ABSTRACT
Jorge Luis Borges once claimed that Victor Segalen (1878–1919) was “one of the most intelligent writers of our age, perhaps the only one to have made a fresh synthesis of Western and Eastern aesthetics and philosophy.” And the author of A Lecture on Buddhism (not to mention The Self and the Other ) went on to chide his friend, a French poet: “You can read Segalen in less than a month, but it might take you the rest of your life to begin to understand him” (as quoted in the introduction to Segalen’s Paintings, 1991).
