's going to be that you're actually going to be able to maintain fertility.   Mason: (34:39) That means libido, sexual vigour, sexual capacity, sexual fluids, and the capacity to regenerate sexual fluids. These are all things. So how sustainable have you been with sex? Too much? Not enough? There's no answer here and that's something I think if you see an aversion towards sometimes with Daoism because they're like it seems very rule-heavy. You're allowed to have this much sex. Not this much sex, you can't ejaculate so on and so forth. These are all just really loose suggestions especially from a civilization that really liked things to be really defined. But you just take them and you just work them into your own.   Tahnee: (35:14) Well, the distinction too is Confucian versus Daoistan. The Confucians were quite rigid and the Daoists had a lot of the rules were based on chi so it's about chi cultivation. So I think that's what I've always found really interesting is if you look at what the Confucians contributed which was they were society structure. Then you look at what the Daoists contributed. So I have found in my experience with the teachers of Qi Gong that I've studied with and I've learned from some who are very loose. It's like going with the flow, finding your own form, feel your body's fluid. Others are really strict and really regimented and really rule-based. Master Chia who I have learned the most from when he speaks to sexual cultivation for men especially. He's like younger men go for it, you've got heaps more to spare but as you get older you need to be more mindful.   Tahnee: (36:10) He has some structures and guidance around that but I think it's a really personal thing and one of our big guiding principles at SuperFeast is sovereignty. I think the whole point of this information is not for us to be like we know the best and you guys should do these things it's really about reflecting on our own journeys to this point and hopefully providing some context for what you might want to look at through your own life and then filter that into what's relevant for you. I think this is really important when it comes to any kind of teacher or any kind of education. Especially when it's ancient stuff because we've lost so much. We only got the classics in English in the 80s and that's not very long ago and we don't know what other texts there were that were destroyed.   Tahnee: (36:56) Mao Zedong's team destroyed a whole lot of beautiful literature and writings from earlier times in China and I'm sure other things that were lost. It was oral traditions so I'm sure many things were lost in that way. So we're lucky to have what we have but we're making assumptions from a limited number of sources really at the end of the day. I don't speak Mandarin or read Chinese characters unfortunately so I'm learning through people that have translated it for me and they can make assumptions. If you go and read the [inaudible 00:37:27] I've read five or six different translations and they're all so different. Some are poetic and beautiful, some are really modern, some are really traditional and follow the translations really literally but then they're a little harder to interpret in a modern context.   Tahnee: (37:43) I don't think you can say there's an unequivocal right or wrong way. I think nature is there as a great teacher and she's been there through all of the traditions and kidney time is probably one of those times where we really remember how powerful nature is and especially if you're somewhere... We're in Byron it doesn't even get that cold here but if you're somewhere where it snows like I've been Scandinavia that it shuts down. You're snowed in. Nature is so powerful that she can shut down civilization for a period of time and it's dark and it's a different experience to be in those places and I don't know what it's like to live there through winters.   Tahnee: (38:22) But I can imagine you wouldn't be going out and doing things all the time. You'd want to be staying home and staying warm and staying in bed. I know people get a lot of seasonal effectiveness disorder and these kinds of things but I think part of that's got to be that we're culturally pushing ourselves to not just stay home and rest during these times. We've separated from the family unit so people are alone in apartments when they should be with their families. Again not everyone wants to be with their families all the time. I get all of that but you can see how as we've moved away from collective living and these nature-based cultures you can see how these health problems arise. I'm using inverted commas that you can't see which really come a lot from our social and cultural context. So I think one of the things we love about this is it gives us a language and a story and an explanation for how we have noticed our own lives adapt and change as we've gotten older and smarter and wiser. Yeah. I think hopefully you guys can take some of that and find what works for you and then move on.   Mason: (39:28) Yeah. You definitely hit it and that's how institutionalised do we want these healing systems to be? Where it's like uh-uh-uh this is the system, that's the text that we have to go by therefore follow this rule. It's like hmm, I don't think that's how Daoism works and that's why there's such a split between traditional Chinese medicine which is institutionalised, and classical Chinese medicine which is based on well, what's your experience? What are you perceiving because it's reality versus road learning? So I think you're going to see more and more of that split occurring. I think you're going see more and more that split genetically towards people going on that path of not saying good or bad that's a very murky thing to say but there is a path towards cultivating greater potential, self-cultivated potential versus reliance in order to ensure that potential now I'm using inverted commas is present within the body. So one is reliant, one is self-cultivation. A little bit of both is probably good as well.   Tahnee: (40:36) If we're going to be Daoist... Well, yeah. I think you have to remember that we're a species that thrives in smallish groups so I think that's something we have to take into account is human nature. But then I also think self-cultivation and self-responsibility is really the essence of the Daoist way. I think any time we're getting to guru worship or giving away power to an ideology or some kind of text or anything then we're starting to understand that maybe we've moved away from really our own selves. I guess that's what that reflection time and that kidney... If you're exhausted... I'm a mum. I have a business. I know what it feels like to be really tired sometimes and I don't want to take care of myself. I don't want to take care of anybody else.   Tahnee: (41:25) I just want to get away from the world when I feel like that. That's not a great place to be contributing your best from. So if your kidneys are tapped out then you're not going to be even beginning to radiate shen. You're not going to have the motivation to transform into liver vision and planning and getting things done. Yeah. If you're someone like Master Seng he's on the opposite side of things who can never seem to get out of that yin state then maybe there's this stagnation in your water and you need to clear that out. You might need a different kind of treatment to the people who are like Mase and myself who are go, go, go.   Tahnee: (42:03) So I think it's important to have a look at your own pathology and your own habits. This is a personal observation in my body but if I've had a really kidney deficient month and that would look like for me not getting enough sleep, doing too much work, being a bit too busy outside of my good solid, retainer structure then my menstruation will usually have a brownish tinge which means I've really dried out my water. I'm sort of burning my blood a little bit. I'm dry and it's not good. On the flip side of that if I've had a really stressful and that would typically be more of a livery kind of month where I've been really fast-moving and anxious and stressed and in my head and thinking a lot and maybe even into spleen deficiency my blood's going to be bright red and it's going to be really thin.   Tahnee: (43:04) So that's the structure and the substance of my blood is missing. So I'm looking at my menstruation and I'm using it as this guide to say okay, well, that's moving and kidney deficiency. This is me being in liver or spleen deficiency. Then I will adjust my lifestyle and my diet depending on how that works, what I'm seeing, and what I'm observing. So there are self-reflections that I've been able to develop over the last few years thanks to support from acupuncturists and people who've helped me understand that. But now I can see what I'm doing to myself and I can have more self-awareness and self-reflection on what to adjust in my life. So those are for me things that I'm really conscious of and have to be aware of because that's this idea of your menstruation being a report card.   Tahnee: (43:50) The kidney provides the water for the blood so it's a really important part for women. Important for men too but the spleen provides the nutrition for the blood, it provides from the food the substance that makes the blood healthy. The liver cleans and transports and transforms the blood and the water from the kidneys is provided to help keep the blood fluid and flowing. So that's why I would get that brown more congested blood toward the end of my menstruation if I'm in kidney deficiency. So those are things that you can think about if you're someone who wants to learn more about that. I'd recommend going and getting a close relationship with an acupuncturist and being really open and sharing about your body and about the things you observe and getting that kind of self-awareness because it's going to help you.   Tahnee: (44:33) A lot of other people were shocked with big bags under their eyes with kidney deficiency and things like that. You can look at what your tendencies are: weak lower back, weak knees. I know if my back's going that's when I'm in kidney deficiency. Whereas for other people that could mean liver deficiency. It could mean different things so you need to learn your body signs and what it does. But if you're getting older and your knees are starting to go and your hips are starting to go those things are a pretty good sign that you're burning out your jing and you want to look at slowing down a little bit. Getting into some more restoration and maybe working with some herbs may be working with a practitioner starting to cultivate. Very important I think.   Mason: (45:10) Stillness practise, contemplation time, coming down in that afternoon period and so just remember very quickly the kidney's a regulating bone integrity, bone marrow integrity. So imagine just that life being born from that marrow pure potential for the human body. So you're tapping out your jing, you're tapping out your marrow. You're going to see faster degeneration as you age, you're going to see faster ageing come about. That's why you see, some people grey hair is inevitable but there's been countless people who are in superficial jing deficiency and kidney deficiency and have started developing greys and they go hey, I got into beauty blend and my greys have stopped coming through, what the hell's with that? I mean yeah that's not going to happen for most people who have got greys but for those of you that are really superficial, it's like yeah blood. Blood getting up there. Nourishment getting up into the hair and pigmenting.   Tahnee: (46:13) I miss [inaudible 00:46:14] because it was really good for that too. That is kidney and jing that's what you're talking about. We talked a bit about the yang of kidney but the yin of kidney is more of that substance of the blood, the marrow, the brains. The kidneys are in Daoism when Chinese medicine the brain is called the sea of marrow. So really the integrity and quality of the brain is supported by the kidney energy. So we look at using kidney hubs to support brain function and again if you think about these degenerative diseases that are now showing up especially in Western culture with the brain you can point to a lot of our habits through our society as also being implicated in that degeneration.   Mason: (47:03) Non-sustainable practises. Non-sustainable habits. Really simple. It's so boring hearing myself say it over and over again and talking to myself as well. It's really comforting as well feeling the freedom come through that discipline around okay, it's not going to stop. Sleep, consistent diet. I would love the extremes I don't think we'll get to it today. But cold plunging it's another extreme. Tahnee was talking about how nice it is just to live within the elements and respect them and be like cool I'm just going to flow with you and see what you can tell me and just yield. But we're so addicted to dominating. No, I'm not going to go with the flow. I'm not going to be conventional. I'm going to fly in the face of winter and I'm going to go further into cold plunging. We'll see if we can get to that but it's just that's all well and good in particular times of life and I'm not saying what we're doing is better than anyone else is doing but as a thought maybe we can start looking at sustainability in our lifestyle based on what's happening in the elements around us as a way to go...   Mason: (48:26) It's not a competition to not age as fast either. It's about us personally feeling our own potential and our own cultivation and our own what's possible for ourselves and then that really does come back to gosh, I don't know, I'm just looking behind you at the Daoist in Alchemy chat and I just said intergalactic journey. But it is true. It is your own intergalactic journey. Maybe that for you means there is a degenerative thing coming a little bit earlier than some other people that they didn't live sustainably. I'm not saying get caught up into that competitive way of living and I know that. I've said that because I'm bringing up the cold plunging and I know that's a relative conversation. Some people really do find benefit. At the moment I'm not saying don't do it but anyway. I've gone off task. I think I'm going to bring up the cold plunging conversation in another one because there's lots of little distinctions-   Tahnee: (49:24) Yeah. I want to be really clear that someone like Wimhauf who we've met he's devoted to his practises. He 100% is a young body type, yang like Y-A-N-G-. He's strong, lots of muscle mass. He has done lots of chi cultivation and he's an extreme example of what's possible and I'm 100% for that stuff. I'm really into it. If I didn't have all the shit going on in my life that I had I would totally be experimenting with all of that and I think what I see a lot is people go from their normal Western life to just into these practises which again in Daoism they're really common. In Tibetan Buddhism, in yoga, my teacher tells stories of the monks being buried in snow and having to melt their way out to show how strong their chi is. These are QiGong practises that you are supposed to show as a level of mastery and that's cool just learning a breathing practise and jumping in the cold all the time.   Tahnee: (50:29) It's a start of that but you don't have the context of chi or prana and you don't have that immersion in the system I guess. I don't know if Wim does that if you go on his retreats and things he takes you deeper and I'm sure there are people that are close to him who learn the real deep techniques. I'm 100% for people exploring that stuff. But we hear a lot from people who are like, oh, I got sick after cold plunging again.   Mason: (50:55) I don't have a menstrual cycle anymore.   Tahnee: (50:58) Yeah. Because cold has entered the uterus and you haven't cultivated your dantian enough your lower dantian that it's projecting heat so it's able to prevent you from getting cold penetrating into that space. So there's no talking about that it's just like oh, it's a part of cold plunging or something like that. Well, it's not. It's not a physiologically healthy thing to have happen to a woman in that time of her life. So I guess that's the kind of disclaimer and container to all that stuff. I think there's lots of really interesting conversations to be had about it because I definitely believe in it as a practise. It's really incredible but I think it's in the vortex, out of the vortex we always used to say. You have to have the container in the context and the explanation and the understanding.   Mason: (51:43) Sorry, I'm going to go because there's one little last bit of it. Can you have a yang and a yin approach atmosphere around the way that you're looking at it? I think again it's reliance. In the yang season in summer, it's great to have reliance on things to get heat because you're out there, you're experiencing, and then when you go into yin time it's like maybe I want to be able to cultivate something on my own. Maybe I want that to be a little side dish to what I can do myself.   Tahnee: (52:08) I think quickly with diet. So warming foods. So animal foods are really warming and taste yum so they can be really useful especially if you ask someone who feels the cold and who isn't particularly strong in winter. If you're not into those you can look at things like seaweeds and all of the traditional winter vegetables, your roots, your gourds, those kinds of things, pumpkins. Garlic and onions are really warming if you can tolerate them. Squash, zucchini, all those things you'll see them. I'm going to the farmer's market got all the winter vegetables coming through. Caulis all that kind of stuff. A lot of traditional things for winter weather there's herbal wines and stuff as well because alcohol is warming. Yeah, which is obviously something to do with moderation. With pepper or your Ayurvedic spices anything that warms your digestion. Ginger. Ginger tea is my number one go-to. Boil it up just slice it into fine little chunks, boil it for at least 10 minutes because you want to get it really strong. Then I put a little bit of panela sugar in that and then just drink it.   Mason: (53:17) Get the cinnamon in.   Tahnee: (53:17) It heats you up from the inside out. You just want to avoid the tropical stuff. You want to avoid too much dairy all of those things that are cooling and cold are not super helpful this time of year. Again if you look at Ayurvedic diets and things they always warm up the milk and add spices and ginger something like a chai. That's a better way to consume dairy than having a cold flavoured yoghourt or anything like that. Same with coconut and those kinds of things and a lot of people love coconut but it wouldn't be probably that ideal to have in winter.   Tahnee: (53:50) Winter it's actually one of the reasons you have spicy coconut soup things in Thailand and stuff is because coconut by nature is cold and then you add all the spice to it which helps to make you sweat and cool you down in those hot climates. So if you're looking at more of those broth kinds of things, more of those nourishing homely style meals at this time of year.   Mason: (54:11) You got to mention black foods. Kidney beans. Black sesame seed, black beans-   Tahnee: (54:21) Seaweeds. Yeah. All of those kinds of things. Molasses is really good-   Mason: (54:23) Molasses. Dark leafy greens thrown in there too... We're loving our slow-cooked meals. Soups.   Tahnee: (54:32) I don't have any affiliation with them but I bought an Instant Pot. It's the best thing that's ever happened to me, especially as a mum. It's so good. Okay. Mase is sick of hearing about my Instant Pot.   Mason: (54:45) No, I'm not.   Tahnee: (54:46) You love it too don't you?   Mason: (54:47) Yeah. I've been using it quite a bit. You will absolutely love us and your spleen will love you if you have a glass of warm to hot water first thing in the morning. That's my favourite at this time of year. Some days I forget but in winter I'm five days a week since I was in China and was told by my Daoist, my tonic herb friends that that was their favourite tonic ever. Just guys beanies, socks, long walks in nature.   Tahnee: (55:21) Yeah because cold gets into ears which are related to the kidneys, the back of the head, the neck, the back of the neck around C7, the lower back, and then down really through all the joints in the lower body and the soles of the feet. Also through the arms and the hands so you really want to cover as much as you can but you'll have an area where you have a tendency to be weak so you want to be extra mindful of that. So for me, it's the feet and the back of the neck. I have to keep those areas warm otherwise I can feel the cold getting in. So you'll just have to play around with that and see what you really feel you need to stay warm but that's important.   Mason: (56:00) Having a break from stimulants. Don't have to be strict if you like them you like them. It is like throwing pebbles into the pond so you can't look down into your depths. That's why we do 30 days of jing in Australian winter. Sorry Northern hemisphere folks but it's even in the middle of summer it's a great experience for you guys to all have. Just getting off stimulants for 30 days and you can do it anytime. We've got all the resources there. We've got a Facebook group there for you to go and join and just give you the down low but it's basically adding in the jing herbs or the jing formula which are the kidney, that's the kidney formula. Really great herbs to be having during the winter. You might feel in the beginning there might be three weeks or four weeks in the beginning of the winter season where you're craving the kidney herbs, jing herbs, and then maybe you don't feel like them as much. Don't worry about that. It's like there's no rule that you have to have only kidney herbs when you're in winter but it's maybe just a little bit of a guide. That's what I'm like in spring. At the start I'll go two or three weeks hard on the beauty blend and then it just breaks out and I'm off doing intuitively whatever I want.   Tahnee: (57:14) Well, yeah because as the seasons change and this is in the Neijing as well I'm pretty sure. I think it's the first 18 days of every season as you're transitioning in it when the chi is the most unstable. So you're really wanting to smooth the transition as much as you can. So I often think about that as what can I do to stabilise as much as possible during this time? Yeah, I always feel the same at the first few weeks of the season coming in and I'm really hyper-aware of it, and then it settles in and it's just part of life those next couple of months. But, yeah, I think it's important to remember that's usually when people get sick because they're clinging to old habits or they're not really listening to what their body's asking for as the season changes and that's where the herbs can help to cultivate the organ systems and support them because the seasons demand a lot of the organ systems that they're correlated to. So that's why we can support them with herbs. I'm really lacking Chaga at the moment which is common for me. In winter I'll start to use Chaga again. I don't usually use it through the rest of the year.   Mason: (58:26) Pregnancy in winter for you.   Tahnee: (58:28) Yeah. Funny.   Mason: (58:33) Yeah. Big shout out to Chaga, Chaga has been my go-to winter herb. I forgot to message you yesterday and ask to bring a big bag home but go and do that right now. Thanks, guys. I was just going to give a shout out to the yoga Nidra as a winter practise as well-   Tahnee: (58:53) I love yoga Nidra.   Mason: (58:54) ...and yin yoga if you get on our newsletter list and jump on Instagram as well. Tiny has got some yin yoga sequences coming up.   Tahnee: (59:06) Yeah. I forgot about that but we have shot the photos and what I was thinking is for each season I'd give you a sequence or a couple of sequences to practise during the three or four months of the season just to help cultivate the chi. We've been sharing some Daoist practises. We've been sharing like in autumn we have lung tapping and all of those kind of things. We've got some stuff filmed for kidneys which is coming up and we're just going to keep trying to give you guys some lifestyle stuff as well to support because I think for both of us that's really been a big part of our journeys is not just taking the herbs but also using them with the practises that support the function of the herbs and the health of the chi in the body.   Tahnee: (59:53) So yin is something that I love and I think it's really easy to do at home. You don't need to be good at yoga. You don't need to be flexible. You don't need to be really... I often do it in my UGG boots and my tracksuit on the floor. It's not very attractive but it does the job and it's really quite easy just to be still and feel into your body. It's a very yin kind of kidney practise. So I think hopefully you guys will love that and you can send through any requests if you want sequences for any type of thing. But yeah. I don't think there's much else to say there at this point.   Mason: (01:00:30) No, thanks, everybody. I hope you join us on the 30 days of jing. You can find that over on Facebook. You can look up the group, 30 days of jing and you'll find it there and request to join.   Tahnee: (01:00:43) We'll all be doing it, not all of us at the office, most of us at the office will be doing it and I'm really excit

Eric Schluessel's Land of Strangers: The Civilizing Project in Qing Central Asia (Columbia UP, 2020) looks at what happened when, at the end of the Qing, Chinese Confucian revivalists gained control of the Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang and sought to transform it. Yet this is not a book about high politics or discourse — far from it. This is a book about what this civilizing project looked like on the ground, how it played out in “everyday politics,” and how Turkic-speaking Muslims felt about and responded to attempts to transform them into Chinese-speaking Confucians. Centering on the voices and experiences of ordinary people in the oasis of Turpan, Land of Strangers is filled with stories of prostitution, human trafficking, venereal disease, families divided by war, and so much more. Reading across the Turpan archive this book combines records in both Chinese and Chaghatay, laying bare the difficulties revivalists encountered in educating children and showing how interpreters went about 'translating' oral Chaghatay, and throughout it emphasizes how the negotiation of place, difference, and identity was continual and fraught. This beautifully written and meticulously researched book is a must read for anyone interested in Chinese history, the history of Central Asia, colonialism, and empire, as well as any historians who might get a particular thrill in seeing the “ragged” sources Eric is dealing with so expertly pieced together. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. She can be reached at sbramaoramos@g.harvard.edu

Eric Schluessel’s Land of Strangers: The Civilizing Project in Qing Central Asia (Columbia UP, 2020) looks at what happened when, at the end of the Qing, Chinese Confucian revivalists gained control of the Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang and sought to transform it. Yet this is not a book about high politics or discourse — far from it. This is a book about what this civilizing project looked like on the ground, how it played out in “everyday politics,” and how Turkic-speaking Muslims felt about and responded to attempts to transform them into Chinese-speaking Confucians. Centering on the voices and experiences of ordinary people in the oasis of Turpan, Land of Strangers is filled with stories of prostitution, human trafficking, venereal disease, families divided by war, and so much more. Reading across the Turpan archive this book combines records in both Chinese and Chaghatay, laying bare the difficulties revivalists encountered in educating children and showing how interpreters went about 'translating' oral Chaghatay, and throughout it emphasizes how the negotiation of place, difference, and identity was continual and fraught. This beautifully written and meticulously researched book is a must read for anyone interested in Chinese history, the history of Central Asia, colonialism, and empire, as well as any historians who might get a particular thrill in seeing the “ragged” sources Eric is dealing with so expertly pieced together. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. She can be reached at sbramaoramos@g.harvard.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Eric Schluessel's Land of Strangers: The Civilizing Project in Qing Central Asia (Columbia UP, 2020) looks at what happened when, at the end of the Qing, Chinese Confucian revivalists gained control of the Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang and sought to transform it. Yet this is not a book about high politics or discourse — far from it. This is a book about what this civilizing project looked like on the ground, how it played out in “everyday politics,” and how Turkic-speaking Muslims felt about and responded to attempts to transform them into Chinese-speaking Confucians. Centering on the voices and experiences of ordinary people in the oasis of Turpan, Land of Strangers is filled with stories of prostitution, human trafficking, venereal disease, families divided by war, and so much more. Reading across the Turpan archive this book combines records in both Chinese and Chaghatay, laying bare the difficulties revivalists encountered in educating children and showing how interpreters went about 'translating' oral Chaghatay, and throughout it emphasizes how the negotiation of place, difference, and identity was continual and fraught. This beautifully written and meticulously researched book is a must read for anyone interested in Chinese history, the history of Central Asia, colonialism, and empire, as well as any historians who might get a particular thrill in seeing the “ragged” sources Eric is dealing with so expertly pieced together. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. She can be reached at sbramaoramos@g.harvard.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Eric Schluessel's Land of Strangers: The Civilizing Project in Qing Central Asia (Columbia UP, 2020) looks at what happened when, at the end of the Qing, Chinese Confucian revivalists gained control of the Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang and sought to transform it. Yet this is not a book about high politics or discourse — far from it. This is a book about what this civilizing project looked like on the ground, how it played out in “everyday politics,” and how Turkic-speaking Muslims felt about and responded to attempts to transform them into Chinese-speaking Confucians. Centering on the voices and experiences of ordinary people in the oasis of Turpan, Land of Strangers is filled with stories of prostitution, human trafficking, venereal disease, families divided by war, and so much more. Reading across the Turpan archive this book combines records in both Chinese and Chaghatay, laying bare the difficulties revivalists encountered in educating children and showing how interpreters went about 'translating' oral Chaghatay, and throughout it emphasizes how the negotiation of place, difference, and identity was continual and fraught. This beautifully written and meticulously researched book is a must read for anyone interested in Chinese history, the history of Central Asia, colonialism, and empire, as well as any historians who might get a particular thrill in seeing the “ragged” sources Eric is dealing with so expertly pieced together. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. She can be reached at sbramaoramos@g.harvard.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/central-asian-studies

Eric Schluessel’s Land of Strangers: The Civilizing Project in Qing Central Asia (Columbia UP, 2020) looks at what happened when, at the end of the Qing, Chinese Confucian revivalists gained control of the Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang and sought to transform it. Yet this is not a book about high politics or discourse — far from it. This is a book about what this civilizing project looked like on the ground, how it played out in “everyday politics,” and how Turkic-speaking Muslims felt about and responded to attempts to transform them into Chinese-speaking Confucians. Centering on the voices and experiences of ordinary people in the oasis of Turpan, Land of Strangers is filled with stories of prostitution, human trafficking, venereal disease, families divided by war, and so much more. Reading across the Turpan archive this book combines records in both Chinese and Chaghatay, laying bare the difficulties revivalists encountered in educating children and showing how interpreters went about 'translating' oral Chaghatay, and throughout it emphasizes how the negotiation of place, difference, and identity was continual and fraught. This beautifully written and meticulously researched book is a must read for anyone interested in Chinese history, the history of Central Asia, colonialism, and empire, as well as any historians who might get a particular thrill in seeing the “ragged” sources Eric is dealing with so expertly pieced together. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. She can be reached at sbramaoramos@g.harvard.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Eric Schluessel’s Land of Strangers: The Civilizing Project in Qing Central Asia (Columbia UP, 2020) looks at what happened when, at the end of the Qing, Chinese Confucian revivalists gained control of the Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang and sought to transform it. Yet this is not a book about high politics or discourse — far from it. This is a book about what this civilizing project looked like on the ground, how it played out in “everyday politics,” and how Turkic-speaking Muslims felt about and responded to attempts to transform them into Chinese-speaking Confucians. Centering on the voices and experiences of ordinary people in the oasis of Turpan, Land of Strangers is filled with stories of prostitution, human trafficking, venereal disease, families divided by war, and so much more. Reading across the Turpan archive this book combines records in both Chinese and Chaghatay, laying bare the difficulties revivalists encountered in educating children and showing how interpreters went about 'translating' oral Chaghatay, and throughout it emphasizes how the negotiation of place, difference, and identity was continual and fraught. This beautifully written and meticulously researched book is a must read for anyone interested in Chinese history, the history of Central Asia, colonialism, and empire, as well as any historians who might get a particular thrill in seeing the “ragged” sources Eric is dealing with so expertly pieced together. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. She can be reached at sbramaoramos@g.harvard.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Eric Schluessel’s Land of Strangers: The Civilizing Project in Qing Central Asia (Columbia UP, 2020) looks at what happened when, at the end of the Qing, Chinese Confucian revivalists gained control of the Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang and sought to transform it. Yet this is not a book about high politics or discourse — far from it. This is a book about what this civilizing project looked like on the ground, how it played out in “everyday politics,” and how Turkic-speaking Muslims felt about and responded to attempts to transform them into Chinese-speaking Confucians. Centering on the voices and experiences of ordinary people in the oasis of Turpan, Land of Strangers is filled with stories of prostitution, human trafficking, venereal disease, families divided by war, and so much more. Reading across the Turpan archive this book combines records in both Chinese and Chaghatay, laying bare the difficulties revivalists encountered in educating children and showing how interpreters went about 'translating' oral Chaghatay, and throughout it emphasizes how the negotiation of place, difference, and identity was continual and fraught. This beautifully written and meticulously researched book is a must read for anyone interested in Chinese history, the history of Central Asia, colonialism, and empire, as well as any historians who might get a particular thrill in seeing the “ragged” sources Eric is dealing with so expertly pieced together. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. She can be reached at sbramaoramos@g.harvard.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

After Khuiblai Khan’s death in 1294, his successors ruled over the most powerful kingdom on earth, the Yuan Dynasty, controlling all of China and Mongolia. Yet not even one hundred years after the declaration of the Yuan in 1271, the Dynasty was pushed from China, their rulers a shadow of the men Chinggis Khan and Khubilai had been.  In our first episode on the Yuan Dynasty, we take you through the first 40 years of their rule after Khubilai, and introduce you to ten Khans, from Temur Oljeitu to Toghon Temur, and the manner in which they lurched from crisis to crisis in the fourteenth century. It was an age of political chaos and bloodthirsty brothers, scheming bureacrats, overbearing mothers and misplaced Khans, and a century where every other person was seemingly named a variation of Temur. It was a period  to have strangled even the greatest of rulers and most robust of dynasties; and these were not the greatest of rulers. I’m your host David, and this is Kings and Generals: Ages of Conquest.   Our first of ten Khans for today is Temur Oljeitu, Khubilai’s grandson and first  successor. Khubilai, as we demonstrated rather thoroughly, had outlived his chosen heir, Jinggim, as well as a plethora of other sons and grandsons. After Jinggim’s death, Khubilai had vacillated on who should succeed him. It was much more traditional Chinese custom for chosen heirs and the like, as opposed to the Mongolian method of ‘to the strongest,’ and declarations of quriltais. Seemingly reluctantly, only in the very twilight years of his life almost a decade after Jinggim’s death, did  Khubilai move to make Temur Oljeitu, one of the late Jinggim’s younger sons, his heir. In 1293 Khubilai gave Temur Oljeitu the jade seal of the heir apparent, but had not provided  him the full titles and honorifics that Jinggim had held. Thus, when the old Khubilai finally did die in February 1294, Temur Oljeitu was the favourite candidate, but not the only one. He was challenged by his older brother, another son of Jinggim named Kammala. It came to the quriltai in April 1294, where both made their speeches, each demonstrating their knowledge of the maxims of Chinggis Khan, aiming to convince the elite and each other of their fitness for the Grand Khanate.   Of course, it wasn’t really just a matter of speeches which determined the outcome. Being the selected heir of Great Khan Khubilai was obviously a powerful boost, but Temur Oljeitu had a number of powerful allies backing him. His mother, Kokejin, was well respected and beloved by Khubilai; military leaders, especially Bayan of the Baarin, the great conqueror of the Song Dynasty, backed Temur Oljeitu; and prominent members of the bureaucracy, such as  the Chancellor of the Right, Oljei. This was to be a heralding of the future of the succession Yuan Khans, where the bureaucracy and military elite became the decision makers. Kammala was convinced to accept Temur Oljeitu, who on April 15th, 1295, was duly enthroned as Khan of Khans and Emperor of the Yuan Dynasty.   Temur Oljeitu was a respectable choice. Conservative minded, both he and Chancellor Oljei, as well as Oljei’s successor Harghasun, aimed to consoldiate and stabilize the Yuan Dynasty after the struggles of Khubilai’s final years. Open minded regarding Chinese culture, respecting Confucianism but not enmeshed in it, while also having connections to the military elite in the Mongolian steppe, Temur Oljeitu was very much a Khan in the mold of his grandfather Khubilai, though lacking his physical and intellectual vigour, while also keeping one of Khubilai’s worst vices, a penchant for alcoholism.  In order to stabilize the government and economy, reconciliation of various branches of the family was favoured and great invasions abandoned. Lavish gifts to princes on his accession helped affirm their loyalty and quiet some of the Mongols in Manchuria who had been so problematic in Khubilai’s last years. Plans to invade Annam and Japan were cancelled; the only foreign ventures were to be brief excursions into Burma and northern Thailand which, though largely failures, were not on the scales of any of Khubilai’s efforts. Tax debts from Khubilai’s reign were cancelled, and Temur Oljeitu sought to reduce the tax burden on the people, forbidding the collection of anything beyond established quotas.   Diplomatically, Temur enjoyed a significant triumph over his father. In 1301 his armies under his nephew Qaishan finally defeated Qaidu Khan, the master of central Asia. When Qaidu died of his wounds in September 1301, Qaidu’s puppet Chagatai Khan Du’a decided he had enough of fighting the Yuan. With Qaidu’s son Chapar, Du’a contacted Temur Oljeitu indicating his willingness to recognize Temur Oljeitu’s  overlordship. Temur Oljeitu was delighted and immediately accepted. Their representatives were sent to the Khan of the Ilkhanate, also called Oljeitu, and the Khan of the Golden Horde, Toqta. By 1304, peace had reached between the Khanates. For the first time since 1259, there was a recognized Great Khan, something Khubilai had never achieved. Though Temur Oljeitu wielded no authority over them, he sent patents to affirm each Khan, and in turn received gifts and tribute from them, a process largely carried out by his successors. And in 1306, when Du’a went to war with the heirs of Qaidu, Temur Oljeitu provided him with an army. For a few years at the start of the fourteenth century, we can finally speak of a proper pax Mongolica, when there was peace between all of the Khanates across Eurasia. It would not last very long.   In internal matters, Temur Oljeitu did not quite have the same success. For one thing, the Yuan Dynasty permanently hemorrhaged money. In 1295, less than a year after his enthronment, the imperial treasury was reporting to him that nearly all of the wealth Khubilai had accumulated over his reign had been spent in gifts to the princes. The financial policies of Temur Oljeitu and the Chancellors Oljei and Harghasun had brought stability after the “Three Bad ministers,” but was  not bringing in new revenue. Temur Oljeitu had to cover government costs by paying out from the silver reserve. This was the silver needed to back the paper currency, and with less silver reserve, inflation would rise and rise, a problem we will keep coming back to. Government corruption was intense. The set quota for the number of court and capital officials was set at 2,600 persons. In the first year of Temur Oljeitu’s reign, it was found to be over 10,000. In 1303, a corruption trial revealed bribery going to the very highest levels of Temur Oljeitu’s government. A furious Khan pushed for further investigation, resulting in over 18,000 convictions of officials and clerks on bribery and other corruption charges. Rather typical of Temur Oljeitu though, was that he lacked the energy to carry out these charges and sweeping changes implied by such convictions. Most officials were let off with hardly as much as a warning, and many simply returned to their posts within the following years.   While it has been common to attest the Yuan Dynasty’s economic failings to corruption and lavish gift giving- which to be sure, there was no shortage of- recent research has highlighted a significant problem overlooked in such a presentation. The fourteenth century was the start of the Little Ice Age, a global climatic shift towards generally cooler and wetter temperatures, not counting for regional variations. Some variations in temperature and weather of the thirteenth century can be attributed to the  massive eruption of the Indonesian volcano of Samalas in the late 1250s, with the Little Ice Age entailing more long term shifts. Cooler temperatures in general strongly affect the Asian monsoon season, which in the 14th century manifested into a general trend of intense colds and snowfall in Mongolia and the steppe, droughts in North China and unending rains and typhoons in southern China. These began to be felt in the very first years of Temur Oljeitu’s reign. In 1295, the year after he became Khan of Khans, typhoons struck the Yangzi River delta, his empire’s most densely populated region; the Yellow River broke its banks in multiple places and caused repeated flooding, and a dry spell from the previous years resulted in plagues of locusts that eradicated crops. Flooding, typhoons and locust plagues were annual problems for most of the 1290s. In Mongolia and the steppes, the winters turned harsh, and unexpected and high volumes of snow fell even in spring and summer, starving entire herds and forcing many to flee south to seek support for the Khan. So intense were these problems that in 1297 Temur Oljeitu changed his reign title from Yuanzhen,  “Primary allegiance” to Dade, “great virtue.” Usually reign titles were held for decades, so to change it after two years was a last-ditch attempt to appease the heavens.        It was not just an ecological problem though. Khubilai Khan had continued the policy of huang zheng from the Song Dynasty. This was government-provided disaster relief, in the form of cash, food, normally grain or rice, farm tools, animals and other supplies to help the given stricken population through this period.  It was a duty of the ruler of China, and fit well into Khubilai’s policy of reconstruction after the Mongol conquest and relieving the burdens of the lower classes. None of Khubilai’s heirs dared repeal such a law, for it became a basis of Yuan legitimacy. However, in a century that was to prove one of unprecedented, and worsening, climatic terrors over a vast geographic area, from the forests of Siberia, mountains of Tibet, Korea, Manchuria across all of China and its southern coast, this was to prove an impossible burden to meet. The detailed Chinese records reveal a dynasty facing a crisis every year. From 1272 until 1357, there was a major famine somewhere in China on average once every two years; over 56 earthquakes were recorded; super typhoons on the southern coast coincided with supersnowstorms in the steppe. Exceptionally cold winters and unexpected frosts meant certain crops could no longer be reliably grown in the north. The densely populated Yangzi River Delta, home to one of the most economically and agriculturally vital areas of the empire, was almost yearly suffering droughts, flooding, epidemics, starvation and typhoons which wiped away entire towns. For more than a third of the Yuan era, the empire experienced at least seven distinct natural calamanities within the same year! People died in the disasters  by the thousands, and survivors died in the hundreds of thousands in the ensuing famines and destruction of farmland. Survivors needed to be brought onto government relief. Grain and rice shortages caused the Yuan to try and cover costs only with cash, and to provide more cash, more had to be printed, to the point it outstripped government revenues. Inflation was the result, and Yuan paper money became ever more worthless over the 1300s. Further, waves of natural calamanities always appear to symbolize the given dynasty had lost the support of heaven, and that the time was come for them to be overthrown.        Temur Oljeitu’s reign saw the beginning of these problems. In 1301, a spring drought in the Yangzi Delta was followed by a massive typhoon; arable farmland was destroyed for 50 kilometres along the coast line, and a 30-40 metre high wave pushed 280 kilometres inland! 17,000 were killed by storm by the storm itself, and 100,000 by the ensuing starvation. Only a month later, there was flooding displacing people in Manchuria, a freak August snowstorm in Mongolia, flooding around the imperial capital of Dadu, and a locust plague in Hebei province. From this year onwards, flooding somewhere in the Empire became an almost annual problem: in 1302, 50 days  of torrential rain caused flooding in 14 prefectures in southern China, and in 1303 and 1305 severe earthquakes rocked the Central regions. And these problems would only become worse over the rest of the dynasty’s history.       The Khan was simply not  equipped to handle this. The conservative-minded Temur Oljeitu and his chief ministers, Oljei and Harghasun, could not invigorate the dynasty for such an immense task as this. After the death of chief and favourite wife in 1299 and mother in 1300, and onset of illnesses from his years of heavy drinking, Temur Oljeitu lost much of his energy for governance, allowing another wife, the empress Buluqan, to overpower him. She sought to ensure the succession of their son, Deshou, a process in which she made many enemies, though even her hostile biography in the Yuan Shi recognized her as a just and able minister. Exiling and removing possible challengers to Deshou’s accession, she was able to have Temur Oljeitu confirm him as heir in 1305… only for Deshou to die unexpectedly early in 1306. When Temur Oljeitu died in February 1307, he had no heirs and no surviving children, and was given the posthumous temple name of Chengzong. One Khan down, nine to go.       Temur Oljeitu’s death saw factions form immediately. Empress Buluqan had her allies, and sought to make Temur Oljeitu’s cousin, Ananda, the next Great Khan. A Muslim and prince ruling over the former Tangut territories, Ananda had a powerful army and seemed a likely candidate.. Until Ayurburwada, a son of Temur Oljeitu’s older brother Darmabala, led a coup in Dadu, arresting Ananda and Empress Buluqan and their allies. They died in prison soon after. Ayurburwada wanted to be Khan, but faced a challenge from his older brother Qaishan and his powerful and experienced army. A veteran of wars against Qaidu and their enemeis in the steppe, Qaishan was a fearsome foe, and war was only averted with the intervention of their mother, Targi. Agreement was reached, making Qaishan the Khan of Khans, and Ayurburwada his heir. So we have our second Khan of the episode, Qaishan,  known also as Külüg Khan and by his posthumous temple name, Wuzong.       Unlike Khubilai and Temur Oljeitu, Qaishan was a man of the steppe with no love or understanding for Chinese culture. He immediately changed course with Temur Oljeitu. Where his predecessor sought continuation of Khubilai’s policies and maintained ministers, Qaishan removed most of Temur Oljeitu’s adherents. Instead of seeking to rule through the Secretariats, Qaishan wanted to rule like a steppe nomad in the vein of Chinggis Khan, via his personal retainers and keshig. Lavish gifts were spent on his friends and allies, even building a palace for them. Princely titles were handed out like candy. And for this, only four months into his reign, Qaishan found he effectively spent well over a  year’s worth of government revenue: he found himself able to pay less than half of what he had promised in gifts to the aristocracy. In  a panic, he spent the rest of the reign trying to address this. The price on salt licenses, one of the most important industries in the Yuan realm, was raised by 35%; prohibition on liquor production was lifted in order to collect taxes there. The tax debts that Temur Oljeitu had cancelled were now to be collected again. Most famously was Qaishan and his allies’ currency program. New copper coins were minted, golder and silver were demonetarized and new paper bills put into circulation. The new currency was based on an  exchange of 1:5 with the old, and the volume of currency printed in 1310 was 7 times higher than the three previous years!       Qaishan’s efforts did little good other than expand the bureaucracy needlessly and grow inflation. His sudden death in April 1311 after only a 4 year reign brings us to our third Khan, Qaishan’s younger brother Ayurburwada Buyantu, posthumous temple name Renzong. This was the first fully peaceful transition of power in the Yuan Dynasty’s history. It went according to their agreement, and once comfortably in power, Ayurburwada violently purged the government of Qaishan’s allies and appointees. Unlike the steppe raised Qaishan, Ayurburwada was a man with a good Confucian education, could read and write Chinese and appreciated Chinese art and culture. Most of Qaishan’s policies were immediately reversed, the new currency abolished, the building projects halted,  and good Confucian scholar-officials placed into power. Ayurburwada wanted a more traditionally Chinese-Confucian government, and reinstated the civil service examination system to choose officials, for instance, with a distinct Neo-Confucianism curriculum which stayed for the Ming and Qing dynasties. He promoted the translation of Chinese classics in Mongolian, and began the codification of the Yuan legal system, a process that took until 1323. But he could not address the real problems facing the dynasty. The environmental crisis only grew worse, with more severe snow storms in Mongolia increasing the northern refugees crisis, while the flooding problem grew exponentially worse in 1319 onwards, all in addition to the varied economic troubles associated with this, from destruction of farmland to government support of refugees. Ayurburwada could reverse Qaishan’s disastrous currency but could not find new revenue sources to alleviate the problems that Qaishan had tried to fix, and government expenditure was not trimmed. After a brief effort, Ayurburwada found he could not change the privileges of the aristocracy  or interfere in the administration of their appanages, though he tried to lesson the number of new princes made and reduce the level of annual gifts. He needed the support of the Mongol and military elite, and reducing their gifts was not a good way to do this.    His greatest political challenges came from his own mother, Dowager Empress Targi, and her favourite, the Chancellor of the Right Temuder. Both were ntrenched supporters of the status quo- that is, enriching themselves and their followers at the expense of the Chinese. Ayurburwada found himself continually harassed, always combating them and their allies who resisted his reform efforts. Temuder bullied and fought with Ayurburwada’s  ministers and was openly corrupt. The Khan could not even arrest  him. The most he could do was remove Temuder from office, only for Dowager Empress Targi to make Temuder the Grand Preceptor  to the Heir apparent, Ayurburwada’s  son Shidebala. Unable to stand up to his mother, the reform minded Ayurburwada died in March 1320, aged only 35, without having really made any true reforms to the Yuan state or government, other than add a coat of Confucian-coloured paint to the dynasty for a brief period. He was peacefully succeeded by his 18 year old son Shidebala, known also as Gegeen Khan or by his posthumous temple name of Yingzong. So starts the reign of our fourth Khan of the episode.   Only three days after Ayurburwada’s death, Dowager Empress Targi reinstated Temuder as the Grand Chancellor of the Right, and began a veritable reign of terror. The officials who stood up to them during Ayurburwada’s life were severely punished, exiled or executed. Appointing his own allies and family members, Temuder ran roughshod over the young Khan. But well educated, sinicized and with a strong spirit, Shidebala Khan did not long sit idle. He appointed a fine choice to the second government position, Chancellor of the Left,  in Baiju, a grandson of Antung, a popular chancellor under Khubilai, and a descendant of the heroic Mukhali, great general and viceroy of Chinggis Khan. A friend to Confucians and of proud Mongol heritage, Baiju was an excellent choice for any enemy of Targi and Temuder to flock to. Together, Baiju and Shidebala Khan became staunch allies, and the Empress Dowager is said to have complained of the young Khan, “we should not have raised this boy!”   Only two months into his reign, a conspiracy was discovered to replace Shidebala with his  younger brother. Baiju urged Shidebala to act quickly, and they unravelled the conspiracy, discovering it was associates of Targi and Temuder behind the plot. Weakening their support network, the Khan and his Chancellor gradually began to repulse the Dowager and her Chancellor. The aging pair were only overcome when they died of old age in the fall of 1322. After that, Shidebala and Baiju could finally carry out their reforms, pushing out more of Temuder’s associates from government and continuing policies of the late Ayurburwada. Shidebala supported Confucians, but he loved Buddhism. An ardent and devout Buddhist, Shidebala ordered a Buddhist temple honouring the ‘Phags-pa lama to be constructed in every prefecture in the empire, with the stipulation that they all had to be larger than their Confucian counterparts. The Khan did not apparently see the hypocrisy in such an expensive program when he was supposed to be dealing with the financial crisis. He also showed open disdain for Islam, having the mosque in Shangdu, the summer capital, destroyed in order to make room for the ‘Phags-Pa temple there.   If Shidebala would have strengthened or weakened the Khanate without the presence of his grandmother or Temuder, it will never be known. In September 1323, a conspiracy made up of a number of princes, allies of the late Temuder and part of the Imperial Asud Guard killed Shidebala and Baiju at Nanpo. Immediately they reached out to prince Yesun Temur, a son of Temur Oljeitu’s older brother Kammala. A month after Shidebala’s murder, Yesun Temur was declared Khan on the Kerulen River, the very birthplace of Chinggis Khan, and became our fifth Khan of the episode.   Yesun Temur was almost certainly involved in the plot against Shidebala, and moved quickly to secure himself against charges of illegitmacy. First rewarding the conspirators, once he was firmly entrenched in the two Yuan capitals, he had the conspirators violently purged, the princes involved exiled to far corners of the empire. Yesun Temur worked hard to distance himself from the means of his enthronement. The official version of events became that he had learned of the plot only days before it happened, and had tried to warn Shidebala Khan. He just happened to be very convientenly placed to immediately become Khan.   The new Khan had spent many years in the steppe and had a powerful military backing, and in some respects was a proponent of returning things to “the old ways.” Only a single Chinese minister was carried over into the new adminsitration, and was routinely ignored. Muslims gained their most prominent status in the Yuan under Yesun Temur. His chancellor of the Left, Dawlat  Shah, was a Muslim and a firm ally throughout his reign. However, he understood that the means of his ascension left a bad taste in some mouths, and therefore reached out to accomodate them. Supporters of Ayurburwada and Shidebala who had been wronged by Temuder were posthumously pardoned or restored to their posts; Baiju’s son was given his father’s old military position. Two sons of Qaishan who had been exiled by Shidebala, including one Tuq Temur, were allowed to return. More princely titles and appanages were granted, gifts were made- another addition to the expenditure, but arguably necessary given the means by  which he had ascended the throne. Despite his origins, Yesun Temur showed respect to Confucians, refused to scrap the state exam system and encouraged the further translation of Confucian classics and teaching to Mongols, though these had little effect on government. Like Shidebala, Yesun Temur was a Buddhist, and spent great sums on Buddhist temples throughout the empire.       The environmental crisis only worsened though. The flight of Mongols and other peoples of the north and northwest grew so bad that in the first year of his reign, 39% of the money printed that year was spent on trying to send the refugees back and put them onto their feet. This was so ineffective that he then ordered any Mongol trying to migrate south without express permission was to be executed, and in 1326 forbid steppe princes from sending their wives to the court to complain about famine in Mongolia. Intense flooding every year of the 1320s annihilated cropland and worsened the problem, and inflation only continued to rise. These troubles showed no signs of abating when Yesun Temur died of illness in August 1328, aged 35. Our fifth Khan of the episode was succeeded by his 8 year old son Ragibagh at Shangdu in Inner Mongolia. Dawlat Shah and the party enthroning the new Khan were taken aback when news reached them of a coup already underway in Dadu.       Dadu, the imperial capital, had been seized by a Qipchap officer named El Temur. A compatriot of the late Qaishan, who had fought beside him in the wars against Qaidu, El Temur seized the capital in order to restore it to the line of Qaishan. Inviting both Qaishan’s sons Tuq Temur and Qoshila to Dadu to take the throne, El Temur deftly outmanuevered the supporters of young Ragibagh Khan. El Temur’s ally Bayan of the Merkit brought Tuq Temur to Dadu and in October 1328, made him the seventh Khan of the episode- with a promise to abdicate once his older brother, Qoshila, arrived from his exile in the Chagatai Khanate. This was the so-called “War of the Two Capitals,” with the two factions based in each of the capitals founded by Khubilai Khan, Dadu, where sits modern Beijing, and Shangdu, in the steppes in what is now Inner Mongolia. The two sides fought across the border, but El Temur and Tuq Temur’s  armies had the better of the encounters. They advanced on Shangdu which surrendered in November 1328. Dawlat Shah and his allies were captured and executed; the young Ragibagh, the sixth Khan of the episode, was never found.        Qoshila was excited at the news, and with the Chagatai Khan Eljigidei, declared himself Khan at a quriltai north of the old imperial capital of Karakorum, declaring Tuq Temur to be his heir. The Chagatai Khan returned to his Khanate, and Qoshila marched southeast.The eighth khan of the episode met the seventh at a palace built by their father, Qaishan, in August 1329. The reunion of Qoshila and Tuq Temur was warm. Four days later, Qoshila  Khan was found dead, and Tuq Temur was enthroned once more as Khan of Khans.       Despite being enthroned twice and having killed his brother for the throne, Tuq Temur was a puppet. He sat on the whim of the real powermakers, El Temur and Bayan of the Merkit. They were the ultimate bureaucratic kingmakers, having built their own wealth and support networks independent of the Khan. Unlike Temuder who was loyal to Targi Khatun, or civil servants like Oljei or Harghasun, El Temur and Bayan were their own dynamic duo controlling government, granting themselves titles, imperial wives, honorifics and fiefdoms. Tuq Temur Khan contented himself with his studies of the Chinese classics and Confucianism, which he adored, practicing his calligraphy, collected art and was haunted with guilt over murdering his older brother. The khan founded an Academy to help instill Confucian morals on the Mongols and government. El Temur, who had no care for Confucians, took over this Academy to restrict access of its members to the Khan.        The nakedly illegal reign did no favours for a Dynasty struck with financial and ecological chaos. In the three years Tuq Temur was Khan of Khan, 21 rebellions broke out requiring great resources to be crushed. It would not be until 1332 that the final holdouts of Yesun Temur loyalists would be militarily crushed. No new revenues could be found while the costs of relief, war, the court and corruption continued to soar alongside inflation. In 1328, 343,420 ding of paper money was printed. The next year, 1.232 million was printed, which almost covered the 1.35 million in cash and nearly 1 million tonnes of grain spent on famine relief, a full 20-30% of government revenue in that year.       Tuq Temur Khan obsessed with legitimacy: other claimants were exiled, including the sons of Qoshila. One, the 13 year old Toghon Temur, was sent to Korea. Tuq Temur and his empress had their eldest son Aratnadara declared heir in 1331… one month before Aratnadara died. Beset with grief and guilt, Tuq Temur changed the name of his eldest son, entrusted him to the care of El Temur, and died in September 1332 with the succession undecided. On his deathbed, overcome with shame, he apparently declared that a son of Qoshila was to succeed him in order to make amends. And so, El Temur carried out Tuq Temur’s will, installing the late Qoshila’s six year old son Rinchinbal as the ninth Khan of the episode. El Temur envisioned many happy years watching over this malleable child ruler, only for the lad to die of illness a full 53 days into his reign.        El Temur desired to place Tuq Temur’s young son on the throne, but court resistance was led by  Tuq Temur’s widow, the empress Budashiri, who wanted to hold to her husband’s final will. And so, El Temur invited Qoshila’s older surviving son, the thirteen year old Toghon Temur, to come take the throne, our tenth and last Khan of the episode- and the last Chinggisid Khan to rule the Yuan Dynasty in China. The long reign of Toghon Temur will be the subject of our next episode, so be sure to subscribe to the Kings and Generals podcast in order to follow. To help us keep bringing you great content, please consider supporting us on patreon at www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals, and providing us a kind review on a podcast site of your choice, or sharing with your friends. All are appreciated. This episode was researched and written by our series historian, Jack Wilson. I’m your host David, and we will catch you on the next one. 

"You must know that, as we shall tell you later on, the Great Kaan has entrusted to twelve men the task of attending, as seems best to them, to all territories, governments, and everything else. Among these twelve men, there was a Saracen, [Ahmad] by name, a shrewd and capable man, who above all others enjoyed great power and influence with the Great [Khan], who loved him so much that he gave him every liberty, for, as was found after his death, this [Ahmad] laid such a spell over the Kaan with his sorceries that the latter placed absolute faith in his words, paying them the closest attention. Thus he was able to do all that he wished. He it was who distributed all governments and offices, and punished all offenders. And every time he wished to encompass the death of someone he hated, whether justly or unjustly, he would go to the [Khan], and say, “Sire, such a man is worthy of death, for he has offended your Majesty in such a way.” Then the [Khan] would say, “Do what thou thinkest most fitting.” And straightway he would have the man put to death. Hence, seeing the complete liberty he enjoyed, and that the Lord placed absolute trust in his words, no one dared cross [Ahmad] in anything whatsoever.”   So the Venetian traveller Marco Polo, in the Benedetto translation, introduces Ahmad Fanakati, the famous “evil finance minister” of Khubilai Khan. Ahmad, the first of Khubilai’s “Three Villianous Ministers,” as they’re termed in the Chinese sources, is often used to symbolize the decay and corruption of Khubilai Khan’s final years. Where Khubilai had once been a vigourous monarch attending to every detail of state, by the 1280s  his interest and energy for governing declined with every year. Having taken you through the inconclusive, expensive and disastrous foreign miltiary expeditions of Khubilai’s last years, we shall now take you to the political and personal failings of Khubilai’s twilight, beginning with the Three Villianous ministers- Ahmad Fanakati, Lu Shih-Jing and Sangha. I’m your host David, and this is Kings and Generals, Ages of Conquest.   Ahmad, the first of the “Three Villianous Ministers,” was a Muslim from Central Asia who had been a favourite of Khubilai’s wife Chabi. Appointed to Khubilai’s Central Secretariat in 1262, Ahmad’s power and influence rapidly rose through his canny ability. For  a refresher on the secretariats and government structure of Khubilai, you can check back to episode 37, “Kublai Khan’s Reign.” By 1264, Ahmad was Vice-Chancellor of the Central Secretariat, and in 1271 was even briefly appointed as head of  the newly made Supreme Secretariat. His primary responsibility in Khubilai’s service was as a finance minister, tasked with providing the Great Khan more and more revenues. In this position he promoted trade, particularly with Central Asia and sought to increase the number of taxable households in the empire- usually by tracking down those who had escaped prior registration. Ahmad also oversaw further progress on implemention of regular land taxation, one of those ever-present problems of the Mongol administration in China, as well as new taxes on merchants. One of his most noteworthy efforts was the expansion of government monopolies; iron producing regions would have to provide yearly quotas of iron to the government, which would be turned into tools and farm implements to be sold back to farmers. After 1276 Ahmad forbade the private production of copper tools, making it a privilege of the government to produce and sell these, usually in exchange for grain. The yearly revenue from the strictly enforced salt monopoly increased dramatically over the 1270s and early 1280s, and monopolies on tea, liquor, vinegar, gold, silver - all traditional monopolies of the Chinese state- were enforced under Ahmad’s supervision.        None of Ahmad’s financial policies in and of themselves indicated an expectional cruelty on his part or hatred towards the Chinese. Rather, he was enacting the will of Khubilai, who was making ever increasing demands for income. Ahmad had to choose between more state revenues or looking to fail the Great Khan, and judged, rather wisely, it was better to come up with more revenue. Ahmad carried out his mandate thoroughly, and for this earned as much love as any thorough tax collector will- i.e, not very much. If we are to believe the sources, the Chinese at large hated and cursed him for his policies, and the fact that he was a foreignor. Khubilai, as Ahmad’s backer, thus found his own standing harmed in their eyes. However, whatever “public opinion” was regarding Ahmad does not particularly matter: the Mongols never showed themselves really concerned with how the masses viewed their ministers. The fact that Ahmad was bringing in the revenue streams and trying to handle the tricky task of incorporating the former Song territories into the Yuan Empire mattered more to Khubilai than the cursings of merchants.       The reason that Ahmad has become so infamous comes not from his taxation policy and treatment of the lower classes, but his treatment of the elite and other members of government: the ones who wrote the sources we use for learning of Ahmad’s career. Khubilai over the 1270s seems to have given minimal oversight to Ahmad, trusting him to get results and engaging less and less often in meetings. Left to run things how he desired, Ahmad sought to secure his position, placing  his friends, allies and family in government positions. One of his sons was placed into the lucrative position as darughachi of Hangzhou, the capital of the late Song Dynasty. He also sought to run his political foes out of the bureaucracy; in at least one case, a political enemy was hounded into execution. Often he butted heads with Khubilai’s other advisers, especially Confucians and Buddhists. The Chancellor of the Right, Antung, blocked an attempt by Ahmad to place a son in prominent position in Khubilai’s capital of Dadu; respected advisers like Shi Tienzi fought Ahmad’s tax policies. Their resistance brought the dissolution of Ahmad’s brief post as Administer of the Supreme Secretariat, and their collective complaints about a lack of oversight over Ahmad forced Khubilai to grant his son Jinggim authority over Ahmad’s actions. But as many of these most stalwart adivsers died off in the 1270s, Ahmad’s  power increased, and fewer voices were there to whisper against him. His influence grew so great that Rashid al-Din, a contemporary who served as vizier of the Ilkhanate, described Ahmad as the vizier of Khubilai’s Yuan Dynasty.       . Ahmad accused his remaining foes of embezzlement, adultery and “unbecoming personal conduct,” which succeeded in driving a number from office. Similar accusations were hurled back at Ahmad himself, pointing to cronyism, personal enrichment, taking bribes and manipulating gold and silver rates for his own gain. Detractors accused him of allowing and even promoting abuses in the system, and that his continued issuing of paper money was causing inflation and therefore encouraging the subjects to hoard their own gold and silver. The most famous accusation against Ahmad, repeated in the Yuan Shi, by Marco Polo and Rashid al-Din, is that he was a lechourous pervert, stealing wives, daughters and mothers for his insatiable sexual desires. To quote Marco Polo,    “There was no fair lady whom if [Ahmad] wanted her, he did not have at his will, taking her for wife if she was not married, or otherwise making her consent. And when he knew that anyone had some pretty daughter, he had his ruffians who went to the father of the girl saying to him, What wilt thou do? Thou hast this daughter of thine. Give her for wife to [Ahmad]  and we will make him give thee such a governorship or such an office for three years.”   Rashid al-Din for his part, is hardly more subdued in his description of Ahmad’s  “female interests,” stating simply that Ahmad had some forty-one wives and four hundred concubines. There was likely a bit of truth in these accusations: it seems Ahmad was engaging in cronyism, personal enrichment and a bit of adultery on the side, but the  scale of the issue was almost certainly overstated by his unsympathetic chroniclers. Further, none of these would be vices unique to Ahmad’s service in government. Regardless, it’s clear that there was a  lengthy conflict going on in the upper uchelons of the Yuan bureaucracy over the 1270s and 1280s, one which Khubilai seemed content to turn his gaze away from.       Notably, Ahmad had an openly poor relationship with the crown prince, Khubilai’s son Jinggim. According to Rashid al-Din, Jinggim’s dislike was so open for the finance minister that one day Jinggim struck Ahmad on the head with his bow, causing him to bleed profusely. Ahmad went before Khubilai, who inquired as to what had happened. Attempting to be diplomatic, Ahmad answered that he had been kicked by a horse, to which Jinggim, standing nearby, shouted “art thou ashamed to say that Jinggim hit thee?”, and then proceeded to punch Ahmad a number of times, right infront of Khubilai. Rashid al-Din and Marco Polo both agree that Ahmad lived in fear of Jinggim, which seems rather reasonable.   Interesting for this anecdote, Rashid al-Din is silent on Khubilai’s response to Jinggim’s assault, surprising given his usually pro-Khubilai stance. Rashid may have been uninterested in commenting on Khubilai allowing mistreatment of a long serving Muslim servant, or  it may have been that Khubilai, characteristic of this period, offered no response. Khubilai was either ignoring the open disputes rocking the top levels of his government, or completely oblivious to them, and remained content to focus on the revenue Ahmad was bringing in. Either option speaks to Khubilai’s growing disinterest in governance and dereliciton of his duties. Marco Polo, who adored Khubilai, sought to explain away his hero’s inaction by stating that Ahmad had bewitched the Khaan.        The tension with Ahmad and his foes reached a breaking point in April 1282. Every year, Khubilai and most of the royal court, including Jinggim, made the trek to the steppe to spend the summer in his secondary capital, Shangdu, the famous Xanadu of Marco Polo. It’s likely the Venetian accompanied them on the trip this year. While the Khan and crown prince were absent from the imperial capital of Dadu, Ahmad’s foes made their move- possibly with the tacit approval of Crown Prince Jinggim. The conspiracy was led by a Chinese fellow named Wang Zhu, who, if we are to believe Polo, had his mother, wife and daughter all fall prey to Ahmad’s urgings. One night the conspirators sent a messenger to Ahmad, telling him that Jinggim had returned unexpectedly and demanded to see him. The worried Ahmad came forth at once to the palace, where he found the conspirators sitting in a dark room lit by sparse candlelight. Bowing before whom he assumed to be Jinggim, the conspirators swung their swords and removed Ahmad’s head. The guards were quick to the scene and killed the perpators, sending a message at once to Khubilai of what had happened. A furious Khubilai returned quickly to Dadu and unleashed hell upon the conspirators still alive and buried Ahmad with full honours. But the survivors in time finally convinced the Khan of Ahmad’s digressions and lechery, though it seems the defining moment came when one of the “lost” jewels from one of Khubilai’s crowns miraculously turned up in the late Ahmad’s private residence. Marco Polo, who writes that he was at Khubilai’s attendance on his return to Dadu, vividly describes the Khan’s reaction. Roaring with anger, Khubilai had Ahmad’s sons and wives rounded up; those found guilty were flayed alive and their fortune confiscated. Ahmad’s body was exhumed and placed on display, it’s head removed and crushed by a cart; and the rest fed to Khubilai’s dogs.        So ended Ahmad’s tenure as finance minister and a purging of a number of his associates. Ahmad’s actions seem to have furthered an anti-Muslim policy Khubilai had been developing since 1279. The original incident which brought this on, according to Rashid al-Din, was a refusal of Muslim merchants to eat non-halal meat offered to them in Khubilai’s court, an offense which Khubilai took personally. Khubilai ordered that whosoever slaughtered animals in the Muslim fashion would in turn be killed and their family and property given over to whoever informed on them. Circumcisions were likewise forbidden, on pain of death. It also may have been an effort by Khubilai to placate some of the Chinese or even Mongols by making an appearance to restrict the privileges of Muslims in the government, and further encouraged by his anger at Ahmad Fanakati. Regardless of the cause, it resulted in a number of greedy individuals using Khubilai’s decree to kill Muslims and seize their property. Rashid al-Din indicates that a number of powerful and wealthy Muslim merchants in the 1280s chose to flee the Yuan realm, or refused to travel there in the first place, rather than face the Khan’s scruple-less enforcers. This reflects Khubilai’s inability to handle any religious matters carefully in these years. The man who had once headed a famed Buddhist-Taoist debate in the 1250s, now  responded to perceived abuses by Taoists in the 1270s and 80s with violence. A conflict between Taoists and Buddhists turned bloody in the streets of the imperial capital, and a group of Taoists attempted to frame Buddhists for a fire attack on a Taoist temple in Dadu. When the plot was discovered, Khubilai had the Taoists involved variously executed, their noses and ears chopped off, and others exiled. Continued circulation of certain Taoist texts banned after the earlier debate resulted, in 1281, with Khubilai ordering all Taoists texts other than Lao Tzu’s Tao Teo Ching to be burned and their printing blocks destroyed.  Restrictions were imposed on Taoist charms, incantations, and magic, while some Taoist monks were forcibly converted to Buddhism.        After Ahmad’s death in 1282, Khubilai promoted one of his associates, a Chinese named Lu Shih-Jung, to the post of Chancellor of the Left. In this position, he took over many of Ahmad’s former financial responsibilities, and subsequently earned himself the place as the Second of the Three Villianous Ministers. One may have assumed placing a Chinese in this position was intended to placate some of the anger felt at the Yuan financial system, though it did little good. While vitriol could be hurled at Ahmad for his actions, Ahmad himself  was not the source of the problems. The immense revenue demands of Khubilai and the Yuan government were not abating as more military expeditions were launched; the second invasion of Japan was undertaken in 1281, in 1282 Sogetu’s army landed in Champa and in 1283 an attack was launched on the kingdom of Pagan, in addition to the expenses of the court, the government and public works. It was  a thankless task to try and cover this, and Lu Shih-Jung found himself no better off than Ahmad. More monopolies were enforced, salt licenses were made more expensive, and rich households that were avoiding monopolies were cracked down on. He increased the issuance of paper money and tried to increase government control of the copper coinage and silver, which only contributed to the inflation. In an attempt to secure his position and actually carry out his policies, Lu Shih-jung sought to place his allies in power and run his enemies out of office. All this succeeded in doing was stiffening resistance against him, until finally Jinggim himself grew frustrated with him. Khubilai was finally forced to interact, having likewise turned a blind eye to the minister and court conflicts as long as the money kept coming in. On Jinggim’s urging, in early 1285 Khubilai dismissed Lu Shih-jung from office, had him arrested and by the end of the year, executed.       The last of the so-called Three Villianous Ministers was a Buddhist named Sangha, either a Uighur or Tibetan. Having supported Lu Shih-Jung and been in the staff of the ‘Phags-Pa Lama, Khubilai had long taken a liking to the experienced and capable Sangha. By 1275 he was placed in charge of the Office of Buddhist and Tibetan Affairs, and in 1280 successfully crushed a revolt in Tibet. After the deaths of Ahmad and Lu Shih-Jung his importance increased dramatically, culminating in his appointment as Chancellor of the Right in 1287 and expansion of his influence across the entire government. Like Ahmad and Lu Shih-Jung, Sangha also had the undesirable task of paying for Khubilai’s expenses, and likewise enforced monopolies and new taxes, to the ire of many. He tried to tackle the matter of inflation head on via currency reform instead of just printing more money. In 1287 he persuaded Khubilai to replace the existing paper money with a new unit, which the subjects were to exchange their current paper money for on a five-to-one basis. To put another way, Sangha was seeking to reduce the amount of money in circulation, and thereby reduce inflation. No matter how well meaning it was, it succeeded in angering many who felt they were devaluing themselves for notes of lesser value.        Perhaps the most notable project Sangha oversaw was the expansion of the Grand Canal to the capital of Dadu. Canals had long been a part of Chinese trade networks; as China’s many rivers generally flow west to east, speedier movement could be attained by digging north-south canals to connect them. Under the Sui and Tang Dynasties, when most of China’s north and south were unified, came the first great connections of these canals, tying the Yellow and Yangzi Rivers- China’s two great arteries- together in what  came to be called the Grand Canal. After the fall of the Tang, the division of China between Liao, Song and Jin had left little reason for the maintenance of these north-south canals, and the route was largely left to silt up. With unification under the Mongols, there was once again an impetus to restore it. While Khubilai had been quite  forward thinking in many respects to the requirements of his great capital of Dadu, he found that supplying it with its necessary grain was proving difficult. Khubilai wanted to use the great production regions of southern China and the former Song territory to supply Dadu, and initially hoped to rely on the coastal route, with ships making the long journey bearing the foodstuffs. While there was some successes here, the route was perilous. Shallow waters and storms off the Shandong Peninsula and Gulf of Bohai brought many of these shipments to the bottom of the sea. Such was the fate of over a quarter of the fleet bearing the grain in 1286. With the sea route too unreliable, it was decided to dig a proper canal to connect north and south- not only better supplying Khubilai’s capital, but tying his empire closer together as well. Some canal projects had started as early as 1283, but it was Sangha who suggested a massive, 217 kilometre, or 135 mile, expansion of a vast Canal to bring supplies right into Dadu. By February 1289 the bulk of the work was completed, with expansions over the 1290s which allowed ships to sail from Hangzhou right into the heart of Dadu. The Canal was an impressive structure- much of the Yuan canal system, with upgrades and expansion, remained in use until the 1850s when flooding irreparably damaged much of it. But it was a massive expense; some three million labourers had to be mobilized for the construction, and it required even further expenditure for basic maintenance to prevent it from silting up. Though it served its purpose in providing for the supply of Dadu, it was another cost that men like Sangha had to try and cover.       Another area Sangha found to help bring in further resources was to try to revitalize the Central Asia trade and increase taxes on merchants. In order to do this, Sangha needed to encourage the travel of Muslims to China, something hamphered by Khubilai’s anti-islamic promulgations. It took until 1287 for Sangha to succeed in getting Khubilai to rescind his bans on halal slaughter and the like- convincing Khubilai not on the basis of compassion, but on the revenues they would provide. In the following years Sangha did receive Khubilai’s support for schools for educating on Muslim languages and scripts to assist in trade contacts. This was rather typical of Sangha, who on a whole favoured many of the men from the ‘western regions,’ of China, what we today would deem ‘non-Han’ peoples. Muslims, Tibetans, Uighurs, all found protection and patronage from Sangha. All of his major-apointees to positions of power came from these non-Chinese groups, which of course did little to endear him to his Chinese enemies. Like his predeceassors, he forced his enemies from their offices and appointed his friends and allies. In the increasingly faction divided Yuan government, with little direct interference from an ever-more out-of-touch Khubilai, removing enemy voices and appointing friendly ones was one of the best means to not just stay in office, but actually enact some policies before they became bound up in intrigues and infighting. Of course, Sangha therefore suffered from the standard accusations of cronyism, enriching himself as well as intense sexual perversions. A particular offence which Sangha was said to have given support to, was when a Buddhist monk in his service descrecated and looted tombs of the former Song Emperors, and turned former Song palaces into Buddhist temples. Here was an issue which angered former Song subjects and literati combined and did little to endear the new Yuan masters in south China. With mounting pressure building against him, Sangha’s enemies conveniently “found” stolen pearls in his private residence. Khubilai had him removed from office, stripped of rank and title and executed over the course of 1291.       So ended the period of the “Three Villianous Ministers.” As the histories of these men were largely written by parties antagonistic to them, we should take many of the accusations with a grain of salt. Ahmad, Lu Shih-Jung and Sangha certainly had a little issue making the same accusations towards their political foes. What these episodes highlight is the ever widening divide between Khubilai Khan had the demands of government and the start of issues which would plague all of Khubilai’s Yuan successors: the seemingly impossible task to govern China while dealing with the costs of a top heavy court and military expenditure. None of them would be up to the task, and it is no wonder that Ahmad, Lu Shih-Jung and Sangha could not find the balance between meeting Khubilai’s demands and placating court opinions, particularly when Khubilai refused to intervene. The Three ministers became scape-goats for the issues of Khubilai’s government and served to illustrate the failures of the last years of Khubilai Khan. Our final episode on Khubilai looks at these years, so be sure to subscribe to the Kings and Generals Podcast to follow. If you’d like to help us continue bringing you great content, pelase cosnider supporting us on Patreon at www.patreon.com/kingsangenerals. This episode was researched and written by our series historian, Jack wilson. I’m your host David, and we’ll catch you on the next one. 

Broken Promises: Historical Lessons on How Not to Govern the Uyghur HomelandThursday, December 3, 2020Hoover Institution, Stanford UniversityXinjiang is a Muslim-majority region in northwest China, and its autochthonous Uyghur people are very different from China’s Han majority in terms of culture, language, and religion. Since 2016, China’s leadership has shifted its governing strategy in Xinjiang from economic development to cultural assimilation, citing the threat allegedly posed by Islam. A new system of reeducation camps, disappearances, and political imprisonment has now been widely reported in global media. This new policy is reminiscent of the last campaign of cultural assimilation undertaken in the region. From 1877 to 1907, Neo-Confucian activists from Hunan province attempted to turn 'Muslims into Confucians' and transform this alien border region into a familiar province of China proper. The result, however, was neither stability nor assimilation, but greater resentment, violence, and alienation. This talk explores the ramifications of that historical 'civilizing project' in terms of its effects on economy, sexual relations, and the creation of a deeper and more hostile ethnic consciousness. It reflects on the remarkable parallels with the program undertaken today in terms of its underlying logics and its social effects, and on the persistent idea of the 'broken promises' in the Uyghur relationship with China-based states.Eric Schluessel is an assistant professor at the George Washington University in Washington, DC. His research concerns the social history of Xinjiang and China in the nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries. Prof. Schluessel previously taught at the University of Montana, was recently a Mellon Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and spent the 2019-2020 academic year on a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. His publications include Land of Strangers (Columbia, 2020), An Introduction to Chaghatay (2018), and several articles on Uyghur and Chinese affairs past and present. He received his PhD in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University.ABOUT THE HOOVER HISTORY WORKING GROUPhttps://www.hoover.org/research-teams/history-working-group  This interview is part of the History Working Group Seminar Series. A central piece of the History Working Group is the seminar series, which is hosted in partnership with the Hoover Library & Archives. The seminar series was launched in the fall of 2019, and thus far has included six talks from Hoover research fellows, visiting scholars, and Stanford faculty. The seminars provide outside experts with an opportunity to present their research and receive feedback on their work. While the lunch seminars have grown in reputation, they have been purposefully kept small in order to ensure that the discussion retains a good seminar atmosphere.

“Now I wish to tell you [...] all the very great doings and all the very great marvels of the very great lord of the Tartars, [...] who is called Kublai Khan, which [...] means to say in our language the great lord of lords, emperor, and [...]this great Khan is the most powerful man in people and in lands and in treasure that ever was in the world, or that now is from the time of Adam our first father till this moment; and under him all the peoples are set with such obedience as has never been done under any other former king. And this I shall show you quite clearly in the course of this our second book, that it is a true thing which I have told you so that each will be sure that he is, as we say without contradiction, the greatest lord that ever was born in the world or that now is.”       So Marco Polo introduces Kublai Khan in his Description of the World, as per the classic translation of Moule and Pelliot. Having now taken you through the successful Mongol conquest of China and fall of the Song Dynasty, we’ll now look at Kublai’s reign itself, and his efforts to build a new dynasty in China. Great Khan of the Mongol Empire and simultaneously Emperor of China, Kublai Khan was one of the single most powerful men in human history, rumours of his vast wealth and might spreading across the world. Kublai Khan’s long reign will be dealt with in two halves; a first one today covering 1260 to 1279, followed by a look at Kublai’s foreign ventures, then another episode detailing his last years. I’m your host David, and this is Kings and Generals: Ages of Conquest.       Kublai’s name has popped up in several episodes even before his war with Ariq Boke, but we’ve dealt little with the man directly. Born on the 23rd of September, 1215, Kublai was the second son of Tolui and Sorqaqtani Beki, and a grandson of Chinggis Khan. Indeed, Kublai was the last of the Great Khans to have ever personally met Chinggis, though Kublai was little more than 12 years old at the time of Chinggis’ death. It was never likely that Kublai would have come to the throne: while all of Sorqaqtani’s son received the same extensive education, learning to read and write the Mongolian script, take lessons in governance and even had Chinese advisers, Kublai was the only one of her four sons who really found himself attracted to Chinese culture. In time, Kublai even came to speak some Chinese, though never learned the characters. While Sorqaqtani’s eldest son Mongke led armies on the Great Western Campaign across the steppe in the 1230s, Kublai was beginning to govern Chinese for the first time, having been given an appanage in North China by Ogedai Khaan in 1236. Like many Mongols granted territory in China, Kublai did not actually rule from China, staying in Mongolia proper. As with much of North China, Kublai’s appanage was left to the whims of tax farmers and merciless officers demanding extraordinary levies. By the time Kublai learned of it, thousands of tenants had already fled their lands. Perhaps on the council of his Chinese tutors, Kublai sought assistance and local knowledge. The tax farmers in his lands were dismissed and replaced with dedicated officials. A regular taxation system enforced, burdens lessened and by the 1240s Kublai had succeeded in encouraging a number to return. The episode was an important one for Kublai. Leaving government to operate without oversight would allow all manner of corruption and abuse into the system, depreiving the lord of his tribute and putting increased pressure onto the peasanty and farmers at the bottom. Given the chance, they would flee, leaving those petty officials to now increase the pressure on remaining tenants and continue the cycle. By curbing abuses and encouraging growth, Kublai reasoned, the lord would reap even greater rewards over time.       For most of the 1240s, Kublai was a minor figure. He was a grandson of Chinggis and thus a high ranking prince, to be sure, but one of little importance without a military record to his name- the only kind of record which mattered, as far as the Mongols were concerned. Just before 1240 Kublai married his second and most famous wife, Chabi of the Onggirat. A wise and outspoken woman, Chabi would, for most of Kublai’s long life, be one of his most significant advisers and supporters, a calming and motivating voice when he needed it most. Chabi was also a devout Buddhist, and certainly must have encouraged Kublai’s own interest in Buddhism. It’s no coincidence their first son was given a rather classically Tibetan Buddhist name, Dorji. She may very well have been a driving force in bringing more Buddhist advisers into Kublai’s fledgling court in the 1240s. In 1242, the Buddhist monk Hai-yun was summoned to Kublai, who further educated Kublai on Buddhism. In 1243, Hai-yun helped Kublai choose the Chinese Buddhist name of Zhenjin, “True Gold,” for Kublai’s second son, rendered in Mongol as Jingim. Hai-yun introduced Kublai to another Buddhist, Liu Ping-chung, who would become one of Kublai’s most prominent advisers in the years to come. While Kublai was personally more inclined to Buddhism, he did not limit himself to it. Confucian scholars such as Chao Pi, Tou Mo and most famously, Yao Shu, came to Kublai in these years. Yao Shu was highly trusted by Kublai, and the Chinese sources are replete with examples of Yao Shu turning ancient Chinese parables and stories into practical advice for Kublai as a general and in time, ruler. These  men were made responsible not just for informing Kublai of the ancient Confucian classics, but of tutoring Kublai’s sons as well. The oldest boy, Dorji, died early, and Jingim became the focus of their teaching efforts, receiving an education in Buddhism, Confucianism and even Taoism.       Confucians and Buddhists were not his only advisers; Uighurs, Turks and Central Asians served Kublai in a vareity of roles as interpeters, translators, officials and financial advisers. For military matters of course, Kublai relied on his Mongolian kinsmen. Over the 1240s and into the 1250s, Kublai cultivated what historian Morris Rossabi has termed the “kitchen cabinet,” of advisers, a wide collection of opinions and experiences which he could draw upon, men he knew for years and trusted, backed up by his wife Chabi.      As we’ve covered before, when his older brother Mongke became Grand Khan in the 1250s Kublai was thrust into the international spotlight. We needn’t go into this in great detail again; how Kublai was for the first time given a military command, against the Dali Kingdom in Yunnan. How Kublai returned to Northern China to oversee matters for Mongke there, only to annoy his brother with possible aspirations to greater autonomy and perhaps independence, an overconfidence brought on by a successful military campaign and fruitful years as a governor which saw him construct his own capital, known as Shangdu in Inner Mongolia. Mongke greatly reduced Kublai’s influence in the aftermath, and Kublai only managed to crawl back into Mongke’s favour in time to be given command of an army in a massive assault on the Song Dynasty. The sudden death of Mongke in August 1259  brought the campaign to a screeching halt. Mongke and Kublai’s youngest brother, Ariq Boke, stepped up into the regency. Kublai ignored requests to return to the imperial capital at Karakorum in Mongolia, and continued to campaign for a few more months, until his wife Chabi sent word of rumour that Ariq was going to put his name forward for the Khanate. But Kublai had already been aspiring for the throne. He may have intended to keep campaigning and build up his rather lacklustre resume as a commander, but now had to rush north earlier than he had hoped. In May of 1260, at his residence in Shangdu, Kublai declared himself Khan of the Mongol Empire, precipitating a four year civil war between himself and Ariq. Though Kublai had Ariq’s surrender by 1264, over those four years the princes in the western half of the empire took their independence, leaving Kublai ruler of a realm much reduced in size. As our previous episodes have demonstrated, Kublai sent his armies on the colossal effort to conquer southern China and its Song Dynasty, a task only completed by 1279. Kublai though, did not lead these armies himself, instead focusing on building his new empire, as we’ll go into today.       After declaring himself Khan in early 1260, his early efforts were directed at the war with Ariq Boke. Once the conflict quieted by 1261 and 62, as Ariq was pushed from Mongolia, Kublai could begin to consolidate his empire. Though he still perceived of himself as ruler of the Mongol Empire, he understood that his powerbase was in China. From the beginning, Kublai could not have merely co-opted Mongke’s administration. Since the reign of Ogedai, the Mongol imperial organization functioned through Secretariats, influenced by yet unique from the Chinese system. The Central Secretariat, based in the imperial capital, was the central government, the head of which served as a sort of Prime Minister, consulting with the Great Khan to carry out his will and laws. For Ogedai, Guyuk and Mongke, the Central Secretariat had been staffed by members of the keshig, the imperial bodyguard. The Central Secretariat delegated authority to the various Branch Secretariats, the regional offices overseeing imperial government. Branch Secretariats for North China, Central Asia  and Western Asia were the three main offices, with a Secretariat for the Rus’ Principalities in the process of being organized at time of Mongke’s death. The Secretariats struggled to carry out their will, for they were operating alongside various regional Mongol princes who had been allotted these lands as well. The conflict over whether the Secretariats or the Princes carried out administration or taxation, among other responsibilities, was a key component of government ineffiencies over the century.    With the outbreak of war with Ariq Boke, most of the top members of the former Central Secretariat had sided with Ariq Boke in Karakorum, leaving Kublai to rely on his own men. Among his earliest actions was to get the loyalty of the China Secretariat and local Mongol princes, and prevent them from allying with Ariq. Of these, Qadan was the most significant, a son of Ogedai who ruled on Kublai’s northwest frontier, the border close to Ariq’s territory and the Chagatayids. Key allies like this allowed Kublai to focus on more internal matters.    The officials of the China Secretariat were naturally brought on into Kublai’s new government. Without access to the old Central Secretariat offices though, Kublai had to establish a new one after becoming Khan. Unlike the Central Secretariats of the previous Khans, Kublai’s was not filled by men of his keshig -though they were present- but civilian administrators and his own advisers. The first to head the new Secretariat was Wang Wen-tung. In structure Kublai’s Secretariat had much more in common with the usual Chinese office, indicative of the influence of Kublai’s Confucian advisers. The head of the Secretariat was assisted by two Chancellors of the Left and Right, often serving as his replacement and primary advisers to the Khan. The Head of the Secretariat and the two Chancellors oversaw what was known as the Six Functional Ministeries, which carried out the day-to-day running of the empire: the Ministry of Personnel, responsible for civilian officials; the Ministry of Revenue, responsible for the census, taxes and tribute; the Ministry of Rites, responsible for ceremonies, sacrifices and embassies; the Ministry of War, responsible for some aspects of military command, colonies, postal stations and supplies; the Ministry of Justice, which managed law and prisons; and the Ministry of Public Works, which repaired and maintained fortifications, dams and public land.   In 1263, Kublai also re-established another Chinese institution, the Privy Council, which managed the Imperial Army and protected the capital. Kublai sought a more centralized control of the army, but in this found resistance from the Mongolian leadership and princes. While Chinggis Khan had largely replaced the traditional military leadership and chiefs, a new hereditary leadership was installed, both from his sons and non-Chinggisids. By Kublai’s time, he was dealing with well-entrenched egos born into these positions. They would answer the Khan’s summons for war, of course, but did not want to be managed in all aspects by officials in a distant capital who may not have been nomads. To compromise, Kublai organized his armed forces into three major branches. The first a “Mongol Army,” under his direct control, and that of the Privy Council. This was stationed close to the Imperial capitals, made up of Mongols, Central Asians and Turks. This was followed by the “Tammachi,” the Mongols who served the Khan, but maintained their own princes and lived out in the steppes. Then there was the “Chinese Army,” the largely infantry force of Chinese who served as garrison troops.   By 1268, in order to watch his growing bureaucracy, Kublai brought on another Chinese institution, the Censorate. The duty of the Censorate was to inspect officials and route out corruption; they would report directly back to the Khan to inform him of the goings-on in his government, of tidings which may not have reached him through regular channels. For Kublai, good governance was a high priority, and he gave his Censorate great resources and power. The Khan wanted to know what happened at all levels of government. Compared to other dynasties, Kublai’s Censorate had great power… on paper. In reality, there is little evidence for its effectiveness outside of the provinces closest to the capital. The Censorate’s first leader, a Confucian named Zhang Dehui, resigned after a dispute with Kublai on how the law applied to the Khan. To put simply, Kublai argued that it didn’t, and Kublai had him replaced with a more pliant Mongol.    Kublai’s affinity for the classic Chinese government structures should not be overstated. Employing traditional styles of governance helped placate Confucian elites and scholars, going some ways to convince them that Kublai had ‘stepped past,’ his nomad roots, but he was unwilling to let himself be tethered to it. The most obvious example was in his refusal to restore the Civil Service examination systems. Since the Tang Dynasty, most Chinese bureacrats were selected after completing these exams. The highest men in the empires were scholar officials who were well versed in Chinese history and literary classics, and jealuously guarded access to high office from those who had never completed the exams. Kublai did not want to limit himself in who he could appoint to office, preferring to keep his doors open to anyone he perceived useful or deserving, regardless of their origins. So, the non-Chinese men from his keshig could still staff high positions, and men from Central Asia could be raised to high station. Of these, none were more famous than Ahmad Fanakati, becoming Kublai’s finance minister in the 1260s. Particularly with the rebellion of Li Tan in 1262, a Mongol-aligned warlord in Shandong, Kublai’s desire to place power in the hands of the Chinese lessenged. Though the rebellion was quickly crushed,  Kublai’s chief minister of the Central Secretariat, Li Tan’s father-in-law Wang Wen-tung, was found complicit and executed. The power of Mongol-allied Chinese warlords across North China was greatly curtailed following this, and Kublai found himself far more suspicious of the Confucians in his government.   For Kublai’s empire, the old imperial capital of Karakorum was untenable. Deep in Mongolia, it was a difficult to supply and highly exposed location, now vulnerable to the mobile horsemen of Kublai’s Central Asian kinsmen- first Ariq Boke, the Chagatayids and in time, the young Ogedeid prince Qaidu. Neither could the complex bureaucracy he was building be managed from Mongolia’s Orkhon valley. Karakorum was to be effectively left abandoned,  a garrison outpost of only symbolic value. For a little over 30 years Karakorum had been the administrative centre of most of Eurasia. Never again would it regain its importance. Kublai first made Shangdu, in what is now Inner Mongolia at the edge of the steppe and Chinese frontier, his capital. Shangdu, originally called Kaiping, is most well known through Samual Taylor Coleridge’s poem Xanadu. Though it housed Kublai’s court and was in the steppe, it was built in Chinese style; roughly a square, with low, rammed earthern walls and a palace. But even Shangdu was insufficient for governing the empire. The area was unsuited to housing a great population, and would still have kept Kublai removed from his subjects. Chinese sources assert that Kublai’s Chinese advisers informed him of the need to govern from within China, but Kublai must have seen it himself. Most Imperial capitals were located more centrally, along the lower arm of the Yellow River where it cuts through the North China plain. Of these cities, none were better known than Xian, in Shaanxi province, from which a great many dynasties ruled from. The former Song and Jin capitals of Kaifeng were also located along the Yellow River. Kublai did not wish to abandon his homeland though, desiring to maintain some proximity, both for personal and security reasons. So a more northerly location was chosen: the ruins of the Jin capital of Zhongdu. Fittingly, the city had been taken by the Mongols the same year as Kublai’s birth, in 1215, and now Kublai was the one to restore it… somewhat. His new city was built just northeast of Zhongdu, straddling three rivers to provide ample water for the population. Construction began in 1267. Built in Chinese style but overseen by a Muslim engineer, it was a vast, square shape with walls of rammed earth. Within was a smaller enclosed area, housing the imperial city, palaces and residences of the Khan. This was to be Dadu, meaning great capital. To Mongols and Turks, it was Khanbaliq, the Khan’s city. Marco Polo would interpet it as Cambulac. Today, Beijing sits atop of it.       Dadu in many ways embodied Kublai’s often roughly mixed Chinese and Mongolian demands. The Chinese wanted Kublai to step into the expectations of a Chinese Emperor and conduct proper rituals to maintain the Mandate of Heaven; constructing a capital within China, building requisite temples to honour his ancestors and donning proper imperial garb helped  to present the necessary image. Yet, Kublai and his sons slept not in Dadu’s sumptuous residences, but in gers in the city’s central park; feasts were decidedly more Mongolian in terms of drunkenness and yelling; his altar sat on top of soil brought from Mongolia. In a sort of quasi-nomadization, Kublai conducted treks between Shangdu and Dadu every year, spending summers in Shangdu and winters in Dadu. Each trek was marked with Mongolian shamanistic ceremonies: flicking airag onto the ground for the departing Khan and calling out the name of his illustrious grandfather. At Shangdu Kublai hunted and feasted, doing a little bit to remind himself of his heritage and escape the demands of office.       As we’ve been iterating, the image of a legitimate emperor of China was a major part of actually ruling China. Each Chinese dynasty, it was believed, ruled with the Mandate of Heaven, the divine support necessary to control the Middle Kingdom. Victory in war meant the conqueror had Heaven’s support. But Heaven needed to be appeased through proper ritual and ceremony. Good governance and climate meant that the Dynasty had Heaven’s support. Corruption and ecological disasters, coupled with military defeats, meant Heaven had rescinded its blessing. The image of being a proper Chinese ruler was therefore necessary for any man wishing to have that divine backing. Kublai would have been reminded of this constantly by his advisers, particularly Liu Ping-chung, who urged Kublai to commit to declaring a dynasty and marking himself as the successor to the Song. In 1271 the Yuan Dynasty was officially declared. Yuan was taken from the Yijing, the Book of Changes, one of the most ancient of all Chinese classics. Yuan has connotations of primal energy and the origins of the universe; all auspicious things to refer to for a man who already had the backing of Eternal Blue Heaven.        To Kublai, taking the Dynastic name of Yuan was not an indication he was replacing the Mongol Empire. To him, Da Yuan, the Great Yuan, was another way to express Yeke Mongghol Ulus, the Great Mongol State. It was to help Chinese acceptance of his rule and maintain Heaven’s Mandate. But it was a fine line to try and present oneself as both Mongol Emperor and the Chinese Emperor, and the declaration of the Yuan may have been in part a recognition of his lack of effective power over the western Mongol Khanates. Kublai still very much saw himself as their overlord, but even he would have recognized his actual power over them was limited at best.        By declaring the Yuan Dynasty, Kublai was also demonstrating his intention was not just to loot and occupy China, but actually rule there. Now, we’ve talked alot about things Kublai ordered, declared and issued: but what did his rule actually look like? In terms of wanting to be a good ruler, what did Kublai accomplish in this regard? Well, ol’ Kublai was not just a man of ideas, but put things into action. Reconstruction of China both north and south was a primary goal of his. Northern China had hardly recovered from the prolonged Mongol-Jin warfare. Despite efforts in the past to institute regular taxation as proposed by the thanksless Yelu Chucai, much taxatio remained adhoc, local populations still being taken advantage of by Mongol officials. For the success of his Dynasty, Kublai wanted the burdens on the population relieved.       In 1261, Kublai began to provide funding for the Office for the Stimulation of Agriculture, headed by his friend and adviser Yao Shu. The stated goal of the office was to help peasants restore, develop and advance agriculture. Kublai wanted Northern China to once again reach a state of food security and be able to produce surplus as protection against shortages. A starving and discontented peasantry would pose a risk of massive uprisings, and the surplus was needed for the massive capital at Dadu. Dadu required 58 grainaries, each one holding 2,170,440 kilograms of grain, or  4,785,000 lbs. Kublai needed a reserve just to feed his capital, let alone secure northern China.        Kublai also understood it was not just a matter of providing funds and labour; the peasants needed to be protected from the Mongols. In 1262, Kublai forbade Mongols from ranging their animals through peasant fields, protecting vital cropland from becoming lunch for hundreds of goat and sheep. He also sought to abolish, once and for all, the tax farmers who sought to beggar the Chinese. Taxes needed to be simplified, and the power of the princely appanages curtailed in order for the Central Secretariat to retain dominance. For this, princes were denied their ability to collect taxes; rather than pay both the local prince and the Central Government, the taxes would go just to the government. Then, an allotment would be provided to the princes. Simplifying and reducing taxes always goes a long way to reducing stress on the folk on the bottom of the social rung. Taking this further, Kublai also reduced or completely removed taxes on entire regions to help them recover. Funds were provided for farmers to restore lands damaged during the conquest, as was grain for those in need. The Khan regularly met and sought knowledge from his advisers on how to restore the countryside and promote trade, and heaped rewards on those who provided effective ideas.       Kublai also promoted what he saw as useful professions. Generally, Chinese dynasties looked down on craftsmen and doctors, but Kublai carried on the Mongol practice of favouring those with skills. Craftsmen and doctors were exempted from certains taxes and corvee labour. For craftsmen and merchants, Kublai encouraged trade, especially from Central Asia  and on the South Asia sea routes.  In 1268 he opened the General Administration for Supervision of the Ortogh, which provided government loans to merchants taking part in caravans from Central Asia. In southern China, kilns were registered and supported by the government to aid the production of porcelains, a valuable part of the Southeast Asian sea trade.  Taxes were lowered on commercial transactions, roads and routes were improved to facilitate movement. Foreign merchants were encouraged to come to China in order to advance the overseas trade, bring their knowledge and even serve in the government: owing their work to the Khan was thought to make them more useful. It is in such a capacity that Marco Polo would work, serving it seems in Kublai’s keshig, as we’ll explore in a future episode.   For doctors and physicians, Kublai established and funded academies and hospitals for them to work in, and to learn from Muslim medical knowledge Kublai imported- a full 31 volumes of Muslim medical practices were collected for the court library. As Kublai was often in poor health and suffered terribly from gout, he was keen to support this industry and whatever relief they might bring him. Expensive drugs, ingredients and doctors were collected from across the Islamic world and even southern India and brought to China. Exempted from many tax obligations and corvee labour, and often serving upon the elite and government, medical leaders reached a very high, and very lucrative, social standing they had not previously enjoyed. By encouraging the growth in numbers of physicians and hospitals, this brought greater access of their services to people at large as well.       Within his first years as Khan, Kublai had also organized the printing of new paper currencies. The first of these was backed by silk, and the later by the silver reserve. Earlier Khans had encouraged payment in coinage over kind, and Kublai took this to the next level. He hoped to employ the same currency throughout his realm to ease trade and aid in economic stability. The earlier paper mony printed by his predecessors and the Song emperors was invalidated, though in the former Song territory the people were given a period of years to hand in the old money, including gold, silver and copper coins,  in exchange for the new. Until the late-1270s, Kublai kept tight control on how much was printed in order to prevent inflation, and the system worked quite well. Only with costs endured from the failed attack on Japan and the last years of war with the Song, did the printing of paper money escalate, though not yet to disastrous levels.   In science too, Kublai promoted cross-continental contacts. Astronomy was always of interest to Chinese monarchs and diviners, and a good mark of any emperor was formatting a new calendar. For this, considerable Muslim knowledge was imported. In 1271 the Institute of Muslim Astronomy was founded, allowing Chinese astronomers to study translated Islamic texts and instruments to design their own, and eventually provide Kublai a new, more accurate calender. Kublai also ordered the establishment of a new legal code which began to take effect in the early 1270s. It was actually more lenient than previous dynastic legal codes: only 135 crimes were punishable by death in the Yuan legal code, less than the preceeding Song, or succeeding Ming, legal codes. Executions per year during the 13th century rarely exceeded 100, with the Khan personally reviewing these cases, preffering to send them to labour or to pay a fine. The latter was an uniquely Mongol addition to the Chinese legal system. For the Mongols, such fines were regular compensation for punishments, and now too would become standard practice in China.       Kublai also gave China the basis for the provincial organization it holds today. As the first man to unite all of China in 300 years, he was able to order a country-wide provincial reorganization. Unlike previous dynasties, Tibet, Xinjiang and Yunnan were now part of China; Yunnan, for instance, had never been under Chinese suzerainty before, and has never left it since. Kublai reorganized China into 12 provinces, each governed by regional versions of the Central Secretariat. In much of the south, former Song officials were brought to staff the lower levels of government, but a system of Mongol and Central Asian daruqachi supervised and managed them.       As part of his hope to tie the various disparate regions of his empire together, Kublai sought a writing system all could use. He did not want to rely on Chinese, a script few Mongols had ever learned. But neither was the Uighur script the Mongols used for their own language fully adequate. Adopted by Chinggis Khan in 1206, it only barely covered the sounds of spoken Mongolian, and was simply incapable of representing Chinese. For this task, Kublai turned to one of his best known advisers, the ‘Phags-pa Lama. Born in 1235, in the 1240s he accompanied his uncle, the Sakya Pandita, one of the leaders of Tibetan Buddhism’s Sa-Skya sect, to the court of Ogedai’s son Koten. Basically growing up in Mongol courts, in the 1250s he found himself attached to prince Kublai, and in time Khan Kublai. Made Kublai’s personal chaplain after he became Khan, in 1264  the ‘Phags-pa Lama and his brother were appointed to govern Tibet on behalf of the Mongols. Having spent comparatively little time there, they did not do a great job. His brother died in 1267, which was soon followed by an uprising from a rival Buddhist sect, crushed with a forced reimposition of Mongol rule. With the Mongols now ruling Tibet directly, the ‘Phags-pa Lama returned to Kublai’s court, where he was given a new task: designing for Kublai a new universal script for the empire. Completing it by 1269, this was the famed Yuan square script, or ‘Phags-pa script, as named for its designer. Based on the Tibetan script, it was 41 square shaped letters written vertically and designed to capture sounds of both Chinese and Mongolian. Kublai was delighted and heaped rewards onto the ‘Phags-pa Lama, making him Imperial Perceptor and Head of all monks in Kublai’s empire, in addition to further tutoring Kublai’s son Jingim. Kublai ordered the script to be taught to all officials, and all government documents were to be issued in the new script. Surviving stone inscriptions, paper money, porcelain and state paizas from the Yuan period all feature the characteristic blocks of the ‘Phags-pa script. But aside from official and decorative purposes, the script never caught on even within the government, despite repeated proclamations from Kublai for his officials to learn it.        In keeping with the precedent of previous Khans, Kublai’s early reign encouraged the respect of religions. The legal code did not set out to prohibit any religion, and religious communities, especially Muslims, were often self-governing as long as they paid taxes. Respect was shown to Confucians, Buddhists, Taoists, Muslims, Shamanists and even those Christians in China. Like Mongke, there were members of these religions convinced that Kublai was about to, or had already, converted to their faith, so effective was Kublai at protraying himself as a friend to all. The ‘Phags-pa Lama, for instance, presented Kublai as the Buddhisatta of Wisdom to Tibetans while Marco Polo portrayed Kublai as a fine Christian monarch in his accounts. Tax exemptions were provided to religious orders, financial aid to help in rebuilding and constructing new temples, representation at court and other privileges were granted to these various communities. In exchange, they convened with the Heavens and Gods on Kublai’s behalf to bring good fortune onto the Yuan realm and maintain the Mandate of Heaven.       It should not be thought that Kublai set out to create an idealized utopia-  he was still Mongol Emperor after all, and the Mongols were only a small minority among tens of millions of Chinese. Kublai issued proclamations to keep Mongols and Chinese separate; the Chinese could not learn Mongolian or wear Mongolian clothing, and it was illegal to sell Mongolian horses to them. Marriage and intermingling were dissuaded. Most famously, Kublai organized a racial heirarchy to determine favours and certain rights. Obviously, Mongols were at the top of the hierarchy, followed by the semuren, referring to Central Asians, Muslims, various Turks and even Tangut. Below the semuren was the hanren, the northern Chinese and former denizens of the Jin Empire. Khitans and Jurchen were included among them. After 1279, another category was added, the nanren, the Southern Chinese of the late Song Dynasty. The cateogrization though was vague, subject to change and often ignored. Yet it underlined a key fact: despite all Kublai did to look like a Chinese monarch, neither he nor his successors would ever be Chinese, and that divide would not disappear after Kublai’s death. For those Mongols still in Mongolia though, Kublai certainly looked too much like a Chinese monarch for their tastes. This was not a dynamic that would promote the longevity of the Yuan Dynasty.       From 1260-1279, Kublai Khan’s reign was marked by numerous accomplishments, with the notable exception of the invasion of Japan in 1274, and of course, his loss of control over the western Khanates. He set about creating a new government structure to run his empire, utilizing talent from across Eurasia and rebuilding China after decades of war. For the first time since the collapse of the Tang Dynasty in 907, China was united under one ruler. But 1279 was to be, in many ways, the high water mark of his reign. The effort it took to manage the Yuan government was considerable, and needed tremendous personal energy on the part of the monarch to keep it running as effectively as possible. As age, health and personnal losses took the energy out of him, the 1280s ultimately marked a series of failures for Kublai, which we will explore in forthcoming episodes, so be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more. If you’d like to help us keep bringing you great content, please consider supporting us on patreon at www.patreon.com/Kingsandgenerals. This script was researched and written by our series historian, Jack Wilson. I’m your host David, and we’ll catch you on the next one. 

Mongke Khaan was dead. Over his 8 year reign, he had ruled the Mongol Empire firmly, strengthening government and renewing the conquests. Yet had not solved the tensions and problems which had been simmering below the surface since the death of Ogedai. Having not designated a successor, Mongke’s brothers Kublai and Ariq Böke would stand in to fill the void, with disastrous results for the empire. In the aftermath of Mongke’s death, the Mongol Empire was irrevocably torn apart, ending the dreams of Chinggis Khan for Mongolian unity. I’m your host David, and this is Kings and Generals: Ages of Conquest.   Before we carry on with our narrative, we must note that following events are highly coloured by who won- quite literally a case of history being written by the victors seeking to justify their victory. Based on recent scholarship and recognition of these biases, we will try to offer a slight reinterpretation of the events, though the outcome remains the same.   Mongke died in August 1259 while on campaign in China, fighting the Song Dynasty in Sichuan. His plan to overwhelm the Song came to a crashing halt, bogged down in sieges and mud, before his demise caused his army to fall back. Perhaps the sole safe guard left in place in event of his death was his youngest brother, Ariq Böke, left as regent in the imperial capital, Karakorum, while Mongke marched on China. Intended to keep the empire running smoothly in Mongke’s absence, it’s possible Mongke, as with so much of his reign, had tailored this as reaction to the regencies after the deaths of Ogedai and Guyuk. Rather than repeat the chaotic periods of control by Torogene and Oghul Qaimish, Mongke may have wanted Ariq to seamlessly step up and guide the empire to an organized quriltai, rather than rely on conniving mothers to do it themselves. Thus was Ariq brought to the forefront of the world stage.   So who was Ariq Böke? The youngest son of Tolui and Sorhaktani Beki, he was born sometime in the early 1220s, putting him in his early forties at Mongke’s death. Unlike his older brother Kublai, Ariq never showed any affinity to Chinese culture, despite being provided Confucian advisers. Instead, he is generally portrayed as a proud supporter of Mongolian culture, priding himself as a nomad uncorrupted by the sedentary world. The second part of his name, Böke, is an epithet, which means variously ‘bull, strong/unbreakable, wrestler.’ Evidently, he was a man of quite some physical prowess, perhaps a star in that favourite Mongol pastime of wrestling. He seems to have had an affinity to Christianity: the Franciscan Friar, William of Rubruck, during his visit to Mongke’s court in 1254 interacted with Ariq and noted that he listened to Christian oratory several time, made the sign of the cross and stated that he knew the Messiah is God. Considering that Rubruck remarked on Mongke’s own refusal to convert to Christianity or Islam and his personal failures to convert anyone, there’s no reason to think he lied on Ariq’s interest in the religion. Ariq’s mother Sorhaktani and at least one of his sons, Mingliq-Temur, were Christians. His chief wife was an Oirat princess, Elchiqmish (el-chiq-mish), described as very tall and as a granddaughter of Chinggis Khan via his daughter Chechiyegen (Chech-ee-yeg-en), she was also Ariq’s cousin. They had no children, but Ariq is said to have loved her very much.    One of Mongke’s sons who accompanied him on the campaign into China, Asutai, brought his father’s body to Mongolia in autumn 1259. Immediately, Ariq Böke stepped into his duties as regent. Messages were sent across the empire to alert princes and notables of the Great  Khan’s demise: Kublai, Mongke’s brother closest in age and also campaigning in China, learned of his death in September. Their third brother, Hulegu, learned of it in spring 1260. Representatives of the family were told to come to Mongolia in order for Ariq to arrange a quriltai and decide who would succeed Mongke. But trouble came from a perhaps expected direction: Kublai, their brother who had often butted heads with Mongke, now refused to return to Karakorum.    Over Mongke’s reign, Kublai had been a repeated problem for both the Khan and his chief officials. After his return from the Dali campaign in 1254, Kublai began administering a large swath of northern China. There he showed what some modern authors interpret as inclinations to independence; or at the very least, pretensions to greater autonomy. The first sign was Kublai butting heads with the head of the Secretariat for China, the long-time servant of the Central Government, Mahmud Yalavach. Yalavach was reappointed to the position in 1251, and nominally in charge of tax assessment and collection, but found his efforts challenged by Kublai and his Chinese advisers who desired a more ‘Confucian,’ and local method of taxation and governance. Yalavach was never on good terms with the Chinese, and found many enemies among Kublai’s faction. Accused of malfeasance by Kublai’s followers, around 1254 Yalavach was removed from his post and soon died, though the exact details are murky. So ended the long career of a man who had once served as Chinggis Khan’s envoy to the Khwarezmshah.   Without Yalavach’s meddling, Kublai could strengthen his local influence and position. Most apparent was in the building of a city in 1256 in what is modern Inner Mongolia, on the very edge of the steppe and north China. Called Kaiping, it was built in Chinese style and looked rather suspiciously like a capital city, a rival to Karakorum. The next year, some of Mongke’s ministers under Alandar led an investigation into Kublai’s administration, finding numerous infractions. Kublai’s authority was curtailed, his powers of tax collection rescinded, and some of his men executed. But there were further concerns, most identifiable in Kublai’s affinity for Chinese culture. Filling his staff with Buddhist and Confucians, Kublai’s administration looked a little too Chinese for Mongke’s tastes. The Mongol Empire needed to be ruled by Mongols, afterall, and placing more power into the hands of the Chinese simply would not do. Kublai remained in Mongke’s bad graces until 1258, when Mongke needed him for the oncoming campaign against the Song Dynasty. Provided one of the main armies, Kublai led his force through Central China to O-chou, modern Wuhan, where he learned of Mongke’s death in September 1259. Ariq Böke’s officials were there to get Kublai to move north for the quriltai, only for Kublai to spurn them.     While Kublai’s official excuse was that he could not depart with his task unfinished, an alternative explanation is often provided by modern authors. That is, that Kublai saw this as his chance to take the throne, but needed to beef up his military credentials with victories- so far unearned in that campaign. Ariq Böke, to our knowledge, had not led any armies, making this perhaps the one area Kublai could one-up his brother in the eyes of the Mongol aristocracy. Keep in mind how Ariq’s epithet stressed his strength and ability as a wrestler. In comparison, Kublai suffered from gout and may have already been overweight. Already seen as soft for his interest in Chinese culture and known for having lost Mongke’s trust as an administrator, Kublai needed every advantage he could get in an election against Ariq. If he could paint himself as the better, more experienced military commander, that could be all the edge he needed. Since elections took a while to be called to allow for the appropriate princes and representatives to return to Mongolia, Kublai e predicted he had plenty of time to take a few cities and score some victories of his own.   Kublai spent the next two month crossing the Yangzi River and taking O-chou, linking up with another commander, Uriyangqadai, the son of the illustrious Subutai. The news of Kublai’s continued campaigning was not well met back in Karakorum. Two members of Mongke’s keshig were particularly displeased by this: Alandar, the official who investigated Kublai’s administration, and most importantly, Bulghai, the chief judge of the empire, a Nestorian Christian and Mongke’s #2. Neither was friendly with Kublai. As brother closest in age to the late Khan, Kublai was a prime candidate for the throne, albeit one too interested in Chinese culture and a threat to the current top men of the empire. Therefore, Bulghai and Alandar began to organize the election of Ariq as the next Khan of Khans, if Ariq had not already begun to encourage this himself. With the burial of Mongke, his son Asutai and his generals returned and presented Mongke’s jade seal to Ariq.    Part of organizing a quriltai was getting the appropriate bribes -again, sorry, gift giving- out in time to ensure the princes voted for the right candidate. It had taken Torogene a matter of years to organize the proper support for Guyuk’s coronation, and this was not a process done in secret. That Ariq was left as regent in Karakorum suggests he had a good relationship with those top officials of the Central Secretariat. Having these men and their government institutions on his side made for a powerful campaigning apparatus. Quickly, it seems Ariq gathered widespread support, particularly from the imperial administration and Mongke’s family, especially his sons Asutai and Urungtash who, for reasons we cannot discern, do not seem to have ever been considered as candidates.   In November 1259, messages reached Kublai from his wife, Chabi, at that time in Kaiping. Kublai highly valued Chabi’s advice, and when she sent word that Ariq looked to be moving to claim the Khanate, Kublai was forced to give up his advance to China. That this exchange occurred suggests Kublai’s primary interest was not carrying out the expansion, but securing his own claim for the throne. Withdrawing north to Kaiping, he left only a token force behind to guard his conquests, which was soon crushed when an army was sent by the Song chancellor, Jia Sidao. Sidao portrayed it as a great victory, playing it up to secure his newly taken place at the head of the Song court. Kublai could only send envoys seeking a diplomatic settlement, who were imprisoned by the chancellor, an anticlimactic end to Kublai’s effort at military glory in time for the election.   Returning to Kaiping in Inner Mongolia in the first days of 1260, Kublai watched the support for Ariq’s election continually grow. Having been forced to give up his military conquests in the south, and therefore not creating a reputation as a great conqueror, Kublai may have felt he lost the chance to win an election on Ariq’s term. Perhaps fearful that Ariq may try to arrest him if he approached Karakorum with a small entourage, yet knowing approaching with a larger escort would look like he was attacking the city, Kublai felt he had only one choice: declare himself Khan first, on ground of his choosing. In April or May 1260, at his own city of Kaiping, did Kubla Khan a stately reign decree, and in doing so signed the death warrant for Mongol imperial unity. By all standards, it was illegal: Kublai had neither the support of the four branches of the family and the election was not in the Onon-Kerulen region, the homeland of Chinggis Khan, but in his Chinese-style city. Kublai Khan had just usurped the throne.    He had one small feather in his cap; Kublai could boast he was already recognized by a foreign power. When moving northwards, Kublai met the travelling Crown Prince of Korea, Wang Chon. Having been sent as a royal hostage to Mongke’s court, his timing was poor: while on the road, both Mongke and Wang Chon’s father, King Kojong, died. Korean sources assert that upon learning of Mongke’s death, like a good loyal subject Wang Chon sped to recognize Kublai as the rightful Khan. The idea that Wang Chon had any choice of the matter is generally dismissed by modern scholars. As part of Kublai’s entourage, he witnessed Kublai’s election and was soon sent back to Korea to be installed as the new King, Wonjong. A powerful opening move, it was the beginning of a decades-long close relationship between Kublai, Wonjong and their descendants. Kublai followed up his election with official messages to the Song and official proclamations; that his goals were to feed the hungry, reduce taxes and burdens on the people. Within days of becoming Great Khan, Kublai took a Chinese era name. In Chinese imperial tradition, emperors denoted sections of their reign as eras, which was used for year identification. It’s the kind of thing one does if they want to be associated with Chinese customs of leadership. From the start, Kublai Khan did not just hold an illegal election, but a shockingly Chinese one as well.  For Ariq’s faction in Karakorum, this was a shocking demonstration against the legacy of Chinggis Khan. More immediately, it was a dangerous grab for power.   In reaction, in July of 1260 Ariq Böke finally held his election and was declared Khan in an appropriately placed, decidedly non-Chinese process. Ariq held a better claim to legitimacy, for it seems he actually had the support of the branches of the family. The regent of the Chagatai Khanate was the popular Orghina Khatun, sister of Ariq’s beloved wife Elchiqmish, who gave her support. The Jochid Khan, Berke, sent his support, as did some Ogedeid princes, and it seems so did Kublai and Ariq’s brother, Hulegu, whose son Jumqhur attended.  Mongke’s sons Asutai and Urungtash, his widows, his keshig and the Central Secretariat led by Bulghai and Alandar, sided strongly with Ariq, and so did the venerable Shigi Qutuqu, an adopted son of Chinggis Khan now well into his 70s.    Over summer 1260, as tensions heightened, messengers sped between the two brothers. Each wanted the other to submit and recognize their rule. Neither yielded. While Ariq had the official support, Kublai was decidedly in the advantage in terms of position. Kublai could exert his hold across northern China, ousting officials who had declared for Ariq and allying with  Qadan, a son of Ogedai and the prince holding the Uighur territories around Beshbaliq. Between them, they sought to close off access to north China to Ariq. For Ariq in Karakorum, this placed him in an unsustainable position. Karakorum could not support itself, requiring hundreds of cartloads of supplies daily, largely from northern China. With his army stationed there, this was even more imperative. In a contest of resources, Kublai’s hold of north China was a trump card.    To further starve out Karakorum, Kublai sought to install a new Chagatai Khan loyal to him, a great-grandson of Chagatai named Abishgha. With a small party, Abishgha was sent to oust Orghina Khatun and take power there, denying the Chagatai ulus’ resources and men to Ariq. Abishgha and his small party were captured and brought to Ariq. Tensions boiled. It was a diplomatic impasse. By autumn, it was war. Kublai began to occupy Mongolia, while Ariq sent an army under Alandar to seize the former Tangut territory, the Gansu corridor, the conduit which links north China to Central Asia. In October, Alandar was killed and his  army defeated by Kadan and Kublai’s loyalists. Kublai could now exert control across the northern Chinese right to Kadan in Uighuria. At a similar time, part of Ariq’s army was also defeated by Kublai’s troops at an unknown site called Baski. A panicked Ariq had Ahishgha executed, then moved his army from the untenable position at Karakorum, falling back to the Yenisei River valley. Northwest of Mongolia proper, the Yenisei is a valuable region producing wheat, millet, barley and craftsmen, but no place to conquer China from. Sending messages of peace to Kublai, Ariq managed to diplomatically hold off Kublai, stopping him from seizing Karakorum and providing Ariq time to think of new plans.   With the start of 1261, Ariq implemented his new schemes. While popular in the Chagatai ulus, Orghina Khatun, regent for her young son Mubarak Shah, was not a war leader. Ariq had her replaced by Alghu, a grandson of Chagatai who could hopefully rally the ample resources of the Middle ulus for Ariq’s needs with loss of access to resources of China. In the summer, Ariq sought to wrest control of Mongolia from Kublai’s men. Ariq won the first engagement, but Kublai merely sent another army against his brother. In November 1261, at Shimu’ultu Lake in southeastern Mongolia, Ariq Böke Khan’s army was defeated and forced to retreat. Ariq had to abandon Mongolia for good, falling back to the Yenisei River.    Ariq could never come back from the defeat at Shimu’ultu. He lacked the manpower to engage in any attrition with Kublai, and over 1262 the chance of victory was wrenched from his grasp. That year Kublai’s forces entered Karakorum, though his direct actions against Ariq were limited due to an uprising within his Chinese territory. In the west, Ariq’s ally Berke was unable to provide support with the opening of war between him and Hulegu over the Caucasus.  Alghu, Ariq’s appointee in the Chagatai realm, started to attack Jochid possessions in Khwarezm and Tranosxiana, ousting Berke’s representatives. Killing Ariq’s envoys, by the end of the year Alghu declared for Kublai. Ariq’s only chance at securing anything depended on the resources of the Chagatais, and in 1263 from his base on the Yenisei he attacked Alghu. Alghu won in the first two engagements, but Ariq had the better of the third, forcing Alghu to flee to Kashgar.    Ariq took the Chagatai capital of Almaliq, in modern Xinjiang close to the border with Kazakhstan. It was here that Ariq spent the final days of his reign. An incredibly harsh winter in 1263 brought famine to men and horses on the steppe. A frustrated Ariq Böke took his anger out on captured Chagatai prisoners. Harsh treatment of fellow Mongols alienated Ariq’s supporters and coupled with the conditions, led to desertion. Hulegu’s son Jumghur left, as did Mongke’s son Urungtash, who brought his father’s seal to Kublai. The omens were bad: harsh winds tore Ariq’s tent right from its pegs, causing it to crash about and injure many. At its end and with an ever decreasing circle of supporters, Ariq knew the gig was up. In August of 1264, he came in person before Kublai at Kaiping, now renamed to Shangdu. Per the account of the Ilkhanid historian and vizier Rashid al-Din, Ariq waited in front of Kublai’s ger for permission to enter, and upon coming face to face with his brother burst into tears. An emotional Kublai asked, “my dear brother, during this strife and contention, were we right or were you?”   To which, as written by Rashid al-Din, Ariq Böke replies “we were then. But you are today.”   Blame was placed onto Ariq’s generals, who were accused of instigating Ariq’s “revolt.” 10,  including Bulghai, were executed. Ariq was to be put on trial before the other heads of the family, but all of them- Berke, Hulegu and Alghu, refused to come. Yet Kublai’s generals demanded punishment. The problem was fixed when illness very conveniently struck down the erstwhile healthy Ariq Böke. The timing was certainly handy, and accusations fall on Kublai. Yet it’s possible that a depressed Ariq, brought down by a difficult and fruitless civil war, drunk himself to an early grave. So it was that Kublai was the sole claimant as Khan of Khans.    Having won the war, Kublai lost the empire. Only Hulegu provided his nominal support, but neither he nor Berke or Alghu ever made an attempt to submit in person. Over 1265 and 1266, the three of them died. Hulegu’s successor, his son Abaqa, received an official investiture from Kublai, but Kublai had no power to depose or appoint him or his successors. Kublai sent another descendant of Chagatai, Baraq, to take Alghu’s place, but Baraq soon operated independent of the Great Khan, and fought with the rising prince of the Ogedeids, Qaidu. By 1269, a brief peace was organized between Baraq, Qaidu and the new Jochid Khan, Mongke-Temur. The Peace of Qatwan as it’s known, saw territorial distribution and allotment totally without Kublai’s consideration, circumventing utterly the Great Khan’s authority. Kublai’s rule as Great Khan was nominal in the western half of Mongol territory, a spectre of illegitimacy hanging over him. By 1271, we can speak in earnest of the divisions of the Empire as independent entities, khanates:  the Golden Horde, the Chagatai Khanate, the Ilkhanate and the Yuan Dynasty, the latter being the Chinese dynastic name Kublai gave to his reduced empire. As well, there is the matter of the Ogedeid Khanate under Qaidu, the Neguderis and the Blue and White Horde, but we will illuminate these in future episodes.   Most of our sources from within the Mongol Empire come from areas ruled by the descendants of Kublai and Hulegu, the Yuan Dynasty and the Ilkhanate. In the Yuan Dynasty, the need to justify Kublai’s election as legitimate is obvious. The most influential of Ilkhanid authors was the vizier Rashid al-Din, whose Compendium of Chronicles is among the most valuable of all medieval sources on the Mongols. Writing around 1300, Rashid was personally informed of the events of the 1260s from Bolad Chingsang, one of Kublai’s judges who took part in the trials against Ariq and his generals. This pro-Kublai bias strongly affected Rashid al-Din’s work, who dubbed the war as “Ariq’s revolt.” Like so many other figures of the Mongol Empire, only by carefully sifting through the surviving sources can we hope to see through the biases of the winning side. Doubtless, had Ariq had won, Kublai’s name would have been the one tarnished. But Kublai secured his empire, and now the long reign of Kublai Khan was to begin.    The Mongol Empire as a united entity ceased to exist by Kublai Khan’s victory in 1264, but it’s history does not end there. Our future episodes will discuss the other great breakup of the empire, the Berke-Hulegu war, and the continued histories of the successor Khanates, so be sure to subscribe to our podcast. If you’d like to help us continue bringing you great content, consider supporting us on patreon at www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. I’m your host David, and we’ll catch you on the next one!

In today’s episode, in honor of Bastille Day next week, and Fourth of July last week, I want to talk about the ongoing evolution in elitism, and the problem of how the emerging new elites can be better than the old ones being toppled.1/ Elites are a constant and arguably necessary presence in history. Political revolutions that try to do away with elites invariably seem to either fail quickly, or install new elites without meaning to. So the question for me is not how to get rid of elites, but how to try and ensure the ones we end up with are better than the last lot.2/ I’m going to sketch out a rough theory of elitism and its dynamics, and then get to posing the question itself, and then propose an answer, from the perspective of both the new TBD elites, and the masses they define, so let’s get started.3/ First, the concept of an elite is not dependent on a particular structure of society. Elites might be kings, nobles, elected leaders, bureaucrats, scholars, scientists, priests, cult leaders, media leaders, business executives, or subcultural inner circles. The prevailing idea of masses is induced by the prevailing idea of elites as a complement.4/ So there’s always a subset that regards itself, and is regarded as, entitled to a sustainably better than average human condition, with attendant privileges. And importantly, it is a stable equilibrium. Those who are worse off, the non-elites, and think the elites don’t deserve their better conditions, still live with it. The masses rarely disturb the peace unless they are under extreme stress.5/ Elitism and privilege go together of course. The word privilege literally means private law. Elites are a group for whom laws apply differently, or a different set of laws apply. In the most extreme case, they are formally above the law entirely. That’s the usual definition of a monarch and the dividing line between monarchs and ordinary nobles. 6/ The nobility might have a privileged code of law, but they are still governed by a rule of law, even if it’s not the same one as applies to non-elites. This special treatment has to be pretty special though, so I don’t use privilege in the broad social justice sense of the term, as in white privilege. That’s a different, more diffuse sense of privilege as a structural advantage. I’m talking narrow privilege where you can get exceptional, personalized treatment under whatever rule of law applies to you. 7/ For example, in medieval Europe, the nobility had hereditary property rights, governed by Church law, and the commoners mostly didn’t have the same sorts of property rights, only duties. But what made the law for the nobility special was that it was personally administered, with exceptions being more important. Laws honored in the breach rather than observance, as Shakespeare put it. 8/ So for example, there were laws against consanguinous marriages, but the Church did brisk business in allowing exceptions. Or you have indulgences absolving you of sins that are more easily available to nobility. Or in more modern times, draft exemptions. That’s what privilege looks like.9/ So one way or the other, some subset of humans will create not only better than average conditions for themselves through private laws, they will even get exceptional treatment under that private law. Or a position above the law entirely.10/ A big part of the stability of this condition is personal social capital: knowing the right people, with the right level of trust, to get rules bent or interpreted in your favor. Or being treated as an exception. Or in the extreme case, laws simply made to your specifications to benefit you and disadvantage others. In the most extreme case, they simply don’t apply to you.11/ If you ignore human fallibility and corruption, and look at this as a systems design, it is actually kinda smart to divide the world into 3 zones this way: a zone where the rules apply absolutely, a zone where they can be bent and exceptions are possible, and a zone outside the laws. It gives you a broad ability to evolve the system. 12/ It’s like how, in The Matrix, the architect declared that the city of Zion, Neo, and the Oracle were as much part of the design of the system as Agent Smith. You could even argue that though the architect was God, Neo was the emperor, the citizens of Zion, both red-pilled and native-born, were the nobility, the Oracle was the chief priestess, and the bots like Agent Smith and the blue-pilled people in the Matrix were the non-elites.13/ But back in our world, I asked my Twitter followers whether they consider themselves part of the current elites. Out of 468 respondents, 34% said yes, and 66% said no. Which seems about right since I write for a pretty privileged class of readers.14/ Okay, so with this definition, if you look back at history, it looks like a series of experiments in elitism rather than a series of experiments in governance. Some of them end well, some end badly. But all of them end. The conceptualization of an elite class is not stable.15/ Definitions of elites shift pretty slowly, and typically only move significantly when the technology of trust changes. It used to be about provably noble blood-lines. Then it was about visibly living by a particular code, noblesse oblige. Then it was about money, then it was about education. Maybe in the far future, it will be about being red-pilled out of an AI simulation, so the rules don’t apply to you.16/ Now, while a notion of elite is stable, there is what Vilfredo Pareto called circulation of elites. He traced how two kinds of elites, which he called lions and foxes based on earlier terminology from Machiavelli, tend to simply take turns being the elites. Foxes rule by the power of the pen, lions through the power of the sword. 17/ As I have said, the economy of elitism is sort of system independent, and is based on personal trust and social-capital based computing within a calculus of privileges — exemptions from the law. 18/ A good model of this calculus is Selectorate Theory, which is described in The Dictator’s Handbook, compares all kinds of political systems in terms of 3 groups: influentials, essentials, and interchangeables. Influentials are always elites, interchangeables are never elites, and some essentials are elites. It doesn’t matter whether it is a dictatorship or democracy. This is how governance by elites happens.19/ My final theoretical point is about knowledge. The relation among elites and masses is one usually based on what are called noble lies, where elites exploit their privileged access to ideas, information, and education, to craft false consciousnesses for the masses to inhabit. Think of them as blue pills. How you feel about these noble lies, or blue pills, is a big part of your philosophy of elitism.20/ You can distinguish two basic approaches of elitism. There is what is sometimes called Straussian elitism, which is generally conservative, but not always, and is based on the paternalistic belief that elites lying to the masses for their own good is a good thing. So you get a distinction between esoteric elite red-pill knowledge and exoteric, non-elite blue-pill knowledge meant for the general public.21/ The other approach, which you could broadly call pluralism, is more democratic in spirit, and eschews noble lying, at least conscious noble lying, based on the principle that even if it gets noisy, messy, uninformed, and ignorant, it’s a good thing to level the epistemic playing field, and not privilege some flavors of knowledge structurally. I’m pretty strongly in this camp. There is no blue versus red pill. Everything is available for anyone to learn.22/ Okay, now that we have this basic historical sense of what elitism is, and how it works, we can ask, what makes for good elites versus bad elites? It is important to keep a sense of the real history of elitism when you talk about this question, because it is easy to get caught up in theories. In the collage image accompanying this podcast, I’ve included several famous historical examples. 23/ The storming of the Bastille, the American Declaration of Independence, the Magna Carta, and Lee Kuan Yew, Nehru, and Jomo Kenyatta giving their famous speeches. I also included a picture of Muammar Qadaffi’s corpse after he was killed by a mob — it is important to remember that elitism can end like that. So this is the gestalt of what elitism as a historical practice is. Or to use an esoteric word, the praxis of elitism as a consciously held philosophy.24/ But we shouldn’t anchor too much on these iconic moments when one set of elites takes over from another, or when non-elites temporarily bring down elites altogether, creating a vacuum. The essence of elitism isn’t in these moments of creative destruction of elite power, but in quieter unaccountable workings away from public scrutiny.25/ So think of closed-door board meetings, experts in a committee meeting setting health standards, Congressional committees hashing out the details of a bill, lobbyists waiting to meet a senator to push some agenda, unaccountable editors in a press room deciding which public figure to attack. Unaccountable tech leaders deciding how an algorithm should work. That’s day-to-day elitism.26/ This unaccountability by the way, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It is what it is. To the extent the elites are agents of the will of society at large, there is just so much detail involved in the exercise of actual power that there is no possible way all of it could be made transparent to everybody. At best you can be slightly less opaque and unaccountable than the last crowd.27/ There’s also a middle-class, provincial version I don’t want to discount too much, like a local city leader calling in a favor with the local police chief, or a powerful business person talking to a school principal about their child. Any behavior that exercises privilege is elite behavior. The defining bit is not amount or scale of power, but the fact that it is exercised in privileged ways — private law, with a degree of unaccountability and exceptionalism.28/ Now that I’ve painted a portrait, there’s a fork in the road. You can either accept that this is the way the world works and always will, or you can imagine some sort of utopia where there are no elites and no zone of society that operates on the basis of privilege. 29/ Whether you are a commune anarchist who believes direct democracy or consensus will get rid of elites, or a blockchain libertarian who thinks code-is-law will get rid of elites, down that road I think is mainly delusion. I’ll just point to a famous article, the Tyranny of Structurelessness and leave it at that. Getting rid of elites does not work.30/ One reason is of course that elites have power and they use that power to keep themselves in power even as structural definitions and models of elitism change, become more or less informal, and ideologically different and so on. Angry masses understand this aspect of the persistence of elites. But this is not the biggest reason.31/ The biggest reason, which revolutionaries routinely discount, is that humans seem to desperately want elites of some sort. Maybe not the current sort, or the current model, and definitely not the current specific people, but some elites. Maybe you want black instead of white, women instead of men, techies instead of lawyers, or trans instead of cis, the point is, you want elites.32/ There may be strong preferences for a system of choosing elites. That’s kinda what ideology is. Or looser preferences. For example, I tend to prefer fox elites over lion elites, a large selectorate to a small one, and pluralism over noble lies. I also prefer strong mid-level mini-oligarchic patterns of power to either imperially centralized patterns or extremely fragmented, decentralized patterns.33/ The psychological function of elites appears to be to model how life can and ought to be lived. But this is a pretty loose specification. Christians think in terms of What Would Jesus Do. Confucians in ancient China thought in terms of how to codify the will of the Emperor into law. Woke elites think in term of how to turn intersectional theory into prescription, and anti-Woke elites think in terms of making classical liberalism great again.34/ It’s important to keep your definition of elites broad. For example, many people pretend that people like court jesters (and people often classify me as one) are among the non-elite. Maybe formally, but informally, they wield power and privilege — in my sense of access to exceptional treatment — in ways that makes them elite. So today in the US, the cast of Saturday Night Live, stand-up comics, and people like Jon Stewart and Trevor Noah are definitely elites. 35/ Anti-elite philosophy and philosophers are also necessarily elite simply by virtue of how their influence operates. So whether you’re taking about the Taoist sage Zhuangzi in ancient China or important figures like Robert Anton Wilson in the Discordian subculture of modern America, they’re all elites. Just because you laugh at other elites with sticks up their asses doesn’t make you not elite.36/ There’s many theories of this psychological function. There is a basic ethics theory of people just wanting guidance on how to have a good life, and looking for teachers. There is the theory of elites as surrogate parental figures. There is the Girardian theory of mimetic envy. Each theory explains some aspects and some situations well, and others poorly, but the point is, that psychological function exists. Elites are models of how to live life.37/ Okay, so now that we know what elites are, who counts as elites, how elitism and privilege work, and why they are both psychologically necessary for societies and structurally hard to eliminate, you can finally ask, what makes for good elites.38/ It’s an important question to ask right now, because the current regime of elites is definitely nearing its end. Chris Hayes wrote a good book about this back in 2012, called Twilight of the Elites, and there’s been a lot of other writing about it, like Moses Naim’s End of Power, and Martin Gurri’s Revolt of the Public. 39/ The elites are of course not going quietly. My friend Nils Gilman wrote a great article about the reaction, called The Twin Insurgency, and there is in general a lot of attention on how the current elites are rapidly trying to secure what they have, and sort of batten down the hatches. 41/ But I think the old elites are kinda done for in the next decade. My hypothesis about this is a simple one about how elites fail. In general, elites fail when their relationships with each other become more important than their relationships with the world. Not just masses, the world. The inner reality of the elites absorbs all their attention: whether it is court intrigues, scholarly debates in journals, boardroom battles, product architecture arguments, rivalries among schools of economists, or media wars. 42/ Once an elite class has turned into this kind of inward-focused blackhole unmoored from the larger universe, it’s only a matter of time before it self-destructs. With or without help from the revolting masses. It doesn’t really matter how much power they have. Their hold on that power is a function of the strength of their connection to the world.43/ This is one reason the function of policing is in the spotlight, because the job of the police is to enforce a particular relationship between elites and masses. When this enforcement gets particularly one-sided, they turn into a Praetorian Guard like in ancient Rome. So calls to defund, deunionize, or demilitarize the police, and theories of how policing itself can be ended as a function, are also part of new experiments in elitism.44/ Whether it goes down in flames or more peacefully, change of some sort is coming. If my theories are correct, any non-elite period will be short-lived. The shorter, the bloodier. The current idea of power may be ending, but the role of elite power and privilege will not end. Policing as we know it may end, but some enforcement of elite-mass relationships will remain. It will simply take on a new form in the new medium.45/ Already you see weird kinds of new elites, like online personalities, offline protest coordinators, skilled hackers, and people who are good at crafting spectacles like videos of bad “Karen” behavior. Much of this gets labeled populism, but it’s important to note that each of these manifestations of so-called populism comes with its own breed of new elites, mostly descended from old elites.46/ I think the populist phase of the culture wars might even be over. The actual commoners are exhausted from decades of violence, both physical and cultural. They can at most come out to riot online and offline occasionally. The real battle now is between old and new elites, and within old and new group. And of course, it’s confused by lots of overlapping membership.47/ For example, in the last few weeks, an open battle has broken out between tech industry thought leaders and media leaders. And right now there’s a weird letter doing the rounds on Harpers magazine, signed by a bunch of old elites denouncing a bunch of the new elites. 48/ The elite wars have really gotten going now, because everybody senses old institutions are dying, and emerging ones are at the point in their evolution where they are ripe for capture by one faction of wannabe elites or another.49/ Basically, you could say a new era of experiments in elitism is about to get underway, with more or less blood on the streets around the world. The question again is, what experiments should you support? How can you minimize the bloodshed? How can you try and ensure the new elites are good. If you’re a candidate elite, how do you plan to be good?50/ I don’t know the general answers to these questions, but I suspect I have an approximately equal claim to being a D-list member of the elite in both the old and new worlds. So I can only share my answer. I think the key to being a good elite is to take your function — serving as a model of how life should be lived — seriously. This means thinking more about your connection to the world than your connection with other elites.51/ If you want to define this function more precisely, I think it has to do with the idea that humans are ideally the measure of the world, not the other way around, and privilege is about being among those who get to measure the world rather than being measured by it, and in doing so, create ways to measure non-elites. So if you voted to self-identify as an elite in my Twitter poll, ask yourself: how do I measure the world with my life. 52/ The price of your privilege — which, remember, is special, personalized treatment under private law via access to social capital — is that you are expected to be at the forefront of relating to the wider world, and taking its measure on behalf of all humans. Which means facing uncertainty, and taking on risks, physical, intellectual, and psychological. This is why there is a natural relationship between being a member of the elite, and being expected to lead in the fullest sense of the word. 53/ To lead is to ultimately function as a model to non-elites on how to live, and not just live, but live with, for want of a better word, courage. Since that’s what it means to be the measure of the world, take risks, and deal with uncertainty. Otherwise you’re just a parasite pretending to be a lordly predator. And there’s no real way to fake this. People can tell when you are living courageously.54/ To be non-elite in 2020, on the other hand, is to be measured in a hundred different industrial-bureaucratic ways. The world measures you. Height, weight, gender, wealth, skin color, zip code, credit score, criminal record, degrees, job titles, parentage, and so on. This is what makes you part of the industrial-age masses. This idea didn’t come from nowhere, and is only a century or so old. It’s the complement of the industrial age definition of elites.55/ Being utterly unique and specialized with your 100-dimensional address in society is pretty new. The Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset studied how this industrial non-elite human differed from the peasants of the past. My gloss on his theory is that the masses were measured the way they were because the elites were measuring the world in a specific way: through science and rationality.56/ One of the main proposals for new elites on the table right now looks like an extreme form of industrial bureaucratism, namely intersectional bureaucratism. The other one looks like a throwback to agrarian feudal elitism, with nobility and peasantry. Both are of course lazy and lousy, and you can tell because neither is in the least bit courageous, and both involve an existing set of elites primarily dealing with each other rather than with the world.57/ If you think you aren’t elite now, or won’t be elite in the future, your part of the equation is to ask, first, whether you think elites are necessary, and if so what kind you want. A way to restate that question is to ask: how do you want to measure yourself against the world? The elites you want are the ones measuring the world itself in a complementary way.58/ Whatever it is, it is a particular model of courage that inspires you enough to follow. Your main challenge is spotting real courage facing the world, which does not lie in facing competing elites. If your chosen elites are elites primarily by virtue of battling or beefing with the elites you don’t choose, they are not good elites, and you are not choosing particularly good elites to define who you are. Both of you are going to be miserable.59/ The good news is, there’s never been such a culture of widespread experimentation in new modes of being elite, so you have a lot of choices. The bad news is, it’s going to get really ugly while it plays out. The future elites are going to be playing Game of Thrones for a while, and the future masses are going to be playing Hunger Games for a while.60/ So all I can say is, may the best elites win, and may the best measure of the masses prevail. Get full access to Breaking Smart at breakingsmart.substack.com/subscribe

Guest: Prof. David Mason http://www.san-shin.org/David.htmlTake a tour with David through The Royal Asiatic Society, SIWA, or Tours By LocalsThe mysterious founding of what became Seoul and how Wangsimni got its nameMaster Muhak's prediction about the length of the Joseon DynastyBuddhism's fallWhat the suppression of Buddhism meant for Joseon and the future of KoreaA folktale about Master Muhak The elimination of Buddhist nunsHow Buddhism recovered, the opening of Jogyesa in downtown SeoulSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/user?u=22510065)

Audio Transcript: Good morning. Welcome to Mosaic church Brookline. My name is Jan. I'm one of the pastors here at Mosaic. Hopefully you've got a nice mask like I do. I got this from my dad. My only problem with this thing is, fogs up my glasses so can't see a thing. Happy Mother's Day, everyone. Here in the beginning, just a quick announcement. Could you do me a favor? If you're watching on Facebook right now, could you please hit the share button? I hate to ask. Feels like self-promotion, but it's basically the easiest way to share the gospel ever. Just press that button. Or if you're watching on YouTube, hit the subscribe button, and like, and comments and all that. It helps us get the word out. Also, if you are visiting, welcome. If you're not part of the Mosaic Brookline community, we'd love to connect with you and we do that through the connection guide. The link will be down in the comments on the Facebook Live premiere. And then also, we have another connection card either on our website or in our app, which you can get in the app store or Google Play. Just search for Mosaic Boston.We're so glad you here. Happy Mother's Day. We're so thankful for our moms. We love our moms and we're praying for them. We're thinking and honoring all the mothers in our community. And this day and age, mothers are clearly, clearly essential workers. More work than ever. Salary has not increased. I see this with my own wife, Tanya. She's an incredible mother to our four daughters, working harder than ever. So we're praying for you. I'm praying for the fruit of the spirit in your life, in particular, patience. As we pray for our mothers, we also pray and honor those who are pregnant today in this crazy season to be pregnant. You are already mothers and we're praying for you, for the Lord to strengthen you and comfort you and sustain you and bless you and the child.We're also thinking of those who would like to be mothers and are not. Jesus didn't have children. St. Paul didn't have children. There's many great, godly people in scripture who didn't have children. And from God's perspective, spiritual children are as important, if not more important, than physical children. I know many strong, powerful young women in our church who have seen people come to faith through their ministry. Those are your children, and we are to be fathers and mothers to them. Also for anyone who's lost a child, we pray for you, and God the Father knows what you're going through, what you've gone through. He too has lost a child. So here in beginning, I would just like to pray for all the moms and bless them in the name of Jesus Christ, by the power of the spirit. Would you pray with me?Heavenly father, we're so thankful for the gift of life and we're so thankful for the gift of new life. Lord, we're so thankful for our parents, our fathers and mothers, they're alive. Lord, we pray for them. We pray that you bless them today, in particular the mothers. You told us to honor our fathers and mothers, so we honor our moms today and the moms in the community, moms of physical and spiritual children. I pray that you give them wisdom and knowledge and discernment to raise up these children in the knowledge of the Lord, love for the Lord. Holy Spirit, I pray, fill them with your power, with your fullness, with your love and comfort and wisdom. And I pray that through their ministry at home, what an important ministry that is, what a calling that is. Lord, I pray that you through the spirit bear much spiritual fruit in their lives. Lord, and help us be great children to our parents, to our moms, to honor them well as you've commanded us. And Lord, bless our time in this tremendous book, brilliant book of Ruth. We thank you for the time that you've given us in it, and I pray that you bless the preaching of holy scripture and we pray all this in Christ's holy name. Amen.If you are tuning in today, if you're new, we've been going through the book of Ruth, all three sermons. The previous ones are online, and we'd love for you to listen to those. They've been a blessing to our community. Next week we are starting a new series through the book of Philippians, so definitely come back. Philippians is a timely book. The title of the series is inner peace in utter chaos, and St. Paul is writing this book about joy and peace that transcends all understanding and he's writing it from prison, from quarantine. Today we're finishing Ruth. We're in Ruth chapter four. The title of the sermon is The Heart of the Deal, not the art of the deal, but The Heart of the Deal, and at the center of the chapter is a transaction between Boaz and another gentlemen and Boaz is motivated by his heart. He's motivated by love.The story of Ruth, it is a love story, but more importantly it's a story of redemption. Redemption and love are inextricably intertwined because at the heart of redemption is sacrifice. At the heart of love is sacrifice as well, and that's where they meet together. It's not just a love story of hormonal surging love like rom-coms. It's a love story of sacrifice and of redemption. It's a story of costly sacrificial love. And the story of Boaz and Ruth and the whole book of Ruth, it's a prequel to Jesus. Both Ruth and Boaz, they point to Jesus Christ and his redemptive love and that's what we'll talk about today. One of the reasons why we love the story of Ruth, it's such a great story because it points to a greater story. Jesus Christ takes the stories of our lives and when we give him our lives, he takes the tragedies and triumphs and he weaves it into the ultimate tragedy; the death of Jesus Christ, and then the ultimate triumph, which is his resurrection.Every true story, every powerful story has the same arc; creation, fall and redemption. Think of the greatest stories that you've ever heard, the greatest books you've ever read, the greatest movies that have a lasting impact on your life. If there's no redemption, if the story just ends with loss, fall. If the story is just a descent into lossness, like Camus' The Stranger, Beckett's waiting for Godot, you're left with emptiness. You're left with a pit in your stomach, a bitter taste that you can't get out of your mouth. We long for an ending that's happy, that's full of joy and enduring Christianity is the universal explanation of reality, therefore if we take this our creation fall, redemption and we through it look at the stories that have had a lasting impact, shown endurance and popularity, they all use the same pattern and this can be statistically proven. Of all the books that have ever written, the most popular books of all time, number one is The Bible. Over five billion copies published and so many more now with apps, et cetera. Number two is the writings of Mao Tse-Tung, more than five billion copies as well.The Bible has been valued for its blessing to the largest religious group on earth and the history of the earth, and Chairman Mao's book has been popular because it's been printed as governmental propagation within the largest nation. Then come the Quran, the Book of Mormon, the Chinese Dictionary, Boy Scout Handbook, all around a hundred million, but if you look at pure literary works of fiction, Charles Dickens' Tale of Two Cities, 200 million. The Little Prince, 200 million. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, 150 million. The Alchemist, 150 million. Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, a hundred million. Tolkien's The Hobbit, 100 million. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, 80 million. All of them creation, fall, redemption, and they try to give a glimmer of restoration. Uncle Tom's Cabin, Gone With the Wind, Ben-Hur, all the stories that have endured and were massively popular, same exact arc.And that's why we love the book of Ruth. Same exact arc. The heart of the book is a story of redemption. What is redemption? Just to define our terms, redemption is a pattern of debt and repayment. A debt was owed and it was repaid by someone who paid it at a personal cost to themselves. It's loss and reclamation, it's deliverance upon payment. It's rescue from bondage or enslavement or destitution. And most popular enduring works, more or less, they have a Christ-like Redeemer at the heart of it. Dostoevsky and Brothers Karamazov through Father Zosima, this is what he say;, men are always saved after the death of the deliverer. This is the heart of Christianity; that we are lost, that we are spiritually destitute, in poverty, ostracized from the presence of God. And a Redeemer comes in, a kinsman Redeemer, someone just like us to represent us and pay a debt that we owed.The context of Ruth chapter four where we find ourselves is chapter three. Interesting chapter. As we learned last week, Ruth proposes that Boaz propose. Boaz goes asleep, he wakes up and the first thing that he does is he wants to handle the situation so that he can marry Ruth, but there's an obstacle. He's not the first person legally in line to marry her. We'll talk about that. There's another guy who's got the right to marry her. So, the text is actually a legal transaction before court, so to speak, and Boaz has to handle some business before going on the honeymoon. So would you look at Ruth chapter four with me? I'll read verses one through 12 now and the rest later. Now Boaz had gone up to the gate and sat down there. And behold, the redeemer, of whom Boaz had spoken, came by. So Boaz said, "Turn aside, friend; sit down here." And he turned aside and sat down. And he took ten men of the elders of the city and said, "Sit down here." And they sat down.And he said to the redeemer, "Naomi, who has come back from the country of Moab, is selling the parcel of land that belonged to our relative Elimelech. So I thought I would tell you of it and say, 'Buy it in the presence of those sitting here and in the presence of the elders of my people.' If you will redeem it, redeem it. But if you will not, tell me, that I may know, for there is no one besides you to redeem it, and I come after you." And he said, "I will redeem it." Then Boaz said, "The day you buy the field from the hand of Naomi, you also acquire Ruth the Moabite, the widow of the dead, in order to perpetuate the name of the dead in his inheritance." Then the redeemer said, "I cannot redeem it for myself, lest I impair my own inheritance. Take my right of redemption yourself, for I cannot redeem it."Now, this was the custom in former times in Israel concerning redeeming and exchanging. To confirm a transaction, the one drew off his sandal and gave it to the other, and this was the manner of attesting in Israel. So when the redeemer said to Boaz, "Buy it for yourself," he drew off his sandal. Then Boaz said to the elders and all the people, "You are witnesses this day that I have bought from the hand of Naomi all that belonged to Elimelech and all that belonged to Chilion and to Mahlon. Also Ruth the Moabite, the widow of Mahlon, I have bought to be my wife, to perpetuate the name of the dead in his inheritance, that the name of the dead may not be cut off from among his brothers and from the gate of his native place. You are witnesses this day." Then all the people who were at the gate and the elders said, "We are witnesses. May the Lord make the woman, who is coming into your house, like Rachel and Leah, who together built up the house of Israel. May you act worthily in Ephrathah and be renowned in Bethlehem, and may your house be like the house of Perez, whom Tamar bore to Judah, because of the offspring that the Lord will give you by this young woman."This is the reading of God's Holy and infallible authoritative word. May he write these eternal truths upon our hearts. Three points. To frame up our time, first Boaz the Redeemer. Then we'll look at Ruth the Redeemer, and both point to Jesus Christ; Jesus the Redeemer. First, Boaz the Redeemer. In verse one, Boaz had gone up to the gate and sat down there. Boaz wants to marry Ruth, but he wants to do it in the right way. He wants to do it honorably. He wants to do it righteously. He wants to do it biblically. And there's an obstacle in the way, but he's motivated by love. And when you love, obstacles are turned into opportunities and whatever the cost, whatever the sacrifice, whatever needs to get done, you will do everything you can. You have to biblically, morally, righteously, legally to be with the beloved.One of the things that we're dealing with at the church is lot of young couples had wedding plans for this season and things have had to change. Wrenches have been thrown into plans. My brother, Vlad the drummer, who's usually behind me during worship band, shout out, Vladdy, and Sarah were supposed to get married at the end of May. The banquet hall that they had scheduled they said, "We can't do any meetings." So they've had to adapt. They've had to overcome and they're having a ceremony. It's going to be smaller ceremony. I can't wait to preach at it, do the homily. And I'm also the best man. Can't wait to do the best man speech. I know so many stories, oh so many. But this is one of the things that we see is that love is willing to sacrifice. Love is willing to adapt and overcome. The other thing that we see here is in this relationship, as Boaz wants to marry Ruth, who sacrifices more? Is it Boaz or is it Ruth? It's Boaz. Boaz has to make the greater sacrifice financially and personally and emotionally and socially.And actually, we see this pattern throughout scripture. And no matter how much our culture fights this, it's still true that the man leads with sacrifice. Who pays for the engagement ring? The man does. That's always been true, no matter what our culture says, because it's written on our hearts. So but Boaz goes to the gate. Towns were on hilltop, so he went up to the gate. The gate was a combined town hall and a courthouse and archeological studies show us that along the walls next to the gate were benches and whenever anyone came to the gate and sat down, that meant this person had to do, wanted to do some official business. Boaz spent the previous night at the threshing floor and the text insinuates that he didn't even go home. First thing that he does as he wakes up, as he goes and handles some legal business.So he sees the gentlemen, this Redeemer friend gentlemen. He says, "Turn aside, friend. Sit down here." Great move. Good start. Disarm the guy. Proverbs says, "A soft tongue will break a bone." He says, "Friend, sit down. Let's chat." Verse two and he took 10 men of the elders of the city and said, "Sit down here." So they sat down. He gets a quorum of witnesses in order to officiate or in order to confirm the decision, the contract that will be made. It says, "And behold the Redeemer," or friend, and he calls him the Redeemer. This gentlemen, according to Leviticus 25, it was his obligation to redeem Naomi, to redeem Ruth, to redeem the land. He was spiritually obligated as the closest living male relative to Naomi and Ruth to take care of them. Did he know that Naomi and Ruth were there? Of course he knew. We see this in chapter one that as soon as Naomi comes back to Bethlehem, the whole town knew. In a small town, everyone knows your business as well, maybe even better than you do. He had known that they were there.Why didn't he do anything? Well, that's really the problem here. He didn't do anything. Scripture gives us different categories of sin. There are sins of commission where we do the wrong thing, and then there are sins of omission where we don't do the right thing. Scripture says, "He who knows what is good to do and doesn't do it is in sin." This man knew his obligation according to the law was to take care of Naomi and take care of Ruth, but he doesn't. And we see that he commits the same sin that Adam committed in chapter three of Genesis; the sin of cowardice or the sin of not doing his duty, not fulfilling the job that God had for him. There's weakness and there's cowardice and there's a lack of leading, a lack of intention.Ruth chapter four verse three and then Boaz said to the Redeemer, "Naomi, who has come back from the country of Moab, is selling the parcel of land that belonged to our relative Elimelech." The backstory is Joshua, when he comes into the promised land, one of the things that he did was divide the promised land amongst all the families. And God knew that there would be ups and downs in life. And because of the vicissitudes in life and because of the variations in ability and variations in diligence of work ethics, some families would lose their land and enter into poverty and end up selling their land or leasing it out. So God made two, and these are very interesting laws, to offer these families a second chance. The first was the year of Jubilee. God said every 50th year, whoever has bought the land, whoever has leased the land, has to give it back to its original owners. It was after the seventh segment of seven years. After 49 years, the 50th year, that's the year of Sabbath. That's when land goes back. But before the 50 years were up, land could be bought back, but only by a kinsmen or someone related to the family.The reason why God gave these laws, and I love the theology here and how practical it is, because in God's vision, he didn't want society to be characterized by incredible divergences of the richest and the poorest. He didn't want the top, top, top, top 1% and the bottom, bottom, bottom 1%. He wanted people to give, if you're wealthy, to give generously, to provide meaningful work for those at the bottom to help them rise up. These laws are meant to keep families together so the land stays in the family. Now, scripture says that Naomi was selling her parcel of land. She was selling that little piece of portion of the promised land. And by the way, this piece of land was never meant to permanently leave the family.So, something happened. When Elimelech and Naomi, when they left the promised land, most likely that they leased the land out to someone else. They gave someone else the ability to use the land while they were gone, probably for some on the front end and made some kind of deal that when we come back we would like to purchase the land back from it. Now, this whole leasing, there's a word for it. It's usufruct. I'm sure you know this word. It's an SAT word, if you studied it. Here is the challenge of the day. Chicken wing, usufruct. Who can spell it quickly right now? You get a chicken wing, and I am good on my promises. So usufruct is from the Latin, you get to use the fruit of the land. So, what Naomi is doing now is she isn't giving the land away to someone forever. She wants someone to buy back the land that she had leased before she left, and she wants that person to be a kinsmen Redeemer, whoever buys this land. So, this kinsmen Redeemer gentlemen would take a lump sum of money, pay the current users of the land, and this gentleman would come in and use the land in order to sustain himself, but also Naomi and Ruth, and raise an heir so that by the time the heir gets to legal age, that land goes to the heir.So that's what's going on. Ruth 4:4, Boaz says, "So I thought I would tell you of it and say, 'Buy it in the presence of those sitting here and the presence of the elders of my people. If you will redeem it, redeem it. But if you will not, tell me that I may know, for there is no one besides you to redeem it, and I come after you.' And he said, 'I will redeem it.'" Now, this is fascinating. It's fascinating because Boaz is so committed to God's law. Despite the fact that he loves Ruth, he is willing to give her, he's willing to sacrifice his own desires so that she is cared for. He loves her enough to sacrifice the possibility of marrying her. And what's fascinating is this gentlemen, he's thinking about making a great deal. He's thinking with a deal. Boaz is thinking heart of the deal. For him, this gentleman thinks, "Oh my, I buy this land and I can use it. This is a tremendous investment. I'm so glad. I'm redeeming. I'm buying it." And Boaz is so shrewd that he didn't lead with what he says in verse five. He led with, "You get the land," and then brings in a stipulation. This is verse five."Then Boaz said, 'The day you buy the field from the hand of Naomi, you also acquire Ruth the Moabite, the widow of the dead, in order to perpetuate the name of the dead in his inheritance.' Then the Redeemer said, 'I cannot redeem it for myself, lest I impair my own inheritance. Take my right of redemption yourself, for I cannot redeem it.'" So you can imagine the scene. You can imagine Boaz handing a contract to this gentleman, this Redeemer friend, and he says, "Great, let's make a deal. Sign here. Sign here. Initial here." Pages flipping, pages flipping, pages flipping. "Oh yeah. By the way, last page. Along with the land, you have to marry Ruth and you have to start a family with her. And if a son is born to you, that son will not carry your last name. He will carry the last name of Ruth's previous husband." So with the land, you have to care for Naomi, Ruth's mother-in-law. What's her name? Mara. Bitter. She used to be sweetheart, turn a little sour, so you get her thrown in with Ruth. You have to have a child. Three mouths to feed and when the child gets to legal age, you have to give everything up to him, and that child also gets to split the inheritance of your other children and everything there.As soon as this guy hears all this, he says, "Oh, no. No thank you. I don't need to do this." When he thought the deal would benefit him, he was all for it. As soon as he counted the cost and realized what kind of loss it would bring him, he backs out of the deal. Boaz here is incredibly shrewd and one of the things that we see with Boaz, scripture says he's a worthy man. He knows God, he knows the law, but he also knows people. There's a godly wisdom that he's developed by applying God's word in his life over the long haul, over decades. He's built himself up spiritually, emotionally, theologically, financially. He was ready when God presents him with the situation. He strategically invested his time in the previous seasons so when the new season of opportunity presents itself, he is more than ready.When you're a single man or a single woman, it's not an opportunity to extend adolescence until marriage. And too many men, especially young men, they think, "Okay, marriage is going to turn me into a man." No, no. What turns you into a man is submission to God, to his word. What turns you into a man is fighting the good fight of faith on a daily basis, fighting your sinful desires, fighting sins of omission and commission. What makes you a man of God is time with God. It's walking with God. Boaz was ready when God said, "I'm giving you my daughter." I did this little thing last week where I said, "Here's all of my standards. Here's all of my tests that I'm going to make any potential suitors for my daughters to go through. Here are my standards." Some of them are superficial for comedic effect. Homiletical effect, you know that. Okay, you get that, but the most important ones? They're true. Are you a Christian? Do you love God? Do you fight your sin? Have you led yourself well? Have you protected yourself from sin? Have you provided for yourself? Have you pastored yourself? Well, if not, how are you going to do those things with my daughter?God does the same thing with his daughters. If you want to marry one of God's daughters, you need to meet the standards that God has for a man of God, and Boaz was working on that. He was working on that for decades. He was becoming the man that God wanted him to be, so that when God brought him into the situation and when he introduced him to Ruth, he was ready. He was ready to pastor her, to provide and to protect because he's done that with himself. That's my just pastoral and brotherly encouragement to the brothers in the church, to the sisters in the church. Don't waste the season. Use the season to build yourself up in the Lord, build yourself up for whatever the next season is, marriage or not. And God definitely does bless that.Ruth 4, 7 through 10. Now, this was the custom of the former times in Israel concerning redeeming and exchanging. To confirm a transaction, one drew off his sandal and gave it to the other, and this was the manner of attesting in Israel. So when the redeemer said to Boaz, "Buy it for yourself," he drew off his sandal. Then Boaz said to the elders and all the people, "You are witnesses this day that I have bought from the hand of Naomi all that belonged to Elimelech and all that belonged to Chilion and to Mahlon. Also Ruth the Moabite, the widow of Mahlon, I have bought to be my wife, to perpetuate the name of the dead in his inheritance, that the name of the dead may not be cut off from among his brothers and from the gate of his native place. You are witnesses this day." He signs a contract with the gentleman. That's what's going on with the sandals. Kind of weird, but what he's doing, signing a contract. He's signing a contract with another believer.Now, this is just biblical wisdom in terms of doing business with people. If you're doing business with an unbeliever, you sign a contract. If you're doing business with the believer, you've got to sign at least two. It's important. Why? Because the world is fallen. Things take longer than anticipated, cost more. Things tend to go bad. I've seen this practically that when deals go bad or business goes bad, in the church community, the right hand of fellowship quickly devolves into the left fist of disfellowship. So don't do that, sign contracts if you're doing business with one another. Ruth 4, 11 through 12. Then all the people who were at the gate and the elders said, "We are witnesses. May the Lord make the woman, who is coming into your house, like Rachel and Leah, who together built up the house of Israel. May you act worthily in Ephrathah and be renowned in Bethlehem, and may your house be like the house of Perez, whom Tamar bore to Judah, because of the offspring that the Lord will give you by this young woman."What's fascinating here is they welcome Ruth into the community. They welcome her into the house of God, into the people of Israel. She was an immigrant. Wrong race, wrong faith, wrong language, wrong everything, and she trusts in the Lord and they welcome her into the community. So to speak, they're naturalizing her. If you're an immigrant and you've gone through naturalization process of becoming a U.S. citizen, you know how meaningful that is. I know how meaningful it is. I've gone through it. My wife has gone through it. Basically saying, "You're one of us. You were an outsider. Now you're one of us." And they bless her and they invoke the names of Rachel and Leah. This is important because Rachel and Leah were barren just as Ruth was up to this point, and Leah was the mother of Judah, the ancestor of the tribe of Boaz and Naomi.Why is Perez mentioned here? First of all, Perez is the ancestor of Boaz, but he's also a product of one of these Leviticus 25 Levirate marriages between Tamar and Judah. The problem was, Judah did not fulfill his obligation. He backed out of his obligation. He was passive and not fulfilling the obligation in the same way that this Redeemer friend was passive. And Tamar pretends to be a prostitute, seduces her father-in-law, kind of a story, and Perez is an ancestor of Boaz, and Boaz did not. He did not follow in his ancestor's sinful patterns, sinful decisions. He broke the generational sin by following God. This is important, because if you did not come from a family of believers, if you were not raised in the faith, if you have seen pattern of generational sin in your own life, if there is a legacy of sin, you don't have to follow in those footsteps. By grace through faith, God can redeem you from that. That's what we see here. So Boaz, he makes the decision to marry Ruth. All of her liabilities, all of her debts now belonged to Boaz, and all of Boaz' money, all of his finance, all of his wealth now belong to Ruth. All she has is his. All he has is hers. There's a transfer of debt and a transfer of inheritance. Praise God.Boaz is a Redeemer, but we also see that Ruth as a Redeemer. Look at verses 13 through 17. So Boaz took Ruth, and she became his wife. And he went in to her, and the Lord gave her conception, and she bore a son. Then the women said to Naomi, "Blessed be the Lord, who has not left you this day without a redeemer, and may his name be renowned in Israel. He shall be to you a restorer of life and a nourisher of your old age, for your daughter-in-law who loves you, who is more to you than seven sons, has given birth to him." Then Naomi took the child and laid him on her lap and became his nurse. And the women of the neighborhood gave him a name, saying, "A son has been born to Naomi." They named him Obed and he was the father of Jesse, the father of David. Ruth does for Naomi what she could not do for herself. That's what a Redeemer does. Boaz does for Ruth and Naomi what they could not do for themselves. That's what a Redeemer does.Naomi had nothing. She couldn't work the fields, was too elderly, can't have kids, so no family. Economically, spiritually, emotionally without hope. No family, no land, no name. And Ruth says, "I will do everything I possibly can. I will sacrifice everything I need to sacrifice to redeem you from this situation." She practices chesed, which is kindness. It's sacrificial love and she also redeems Naomi and everyone in the community realizes this and they said, "Naomi, do you not see what a treasure your daughter-in-law is? She is better than seven sons." Why is this important? Because in ancient Jewish customs, ancient Israelites, for them, seven sons constituted an ideal family. This is one of the most shocking texts in this ancient scripture, where they're saying, "Your daughter-in-law is better than ideal family." The original audience would have had goosebumps at this point.Orpah left Naomi. She was left destitute. Ruth stayed and what Ruth said was, "Your people will be my people and your God will be my God. Wherever you go, I am going to go. I'm going to immigrate with you." Here's the thing about immigrants. I come from a family of immigrants. You immigrate from one place to another. My family went from the former Soviet Union to the United States. You go from one place to another in the hope of a better life, in the hope of more freedom, in the hope of more prosperity. And Ruth is saying, "I know I'm going to a land where I will always be looked at as an outsider. I will be ostracized. I don't look the same as everyone. I'll always have an accent. No one will welcome me into the community." She was willing to immigrate for a worse life and she expected that eyes wide open. She said, "I'm becoming a follower of God because God is true. She's basically becoming a Christian because she believes in this as true, not because there's a promise of better life here on earth. She would rather live worse materially, socially, economically. She would rather live worse than live better in a lie. She says, "I'd rather go where I have access to God's people."Ruth knows that if she leaves Naomi by herself, Naomi was likely to perish. So if Naomi is going to have a life, Ruth has to lose her own. If Naomi's going to have a name, Ruth has to lose her own name. If Naomi's going to have to get land and we'll have a family, Ruth has to give up everything; her family wealth, everything. She impoverishes herself so Naomi can eventually prosper. She suffers outside the gate. She becomes an alien and a stranger. She leaves the familiar to go into unchartered territory. As a result, Naomi is redeemed. Ruth also along with redeeming Naomi, redeems Boaz, and Boaz says as such. Ruth 3:10. And he said, "May you be blessed by the Lord, my daughter. You have made this last kindness greater than the first in that you have not gone after young men, whether poor or rich."The key, the secret to a loving marriage, an enduring marriage, a marriage that gets better with time like fine wine, the secret is recognizing the other person's sacrifice for you. Recognize it, name it, call it out. Talk about it. Thank you. I'm so thankful. As soon as you start feeling entitled, that is the first step to being pulled apart from one another. Sacrifice and recognize the sacrifice of the other. Ruth sacrifices to redeem. Boaz sacrifices to redeem. The Lord blesses them, gives them a baby son. In the previous marriage, Ruth didn't have children, and God here in their honeymoon gives them a baby.Point three, Jesus the Redeemer. Both of them point to Jesus Christ. Where do I get that? Verse 14, "Then the women said to Naomi, 'Blessed be the Lord, who has not left you this day without a Redeemer.'" Who are they talking about? Are they talking about Boaz? That's what it sounds like. Let's keep reading. Without a Redeemer. "May his name be renowned in Israel." Whose name? Boaz' name is already renowned in Israel. 15, "He shall be to you a restorer of life and a nourisher of your old age." Is that Boaz? Boaz has already done the restoring. He's already done the nourishing with the grain and with his love. Let's keep going. Restorer of life and nourisher of your old age. "For your daughter in law who loves you, who is more to you than seven sons, has given birth to him." Who are we talking about? You see what's going on in the text? Who's the him? You were just talking about a Redeemer. You were talking about restore, a nourisher. We thought it was Boaz and then it says, "You have given birth." She, Ruth, has given birth to him. What is going on?What's going on is this baby is pointing to the ultimate Redeemer. This baby is a child born in Bethlehem, pointing to another child born in Bethlehem. Ruth 4:17, "The women in that neighborhood gave him a name, saying, 'A son has been born to Naomi,' and they named him Obed. He was the father of Jesse, the father of David." Obed means servant of the Lord. There's another one who's called servant of the Lord. This is talking about Jesus Christ. It's a prophetic passage. Naomi is redeemed by Ruth. Ruth is redeemed by Boaz. Boaz and Ruth have a child who is the ancestor of a king who will redeem all of Israel. That's King David, and King David, he was promised by God, on your throne, King David will sit my son for all of eternity. Who is that talking about? It's talking about Jesus Christ and that's why we have a genealogy at the end of the book. That's why the happy ending of this book points to not just redemption. It points to restoration.Verse 18, "Now these are the generations of Perez. Perez fathered Hezron. Hezron fathered Ram. Ram fathered Amminadab. Amminadab fathered Nahshon. Nahshon fathered Salmon. Salmon fathered Boaz. Boaz fathered Obed. Obed, fathered Jesse, and Jesse fathered David." The book isn't about Ruth primarily. It's not about Boaz primarily. It's not about Obed primary. It's not even about David primarily. It's about Jesus Christ and it's about us. Ruth and Boaz lived their lives in view of eternity. They lived for the long term. They lived to leave a legacy, not have a good time. The choices that we make by the prompting of the Holy Spirit have ramifications far beyond our greatest, wildest dreams. God graciously provides Boaz to redeem Ruth. God graciously provides David to set Israel free, and God graciously provides Jesus Christ to set the world free, set us free.The way that you become a Christian isn't to say, "I want to be more like Boaz," or, "I want to be more like Ruth." Those are all great aspirations, but that's not where it starts. Where it starts is we say, "You know what? I can't be like them by myself because they weren't themselves. They weren't what they turn out to be by themselves. All by the power of the Holy Spirit, and was all by grace through faith." The way you become a Christian is to truly believe in the one who went outside the gate, as Hebrew says. To the one who was truly ostracized, to the one who truly suffered, to the greatest alien and the poorest person spiritually speaking; Jesus Christ on the cross. He was cosmically homeless, cosmically alone, cosmically spiritually destitute. As he cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Jesus Christ was forsaken by God the Father so that we would never have to be.The gospel we see from Ruth is that Boaz sacrificed everything to get Ruth, just like Jesus sacrificed everything to get us. And Jesus doesn't just redeem us from physical debt or from the debt of sin. He doesn't just save us from the captivity to Satan. He saves us from death. One way or another, everyone searches for a way to make themselves right, to justify themselves. And even in a sense, pay a ransom for what they've done, and to pay a ransom to find a rescue from death. In some societies, that payment comes through ancestor worship. That's how you try to overcome death or pay that ransom. Other societies like ancient Egypt, immortality came through elaborate burials or mummification. We live in a culture where we try to pretend death isn't a thing. We try to extend life as long as possible, remain as youthfully looking as possible, but death is coming and we need to think about it.Deep down in our souls, we understand there's got to be some kind of payment for our sins, some kind of payment to overcome death. Be it through works, and it's always ... This is what it boils down to in any other religions. Always works. Hinduism is devotion to the gods and living according to one's dharma. Buddhism, control of passions to attain nirvana. Either Jewish theology, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Shintoist, Taoist, Confucians, atheist. It's all work-based righteousness. Here's how I justify that I am a good person, that I am worthy, that if there is a God, he definitely needs to let me in to heaven. He needs to give me eternal life. That's what he owes me.And someone could push back and say, "Isn't Christianity about works?" Not in its foundation, not in its essence. The rules that God gives us about how we are to live, one of the primary goals of those laws is to expose our sin, expose our brokenness, expose our need for redemption. Galatians says, "The law was our tutor bring us to Christ." The way that we are redeemed by Jesus Christ is by grace through faith, believing and repenting, and Christ's sacrifice is accounted to us. Our debt is paid, and not only does he pay our debt, he offers us his inheritance. I love the word inheritance. I love the idea of inheritance; that you just get this surplus of cash, of whatever, this windfall financially. That's what inheritance is. But there's also a tinge of sadness to inheritance, because for you to get an inheritance, someone else had to pay for it and someone else had to die. And Jesus Christ to cover our debt and offer us an eternal inheritance, he had to die as a sinless substitute.As sinners, there's nothing we can do to redeem ourselves, and for someone to cover our sins, they had to be sinless, a sinless substitute. Not only that, to cover the sins of all of humanity who would turn from their sins and believe in Christ, that Redeemer had to be divine. So Jesus, the sinless human being, our kinsmen Redeemer, was also divine and he alone can save us. As C.S. Lewis said, "The central Christian belief is that Christ's death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start." Everything we read in the old Testament, it all points to Jesus Christ. The greatest redeemer doesn't save himself. He save others. The greatest redeemer doesn't just pay money to save. He gives the greatest thing he has himself, which is his life. Jesus is greater than Boaz. Jesus Christ is our kinsmen redeemer through the incarnation because he became one of us. Jesus paid with a sinless life to redeem our sinful life. Jesus isn't forced or obligated to do it. He willingly laid down his life out of love just like Boaz out of love redeems Ruth.Ruth says and does nothing in this redemption process. Redemption to her was a gift and she lovingly, willingly accepted it. Would you today accept the gift of grace, the gift of redemption? You do that with a quick prayer or a long prayer. Just pray. Just talk to God. God, I am a sinner. I've fallen short of your standards. I've committed sins of omission and commission. God, I haven't loved you with my whole heart, soul, strength and mind. I haven't loved neighbor as my self. Lord, forgive me. Lord, redeem me, and Lord, I want to be in a loving relationship with you. Romans 3:24. "And are justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus." Redemption is only in him. It's a gift. Receive that gift today. And if you do, would you let us know? Would you follow up via the connection card? We'd love to connect with you. We'd love to help you take the next steps of following Christ as Lord and savior.Last, Bible trivia. Question for the chicken wing. We see Boaz, we see Ruth, we see the elders. What was the first ... the guy who was first in line to redeem Ruth and Naomi. What was his name? Type in the comments section. He doesn't have a name. He's called friend and he's called redeemer. His only lines are verse four, "I will redeem it." Verse six, "I cannot redeem it for myself, lest I impair my own inheritance." And verse eight, "Buy it for yourself." The guy who is so focused on himself, the guy who was so focused on his life now, the guy who was so focused on the short-term loses eternal impact, misses out on the blessing of becoming an ancestor of Jesus Christ. He wanted to keep his name, keep his line, keep his legacy, and his name isn't even mentioned in the book.But you know whose name is mentioned? Ruth, because Ruth was willing to give up her name, give up her legacy, give everything up, deny herself and follow Christ, follow God, and she becomes an ancestor to the one who has a name above all names; Jesus Christ. Do you want your name to be remembered? Connect your name to his. Become a Christian and live for him. Weave your story in with his and he'll make your story as good, if not better, as the story of Ruth. What a story this was. We're so thankful for it. I can't wait to be in heaven. I can't wait to meet Ruth. I can't wait to meet Boaz. What a couple. What a story, pointing to the greatest story. Ruth in this story celebrates Mother's Day with the birth of a baby. Naomi celebrates Mother's Day by becoming a grandmother, so happy Mother's Day, everyone. God bless you, praying for you, love you. Let's pray.Heavenly father, we're so thankful for this book. What a rich book it is. What a blessing it's been to our souls, to our community. I pray, Lord, help us follow Christ our redeemer with more vigor, with more passion, with more zeal, knowing that the decisions we make to follow Christ have an impact not just in our lives, not just in the lives of our families, not just in the lives of our community, but they have an eternal impact. Make us godly people who follow Christ who are saved by grace through faith, make us men like Boaz and women like Ruth. Make us more like Christ, the ultimate Redeemer, in whose name we pray. Amen.

Discussing the four different theories behind the meaning of knowledge from both the easter and western societies. The weather Socrates & Protagoras vs the Eastern Confucians & Taoist-Zen schools of thought. Concepts from Peter Drucker's book: Post Capitalist Society. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/mdrnac/message

Patricia Churchland is the queen of neurophilosophy. She’s on fine form in this interview - charming, funny and occasionally savage as we range over her views on the nature of philosophy, the neuroscience and evolution of morality, and consider what’s wrong with the two major ethical traditions in western thought: utilitarianism and Kantianism.  1.43 - Is philosophy just a kind of science in its infancy - a ‘proto-science’ - or it is a special kind of conceptual analysis? Professor Churchland doesn’t pull her punches as she takes on the ‘language police’ approach to philosophy. 8.03 Why so much philosophy is useless. “They make finer and finer distinctions, which nobody in the sciences gives a tinker’s damn about!” 9.03 How epistemology is just ‘isms up the ying yang’! 10.40 What good work is being done in philosophy, and what makes it good? Walter Sinnott Armstrong, Owen Flanagan and Julian Savulescu get nods of approval. 12.00 We set to work discussing Professor Churchland’s book Conscience. Where does moral motivation come from in humans and other mammals? 16.20 Why was the evolution of warm-bloodedness important in this story? 18:00 The emergence of the cortex in mammals. Why the most sophisticated animals are the most helpless when they are born, and why it enables the most powerful learning.  20:40 Why the mammalian dependence on a caregiver is the origin of moral concern. 23.20 What precursors to moral behaviour do we see in chimpanzees, wolves and rodents? 28.40 What’s the difference between chimps and humans? It’s just more neurons! But, argues Prof Churchland, quantitative changes can beget qualitative differences in cognition and behaviour, as illustrated by advances in AI. 33.00 The Purveyors Of Pure Reason - what’s wrong with utilitarianism - and why is the contemporary Effective Altruist movement ‘a bit of an abomination’? Prof Churchland takes exception to the idea that 10 homeless folk should matter to her more than her own daughter, and defends the importance of community as a valid source of moral motivation. She explains why Russian philosophers called utilitarianism ‘Lenin’s Math.’ 44.00 How can neuroscience and evolution theory tell us anything important about ethics? Prof Churchland tackles the naturalistic fallacy, and argues that the sciences can usefully constrain our theorising. She celebrates the contributions of Hume and Aristotle. 47.32 Why morality is a lot harder than most moral philosophers think: it’s not just about figuring out some simple over-arching principles. Moral issues are really practical problems, not primarily exercises in rational reflection.    54.25 There are no moral authorities - but that shouldn’t cause us existential angst. We should be like the Buddhists and Confucians. TL:DR - Aristotle and Hume had it right: there are no moral authorities and no grand rules to live by. You gotta figure it out as you go along.  Follow NOUS on Twitter @NSthepodcast

One of the undeniable realities of the history of religion is persecution. The Christians have been persecuted. So have the Jews, the Muslims, the Hindus, the Mormons, even the Buddhists and Confucians. In some cases, these religions persecuted each other. In other cases, it was tyrannical governments that tried to stamp out all faiths with equal zeal. Although less common, philosophy and philosophers have been persecuted too (and persecuted others, as Marcus and other emperors did with early Christians). Epictetus, for instance, was banned from Rome as part of a blanket ban on philosophers by Emperor Domitian in 93 AD. Later, as the Christians took over Rome, philosophers were subjected to persecution and sometimes mob justice. The point is: Although it is less common today, ‘believing’ in something can cost you everything. We are not—and have not been—as tolerant as we like to think we have been and having faith in something in this world can be a revolutionary act. Which calls to mind an interesting question posed by a Christian theologian. He asked, as a kind of test to people who liked to call themselves Christians but ignore the actual tenets of the religion: If you were arrested and tried for being a Christian, would you be convicted? Or do your actions speak louder than any profession of belief?That’s a question for all of us today, whatever we believe, and most of all for this philosophy we are studying. Could you actually be convicted of being a Stoic? Does your behavior match what you claim to be? It was obvious that Epictetus was a philosopher, even if he’d denied it. Same with Marcus, same with Seneca. But you? Are you guilty of truly practicing philosophy? Or just the minor crime of association?

This month on the Mobcast, the boys discuss Morrison's revolutionary marketing methodology, do bad Australian accents, and wholly embrace the idea of viral nanite breast milk. If you'd like to help out the show, please consider recommending us to friends, relatives or strangers who fall into the following categories: comics fans; Grant Morrison fans; X-Men fans; true doom murderheads; true believers; non-believers; un-believers; daydream believers; homecoming queens; cryptozoologists; butchers; bakers; candlestick makers; neo-Malthusians; warlocks; Ron Paul supporters; weeaboos; teaboos; treeaboos; lapsed Confucians; and the lonely. 

In this message celebrating the full moon day of celebration of the birth, enlightenment and passing of the historical Buddha, Professor Thurman gives an extended teaching on how Saka Dawa is celebrated by Tibetans across the world. Saka Dawa, named for the star, Vishakha, prominent during the fourth month in the Tibetan lunar calendar, is almost the same as the Theravadin observance of Vesak. It is considered the most sacred month for remembering the great achievement of Shakyamuni Buddha in the 6th BCE century (earlier in the Tibetan calendar). H. H. the Dalai Lama and all Tibetan Buddhist monks and laity celebrate this holiday. In this Podcast Robert A.F. Thurman gives an overview of the Buddhist holiday, a detailed accounting of the details of the Buddha’s Enlightenment as revealed by Indian Buddhist Sanskrit literature and Tibet’s yogic tradition. Podcast includes: an introduction to the four major schools of Buddhism found in China, details on the practice of vegetarianism during Buddhist Holidays, the symbolism behind the Buddha’s “Earth Witness” mudra made upon being challenged by Mara the Evil One, just before Siddhartha attained unexcelled enlightenment; and how traditional Chinese people were quite tolerant of diversity in religion and ideology, as “Confucians in office, Taoist for weddings, birth ceremonies, and in retirement, and Buddhist for funerals, meditations, and scientific philosophies.” Includes a teaching on the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths and mentions Professor Thurman’s Four Nobler Truths, based on the White Lotus and Great Total Nirvana Sutras. To listen to more recordings from past programs with Robert A.F. Thurman at Tibet House US in New York City + Menla in Phoenicia, New York in the Catskills please consider becoming a Tibet House US Member. The song ‘Dancing Ling’ by Tenzin Choegyal from the album ‘

On this episode of Flashes of Liberty, Kerry discusses the libertarian concept of Spontaneous Order and who first articulated it. Was it the Daoists (as previously thought), or the early Confucians? Episode Resources: You can find more of Kerry's articles and podcasts on her website, here. Visit THE CONFUCIANS AND SPONTANEOUS ORDER to see the resources in creating this episode. Check out Kerry's Facebook Page  Follow on: On Facebook On Twitter @MereLiberty Email us at kerry@mereliberty.com If you’d like to ask Kerry a question which may be answered on a future episode, you can text or leave a voicemail at (505) 886-1061. You may also send an email. Consider supporting Kerry's work with just a few dollars a month.

How did the Mohists see the world differently in the Hundred Schools of Thought era? We find out today, as we explore their particular perspective as working class philosophers. We also learn lots about the early Confucians. Be sure to support the show at www.patreon.com/deadideaspod to get your portrait drawn! Music and graphic design by Rachel Westhoff. Maps, pics, references and more at www.deadideas.net.

They were the chief rivals of the Confucians in their early days, but today no one has heard of them. Meet the Mohists: a faction of hard-headed, big-hearted philosophers whose ideas would fit right in to modern leftist politics, but which were scorned at the time in Ancient China. Be sure to support the show at www.patreon.com/deadideaspod to get your portrait drawn! Music and graphic design by Rachel Westhoff. Maps, pics, references and more at www.deadideas.net.

Laszlo gives the subject of Daoism, the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi a fresh makeover, covered before in an old China History Podcast episode from days gone by. The history of Daoism is explored as well as its main characters, Laozi and Zhuangzi, and what they called for in those dark Eastern Zhou times. Daoism is both a philosophy and a religion, but this episode only explores the former. The Xuanxue thinkers Wang Bi, Guo Xiang and Xiang Xiu are also discussed, as well as the Neo-Daoism that evolved in the Han. As Daoism and Confucianism evolved in China, side by side, there was occasionally some interesting overlap. Confucians from here on out actively explored ways to reconcile their philosophy with the other major contending schools of thought, Daoism and Buddhism.

Lecture 608 (14 November 2016)

How much do we know about Confucius? What type of world were the Taoists and early Confucians living in? Were early Confucians pro free-market and pro individualism as we understand the terms today?Roderick T. Long joins us this week for a discussion on the thought of the early Confucians, who were precursors of modern libertarians.Show Notes and Further ReadingLong’s new book is Rituals of Freedom: Libertarian Themes in Early Confucianism (2016). See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Dr TR Kidder and I talk about getting paid to play in the dirt, multidimensional puzzles, Confucians won and civilization lost, bottom up movements, mitigation vs adaptation and today is not as bad as people think (hooray for optimism!)

In the Justice System of the Tang Imperial Court, the throne’s interests are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the Confucians, who argue for traditional ethics, and the Legalists, who argue for the unbending application of the letter of the law. These are their stories… Time Period Covered: 731-740 CE Major Historical Figures: Emperor Xuanzong of Tang Chief Minister Zhang Jiuling Chief Minister Li Linfu Eunuch Commander Gao Lishi General Wang Maozhong Major Sources Cited: Herbert, Penelope A. "A Debate in T'ang Chinaon the State Monopoly on Casting Coin" in T'oung Pao LXII Twitchett, Denis. "Hsuang-Tsüng: The Middle Reign" in The Cambridge history of China, vol. 3 Sima, Guang. Zizhi Tongjian.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In the Justice System of the Tang Imperial Court, the throne's interests are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the Confucians, who argue for traditional ethics, and the Legalists, who argue for the unbending application of the letter of the law. These are their stories… Time Period Covered: 731-740 CE Major Historical Figures: Emperor Xuanzong of Tang Chief Minister Zhang Jiuling Chief Minister Li Linfu Eunuch Commander Gao Lishi General Wang Maozhong Major Sources Cited: Herbert, Penelope A. "A Debate in T'ang Chinaon the State Monopoly on Casting Coin" in T'oung Pao LXII Twitchett, Denis. "Hsuang-Tsüng: The Middle Reign" in The Cambridge history of China, vol. 3 Sima, Guang. Zizhi Tongjian.

What is knowledge, why is it valuable, and how might it be cultivated? Barry Allen‘s new book carefully considers the problem of knowledge in a range of Chinese philosophical discourses, creating a stimulating cross-disciplinary dialogue that’s as much of a pleasure to read as it will be to teach with. Taking on the work of Confucians, Daoists, military theorists, Chan Buddhists, Neo-Confucian philosophers, and others, Vanishing into Things: Knowledge in Chinese Tradition (Harvard University Press, 2015) looks at the common threads and important differences in the ways that scholars have attempted to conceptualize and articulate what it is to be a knowing being in the world. Some of the major themes that recur throughout the work include the nature of non-action and emptiness, the relationship between knowledge and scholarship, the possibility of Chinese epistemologies and empiricisms, and the importance of artifice. Allen pays special attention to the ways that these scholars relate knowledge to a fluid conception of “things” that can be “completed” or “vanished into” by the knower, and to their understanding of things as parts of a collective economy of human and non-human relationships. The book does an excellent job of maintaining its focus on Chinese texts and contexts while making use of comparative cases from Anglophone and European-language philosophy that brings Chinese scholars into conversation with Nietzsche, Latour, Deleuze and Guattari, Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, and beyond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is knowledge, why is it valuable, and how might it be cultivated? Barry Allen‘s new book carefully considers the problem of knowledge in a range of Chinese philosophical discourses, creating a stimulating cross-disciplinary dialogue that’s as much of a pleasure to read as it will be to teach with. Taking on the work of Confucians, Daoists, military theorists, Chan Buddhists, Neo-Confucian philosophers, and others, Vanishing into Things: Knowledge in Chinese Tradition (Harvard University Press, 2015) looks at the common threads and important differences in the ways that scholars have attempted to conceptualize and articulate what it is to be a knowing being in the world. Some of the major themes that recur throughout the work include the nature of non-action and emptiness, the relationship between knowledge and scholarship, the possibility of Chinese epistemologies and empiricisms, and the importance of artifice. Allen pays special attention to the ways that these scholars relate knowledge to a fluid conception of “things” that can be “completed” or “vanished into” by the knower, and to their understanding of things as parts of a collective economy of human and non-human relationships. The book does an excellent job of maintaining its focus on Chinese texts and contexts while making use of comparative cases from Anglophone and European-language philosophy that brings Chinese scholars into conversation with Nietzsche, Latour, Deleuze and Guattari, Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, and beyond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is knowledge, why is it valuable, and how might it be cultivated? Barry Allen‘s new book carefully considers the problem of knowledge in a range of Chinese philosophical discourses, creating a stimulating cross-disciplinary dialogue that’s as much of a pleasure to read as it will be to teach with. Taking on the work of Confucians, Daoists, military theorists, Chan Buddhists, Neo-Confucian philosophers, and others, Vanishing into Things: Knowledge in Chinese Tradition (Harvard University Press, 2015) looks at the common threads and important differences in the ways that scholars have attempted to conceptualize and articulate what it is to be a knowing being in the world. Some of the major themes that recur throughout the work include the nature of non-action and emptiness, the relationship between knowledge and scholarship, the possibility of Chinese epistemologies and empiricisms, and the importance of artifice. Allen pays special attention to the ways that these scholars relate knowledge to a fluid conception of “things” that can be “completed” or “vanished into” by the knower, and to their understanding of things as parts of a collective economy of human and non-human relationships. The book does an excellent job of maintaining its focus on Chinese texts and contexts while making use of comparative cases from Anglophone and European-language philosophy that brings Chinese scholars into conversation with Nietzsche, Latour, Deleuze and Guattari, Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, and beyond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The 20th-century Chinese philosopher Mou Zongsan is relatively little known in the West, but has been greatly influential in Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China, as well as influencing Confucian studies in North America. His work helped revive Confucianism at a time when many thought it dead. Yet at the same time, Mou devoted significant scholarly time and effort to writing about Buddhism. Why? Jason Clower‘s The Unlikely Buddhologist: Tiantai Buddhism in Mou Zongsan's New Confucianism (Brill, 2010) attempts to explain why Mou thought Confucians could benefit from the study of Buddhism. In this interview, he explains Mou's interest in Buddhism, and demonstrates to us why the study of Chinese Buddhism and Confucianism are inseparable. Jason Clower is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at California State University, Chico.

The 20th-century Chinese philosopher Mou Zongsan is relatively little known in the West, but has been greatly influential in Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China, as well as influencing Confucian studies in North America. His work helped revive Confucianism at a time when many thought it dead. Yet at the same time, Mou devoted significant scholarly time and effort to writing about Buddhism. Why? Jason Clower‘s The Unlikely Buddhologist: Tiantai Buddhism in Mou Zongsan’s New Confucianism (Brill, 2010) attempts to explain why Mou thought Confucians could benefit from the study of Buddhism. In this interview, he explains Mou’s interest in Buddhism, and demonstrates to us why the study of Chinese Buddhism and Confucianism are inseparable. Jason Clower is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at California State University, Chico. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The 20th-century Chinese philosopher Mou Zongsan is relatively little known in the West, but has been greatly influential in Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China, as well as influencing Confucian studies in North America. His work helped revive Confucianism at a time when many thought it dead. Yet at the same time, Mou devoted significant scholarly time and effort to writing about Buddhism. Why? Jason Clower‘s The Unlikely Buddhologist: Tiantai Buddhism in Mou Zongsan’s New Confucianism (Brill, 2010) attempts to explain why Mou thought Confucians could benefit from the study of Buddhism. In this interview, he explains Mou’s interest in Buddhism, and demonstrates to us why the study of Chinese Buddhism and Confucianism are inseparable. Jason Clower is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at California State University, Chico. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The 20th-century Chinese philosopher Mou Zongsan is relatively little known in the West, but has been greatly influential in Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China, as well as influencing Confucian studies in North America. His work helped revive Confucianism at a time when many thought it dead. Yet at the same time, Mou devoted significant scholarly time and effort to writing about Buddhism. Why? Jason Clower‘s The Unlikely Buddhologist: Tiantai Buddhism in Mou Zongsan’s New Confucianism (Brill, 2010) attempts to explain why Mou thought Confucians could benefit from the study of Buddhism. In this interview, he explains Mou’s interest in Buddhism, and demonstrates to us why the study of Chinese Buddhism and Confucianism are inseparable. Jason Clower is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at California State University, Chico. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The 20th-century Chinese philosopher Mou Zongsan is relatively little known in the West, but has been greatly influential in Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China, as well as influencing Confucian studies in North America. His work helped revive Confucianism at a time when many thought it dead. Yet at the same time, Mou devoted significant scholarly time and effort to writing about Buddhism. Why? Jason Clower‘s The Unlikely Buddhologist: Tiantai Buddhism in Mou Zongsan’s New Confucianism (Brill, 2010) attempts to explain why Mou thought Confucians could benefit from the study of Buddhism. In this interview, he explains Mou’s interest in Buddhism, and demonstrates to us why the study of Chinese Buddhism and Confucianism are inseparable. Jason Clower is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at California State University, Chico. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices