EXCERPT Quite a few of the notes to which I returned in writing this book date from my teenage years, when I was fascinated both by the cosmogony of Neo-Confucianism and by contemporary astrophysics. I remember how, over several summers, I went regularly every week to the central library in Kowloon with my brother Ben, and brought home piles of books on physics and metaphysics, spending all day reading things that were beyond me and which at the time I didn’t know how to use. Luckily, I profited from many discussions with my literature and calligraphy teacher Dr. Lai Kwong Pang, who introduced me to the thought of the New Confucian philosopher Mou Zongsan (1909–1995)—his PhD supervisor at that time. When I started studying Western philosophy, especially contemporary thought, I confronted the great difficulty of integrating it with what I had learned in the past without falling prey to a superficial and exotic comparison. In 2009, an encounter with the work of Keiji Nishitani and Bernard Stiegler on Heidegger suggested to me a way to approach the different philosophical systems from the perspective of the question of time; more recently, while reading the works of anthropologist Philippe Descola and Chinese philosopher Li Sanhu, I began to formulate a concrete question: If one admits that there are multiple natures, is it possible to think of multiple technics, which are different from each other not simply functionally and aesthetically, but also ontologically and cosmologically?…