Composed in 2 B.C., as "The I Ching revised and enlarged," The Elemental Changes is a divination manual providing a clear method for distinguishing alternative courses of action. Structured in 81 tetragrams ( as opposed to the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching), the book offers much to the modern reader. Today in the West, The Elemental Changes is an essential tool for understanding the Tao as it operates in the Cosmos, in the minds of sages, and in sacred texts. It is also one of the great philosophical poems in world literature, assessing the rival claims on human attention of fame, physical...
Composed in 2 B.C., as "The I Ching revised and enlarged," The Elemental Changes is a divination manual providing a clear method for distinguishing al...
During the last two centuries BCE, the Western Han capital of Chang'an, near today's Xi'an in northwest China, outshone Augustan Rome in several ways while administering comparable numbers of imperial subjects and equally vast territories. At its grandest, during the last fifty years or so before the collapse of the dynasty in 9 CE, Chang'an boasted imperial libraries with thousands of documents on bamboo and silk in a city nearly three times the size of Rome and nearly four times larger than Alexandria. Many reforms instituted in this capital in ate Western Han substantially shaped not...
During the last two centuries BCE, the Western Han capital of Chang'an, near today's Xi'an in northwest China, outshone Augustan Rome in several wa...
The Five Classics associated with Confucius formed the core curriculum in the education of Chinese literati throughout most of the imperial period. In this book Michael Nylan offers a sweeping assessment of these ancient texts and shows how their influence spread across East Asia. Nylan begins by tracing the formation of the Five Classics canon in the pre-Han and Han periods, 206 B.C.-A.D. 220, revising standard views on the topic. She assesses the impact on this canon of the invention of a rival corpus, the Four Books, in the twelfth century. She then analyzes each of the Five Classics,...
The Five Classics associated with Confucius formed the core curriculum in the education of Chinese literati throughout most of the imperial period. In...
Sima Qian (first century BCE), the author of Record of the Historian (Shiji), is China's earliest and best-known historian, and his "Letter to Ren An" is the most famous letter in Chinese history. In the letter, Sima Qian explains his decision to finish his life's work, the first comprehensive history of China, instead of honorably committing suicide following his castration for "deceiving the emperor." In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, some scholars have queried the authenticity of the letter. Is it a genuine piece of writing by Sima Qian or an early work of literary...
Sima Qian (first century BCE), the author of Record of the Historian (Shiji), is China's earliest and best-known historian, and his "Letter ...
This is Volume One of a planned trilogy. One morning in Han dynasty China (206 BC - 220 AD), a girl of eleven is waking up... The day Meike grew up started out like most. She woke to the songs of mockingbirds in the camellia tree. She could hear Ahmei, the cook, in the forecourt bang a pot over the stove. She could smell smoke from Ahmei's fire and from a hundred others in their crowded district. If she concentrated, she could smell other things too - earth still damp from last night's rain, peppers soaking in a vat, and something she couldn't quite name riding the breeze that stirred the...
This is Volume One of a planned trilogy. One morning in Han dynasty China (206 BC - 220 AD), a girl of eleven is waking up... The day Meike grew up st...
