Vietnam has seen fast-rising debts, both domestic and external, in recent years. This paperreviews the literature on credit market in Vietnam, providing an up-to-date take on the domesticlending and borrowing landscape. The study highlights the strong demand for credit in both therural and urban areas, the ubiquity of informal lenders, the recent popularity of consumer financecompanies, as well as the government’s attempts to rein in its swelling public debt. Given thehigh level of borrowing, which is fueled by consumerism and geopolitics, (...) it is inevitable that theamount of debt will soon be higher than the saving of the borrowers. Unlike the conventional wisdom that creditors have more bargaining power over the borrowers, we suggest that—albeitlacking a quantitative estimation—when the debts pile up so high that the borrowers could not repay, the power dynamics may reverse. In this new politics of debt, the lenders fear to lose the money's worth and continue to lend and feed the insolvent debtors. The result is a toxic lending/borrowing market and profound lessons, from which the developing world could learn. (shrink)

Absolute Delusion, Perfect Buddhahood: The Rise and Fall of a Chinese Heresy. Jamie Hubbard. University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu 2001. xvii, 333 pp. Hbk $45.00, pbk $22.92. ISBN 0-8248-2345-1.

Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness: Zen Talks on the Sandokai. Shunryu Suzuki, edited by Mel Weitsman and Michael Wenger. University of California Press, Berkeley & Los Angeles 1999. viii, 195 pp. $22.50. ISBN 0-52-21982-1.

Confucian Values and Popular Zen: Sekimon Shingaku in Eighteenth-Century Japan. Janine Anderson Sawada. Univerity of Hawaii Press, Honolulu 1993. xi, 256 pp. $30.

Mourning in Late Imperial China. Filial Piety and the State. Norman Kutcher. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1999. xiv, 210 pp. £40.00, US $64.95. ISBN 0-521-62439-8.

Nagarjuna in China. A Translation of the Middle Treatise. Brian Bocking. The Edwin Mellor Press, Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter 1994. iv, 499 pp. £59.95, US$119.95.

The Skill in Means Sutra. Mark Tatz. Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi 1994. 128 pp. Rs 150.

The Salistamba Sutra, Sanskrit Reconstruction, English Translation, Critical Notes. N Ross Reat. Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi 1993. xiii, 74 pp. Rs 150. ISBN 81-208-1135-6.

Zen Masters: A Maverick, a Master of Masters, and a Wandering Poet. John Stevens. Kodansha International, Tokyo 1999. 161 pp. £8.99. ISBN 4-7700-2385-5.

Hanshan, which means Cold Mountain, was the pseudonym adopted by an unknown poet who lived in China as a hermit twelve hundred years ago. The poems collected under his name have had an immense impact worldwide, especially among Zen Buddhists, and have been translated into many languages. Peter Hobson's translation of more than a hundred of the poems, almost all of which are published for the first time in this volume, brings those qualities of timelessness, poetic diction and engaging rhythm (...) that do justice to the concepts and language of the original. This edition includes not only a clear and succinct introduction for the general reader but also highly informative sections on Hanshan's place in history and on issues involved in translating Hanshan. (shrink)

T H McLaughlin; Parental Rights and the Religious Upbringing of Children, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 18, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 75–83, http.

To compare a novel to a work of philosophy is, admittedly, a risky exercise in analogy. When the novelist is Lawrence and the philosophical text is the ponderous and dialectical Being and Nothingness, such a comparison may seem willfully perverse and peculiarly open, insofar as it deals with Lawrence's great theme of sexuality, to his anathema of "sex in the head." Furthermore, modern criticism, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, has tended to be wary of critical approaches that lean on notions (...) that are not derived from literature itself - a tendency that is being reinforced these days by the structuralist insistence on the "literariness" of the Text. Now, despite its metaphorical statement as a form of dramatic "gesture," Sartre's book is very definitely not a work of literature. T.H. Adamowski, associate professor of English at Erindale College, the University of Toronto, has written articles on English, American, and French literature. This essay is part of a larger study on progress on Lawrence's "sexual poetics.". (shrink)

T H McLaughlin; Parental Rights and the Religious Upbringing of Children, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 18, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 75–83, http.

Transformations of the Confucian Way. John H. Berthrong. Westview, Boulder, Colorado, and Oxford 1998. xiv, 250 pp. Cloth £53.95, pbk £15.95. ISBN 0-8133-28055/2804-7.

The representation of physics problems in relation to the organization of physics knowledge is investigated in experts and novices. Four experiments examine the existence of problem categories as a basis for representation; differences in the categories used by experts and novices; differences in the knowledge associated with the categories; and features in the problems that contribute to problem categorization and representation. Results from sorting tasks and protocols reveal that experts and novices begin their problem representations with specifiably different problem categories, (...) and completion of the representations depends on the knowledge associated with the categories. For, the experts initially abstract physics principles to approach and solve a problem representation, whereas novices base their representation and approaches on the problem's literal features. (shrink)