What is the Authenticity Crisis?

The reason why this book project has lasted for such a long period of fifteen years is simply that I don't know what I am arguing about. I was fascinated by the life story of Yinyuan and the Chinese monks associated with him. But I don't know what they represented and why they were important until the very end of this project.

I need a sound argument to make the manuscript survive the harsh peer review. My first submission simply failed because my initial thought was to write a biographical account of Yinyuan only. Finally, after reexamining the evidence I have, I came up with the idea of the Authenticity Crisis, which became the subtitle of this book. To put in a nutshell, I regard the concept of authenticity as defining the relation between ideal and reality in human experience, cultural, politics, and society. The Authenticity Crisis is then the situation when the correspondence between the ideal and reality becomes problematic and undermined.

There is no better example than religion to illustrate the idea of authenticity and the situation of the Authenticity Crisis, since faith requires the principle of authenticity from all levels as its foundation. In my book, it is interesting to note that Yinyuan, a Buddhist monk, had become a symbol of spiritual, political, and cultural authenticity in the turbulent seventeenth century. Meanwhile, the authenticity of the Sinic civilization, represented by China, had been seriously undermined by events such as the Manchu invasion. Of course, such a crisis was not a issue of China alone. Rather, all other East Asian countries faced the same question and coped with different means. Although it is not elaborated in this book, it is my view that the Authenticity Crisis is a on-going process and China may not yet overcome it.

Despite the fact that it took a much longer time than I expected, I am happy that this book did not start with a premeditated argument.