Ten Thousand Things: Nurturing Life in Contemporary Beijing

Abstract

Ten Thousand Things explores many forms of life, or, in ancient Chinese parlance the ten thousand that life is and is becoming, in contemporary Beijing and beyond. Coauthored by an American anthropologist and a Chinese philosopher, book examines myriad ways contemporary residents of Beijing understand and nurture good life, practice 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, cultural practices that produce particular forms of life are generative in ten thousand ways: they give birth to life and transform transformations. This book attends to patterns of city life, listens to homely advice on how to live, and interprets great tradition of medicine and metaphysics. In process, a manifold culture of 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 way things spontaneously go. The result, everyone says, is pleasure.

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