Approaches to the Asian Classics

A Columbia University collection of essays by the teachers who ran the university’s Asian humanities course, each one explaining how to read a single major text — the Analects, the Mencius, the Laozi, the Bhagavad Gita, the Lotus Sutra, the Tale of Genji and their companions — for a reader coming to it cold and in translation. It is a guide to a canon rather than the canon itself: what each work is arguing, where the difficulty sits, and why the text survived.

Why it’s on the list: Li Lu’s second section is Chinese civilisation read as a living intellectual tradition — mostly Chinese-language sources — and this is the entry that hands a Western reader a way in, which is the same function the Columbia contemporary-civilisation reader performs for his Western section.

Where I saw it: Li Lu’s Recommended Book List, entry 8 of section II, cited as Columbia University Press, 1990. Full transcription: Li Lu’s Recommended Book List.

Connections

• Li Lu’s Recommended Book List — the list this came from.
• Li Lu — the Himalaya Capital founder who assembled it.
• Waiting for the Dawn — de Bary’s own volume, two entries earlier in the same section.
• China — the tradition the section is built around.
• Education — the book is a teaching apparatus, written by people who taught the course.
• Reading — how to read a difficult inherited text is its explicit subject.