| In 2004, I felt the impulse
to try to finish it. A friend phoned me and told
me that an acquaintance of hers had decided to
write a dialogue on Buddhism and this gave me the
thought that a dialogue was the natural vehicle
to express these ideas. The result is this
series of short dialogues organised around a
Taoist class, composed of a master and two
students. The setting of the dialogue is thus not
too dissimilar from the setting in which these
ideas were created. The class is smaller than my
own, since the demands of dialogue require a
small number of people. Here there are three, the
master Fu Hsiang and the students Men Chow and
Tsia Tung.
Initially, my first thought was to set these
dialogues in some remote part of Chinese history.
But this would be inconvenient, since many
insights about human nature and the natural world
were not available to the ancients. Rather than
maroon the discussion in first century science, I
placed it to the present day. So there are
references to current events and facts about
natural history and chemistry which are products
of Western science.
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