Most Americans have observed individual Filipinos going about their business, as student, taxi driver, domestic servant, gardener, politician or journalist. Their acculturation to the principles and surface manifestations of modern western civilization is increasingly apparent, despite three centuries of indoctrination in Spanish customs and traditions and many centuries more of Arabic and Hindu influences. Indonesian culture survivals are, however, everywhere manifest in their daily life, beliefs, thoughts and actions.

One of the most encouraging trends in contemporary scholarship is the considerable raprochment between fields of study conventionally classed as the “humanities” and those called the “social sciences,” or now fashionably, “behavioral sciences.” A strong contributing factor here has been the growth, especially during and since World War II, of so-called “area” studies which focus various disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches upon a region. Furthermore, the region which has constituted perhaps the most active front for such experiments in coordination is the Far East.

Modern technology was introduced into Japan under the sanction of traditional Japanese values. I do not suggest that there was logical necessity in this: that from the values we could infer modernization; nor do I suggest that nothing new was added. But despite amplification and reinterpretation, it was, none the less, traditional ideas that Japanese leaders used to justify change. Japanese mythology, long neglected by political theory, became the core of an ideology that made national power a necessity. At a time when Japan found herself impotent yet plunged into the middle of a world power struggle, mythology was called upon to endow the nation with one kind of greatness: the emperor was descended by unbroken lineage from divine ancestors, and he was father of a nation conceived as an extended family: what other nation could make that claim? A nation unique and precious as this was, could not fall behind others in power—economic and political as well as military—even if inherited institutions had to be scrapped wholesale to keep abreast. Otherwise the claim to greatness must eventually collapse. Belief in the claim, which was bolstered in everyday life by making a cult of the patriarchal family with its values of obedience and hierarchy, gave the nation the will and discipline to transform an almost purely agrarian society into a predominantly industrial one within a generation. No Asian nation has yet duplicated this feat.

From past to present all is but talk, and all talk is but laughs. The birth of yin and yang from the original chaos, the voluntary abdication and forceful overthrow of the sage kings-who's ever witnessed this sort of thing? It's nothing more than talk. Future generations will talk about our generation, just as our generation talks about past generations. To talk about something and doubt it is laughable; to talk about something and believe it is even more laughable. Classics, philosophy, and histories are nonsensical talk, and people compete to transmit them. Poetry, rhapsody, and prose are preposterous talk, and people compete to perfect them. Praise or sneer, advocacy or suppression-these are whimsical talk, and people compete to respond to them. Sometimes we laugh at others; some other times we are laughed at. Those who laugh at others are in turn laughed at by others. The Treasury of Laughs is a collection of jokes. With all its thirteen chapters, some may still say it's a thin book. If you read it and are delighted by it, please don't be. If you read it and are enraged by it, please don't be. The world from past to present is an immense treasury of laughs; you and I are all in there as laughingstocks. Without talk there're no human beings. Without laughs there's no talk. Without laughs and talk there's no world. Cloth-Sack Monk, you're my master, you're my master!

A. The peninsula before the conquests by Funan. The first known contact of the Khmer Empire or any of its antecedents with what is now called the Malay Peninsula1 occurred when Fan Shih-man of Funan conquered a considerable portion of that peninsula early in the third century; although it is believed, from the terms in which the account of his voyage are expressed, that Hun-t'ien, or Hun-shen (Kaundinya), who conquered the native queen, Liu-yeh (Willow Leaf), and founded the kingdom of Funan about the middle of the first century, came from an Indian settlement on the eastern side of that peninsula.

In the area under consideration in this paper, eight countries with a population of 600 million people or about 30% of the world's total population have acquired their independence since the end of World War II. National governments in this area are faced with serious economic, social and other problems, many of them long-standing but of more compelling current importance because of the raised expectations of the Asian peoples. The technical and financial resources of these governments for meeting their problems are limited and, in some cases, ineffectively and inefficiently used. Their ability to develop, in the short-term future, solutions to these problems judged effective by their people will determine the survival of these or similarly-oriented governments, or their replacement by chaos or extremism.