Will Buckingham

Mainstream educational theory and practice tend to favour what Freire, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, has called ‘banking education’, in which students are seen as depositories of knowledge. But seeing pedagogy as a matter of simply communicating knowledge misses the epistemological complexities of our relationship with the world. By means of a reading of the Dao De Jing and the Zhuangzi, in this paper I intend to explore how the communication of not-knowing may be of central value in teaching and learning. Arguing that our lives are characterised by an ‘epistemological chaos’ in which the distinctions between knowing and not-knowing can never be firmly established, I suggest that the Daoist texts may allow teachers and students to rethink the purpose of education as a matter of yang sheng, or ‘nourishing life, by means of developing skill in dealing with the epistemological chaos in which we are immersed. [China Media Research. 2014; 10: 10-19]

This essay explores the cultural translation of the Chinese classic, the Book of Changes or Yijing through a reflection on my own attempts to adapt, use and misuse the text in literary form. My own engagement with the Yijing began when I set out to write a novel- of sorts based on the Chinese classic. The process of writing this novel, Sixty-Four Chance Pieces: A Book of Changes, has required not only that I culturally translate the Yijing, but that I allow myself to be culturally translated in turn by this text. By combining theoretical approaches from China and the West, and by crossing between theoretical reflection and storytelling, this essay explores the complexity of this double cultural translation of readers and texts by asking what it might mean to understand, misunderstand or fail to understand a text as it is transmitted between often divergent contexts.