China’s Magical Creatures – First Reflection
- Lauren B
- 0
- on Sep 29, 2022
This class is nothing like I expected it to be but I’ve really enjoyed how it’s turned out so far. At the beginning of the course I wasn’t as open as I could have been concerning the readings. I was looking at the information we were learning not only in a modern context but my own when I should’ve been trying to look at it in the most unbiased way possible while also regarding it within the time the information occurred. This was especially challenging during the week we learned about divination and the different kinds within it. I just couldn’t see how people could put so much stock in it but when we made our own hexagrams it clicked for me. Based on the question I asked, the meaning of my hexagram not only made sense and resonated with but echoed similar advice I’ve received when I ask that question. It clicked for me, why people had so much faith in divination because it can be right occasionally and even when it may not correlate to your question as much people will search for answers. They will always find something they can apply to their question based on what they divined. After that week and even now I feel a lot more open-minded in the way that I read documents, even becoming more interested in them than I thought I would be. When we learned about yinyang I was shocked by how much basic information I just didn’t know. Obviously, I knew about yinyang but I had no idea the extent to which they represented balance and co-existence. Reading about the deeper meaning and almost definition each force had was super interesting and made me reconsider the content that we had learned previously and going forward I kept this idea of balance in mind. Take the afterlife for instance, in Chinese culture the afterlife is considered an extension of your life just after death. It’s also believed that after you die you gain slight supernatural powers that relate to divination. I believe that the afterlife can almost be a balance to your living life.
Every week I try to approach the work better than I did the week before. Whether that be making comments on websites or taking notes based on the readings we have. But sometimes I feel like I still don’t have a good basis, definition, or understanding of the topic we’re reading about but it can be hard to search for that myself because I don’t know where to start and sometimes it can be intimidating to simply start. This happened to me when we were learning about the different forms of divination, I was really confused on what each form was and how they were used. But this is something I want to change. Going forward if I’m confused about a topic I’ll just start by googling it if I’m confused and look for a response from a credible source. This week I started to make the reading journals for my weekly reports as I finished each reading assignment and this was insanely helpful. It made the whole process go far more smoothly as well as quickly. It felt much more efficient and then allowed me to complete the report faster than I normally would. Overall, I also want to get better at participating in class discussions because now I feel like I rarely raise my hand in class even though I have thoughts and ideas that would contribute to the class. I think I just have to push myself to raise my hand, to make it a habit which would result in my increased participation in the class.
I haven’t fully cultivated the skill yet but I can feel myself getting better at deciphering scholarly texts through practice at reading them for class. It’s still quite hard though so I want to keep trying to understand them. I could do this by focusing on a certain part of the text and trying to understand it and read in between the complex language. Huge themes I’ve seen emerging over the past few weeks are divination, the afterlife, and balance. I’ve also come to realize how so much crucial information about topics is simply lost in translation or the events happened at a time when no one was recording them. It’s also interesting how people had such a fear of the unknown which often led to rationalizing the events in ways they thought made sense. This was extremely prevalent in their uses of the five phases as well as the creation of the Classic of Mountains and Seas. I’m really excited to see where this class takes me and learn how to make the textbook better than it already is.
