Contemporary readers of philosophy, literary criticism, and related modes of discourse face a constant challenge. Even as we doubt, or indeed, fain to reject outright, the adequacy of traditional understandings of language, we are compelled to follow its insidious rules, and in rebellion we succumb to complicity with the system we suspect. The mechanics of interpretation, the possibility of consensus on the meaning of any given word, the relation between language and physical reality or thought, the hope for communication—all these things are thrown open to severe suspicion, and even under indictment, they control the flow of evidence and the disposition of judgment. “The mastery of (a) language” no longer means the inception of babbling autonomy in a toddler, a student's competence with a foreign tongue, or critical acclaim for a new writer's genius. Now perhaps it's language that's the master. The signal ambiguity inherent in that preposition “of” both sets up and already deconstructs this possibility.

The japanese writer Matsuo Bashō (1644–94) is known in the West primarily as a haiku poet. But he was also a master of Japanese prose, both haibun (short pieces of poetic prose) and kikō (travel literature). It is in his prose, particularly his travel journals, that Bashō portrays a vision and a way of life that is profoundly religious.

Toward the end of a diary entry for Sunday, June 14, 1925, the writer reminds herself to “answer Gerald Brenan, & read the Genji; for tomorrow I make a second £20 from Vogue.” For a short review of a long book, £20 was worth a bit of excitement: advertisements in the London press that summer indicate that the yearly wages of a cook or housemaid ranged from £28 to £45. For someone in search of a Bloomsbury flat of one's own, £20 could keep you in modest, furnished comfort on Gordon Square for ten weeks.

It is no easy matter for a government seeking to foster rapid economic and social changes to win acceptance of its programs. Too much control by the center assures local resistance; too much dispersal of authority empowers it. The dilemma is a familiar one today, but it is not, of course, a new one. The leaders of Meiji (1868–1912) Japan found it to be the knottiest problem in their efforts to construct a modern state. They needed to exert sufficient central control of local government to assure that their initiatives could be enacted in Japan's villages and that taxes would flow to the center in a predictable and orderly manner. But these goals required the central government to permit a measure of autonomy—to rely on pre-Meiji inter- and intravillage organizations originally devised to guard and insulate the village from the demands of higher authority. Their efforts to resolve the dilemma quickly took on a note of desperation: in the first twenty years of the Meiji era, the government radically altered the system of local administration four times.

The process of state-building in the Chinese revolution was confounded, and remains obscured, by a contest between rival claimants to state power in the Nationalist and Communist parties. There is a natural temptation to trace conflict in the state-building process to ideological differences between the two parties, as they did themselves, and to overlook their similarities and downplay the potential for political conflict and social resistance inherent in state-building generally. This is the case with histories of the Nationalist Revolution of the 1920s, when the two parties came together briefly to fight for national unification and independence. Each party is assigned an irreconcilable difference of purpose, the Nationalists aiming for cohesive national revolution and the Communists for divisive social revolution, and their combined efforts are represented as the historical working through of this conflict of purpose (Rankin, Fairbank, and Feuerwerker 1986:10; Wilbur 1984). The clash of aims seems to be not far removed from a clash of ideologies, and the collapse of this First United Front is portrayed as the historical resolution to a philosophical contradiction. In the definitive words of C. Martin Wilbur, “The main weakness was disagreement among the leaders concerning the social goals of the national revolution,” traceable to “competing ideologies among intellectuals throughout China” (Wilbur 1968:223). Conflict between the parties and within society boils down, in the end, to an ideological dispute.