also figure in our representation of formally organized schools; because of the care
with which lineage transmission records were treated by the Buddhist sects, we
usually know the names of sect leaders for generations, even if there is nothing
significant to be said about their own doctrines.- The periphery is the world of the autodidact, and home of the myth of posthumous
glory. Though one might hope to find “closet creativity” here, untrammeled by
conformity to the fashions of the center, the reality is almost the reverse. Peripheral
intellectuals may combine ideas in different ways from what the intellectuals of
the current core are doing, yet they depend on cultural capital transmitted from
the past, only with a greater lag. I recall an undergraduate student—older than the
others, someone who had come back to school on his own—coming up to me
excitedly after a sociology class, proclaiming his discovery: social change is neither
a straight-line evolution nor a cycle but their combination in a spiral. I hadn’t the
heart to tell him that he was working on the ideas of Vico and Condorcet, more
than half a dozen generations behind his time. - Where formal schools constitute probable connections among known individuals
via unknown intermediaries (marked “x”), they are indicated as dotted lines. This
dotted-line symbolism is also used for connections which are likely but not certain.
In some cases, these formal school connections run through persons labeled “i”:
those whose names are known incidentally because of their connection to a more
eminent philosopher rather than mentioned because of notable accomplishments
in their own right (for example, see the Ch’an lineages in Figures 6.3 and 6.4). The
problem of incomplete information, especially as it affects our view of ancient
networks, is considered in Appendix 2. - To avoid misunderstanding, it is worth underlining what the network chart is
about. Everyone has a social milieu that is much larger than the ties shown on the
chart, including many persons who are not intellectuals as well as some who are.
What this network displays are ties among philosophers who have achieved at least
some minimal degree of eminence in intergenerational memory. - Incidental figures are excluded from these calculations of immediate connections,
since they are listed only because they are known from their connection to a more
famous figure rather than in their own right. They are however, included in
subsequent calculations where they mediate links to more distant philosophers of
higher rank. - Once again let us understand the substantive significance of my methodology. If
we could add links to a chain indefinitely, and we included any persons in these
chains whatsoever as long as they eventually link up to someone of eminence, we
could undoubtedly connect anyone to anyone else in the history of the world. The
“small world” studies on social networks in the 1960s (Travers and Milgram,
1969) show that many Americans can communicate with a high-status person
unknown to them within about six links or so. To guard against this possibility, I
allow “incidental” figures (those marked “i”) into the networks only as one-link
connections between members of the well-known intellectual community. More-
over, experimental studies of message transmission show that communications tend
to become garbled after a few links. What this implies for our intellectual networks
952 •^ Notes to Pages 64–67