The myriad ways Beijing residents understand and nurture the good
life, drawing on cultural resources ranging from ancient
metaphysics to modern media. Ten Thousand Things explores the many
forms of life, or, in ancient Chinese parlance "the ten thousand
things" that life is and is becoming, in contemporary Beijing and
beyond. Coauthored by an American anthropologist and a Chinese
philosopher, the book examines the myriad ways contemporary
residents of Beijing understand and nurture the good life, practice
the embodied arts of everyday well-being, and in doing so draw on
cultural resources ranging from ancient metaphysics to modern
media. Farquhar and Zhang show that there are many activities that
nurture life: practicing meditative martial arts among friends in a
public park; jogging, swimming, and walking backward; dancing,
singing, and keeping pet birds; connoisseurship of tea, wine, and
food; and spiritual disciplines ranging from meditation to learning
a foreign language. As ancient life-nurturing texts teach, the
cultural practices that produce particular forms of life are
generative in ten thousand ways: they "give birth to life and
transform the transformations." This book attends to the patterns
of city life, listens to homely advice on how to live, and
interprets the great tradition of medicine and metaphysics. In the
process, a manifold culture of the urban Chinese everyday emerges.
The lives nurtured, gathered, and witnessed here are global and
local, embodied and discursive, ecological and cosmic, civic and
individual. The elements of any particular life-as long as it
lasts, and with some skill and determination-can be gathered,
centered, and harmonized with the way things spontaneously go. The
result, everyone says, is pleasure.
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