Tan Chee Lay 

In the Philosophical Sphere of the I Ching:

A Quick Stylometric Look into Richard Berengarten’s Changing

Even a quick and simple glance at the white cover of Richard Berengarten’s Changing is fascinating. Against this background, the ancient pictogram 易 (Yi) is painted in concise strokes of black ink.¹ To me, this pictographic character suggests the form of a bird flying, a suitable connotation for the ever-changing nature of time and space as perceived from within the perspective of the fleeting existence of a human being. The English word Changing has a double nature, for it can be construed either as a present participle or as a verbal noun (gerund). In either case, the image of the wings of a bird in flight might well symbolise transitory and transformative movement in and through space-time.

Claimed to be one of the most ambitious poems ever written outside the Chinese language in connection with the Book of Changes or I Ching (I Ching), Changing represents a unique reading experience for me. Since I am a Chinese speaker who, as a student, read the original I Ching text in an almost traditional manner in the Chinese department of a university in Taiwan, Richard Berengarten’s book feels both oddly familiar and curiously strange to me. It is familiar because the text and structure of the Book of Changes, which are the direct sources of inspiration for Berengarten’s poem, are subjects that have been studied and scrutinised by generations of Chinese scholars over the ages; and these are integral to the most formative aspects of my cultural and literary background. Yet the approaches and styles of Berengarten’s literary creation, which both adhere to and depart from the text of The Book of Changes itself, are so refreshingly unfamiliar for any Chinese scholar-reader that his interpretations might equally be said to be novel and reinvigorating.

With regard to the former aspect, the Book of Changes consists of a total of sixty-four hexagrams. Each hexagram is made up of two sets of three broken or continuous lines (trigrams). With their corresponding commentaries, in toto they represent a coherent attempt to emulate the entirety of the universe. Indeed, by combining and recombining the many variations and permutations of these figures (384 in all, i.e. 64 x 6), they are meant to embody – or mirror – the circularity (or cyclicity) of human life and fate. Berengarten’s book fully recreates this oriental philosophical aim in such a way that it both ‘envelops’ his own multicultural interpretations and contextualises his inspiration within the multiple and complex traditions of Chinese culture. In his ‘Postscript’, Berengarten writes:

I have modelled Changing closely on the I Ching by replicating and adapting its architectonic patterns at various levels of compositional structure. At the micro-level […] each poem has six stanzas and each stanza consists of three lines. In this way, the forms of both hexagram and trigram are implicitly re-presented (re-called, re-embodied, reduplicated, replicated, etc.) in each poem’s mise-en-page. (CH 525)

Evidently, form (‘pattern’) is important to Berengarten. Of the 450 poems in this book, all but two contain six tercets. While the tercet itself directly echoes the three-line structure of the trigrams in the Book of Changes, similarly the number of stanzas in each poem fully replicates the number of lines in a hexagram. In this way, rather than being a mere source of inspiration, the Book of Changes has been closely ‘followed’ in Changing, not only with regard to content but also in the ‘modelling’ or ‘patterning’ of its mise-en-page. In this way, Berengarten has added an innovative poetic and artistic dimension to his philosophical interpretation, which enriches and augments its apparently timeless and universal appeal in a way that is entirely original. Both these aspects of Berengarten’s poem – the traditional and the innovative – are clearly due to the fact that he has spent fifty years interacting with the I Ching, so much so that his poetry is steeped in its traditions.

Within these parameters of classical Chinese tradition and personal poetic innovation, we can quickly and easily establish that in Changing, Berengarten’s own personal voice and foci of attention are not only portrayed but fully evident through his highly individualised poetic language. One way of deciphering his specific concerns and individual responses to The Book of Changes is by exploring the entire body of his text by means of an analysis of the count, variety, choices and frequency of words. By deploying the online digital corpus system, Textalyser (http://textalyser.net/index.php?lang=en#analysis) to calculate and analyse results, we are able digitally to generate the following outcomes:

Table 1: Statistics of Changing, derived from Textalyser

Total word count	37,923
Number of different words	8,324
Complexity factor (lexical density)	21.9%
Readability (“Gunning-Fog Index”): 6 = easy; 20 = hard	6.8
Total number of characters	239,307
Number of characters without spaces	181,311
Average syllables per word	1.59
Sentence count	2,836
Average sentence length (words)	13.6
Readability (alternative) beta: in general, 100 = easy; 20 = hard; optimal = 60-70	58.3

From the above table, we see that of a total of more than 37,000 words in the book, Berengarten has used more than 8,000 different words. Here, the machine is only able to determine a relatively simple and direct complexity factor of the text, which is to take the total word count (37,923) and to divide them by the number of different words that occur (8,324). This results in a complexity percentage of 21.9%. This feature is sometimes also called lexical density, which is defined as the total number of words in the book divided by the number of lexical words (or content words). In this case, by utilising a mode of intervention and calculation that is purely mechanical, every single word, including non-representational words such as articles, prepositions, conjunctions, and others that are more grammatical (syntactic) in nature and function, is taken into consideration for the calculation. Of course, we also have to note the special characteristics of poetry, among which is the fact that every single word counts and is important in this highly dense and concise genre. In such a context, and even more so than in other genres, I believe it is also important that non-lexical words should be counted, in order to determine the complexity factor.

In the case of Changing, a complexity factor of 21.9% is not especially high. Just to obtain a preliminary idea, we can make a simple comparison with another poet with whom we are familiar, for example, William Carlos Williams. Williams’ Paterson, for instance, a long poem in four parts, has 3,592 different words out of a total word count of 13,380 words, which works out as a complexity factor of 26.8%, and a readability of 7.4, as compared to Berengarten’s 6.8 (the higher the index, the lower the readability). While these two cases may not be fully compatible, we could roughly deduce that each of Berengarten’s words appears about five times while Williams’ appears about four times. Consequently, might we be able to infer that the use of many identical or similar words is a deliberate strategy of Berengarten’s, not only (as noted above) in terms of his explicitly professed aim to “re-present” the “forms” of the I Ching “[…] in each poem’s mise-en-page”, but also in reproducing some of the repeating aspects of the lexicon of the Book of Changes itself? Repetition, after all, is a key element in poetry, at all levels from the phonemic (rhyme, assonance) to the lexical; and in lyrical poetry, just as in song, the refrain (or chorus) has a complex function. It is noteworthy, for example, that the verbs used in the above quotation “re-presented (re-called, re-embodied, reduplicated, replicated, etc.)” are highly similar to some of those in the following poem, whose subject and title is, precisely, “(A) coherent language”:

Our job is to foster and grow

(a) coherent language

[…] to

reaffirm the dignity

of the dead, and reclaim,

recall, rediscover – or find for

the first time (a) language

fit for, capable of examining,

expressing, understanding in

and through words, what had

been unsaid, unsayable, and

so mend and change the real,

regrow and rebuild hope        (23/6: 190)

Related to the complexity factor, of course, is the readability or Gunning-Fog Index of the text, which for Changing stands at 6.8. This figure, obtained from a weighted average of the number of words per sentence and the number of complex words, renders Berengarten’s text as highly readable: 6 is considered easy, and the most difficult text can go up to 20 on the Gunning-Fog index scale.

As a form of triangulation to confirm the relatively high readability of Berengarten’s text, we further see that the average number of syllables per word is only 1.59, which means that there is a far higher proportion of words of one and two syllables than any other. Besides the higher likelihood of simpler and direct words in Changing, words with fewer syllables may be more likely to portray a ‘faster’ rhythm. To justify such an argument, the following table shows the frequencies of both syllable count and word length. From Table 2, it is clear that words of one syllable have an extremely high frequency, of almost 58%, and that words of one syllable and two syllables, considered together, make up an overwhelmingly large proportion of the entire text of Changing: that is, more than 87%.

Table 2: Syllable and Word Counts in Changing

Syllable count	Word count	Frequency
1	21,114	57.5%
2	10,891	29.7%
3	3,489	9.5%
4	1,029	2.8%
5	173	0.5%
6	25	0.1%
8	1	0%

Subsequently, Table 3 further confirms that, the highest frequency for word-lengths is words of three, four and two characters respectively, and that this makes up over 52% of all words in Changing. Words containing over 10 characters have frequencies of less than 1% each.

Table 3: Word Length in Changing

Word Length (characters)	Word count	Frequency
3	7,738	19.7%
4	7,048	18%
2	5,652	14.4%
5	5,120	13.1%
6	3,800	9.7%
7	3,347	8.5%
8	2,176	5.5%
9	1,405	3.6%
1	1,316	3.4%
10	913	2.3%
11	381	1%
12	174	0.4%
13	86	0.2%
14	42	0.1%

While longer words in English tend to be derived from Latin or Greek and often belong to more ‘intellectual’, ‘educated’, and ‘professional’ registers, poets writing in English, possibly including Berengarten, frequently advocate using simpler and more easily communicative language. For example, in the ‘Prologue’ to his play Every Man in His Humour, Ben Jonson advocates “language such as men do use” (2009); and Wordsworth in his ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads’ argues for “a selection of the language really used by men” (1993).

Next, we delve further into the specific words used, and produce the frequency table of word types in the complete text of Berengarten’s Changing in Tables 4 and 5:

An examination of Table 4 reveals several possibly significant facts. First, the few words that Berengarten has utilised most frequently from his extensive vocabulary-base include, in the following order, you, he, it, I, his, her, our, we, she, your and they. From these high-frequency pronouns, might it be suggested that there is a strong tendency in the poems to be ‘relationship-oriented’ and even ‘intimate’ and, along with this, that a major concern in the poem has to do with personal interactions?

Table 4: Frequency table of words in Berengarten’s Changing

Word	Occurrences	Frequency	Rank
and	1582	4.2%	1
the	986	2.6%	2
in	833	2.2%	3
of	791	2.1%	4
to	680	1.8%	5
a	626	1.7%	6
on	361	1%	7
you	302	0.8%	8
is	259	0.7%	9
or	252	0.7%	9
he	232	0.6%	10
this	231	0.6%	10
it	227	0.6%	10
i	221	0.6%	10
for	219	0.6%	10
as	215	0.6%	10
with	215	0.6%	10
his	214	0.6%	10
all	195	0.5%	11
her	183	0.5%	11
our	180	0.5%	11
we	171	0.5%	11
at	168	0.4%	12
not	167	0.4%	12
from	165	0.4%	12
out	162	0.4%	12
by	161	0.4%	12
no	160	0.4%	12
she	150	0.4%	12
your	147	0.4%	12
one	146	0.4%	12
they	142	0.4%	12
him	82	0.3%	N/A
hers	4	0.01%	N/A

The pronouns we (subject), us (direct or indirect object), our and they, all indicate plurality, while you and your may be either singular or plural, according to context. The prevalence of the first, second and third person plural we, our, us, they, and perhaps you and your, could perhaps indicate a primary concern for social issues of the masses – which is very much in keeping with the earliest use of divination in Chinese history, even before the I Ching existed, when diviners applied intense heat to induce cracks in tortoise plastrons and ox-shoulder bones. The evidence of inscriptions on these oracle bones suggests that when rulers consulted diviners they did so mainly on social issues (Knightley: 25).

Another interesting feature we see here is 337 occurrences for the words she, her and hers, by comparison with 528 occurrences for he, him and his. This yields a ratio of 1:1.57 of feminine pronouns to masculine ones. If we take only the subject pronouns she and he, with 150 for the former and 232 for the latter, the ratio is nearly 1:1.55. Although, as might be expected, masculine pronouns are more frequent, Berengarten’s interest in representing the perspectives and experiences of women as subjects is evident:

January-end already. But

she hasn’t yet caught up even

with this year’s beginning,

is still stuck in last year
and deaths of two friends  

haunt her.        (3/1: 25)

I’m pregnant,
she told her mother on
her (mother’s) birthday.        (3/2: 26)

Both of these passages relate to the third hexagram, 屯 (Zhun), which Berengarten translates as ‘Beginning’ CH 3: 23). Here, Berengarten portrays the perspectives and experiences of female subjects and voices at the beginning of a new year, thus emphasising Mother Nature / Mother Earth and the beginnings of all life in birth. second of the above extracts is from a poem entitled ‘Hearing the other smiling’: a daughter is talking, privately, about being pregnant, to her own mother. Their intimacy of the situation is evident in the base-line, which, as elsewhere, serves as a metatext: “after ten years // she conceives” (CH 26). The parenthesis in the phrase “her (mother’s) birthday” clarifies that the timing of this conversation itself celebrates the recurrence and continuation of life and implies the cyclicity of human fate, since life always returns to the starting point: birth.

Next, following the same model as in Table 4 above, Table 5 lists a small selection of words that specifically reveal semantic content in Changing. Most of these are nouns: these will clearly reveal patterns of imagery which themselves indicate dominant and/or recurrent motifs or themes in Berengarten’s long poem. Of the 11 terms chosen, the last 8 are also the names of the trigrams of the I Ching:

Table 5: Selected high-frequency images or ‘imagems’

Word	Occurrences	Frequency	Rank
Time	117	0.3%	13
Light	94	0.2%	14
Nothing	84	0.2%	14
Wind	77	0.2%	14
Water	56	0.1%	15
Heaven	47	0.1%	15
Fire	44	0.1%	15
Mountain	35	0.1%	15
Earth	29	0.1%	15
Thunder	29	0.1%	15
Lake	25	0.1%	15

The eight primary trigrams, which are the core ‘building units’ in the I Ching, must inevitably play a key role in Changing, even if here they are not explicitly presented as contrasting pairs: heaven/earth, mountain/lake, thunder/wind, and water/fire. Even so, the multiple patterns created by the interplay of these elements is imaginatively captured in Berengarten’s long poem, through a multitude of complex and varied relationships with one another. The typical functions attributed to each of these configurations evidently include many traditional motifs, for example: thunder instigates; wind scatters, water (as rain) irrigates; fire (as sunlight) warms; mountains steady; lakes please; heaven rules; and earth stores (Ziporyn: 244-245).

While all these polysemic themes are fully evident in Changing, in Berengarten’s text these eight elements take on still more manifestations and proliferations, which include multiple literal, symbolic, and abstract meanings, connotations, and associations. Hence, in Changing, thunder not only booms in a storm but is also the sound ‘borne’ by victors; wind not only scatters but also infiltrates; water can be either dangerous or life-enhancing and soothing; fire can either smoulder slowly or blaze fast, fuelling more flames; mountains may represent obstacles as much as achievements; a lake may signify not only serendipity but also flooding, which “rises above the trees” (28/1: 224); heaven is, perhaps surprisingly, not only almighty and transcendental, but also immanent and all-embracing; and earth, though motherly, life-giving and nourishing to all, is nonetheless equally the ‘storehouse’ for the slaughtered, the dead, and decay.

Let’s take a closer look at one of these eight trigrams, 巽 (Xun), ‘wind’ ☴. In Changing, the word wind has the highest frequency of all these eight elements (77 occurrences; and this does not of course include many related words, such as breeze, draught, gust). In the I Ching, while wind can embody the strength of dispersing and scattering movements, it can also infiltrate (and even ‘dissolve’) its influences into other parts of nature, and do so too – literally, metaphorically and symbolically – into both human and metaphysical domains (Ziporyn: 245). Both these aspects are explored and configured in Changing – the motif of dispersal, for example, in ‘Fields frost’, and of infiltration, merging and re-emerging, in ‘Against clouds’:

[…] That

dour music is the wind

blowing down from

northern deserts.        (‘Fields frost’, 2/1: 15)

Then wind’s puckered

mouth spread hints of

almost-words through

the tree’s entire body,

reiterating them with

each renewed gust.

Then wind dissolved,

letting leaves speak to

themselves, without

thanking its disposers,

three parts dropletted,

four parts ash.        (‘Against clouds’, 5/0: 40)

To further explore the semantic ‘bundling’ of such high-frequency words – and thus to reveal what we might well think of as dominant themes in Changing – we could possibly look at related image-clusters, or imagems, as Berengarten calls them (RB 2013: 26; and RB, letter to author: 4 Nov 2019). This word water occurs 56 times, in addition to which many others are also present which either belong to or are associated with the same imagem or ‘word cloud’, for example: river, rain, wet, flow, pool, sea, ocean, current, stream, drop, drip, wash, drink, drank, lake, marsh, canal, mud, lagoon, mist, soak, and so on. Notably this list includes both nouns and verbs. Examining such imagems and their relationships, we see that water not only flows and irrigates as mentioned above, but that it can also impose its presence powerfully and forcefully, and destroy:

[…] Rain

lashed and slashed soil,

rivers burst, mists rose,

fields lay soaked.        (‘Relief’, 40/1: 320)

Rain on rain, storm

on storm, flood on

flood.        (‘The lake rises above the trees’, 28/0: 224)

Evidently, imagems involving the element of water are often deployed by Berengarten to signify a variety of ‘flows’, whether spatial or temporal or both. So, in ‘Wind across grass’, the flow is not only through space but also through time:

[C]an you see

how, here, across grass, time

may flow backwards too, as

floods of was and will-be inter-

penetrate, the unpredictable

unlikely casual tomorrow […]        (19/1: 153; emphases added)

But we needed markets.

And love and war like water flow

unnoticed in quiet places.        (‘Wall’, 46/6: 374; emphasis added)

Furthermore, in addition to flow, water-imagems have yet another function: they blend and bond the natural and the human, stasis and motion, and the word and silence. Thus, apparently disparate elements come together in a unison, a seamless and harmonious unity. This theme is beautifully elaborated in several poems, for example:

When you are I come together,

We join in a union, blend in a unity,

Flow in a unison.        (‘As water’, 65)

Border and edges

Among things

[…]

flow into one

another, merge,

blend, bond.        (‘Dark gates of things’, 14/5: 117)

These motifs of flowing and of merging, blending and bonding, of course, connect both wind and water.

A further point that is clarified by this short exploration is that all the eight trigrams in the I Ching, combine connotations that are both ‘positive’ and ‘negative’, both ‘life-enhancing’ and ‘destructive’. This oppositional quality is of course inherent in all such symbols. In Changing, Berengarten explores their binary potentials to the full.

Besides the nouns that indicate the eight elemental trigrams, some of the other words with the highest frequencies in this book are time (117 times), light (94 times) and nothing (84 times). We will probably not be surprised to note that these three words have strong philosophical implications, many of which Berengarten actively explores both in Changing and elsewhere.

First, the word time is a key concept that is inherent in the Book of Changes, for change necessarily involves motion in and through both time and space. In fact, ‘time’ – or rather ‘transition’, ‘transitoriness’ or ‘transience’ – which is often referred to as the continuous flow of qi ‘energy’²– is crucial to an understanding of Changing. Qi is the agent of interactions between nature (including time) and humans (receivers/perceivers of time), so as to maintain balance and harmony in the natural, physical and philosophical dimensions of the world – which, of course, include the realm of poetry and poems.

As for the condition and concept of nothingness, this has never ceased to fascinate thinkers and philosophers in the East. In Chinese, 无 wu (‘nothing’, ‘nothingness’, ‘no’, ‘none’, ‘without’) is a core theme in both the Book of Changes and Daoist thinking. It is also a key component of the compound 无常 wu chang ‘impermanence’, which is fundamental in forming the philosophical notion of ‘ephemerality, transience, transitoriness’³ In fact, the Daoist belief is that ‘nothingness’ is the foundation of all things and happenings, as first witnessed by Lao Zi in his Daodejing (Liu: 38-40). Interestingly, Berengarten’s book of sonnets, published a year before Changing, is entitled Notness, a coinage which is an anagram of the word ‘Sonnets’. This book also explores the concept of nothingness, especially when he testifies that “the so-called ‘core’ of isness is notness, just as at that of notness is isness: a never-ending dance” (‘Afterword’, RB 2013: 85). In the context of time, the 84 occurrences of the word nothing in Changing is telling. Here are just two of many passages that focus on this triple theme of nothingness, isness and transience:

Sometimes you catch a
(the) moment, you really do,
don’t you? But then, what

was it – dust, a nothing,
or figment of a nothing?        (‘Dust’, 38/6: 310)

a learning consisting

of unlearning. What happens

is nothing. Everything

fills to the brim with

absolute nothing. That’s what

empties (into) everything.        (‘Nothing happens’, 52/5: 421)

Thinking more deeply, we can deduce that the idea of “nothing”, or of a “figment of nothing” – which is even more of a nothing than nothing – is in fact the “something” (‘isness’) that inspires the poem. What is more, in the 0/1 binary or base-2 mathematical system of the I Ching’s hexagrams, the broken line (or zero-nature that counterpoises the oneness or fulness of the solid line) itself represents ‘nothingness’. In both of the poems just quoted, a fleeting moment is both as full as a “nothing” and as empty as a “something”. Yet it is precisely in these moments (or in such scintillae of dust) that we can catch meaning and thoughts that make our lives fuller and more meaningful.

The above stylometric analysis of the vocabulary of Berengarten’s Changing has enabled glimpses into his strategies in composing this poem: simple, direct and highly readable, yet containing a wealth of philosophical profundity. Are there perhaps more general points to be drawn here? For example: that truth-telling is often simple; that depth of insight does not necessitate abstruse or recondite terminology; and that wisdom often resides in ‘open secrets’?

What is more, many of the poems in Changing, including those quoted above, might almost appear to have been written during ‘gaps between passing moments’ – fanciful though such an idea may be – that is, in such a way as to ‘catch’ or at least ‘glimpse’ nuanced aspects of the fleeting, transitory nature of change itself. In Berengarten’s ambitious poem, thoughts and feelings of the utmost delicacy are traced or hinted at. And inevitably, such subtleties in themselves equally indicate the delicacy of Berengarten’s relationship with the Book of Changes. Like an ancient Chinese scholar, he consults or explores the Book of Changes in a personal, intimate way, with respect not only to major actions and dramatic or important events but also to the relatively humdrum matters and textures of day-to-day living, with all its minor activities and processes.

On a personal note, as a doctoral student in Cambridge in the mid-2000s, I had the privilege of visiting Richard Berengarten’s study once every other month for two years. I saw first-hand his rich and varied collection of books and materials on and about the Book of Changes. In the postscript of his book, he writes: “I first came across the I Ching in 1962, when I was a nineteen-year-old undergraduate studying English at Cambridge: that is, just over fifty-four years ago at the time of writing this” (523). Furthermore, long before Changing was published, Berengarten was consulting the I Ching and making ‘deep’ use of it when composing other texts, including the opening and closing poems in The Blue Butterfly (see 3 and 111). And during our correspondence in 2007, when I was preparing an earlier essay on his writings (Tan 2010; 2011), he sent me some thoughts on the influence of Chinese culture on his life and work, including the following note:

I even found myself consulting the I Ching when actually composing poems. This was a wholly organic and natural development from the ‘personal’ kind of consultation. […] This means that the I Ching has often helped me to articulate poems in a way that I think is correct and appropriate. I may be wrong, but my own belief is that this also means that these poems enter a ‘mode of being’ and a ‘form’ that is not merely rooted in my own subjectivity and opinions, but in a ‘wider’/ ‘deeper’ / ‘higher’ (‘trans-subjective’, ‘intersubjective’) field. (RB, letter to author: October 5, 2007)

Berengarten’s account of this aspect of his poetics confirms that Changing is not only fully rooted in the I Ching itself but also steeped in the Chinese classic’s wider, deeper and higher spheres of influence.

References

Berengarten, Richard. 2011. The Blue Butterfly. Bristol: Shearsman Books.

_____ . 2013. Imagems. Bristol: Shearsman Books.

_____. 2015. Notness. Bristol: Shearsman Books.

_____. 2016. Changing. Bristol: Shearsman Books.

‘Biography’. Online at: http://www.berengarten.com/site/Biography.html (website no longer available).

Huan, Zhang Yu and Rose, Ken. 1973. A Brief History of Qi. Brookline MA: Paradigm Publications.

Jonson, Ben. 2009. Every Man In His Humor. Online at: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5333/5333-h/5333-h.htm

Liu, JeeLou. 2012. Neo-Confucianism: Metaphysics, Mind, and Morality. New York: Wiley Blackwell.

‘Richard Berengarten’. Wikipedia.

Tan, Chee Lay. 2010. ‘Cross-Cultural Numerology and Translingual Poetics: Chinese Influences on the Poetry of Richard Berengarten’. In A Delicate Touch: Essays on Chinese Influences and Chinese Genres. Singapore: The Singapore Centre for Chinese Language, Nanyang Technological University; with McGraw Hill Education, 1-18.

_____. 2016 [2011]. ‘Cross-Cultural Numerology and Translingual Poetics: Chinese Influences on the Poetry of Richard Berengarten. In Jope, R., Derrick, Paul S., and Byfield, Catherine, E. (eds.) The Companion to Richard Berengarten. Exeter: Shearsman Books, 266-282.

Textalyser. Online at: http://textalyser.net/index.php?lang=en#analysis

Wordsworth, William. 1993. ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads’. Online at: https://www.bartleby.com/39/36.html

Ziporyn, Brook. 2012. Ironies of Oneness and Difference: Coherence in Early Chinese Thought; Prolegomena to the Study of Li. New York: SUNY Press.

Published: Tuesday 26 April 2022

[RETURN TO CHANGING]

Tan Chee Lay (陈志锐) has lived in Singapore, Taiwan and the UK, and has studied Chinese Literature, English Studies and Business Administration. He completed his doctorate in Oriental Studies (Chinese literature) at St John’s College, Cambridge University, specialising in Chinese poetry and exile poets. Chee Lay was awarded the coveted Young Artist Award by the National Arts Council in 2004 and the Singapore Youth Award (Culture and the Arts), the highest accolade for youth, in 2006. A former tutor of the Chinese Language Elective Programme, he is currently an Associate Professor in Chinese in Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. Chee Lay has published and edited over 20 creative writing and academic books in both Chinese and English languages.