I want to thank my colleague, Andrea Bréard, for the time she spent reading and commenting. My experience of the editing process was not a pleasant one. There were some communication difficulties meaning that, for instance, I cannot explain why my glossary, which contained 400 terms, was reduced to fewer than 250 terms. I hope that one day I will be given the opportunity to correct this book, to meet my own highest requirements. The purpose of my book is to explore a link between philosophy and mathematics in China and to raise questions of methodology. It is as a philosophy educator, classroom practitioner, and non-mathematician that I write. When Bréard writes that "I could not make up my mind." this is not the case: I voluntarily chose not to enclose Li Ye's work within traditional disciplinary divisions. As long as the readerconsiders the object of study to be msimply" Yiguranduan 益古演段 (Development of Pieces [of Areas] [according to] (the collection] Augmenting the Ancient [knowl-edge]), this text will indeed come across as of less interest. The text written by Li Ye in 1259 will never be anything but a list of problems concerning the solution of quadratic algebraic equations. Many historians have regarded it as a didactic text to introduce readers to the knowledge necessary to understand Li Ye's other work, Ceyuan haijing I WAit tit (Sea Mirror of Circle Measurements), which is commonly viewed as the centerpiece of his oeuvre. What I want to demonstrate is that this text is not only a treatise on mathematics, but also the support of philosophical-type practices, even meditative ones, independent of Ceyuan haijing. The many diagrams inserted into the text are not illustrations of equations, but support for a practice of representation and visualization. I have chosen to point out the connection that exists here between the history of mathematics, the philosophy of language, and the anthropology of meditative practices (Heifring 2016; Robinet 1995). In my view, that is the most fruitful approach to Li Ye's experiment. Acknowledging its complex-ity, I willfully avoided once again reducing the text to what it is not: simple narration.
