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Acknowledgments
A project such as this necessarily grows from long years of work and experience. I will be eternally grateful to my mother, Joan Laurian Brundage, who always took special care to foster all of my interests in life and who was the first to encourage my interest in China by sending me to Taiwan as a college student. I shall forever strive to live by the light of her exemplary wisdom and compassion. More specifically, this book derives from my undergraduate education at University of Colorado, Boulder, and my graduate education at Columbia University and University of California, Berkeley. I would like to thank Colorado’s Department of Religious Studies and the faculty at Columbia’s School of International Affairs for providing a superb environment for deep thought, reading, and discussion in religion, politics, and international relations respectively. Gratitude is also due to my teachers and dissertation advisers at Berkeley, especially Robert Ashmore, whose course on Du Fu first introduced me to this subject and who spent many hours sharing with me his passion for and keen insights into Chinese poetry and philosophy, and Steve West, whose deep knowledge of Chinese literature proved a constant inspiration. The Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures also provided a splendid environment for reading and thought in the East Asian humanities. All three schools were true “academical