In AD 635 a monk named Āluóběn came to the Táng capital of Cháng’ān. He had crossed the Sasanian and Chinese realms with no army and no “civilizing mission.” He came with a book. The text that came out of his school, the Sutta of Beginning to Hear the Messiah, tried to speak of the God of Scripture in Middle Chinese. It describes a God whose face can no more be seen than the wind can be grasped. This is a God no one can own.
Volume Two of Jiéjīng Shuōwén uses that sutta to link two textual worlds. It has forty-four entries, and each pairs a Chinese character with a Semitic root: 眾 with the murmuring multitude, 風 with the spirit, 有 with inheritance, 居 with dwelling, and 心 with the heart. In each entry Cooper traces the character from oracle bone to regular script. He reads it through the Five Classics and sets it beside the Hebrew, Aramaic-Syriac, Arabic and Greek of the Scriptures. Many of the words in this volume have to do with possession, inheritance and rule. They lead back to one question: who owns whom?
The book is also a sharp critique. Cooper takes on Western scholars who would claim Āluóběn as “ours.” He also challenges the Sòng-Míng Rationalist school, which made Confucius a mouthpiece for a landlord class. Against both, he argues that the Classics and the Scriptures speak with one voice: every human endeavor is passing, and judgment belongs to Heaven.
ISBN 978-1-60191-073-8