Approaches to the Asian Classics

Why it’s on the list: A Columbia University collection in which the teachers of the university’s Asian humanities course each explain how to read one major text — the Analects, the Mencius, the Laozi, the Bhagavad Gita, the Lotus Sutra, the Tale of Genji — for a reader coming to it cold and in translation. A guide to a canon rather than the canon itself.

Where I heard about it

• Li Lu — on Li Lu’s Recommended Book List, entry 8 of the section on Chinese Civilization, History, and Culture (cited as Columbia University Press, 1990). It is the entry in that mostly Chinese-language section that hands a Western reader a way in.

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.