刘洪一
 

深圳大学校务委员会主任

饶宗颐文化研究院院长
 

Liu Hongyi
 

Chairman of the University Council

Dean of the Jao Tsung-I Institute of Cultural Research

Shenzhen University
 

Boundary Studies:

A Theory of Fundamental Cognitive Research

The Chinese term Jie “界” has its original meanings in the definition of categories, threshold values, limits and degrees, implicitly covering such basic ideas as “abundant” and “deficient,” “big” and “small”, “finite” and “infinite”, etc. In the Chinese philosophical schools of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism as well as in ancient Greek and Hebrew philosophies, the term also refers to a fundamental category, a logical starting point and a rational methodology in the cognitive understanding of the world.

        The broken and unbroken lines (yinyao and yangyao), qian and kun (heaven and earth), and the Eight Trigrams in the Zhouyi (The Book of Changes), the idea of Dao or the Way as the constitution of Yin and Yang in the Tao Te Jing, and the Yin-Yang theory of The Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor are all based on the ideas of ‘boundaries'. In Confucian thought which emphasizes the relationship between self and other, since its concepts of benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, loyalty, tolerance, filial piety and brotherhood are in fact concerned with ‘self' and ‘other ', they are in essence issues involving boundaries. In Buddhism, the so-called “ten Dharma realms” including those of Dharma and Bodhisattva, and “the four notions of ego, personality, being and life”, are also based on such boundary categories as “being and non-being”, “form and emptiness”, “sacred and secular”, and ‘regularity and irregularity'. In Zhouyi Can Tong Qi, one of the earliest Taoist classics that integrates the Book of Change, Taoism, Confucianism, alchemy and various techniques of Qigong breathing exercises, its concepts of cold and heat, soul and spirit, pure and impure, good and evil, being and non-being, limits and degrees, and the matching of positions not only highlight the property of boundaries in things, but also emphasize the measurements of boundaries among things. It may therefore be said that the concept of Jie (boundaries) has constituted a foundation of thinking and a theoretical cornerstone for the various schools of ancient Chinese philosophy and scholarship.

The Pythagoras School of ancient Greek philosophy, which conceives of numbers as the essence of myriad things in the universe, identifies ten interrelated and yet mutually opposing categories of ideas, i.e., finite and infinite, one and many, odd and even, square and rectangle, straight and crooked, left and right, brightness and darkness, movement and stasis, good and evil, positive and negative. Euclid's theory of “boundaries” states that “a point is the boundary of a line, a line is the boundary of a plane, a plane is the boundary of a dimension, but a dimension cannot be a boundary”. This statement is in essence an effort to logically define all things in the universe by using “boundary” as the starting point and “measurement” as the tool.

The prominence given to divinity by Hebrew-Jewish and Christian cultures is distinctly characterized by their creation of a supernatural deity – God, the establishment of the relationship between God and the world in the Creation, between God and Man in the Revelation and between man and the world in the Redemption. But the establishment of the boundary and connection between God and Man (with Covenant being the medium) contains the key secret of the Jewish-Christian system of thought.

Although the Oriental and Occidental thought systems including Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, and ancient Greek philosophy, Hebrew-Jewish culture (Christian culture included) are different in their origin, conception, structural form and ideological orientation, in terms of the logical categorization pattern of their thinking and cognition, they all seem to take “boundary” as their logical starting point and as a basic category. It is therefore proper to say that “boundary” is a fundamental category in all philosophical categories, because the original meaning of the term ‘category' itself is ‘kinds' and ‘classes'. As such, it refers to a basic boundary between types and number, without which it would not be possible for philosophy to understand things in the universe. In this sense, “boundary” constitutes the origin of philosophy and the starting point of thought. This is true not only for philosophy, but also for science in general, including mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, economics, management, law, politics, communication, diplomacy, aesthetics, and other disciplines, which take some special forms of “boundary” as their logical starting point and basic categories. Thus, it is through the concept of ‘boundary' that all the sciences proceed to define, analyze and describe ‘kinds' (the property) and ‘numbers' (degree) of the objects in their research.

By making use of literary narrative as a medium, my recent work, The Book of Bi-polar Worlds, “employs the idea of boundary as its warp, the human kind as its woof, the human heart as its nodal point, Chinese culture as its linchpin, and the fusion and sublimation of human wisdom as an integrated solution to human problems in an attempt to explore such fundamental issues as the meaning of the universe and the true nature of humanity. From the perspective of cultural philosophy, it has found the concept of “boundary” to possess the significance of a “secret key” to the decipherment of the origin and ontology of the universe. The research materials in my book orient towards, give rise to, and sublimate into a new area of research: "Boundary Studies", an area of fundamental cognitive research which seeks to study being, cognition and the selection of values. In the words of Chung-Ying Cheng, Boundary Studies is a “fundamental area of philosophical learning” that “exists within the theoretical systems of ontology, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics.” Rich in cultural and philosophical connotations, Boundary Studies embraces the study of such important principles and laws as the meta-roots of cosmology, the ontological principle of boundary-related laws, the complementary principle of structuralism, the transformational principle of process theory, the axiological principle of optimal selection, and teleological principle of conformity.

Being a fundamental area of cognitive research, Boundary Studies reveals from a philosophical perspective the ontological rationale, the logical origin and the cognitive logic and form of comparative literature. As a typical case of Boundary Studies, comparative literature can be viewed as “the boundary studies of literature” or as “literature in boundary studies”. Taking “boundaries” (ethnical, national, cultural, disciplinary, etc.) as the starting point of the discipline and border crossing as its basic principle and approach for disciplinary construction, comparative literature not only embodies the general rules of Boundary Studies, but also demonstrates the distinctive feature of literary representation. The theory of boundary studies will reveal a solid philosophical foundation for comparative literature and may push it into a theoretical space with broader and deeper dimensions

Keywords: boundary, Boundary Studies, theory of fundamental cognitive research, Comparative Literature

Author: Professor Liu Hongyi is Chairman of the University Council, Dean of the Jao Tsung-I Institute for Cultural Research, and Director of the Centre for Comparative Literature and Culture at Shenzhen University.