Mo Tzu, Hsun Tzu, and Han Fei Tzu were three of the most important philosophers in ancient China. This collection of their basic writings points to three very different positions within in the spectrum of Chinese thought and reveals the diversity of of the Chinese intellectual tradition.

Presenting the principle doctrines of Mo Tzu (470A-391 B.C.) and his followers, early rivals of the Confucian school, this section includes writings on music, fatalism, Confucians, and "universal love"--the cornerstone of Mo-ist philosophy--Hsun Tzu (born ca. 312 B.C.) provided the dominant philosophical...

This is one of the most justly celebrated texts of the Chinese tradition - impressive for both its bold philosophical imagination and its striking literary style. Accepting the challenge of translating this captivating classic in its entirety, Burton Watson has expertly rendered into English both the profound thought and the literary brilliance of the text.

This collection is one of the earliest and most important works of Chinese Buddhist poetry and is especially influential in the later literature of the Zen Sect of Buddhism, which looked back to these poems as a classic of Zen literature. The poems cover a wide range of subjects: the conventional lament on the shortness of life, bitter complaints about poverty, avarice, and pride, accounts of the difficulty of official life under a bureaucratic system, attacks on the corrupt Buddhist clergy and the foolish attempts by Taoists to achieve immotal life, and incomparable descriptions of the...

In an earlier volume in this series, the author set out to introduce the English reader to some of the representative works of Su Tung-p'o, the leading poet of the era known as the Northern Sung. The present volume is an attempt to do the same for the most important poet of the era that succeeded it, the Southern Sung, presenting selections from the poetry and prose of Lu Yu, better known in the Far East by his literary name Fang-weng, or 'The Old Man Who Does As He Pleases.'

Ryokan (1758-1831), a Buddhist monk in the Zen sect, was a major figure in Tokugawa poetry. Although a Zen master, he never headed a temple but chose to live alone in simple huts and to support himself by begging. His poems are mainly a record of his daily activities - of chores and outings to gather firewood and edible plants, lonely snow-bound winters, begging expeditions to town, meetings with friends, romps with the village children. At the same time they show us how contented, even joyous, a man could be with a minimum of material possessions, and how rich a spiritual and intellectual...

Gensei, a seventeenth century Nichiren sect monk, composed poetry in Chinese and was a leading figure among the literary elite of his era. "Grass Hill" offers translations of over sixty of these poems, as well as a dozen prose pieces and an extensive introduction to Gensei's work.

The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry presents translations of more than 420 poems by 96 poets drawn from the great ages of Chinese poetry. It begins with selections from the Book of Odes, the oldest anthology of Chinese poetry compiled around the seventh century B.C., and covers the succeeding generations down to the end of the Sung dynasty in A.D. 1279.

Important poets such as Tao Yuan-ming, LiPo, Tu Fu, Su Tung-po, and Lu Yu are treated in separate sections with generous samplings from their works, while lesser poets are represented in chapters devoted to the particular era...