Abstract

Abstract:In the Chinese cultural imaginary, the road (Dao, “way”), especially trade routes, has always been an important metaphor for changing circumstances including shifting ideological grounds. Its own life trajectory is both classical and contemporary, and its emergence predates the trains, nation-states, sovereign powers, and so on, all such signs of techno-political modernity at work. Also in that regard, spiritually inflected images of the “West Heaven,” also an old name for India, where Buddhism originated, have always been present in East Asian cultural spheres, which, in turn, points to the presence of a deeper Eurasian world connected through the Middle East as well. Now, however, quite strikingly, such global conceptual structures, long part of the evolving Chinese cultural tradition too, are being rapidly localized and recast into something else. For example, in China, Buddhism, a religion fundamentally critical of idol worshipping, has become pantheistic, and the political ideas that originally promoted equality newly patriarchal. For those living along the China Eastern Railway tracks in the twenty-first century, all such ideologies have become part of a tensional fight of gods in which they, too, are caught: on one hand they long for a linear progression of society that would never turn back, but on the other hand they are reluctant to abandon the self-comforting theory of reincarnation. This is also how they come to praise the imported concept of the motherland while worshipping figures of traditional patriarchal power.