The networks and applications of twenty-first-century communications technology have broadened media access massively while having the effect of amplifying and intensifying the force of political messaging. Yet a conceptual through line can be drawn between the character and organising principles of twentieth-century international broadcasting and those of today. This chapter offers an overview of the rise and character of international broadcasting as practised by totalitarian/authoritarian and democratic states. It also examines the conditions and processes of communicative exchange required for a broadcaster to engage with and predispose target audiences to influence and persuasion. As an agent of the state in international politics since World War II, international broadcasting has straddled competing ‘efforts to spread information and efforts to control its spread’ (Shaheed 2019, p. 4). The practice has been deployed for benign or hostile purposes, to build trust, to proselytise or to wage psychological warfare.

A correspondent of Moscow’s Novosti news agency, Karl Nepomnyashchi, claimed that American, German and Canadian broadcasters had been ‘the real masters of the black heavens’ during the Cold War (Short 1986, p. 4). He spoke of their ‘vile role’ (Nelson 1997, p. vi) in circumventing the Soviet Union’s control of information during its invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. So long as listeners had access to high-frequency (shortwave) radio receivers, they could circumvent the censorship imposed by their own governments. Shortwave offered the facility of long-distance transmissions that could not be blocked except at considerable expense. In 1984, Indonesian scholar Juwono Sudarsono commented that the Western media presence constituted ‘one of the more powerful instruments of power projection by the United States and its democratic allies’ (Sudarsono 1984). Two decades later, in March 2005, Radio Australia’s Hidayat Djajamihardja recalled how the bellboy of a hotel in Dili pursued him across the foyer, wishing to make a ‘courtesy call’ on the Indonesian-born broadcast journalist (Djajamihardja 2005). They had never met. But that voice! Without hesitation the bellboy recognised its cadence and timbre. He told Hidayat of the years under Indonesian occupation of East Timor when local people lowered the volume on their shortwave radio receivers so they could listen, undetected, to the news from Radio Australia.

Edward Ives’s A Voyage from England to India (1773), as we shall see, is the first English travel book about the overland routes in which we find an Englishman from a humble background, a surgeon by profession, telling his readers how Ottoman governors in different cities in Syria and Mesopotamia highly respected English travellers in their land. He reported how he and his companions enjoyed the hospitality of Muslim rulers, showing how the English were highly respected for their polite manners and accommodating behaviour towards non-Europeans. Travelling in the East, as this chapter shows, offered Ives opportunities to reinvent the Self abroad as one of improvement, respectability and politeness; the idea of being among others – a manifestation of a ‘relational’ condition in the making of the modern self, one ‘outwardly or social turned’ as Dror Wharman has argued – allowed Ives to reimagine the old regime of identity in England in which boundaries were strictly demarcated by fixed markers in contrast to the modern age known for mutability and transience, what Marshall Berman in 1982, via Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto, called, ‘all that is solid melts into air’. Before he set out to the East, Ives was one of those ‘rambling mind[s] and a fortune too narrow to allow’ one ‘to travel like a gentleman’, as Alexander Hamilton in 1739 put it (Hamilton 1739: xxvi). But the idea of joining the Royal Navy as a surgeon gave Ives many opportunities to rub shoulders with people, European and non-Europeans, from different social and economic backgrounds, which enabled him to perform the character of a modern gentleman whose manners and appearance rather than his lineage, family background and religious piety defined his identity. In his travel book, Ives used polite performances and the ethos of improvement well known among the upwardly mobile middling ranks of eighteenth-century Britain to negotiate the freedoms and challenges of modernity.

Introduction

In his book Anthropolog y and Religion, Robert L. Winzeler offers a list of roles of animals in religious belief and practice, including animals as a god, deities, or cult creatures, animals as totems, animals as were-animals, animals as omen creatures, animals as tricksters, and animals as objects of taboo. While making examples of the were-animals, he particularly mentioned the werewolves in Europe and were-tigers in Indonesia and Malaysia. Besides South and Southeast Asia, East Asia also had folklores on the weretigers. After all, the were-tiger culture is deeply rooted in Asia’s natural environment and ecology. Tigers were a significant apex predator across nearly half the Asian continent, which could be found historically in most regions of Central, South, Southeast, and East Asia. Unfortunately, the tiger became distinct from Central Asia in the tenth century and disappeared in Java and Bali in the twentieth century. Nowadays, only the Bengal tiger, Amor tiger, South China tiger, and Sumatra tiger still struggle to survive as endangered species in some nature reserves and zoos across South, Southeast, and East Asia. While interacting with humans, tigers not only appear as real nonhuman animals in the historical experience of human life but also play crucial roles in the spiritual and emotional experience of human life and culture. Contemporary scholars have studied tigers from agriculture, ecology, environmental history, and animal history perspectives.

The study of the were-tigers in Asia can be traced back to the rise of European colonialism in the nineteenth century. When Europeans began their adventures in the Asian continent, they gradually exposed themselves to the information about the tigers and were-tigers in Asia. They then developed preliminary studies on the were-tigers in the early twentieth century, undoubtedly inspired by their knowledge of the werewolves in Europe. In 1901, Jan J. J. de Groot first examined the were-tigers in Chinese history and literature in the ancient and medieval times in a chapter of volume four of his monumental book The Religious System of China. In traditional Chinese texts, he mainly introduced numerous stories about the transformations from tigers to humans. Then nearly one century later, Charles E. Hammond analyzes the symbolic use of the tiger and were-tigers in the ancient lore of China.

The Levant Company appointed Abraham Parsons as a consul in Iskenderun, Turkey, in 1767. Parsons served in the Levant for six years before deciding to retire in Leghorn in Italy where he died in 1785. Seven years earlier, Parsons had undertaken a journey of ‘commercial speculations’, as John Paine Berjew, the editor of Parsons’s travel account, wrote in the preface to Parsons’s Travels in Asia and Africa (Parsons 1808: iii). From his travel book, we learn that Parsons had joined an Arab caravan travelling between Aleppo and Basra where he lived for a few months before boarding a British ship sailing towards India. In 1776, he arrived in Bombay, then moved to Surat and Madras before returning to Europe by way of Suez, Cairo and Alexandria. The details of this long journey were published posthumously in 1808 in a book many in Britain found somewhat repetitive and dull unlike most travel books of the period, which were known for the stories they told about their authors’ adventures and suffering in exotic climes. The Monthly Review suggested that Parsons’s ‘travels bespeak the man of business more than the man of letters and afford us the result of actual observation without much benefit from disquisition or research’ (1810: 288). For the London Review, there is no doubt that Parsons’s book lacks the literary and scholarly quality one finds in previous and contemporary accounts about the Levant. But what is even odd about the book is that it does little to explain differences between societies beyond just the Enlightenment discourse of progress. Parsons, The London Review in 1809 wrote, ‘looks only on the artificial and obvious distinction between the modes of society in states: he knows nothing of the more recondite discriminations that separate, as it were, the souls of communities; and even, in the midst of the most liberal and enlightened intercourse, keep nation distinct from nation.

To watch Wittgenstein listening to music was to realize that this was something very central and deep in his life’, writes Maurice O’Conner Drury, Wittgenstein’s close friend. He adds, ‘He told me that this he could not express in his writings, and yet it was so important to him that he felt without it he was sure to be misunderstood’ (quoted in Fann 1967, 67–8). While the exact meaning and import of this reminiscence remain forever open-ended, it may nonetheless suggest that Wittgenstein’s thinking about, and with, music is a philosophical subject matter in its own right, and that it may extend fur-ther and deeper than has commonly been acknowledged in the literature heretofore.

The purpose of this chapter is to highlight one aspect of this professed importance of music, which is related to Wittgenstein’s particular interest in the intersection between interpersonal relations, the rules of evidence, and the nature of our agreement and disagreement in speech. Our interpersonal exchanges manifest a kind of mutual understanding that is immediate and experienced. Yet, this sort of knowledge of human beings (Menschenkenntnis) is, in fact, a skill, an accomplished sensitivity to human physiognomy, an instance of ‘knowing how’ rather than ‘knowing that’. Thus, it cannot be accounted for in strictly epistemic terms, as it admits ‘imponderable evidence’ (unwägbare Evidenz) into our judgements. In Wittgenstein’s view, this deeply characterizes our human lives and our daily exchanges with one another and the world. Importantly, for Wittgenstein, music affords a genuine locus – a myriad of natural, straightforward instructive occasions and exemplars – for this kind of knowledge of human beings.

To see and appreciate aright this nexus, we first need to carefully disentangle the two main terms in the title of this chapter – music and knowledge – from common tendencies to apprehend them within the context of certain deep-rooted ideas. The bulk of this chapter addresses Wittgenstein’s concept of knowledge that is appropriate to our sensitivity as human beings. As for music in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, I shall restrict myself to the following précis of what I take to be much broader issues, which call for a comprehensive, unified treatment on another occasion.

Prologue

If the past is a foreign country, then it is plausible to expect the conditions for understanding contemporary cultures that seem alien to us to parallel those of historical understanding. R.G. Collingwood famously suggests that such understanding involves ‘the re-enactment of past thought in the historian’s own mind’ (Collingwood 1946, 216–17, 301). This view finds recent expression in Bettina Stangneth’s proclamation that ‘to understand someone like Eichmann, you have to sit down and think with him. And that’s a philosopher’s job’. Such thinking with does not imply any agreement of opinion. Its task is to see things from within a system of concepts and values that is alien to one’s own.

This chapter attempts to illustrate that intercultural understanding requires a parallel sharing of thought processes. It does so through an exploration of recent attempts to make sense of the ghost narratives that emerged in the aftermath of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. With some help from Wittgenstein and Geertz, I suggest that understanding the thoughts of another culture is not a question of mind-reading but rather one of conceptual immersion.

The Universe of Human Discourse

How does one enter the mind of another culture, past or present? How could one? It has become popular to use the expression ‘mind-reading’ as a shorthand for understanding another person’s thoughts. This is not a harmless figure of speech but a misleading portrait of communication that has its contemporary roots in John Locke’s theory of human understanding, which considers all thoughts to be private in that they ‘cannot be laid open to the immediate view of another’ (Locke 1689Bk. IV, Ch. XXI, § 4–10). Accordingly, ‘to communicate our Thoughts to one another, as well as record them for our own use, Signs of our Ideas are also necessary’ (Locke 1689Bk. IV, Ch. XXI, § 4–10).

Locke believed that human understanding requires the translation of inner thoughts into a shared language. This enables communication with recipients, whose minds, in turn, translate our words into their own hidden thoughts.

Call Me Ishmael, Charles Olson’s 1947 study of Herman Melville and Moby- Dick, is an anomalous book. On the one hand, it is a foundational text of Melville Studies, establishing Melville as an American Shakespeare and helping to solidify Melville’s elevated position in a canon of American literature. On the other hand, Call Me Ishmael also offers a bizarre recasting of Melville’s entire oeuvre, transforming the image of the nineteenth-century writer at a moment in which early practitioners of American Studies were consolidating a specifically “national imaginary” with respect to literature and history. Call Me Ishmael is simultaneously a key document of an emerging American Studies and a proleptic critique of the nationalist project of the disciplinary field. Blurring the lines between literary artist and scholarly critic, Olson sought to rethink Melville’s leviathan by reimagining Melville’s own imaginative reshaping of the world system in 1851. Olson accomplishes this in part by establishing Melville’s literary and historical project as a discrete segment of a grand, 3,000-year exploration of time and space. Olson thereby wrenches the author from the hands of a nascent American Studies, whose practitioners were in this process of enshrining Melville as the central figure in a national program coded as the American Renaissance, and Olson projects a baroque Melville not confined to or emblematic of any nationalist cultural project.

In this chapter, I look at Olson’s Call Me Ishmael in the context of the Melville Revival and the academic canonization of Melville in the emergent field of American Studies, particularly as associated with an imagined American Renaissance. Olson arguably occupied significant positions in both movements. Through his early interest in Melville, Olson came of age during the Melville Revival of the 1920s and 1930s. He befriended Melville’s granddaughters, Eleanor Melville Metcalf and Frances Osborne, who gave him access to a wealth of material, including Melville’s own set of Shakespeare volumes, with which Olson was able to develop so much of his own argument. And, as a student of Perry Miller, among others, in the newly established History of American Civilization program at Harvard University, Olson stood at a ground zero of the new and burgeoning field of American Studies.

In play throughout the 1970s and 1980s was the tension in Radio Australia’s dual role in the service of state interests and as an editorially independent democratic exemplar. Through its identity, editorial outlook and production norms as a regional broadcaster, it sought to demonstrate Australia as a state and a society of diversity and openness in its dealings with nations of Asia and the Pacific. Unlike political advocacy, narrowly conceived soft power ‘promotion’ or other forms of persuasive communication, this modelling of espoused norms and principles acknowledged the maxim that a state principally would be judged by how it behaved, not what it said about itself. In this chapter, I present a second study of Radio Australia operating under stress, this time in conditions of armed conflict. It reinforces the importance of agreed policy purpose and functions between government and the broadcaster; it also illustrates how the task of mitigating the tensions between interests and values can be a wicked problem.

Another political function of Radio Australia, as I proposed in Chapter 6, called for a capacity to respond to contingent events. Some events required responses that did not cause extraordinary disruption to normal operations, such as tailoring emergency information to countries afflicted by natural disasters. One major crisis discussed here necessitated an extraordinary response. During the lead-up to and conduct of the First Gulf War in 1990–1991, Radio Australia attracted both ministerial commendations and opprobrium as well as the bipartisan censure of the Senate. For its part, the parent ABC faced the unprecedented threat of ministerial intervention, which would have overridden the corporation’s otherwise independent authority by ordering it to broadcast certain matter ‘in the national interest’ (as per ABC Act 1983, s78 (3A, 5)).

The Gulf War was the first time since Vietnam in 1973 that Australian forces were deployed for possible combat. It would involve independent-minded media in a clash of espoused editorial principles and the government’s invocation of patriotism as a ‘mechanism for disciplining mass media’ (Carruthers 2000, p. 7). In the words of George Orwell (1945), this resort to the call of patriotism tended to be ‘defensive, both militarily and culturally’.

Introduction

In recent years, the call to diversify and globalize the study of philosophy has resulted in an interest in achieving greater geographical and cultural inclusivity in many fields of academic philosophy. While this has brought different philosophical traditions together in the space of shared conversation, the question of how diversity and inclusion translate into genuine intercultural understanding is one that requires urgent examination. A major challenge involves getting a handle on what kind of thinking and understanding we can recognize in traditions that are unfamiliar to us. And, this, in turn, calls for an interrogation of what we consider thinking and understanding to be in the first place, and how they are connected to the forms of articulation that we identify as properly philosophical.

Many past efforts to engage different philosophical traditions under the guise of comparative philosophy betray the deep prejudices embedded in the methods and categories that have emerged in conjunction with the rise of the modern sciences. This has resulted in a certain bifurcation in approaches to the study of non-Western philosophical traditions. In the case of early China, it has, on the one hand, led to a narrow identification of philosophy as corresponding to modes of thought and explanation that resemble (or, as has been more likely the case, made to resemble) familiar templates found in the Western philosophical tradition, and, on the other, to the idea that thinking in the Chinese tradition operates in a way that is not so much rational as it is intuitive, emotional or strategic.1 Underlying what appear to be widely diverging pronouncements about what philosophical thinking in traditional China amounts to is a common core assumption: namely, that modern Western philosophical practices of rational investigation simply represent rational investigation itself.

A major obstacle to the intercultural study of philosophical thinking, then, is arguably our ways of thinking about thinking itself, and how such thinking relates to the cultural forms we investigate to find evidence of it. The aim of this chapter is to highlight this problem and offer some much-needed perspective on cross-cultural philosophical methodology by engaging with Wittgensteinian approaches to intercultural understanding.

Although there is no precise date on which the spatial turn in the humanities could be said to have occurred, a combination of forces and events over the past few decades has ensured that spatiality has become a key concept, and as a consequence, this has effectively transformed many approaches to literary and cultural texts. Geocriticism and spatial literary studies, among others, have focused attention on matters of space, place, and mapping. More generally, critics inspired by such practices have made important connections between literature and geography, architecture, urban planning, and environmental studies, along with other spatially oriented arts and sciences. The spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences has been occasioned by a number of factors, practical and theoretical, but perhaps the most urgent are those associated with the processes and ramifications of globalization. With the advent of globalization, here understood mainly as the extension and expansion of the capitalist mode of production across national boundaries and to a worldwide scale, many of the previously settled social and spatial arrangements—including such formerly crucial distinctions as core and periphery, urban and rural, domestic and foreign, or even near and far, to name a few—have been unsettled and subject to revisionary thinking. In Fredric Jameson’s revolutionary formulation, postmodernism itself emerged as the cultural logic of late capitalism, which is also to say that postmodernity may be associated with the age of globalization, and postmodern thought in its various respects a response to the radically transformed social, political, economic, and cultural terrain of this epoch. As Edward Soja has made clear in such works as Postmodern Geographies and Thirdspace, the postmodern era and postmodernism are both characterized by a new spatiality and a renewed emphasis in critical social theory on space, place, and mapping.

During roughly the same period, world literature has gone from a minor concept, little discussed even in academic criticism and theory, to a major force within both academic literary studies and the wider realms of literary journalism, not to mention the sudden prominence of the concept for anthologists, booksellers, prize committees, and consumers in general.

Introduction

This chapter draws on the insight that intercultural dialogue (ICD) is possible because it actually occurs. In that sense, we depart from those models that approach ICD as a rare thing, a complex phenomenon in which proper understanding hardly occurs, or as something altogether impossible (see Rorty 1983). Instead of approaching intercultural communication as the miraculous product of exchanges between the worldviews of communities that are far apart from one another, we have in mind actual linguistic practices within contemporary societies that may involve the recognition that the other party has completely different principles – whether they be epistemic, ethical or aesthetic. We converse with our bosses, we purchase something at a store, we contact the bank or we discuss personal matters with our loved ones – all of this with people from potentially radically different backgrounds. Most of these linguistic exchanges come about just perfectly – at no point are we hopelessly impeded by our different principles. ICD is a pervasive phenomenon, fortunately so; it is not the miracle that some seem inclined to believe that it is, and this intuition is the foundation of this chapter.

Moreover, this chapter is primarily motivated by the idea that intercultural communication is analogous to other common phenomena. Some of our disagreements can be settled by appealing to some or other factual smoking gun: some piece of empirical information that can be obtained through a finite number of steps. Others, nevertheless, prove to be difficult to settle by means of debates or data – they seem to be particularly persistent or ‘faultless’. Many disputes about the things we care the most about fall into the second group; they are exchanges between interlocutors equipped with different sets of reasons, holding reasonable but conflicting attitudes. A recent attempt to capture the nature of these disagreements, one that aims to de-idealize the common examples of these matters, argues that judgements are always situated, both so-called brute judgements and rule-governed judgements (Kinzel and Kusch 2018). Situated judgements allow these authors to explain how this second group of disagreements between parties who hold different standards can be persistent and rational.

Introduction

Social classes are ubiquitous, but the social classification of people into bounded groups – referred to as ‘castes’ is another matter. These are social groups mapped to a hierarchical arrangement, so that some are secure in their unshakeable position at the top, while others are condemned to remain at the bottom, simply because this is the social station they were born into. In contrast to economic class, which can also be difficult to transcend, birth-acquired caste status cannot be voluntarily changed. Intercaste marriage effects one’s status, but individual economic advancement does not have the traction to shift one’s position within the caste hierarchy. Sometimes, though, at historical turning points, entire groups may move upwards or downwards as a result of the patronage of ruling regimes. Thus, wars have raised the status of ‘warrior’ castes, and when colonial regimes wanted to translate indigenous texts, the status of ritual priests was enhanced to that of a ‘learned’ caste (Bayly 1999). However, throughout various historical upheavals, the ‘Untouchable’ castes remain the lowest in the hierarchy, even below the ‘labouring’ castes. Where mobility occurs, it is not attributable to individual effort or merit; instead, it is the mechanisms and exigencies of governance that determine the potentiality of small movements upwards or downwards.

To engage meaningfully in the lives of people inhabiting a caste world, it becomes imperative to understand what it means to face caste prejudice or ‘casteism’.

Introduction

Plant science and technology in medieval China cannot be separated from the developments in agriculture, economics, and medicine, as well as cultural practice. The Chinese empire ruled most of East Asia in the medieval period. Numerous species of plants were observed, cultivated, harvested, and used in the vast land of China that spanned a wide range of biomes from boreal to temperate and tropical, with most regions classified as subtropical. Besides indigenous plants, many plants from West, Central, South, and Southeast Asia were introduced into China and East Asia in general. This chapter focuses on particular food plants, fabric plants, flowers, trees, and wood which played vital roles in the socioeconomic life of medieval Chinese people. It highlights various scientific and technological aspects of these plants, such as how medieval people knew about them, cultivated them, grew them, harvested them, and used them for socioeconomic purposes. These plants were also important in the political, cultural, and religious life of medieval Chinese people. As covered in other chapters of this volume, some of these plants were introduced to Korea and Japan and became East Asian plants in general.

From the perspective of plant science and technology, there were several important changes and breakthroughs in medieval China, particularly between the sixth and fourteenth centuries. First, there was a spatial shift in terms of the main agricultural production areas from the north region centered on the Central Plain to the lower Yangtze Valley and Sichuan. In south China, rice-farming spread and multiple-cropping systems which yielded high rice production were used. While in north China, the more prolific and superior winter wheat which could be harvested three times in two years replaced millet to become the major food crop. These new developments made it possible to provide sufficient food supplies to the fast-growing population of the Chinese Empire; in the twelfth century, China surpassed a landmark when its population grew beyond 100 million. The development and expansion of agricultural production in south China might be due to several factors. Politically, there were three big waves of southward immigration that occurred: in the fifth century when the Western Jin 西晉 court lost control of the Central Plain and moved to Jiankang 建康 (modern Nanjing, Jiangsu Province); in the ninth century when the Tang Empire collapsed; and in the thirteenth century when the Mongols defeated the Southern Song Dynasty.

Introduction

Although previous two chapters focused on plants, animals were not less significant in shaping the material and spiritual life of ancient China. In the classical era, the tradition of observing nature was developed in the context of the Yin-Yang and the Five-phase theories, which were later incorporated into the ancient arts of divination, including the technique of predicting weather changes by observing the behavior and health of animals. The observation of the close connection between animals and weather developed into the worship of animals, that is, which led to the rise of the cult of animals. This chapter aims to analyze the rise of the cult of the pig in ancient China, with special reference to the context of environmental and climate change.

As one of the most common species among domesticated animals in traditional China’s agricultural civilization, the pig occupies a unique position in both the material and the spiritual life of the Chinese people, which some comprehensive Western-language works on pigs in the past decade did not fully acknowledged. In the Central Plain of the Chinese empire, where the so-called Yellow River civilization had its origin, the pig was the most important source of meat consumed in daily life, thus contrasting sharply with the civilizations of the Jewish, Muslim, and Christian people who lived in the ancient Near East and the Middle East where pork was a food taboo. Contemporary scholars have debated about the origins of the view of the people in these regions that pigs are unclean, and the taboo against pork in these areas.

One of the most notable perspectives on this issue is Marvin Harris’ ecological and environmental theory. For Harris, pigs are hated not only because they are perceived as unhygienic, given that they frequently roll around in their own feces and urine, but also because they compete with humans for the same basic nutrients, such as those found in grain. What interests us is Harris’ observation that pigs have to roll around in their own feces and urine in order to cool off. Harris notes that the behavior of pigs in the Middle East may be influenced by the local climate and the environment.

Introduction

As the previous chapter briefly noted, plants were significant to the economic, cultural, and religious life in medieval China. Grains, vegetables, fruits, and raw materials for making textiles and papers helped sustain a society. Undoubtedly, plants played indispensable roles in the daily life of medieval Chinese Buddhist community. They provided material foundation for the daily operation of the Buddhist community, not only serving as food and nutrition nourishment, but also being presented as offerings to the Buddhist saints. In addition, plants often appeared as landscape decorations around the Buddhist sites, temples, and architectures. In other words, the Buddhist monastic and lay members developed both practical and symbolic meanings for having plants in their life. The Buddhist knowledge and concept of plants are also primarily based on the practical and spiritual needs of the Buddhist community, which emphasize moral and spiritual cultivations of the Buddhists, especially the monastic members.

In the long history of Buddhism from South Asia to China, similar to animals, some plants were more visible and remarkable for their close connections with the Buddhist tradition, such as the lotus f lowers, for their affinity with the Buddha. While Asia is a vast land, different regions might technically cultivate and culturally value different plants. Even for traditional China, as a vast empire, many different regions cultivated their own indigenous plants. With the spread of Buddhism in China, the Buddhist community gradually grew and expanded, and more and more gardens and fields were donated by lay supporters to the monastic community. The Buddhist community also received grains, vegetables, and fruits directly from the lay community. While dealing with both agricultural activities and plant offerings, some Chinese Buddhist masters, especially those who were involved in monastic administrations, developed their own knowledge and experience with plants in both Chinese and Buddhist traditions. This chapter will focus on how a medieval Chinese master Daoxuan (596–667) addressed the issues on the classification of plants in the monastic context. For me, this classification of the plants can be viewed as a Buddhist effort of ordering plants in medieval Buddhist world. This effort not only ref lected a Buddhist master’s knowledge about the botanical world, but also indicated how he reconciled the difference between Buddhist botanical knowledge and Chinese experience.