This article, part of a Common Knowledge symposium on “the consequence of blur,” concerns the place of religion in the historical literature on Asia. It finds a minimalist approach to religion in the case of Buddhism and a maximalist approach in the case of Islam: historians of Asia have little to say about Buddhism, while they exaggerate the role of the Muslim religion. This problem is acute when treating historical circumstances in which Buddhism and Islam are involved in tandem. Although (...) people of the two traditions interacted throughout Asia for more than a millennium, which would suggest that pluralism or something like it was operative, there is virtually no mention of the other in the religious corpus of either tradition. This essay recommends and demonstrates a historical approach more alert to the possibility that religious pluralism may best be found in the past by exploring examples of cross-religious interaction that were not religious but, simply, performed by religious people. The case examined here is of a Buddhist-Muslim interaction that changed the history of the world. The successful spread of Buddhism was tied to the technological prowess and especially the advanced hydrology of its followers, which enabled irrigation for crops, including above all cotton. The sudden “cotton boom” in ninth-century Iran, which enabled the subsequent Muslim takeover of the global cotton industry, was enabled by Buddhists who were fleeing economic collapse and political turmoil in northwest India. This transfer of technology and expertise took place even though Islam is (thought of as) fiercely resistant to alien religious influence. Religious pluralism appears to have been at work when creedal specifics were left blurry, vague, and unstipulated. (shrink)

An environmental history of Buddhism. The book addresses the basic concerns of environmental history: the history of human thought about "nature" or "the environment"; the influence of environmental factors on human history; and the effect of human-caused environmental changes on human society.

This essay, by the editor of Common Knowledge, introduces the sixth and final installment of “Fuzzy Studies,” the journal's “Symposium on the Consequence of Blur.” Suggesting that “Fuzzy Studies” should be understood in the context of a desultory campaign against zeal conducted in the journal for almost twenty years, he explains that the editors' assumption has been that any authentic case for the less adamant modes of thinking, or the less focused ways of seeing, needs to be unenthusiastic and carefully (...) ramified. To establish the distinction between overenthused and unemphatic approaches to blur, he contrasts the ecstatically amorphous “Blur building” with examples of classical Chinese landscape painting. Elizabeth Diller and Richard Scofidio, in their book blur: the making of nothing, chronicle the development of their plans for the Blur building and, in the process, inadvertently show that, to overbear various negative associations of blur and fog, the authors/architects grew self-contradictorily emphatic about the need to produce de-emphasis in architecture and in modern life. Perl shows how this self-contradiction appears also in phenomenology-inflected writings on blur by T. J. Clark, Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Kraus, J.-P. Sartre, and Georges Bataille, but not in the work of the phenomenologist François Jullien, whose book The Great Image Has No Form analyzes the role of blur in classical Chinese art theory and practice. Where traditional Western painting, Jullien argues, calls for voyeuristically intense focus, traditional Chinese painting stimulates “dé-tente, relaxation or ‘untensing’.” Intense focus on a blur is still, Perl observes, an intense focus. In describing a painting by the Yuan Dynasty master Ni Zan, Perl concludes that the only way to be un-self-contradictorily positive about fuzziness, whether in logic or aesthetics, is to de-reify and de-differentiate with the aim of achieving blandness. (shrink)