While both acts of intended self-sacrifice derived from commitment to a transcendent ideal, Dubois sought to rescue the wilderness; Patkar, to save livelihoods and sustainable ways of life.73

The form of narrative addresses the human need to live in time, to express ‘historicality’, which refers to the urge to reach back into our past to change our future and see our life as a whole. Historicality, for Ricoeur, is the way we grasp our most basic potentialities as individuals and collectives by repetition or recollection that guides or

may be able to reconfigure the absolute sovereignty of nations;

For the heart/mind (xinxue) or Wang Yangming school of neo-Confucianism, the Ultimate can only be realized through the self, which has a fundamental, though often unrealized, unity with the universe. Self-realization takes place through the purification of the egotistic desires and moral resolve of the inner subject to act upon the world.

I am reminded of the Jewel Net of Indra, particularly as it is interpreted in the Huayan school of Chinese Buddhism,

However, the continued survival of dialogical traditions in the less modernized societies of the world may well be seen as an opportunity to engage them in the task of creating different paths of self-formation.

The first was the confessionalization of religion built around the self–other distinction, which was sensed as critical to the survival and advancement of nations in the new world.

My sense is that these were the progenitors of the founders and leaders of the redemptive and sectarian societies – charismatic figures with complex and hybrid scriptural knowledge – who spread rapidly during the Ming, Qing and republican periods.

From the Daoists to the neo-Confucians (xinxue) right up to the adherents of the syncretic Morality Society, the practices of self-cultivation have represented a turning back towards one’s original nature that was simultaneously a move towards the quiet and pure “nature of Heaven-and-Earth.” It was through this process that practitioners were able