I have made a chart for ancient chinese philosophy in the style of the "start with the greeks chart" for anons to useask me any questions about it or individual works if you have themalso general Chinese philosophy/literature thread
>>25403478Not a very pretty chart, but appreciated nonetheless. Very good work.I will read all these essays this year, so thanks.
>>25403482I wanted to copy the style of other charts with the covers and everything but most of these books don't have flashy good looking covers in the western style, just a plain background with the title in Chinese. Maybe I will add some more colour in the future
>>25403478Why contemporary Sinologists from Bryan Van Norden to Daniel Bell always talk perpetually like they have Xi's foot in their mouth, always talking about how barbaric and sexist and racist the west is while making apologia for despotism? At least people like Linebarger were disinterested researchers.
Nice! Thanks OP
>>25403500people get too invested in what they study and write about and forget their principles and identity, just look at all the white guys who study Islam for 20 years then convert and end up defending slavery and polygamy
>>25403500Have you ever stopped and considered that they are right? The West puts up with:>stagnant infrastructure>unruly populations>unacceptable rates or violence and addiction>growing poverty AND inequality>criticism of virtue and demonization of standards>being ruled by foreign government lobbyistsIt is impossible to be a Sinologist and not be in awe at how these East Asian civilizations catch up with centuries of western advances in two generations, while all it takes for the West to revert to a banana republic with nuclear weapons is a single bad generation. Asians build to last.I used to despise China before I had to visit the PRC. I still despise them, but there is no doubt that something in their culture and civilization is vastly superior to ours. They deal in reality, while we call suckers those who deal in the real world.
>>25403478Too bad it stops at the Han dynasty, Chinese philosophy peaked in the Medieval era
>>25403626>Asians build to last.And then they destroy it. Pay attention, idiot.
>>25403478Good chart OP. Do you have recommendations for learning classical Chinese?
cool!
>>25403478Thanks for the effort, looks good.
>>25403478Hard disagree on the Zhuangzi before the Tao Te Ching. Really, you should read the Tao Te Ching and practice with the I-Ching for a few years, then you can go into the Zhuangzi or the Leizi once you understand the general character and flow of the forms. If you just hop into the Zhuangzi you're not going to understand shit, attempt to read the footnotes, and instantly get a headache, or get to the outer chapters and feel completely lost. Lao Dan is super accessible to basically everyone at any level because the prose is simple, direct, and also incredibly thoughtful. Flip about and ponder it slowly and basically anyone can get the vibes.
The Way is God, and its Power is the will of God. Jesus Christ is the manifestation of the will of God, the Saint.
>>25403657I've only read and studied ancient philosophy, but I would like to read more post-Han stuff in the future>>25403975There is another chart floating around for that in the /CLG/ general>>25404028Personally, all of my early readings were from Confucian and legalist works, and I only started reading Zhuangzi after lots of mengzi and hanfeizi chapters. So the stories about 鱼之乐 and 逍遥游 didn't seem impossible, they were hard but not impossible I will admit to not being as well read on the ddj as zhuangzi, but my impression was that the language in Zhuangzi is clearer than ddj, stuff like 道可道非常道 I thought could trip up readers and hinder reading of later texts, so that was my reasoning for putting Zhuangzi first
>>25404228I only speak pig english, sorry man. But the symbolic nature of most chapters of the tao te ching is super straight forward. You had a solid background, so when Zhuangzi was chirping Confucius or Mencius, you understood it was parodying the formal structure of their argumentation, and that he was criticing their philosophy. If you didnt? Good luck recognizing the man with one foot having a dialogue with the superior man, or ugly humpback horsehead/the discombobated man. The tao te cheng is both brief and straight forward in presentation for beginners because it doesnt seem particularly... well verbose. Observe:The incomplete becomes completethe crooked becomes straightthe empty is filledthe worn is renewed.Small ambitions are achieved,great ones are confounded.The enlightened man embraces the Dao and becomes an example for the world.He eschews display, and therefore shines.He discards self and so becomes a model.He is self-effacing and therefore achieves recognition.He does not boast and is so celebratedbecause he avoids conflict No one under Heaven can find themselves in conflict with him.Who can doubt the truth of the ancient wisdom "the incomplete becomes complete"?And in completion we retuen to our true state.This is chapter 22 Restraint and Completion, and it mirrors almost exactly the character of the i-ching in practice, because it's not only about order, chaos, then order again, or cycles of secay and rebirth, but about the character of the superior man and the concept of wu wei. The intro is always poetic, but the structure of the language is designed to slowly teach over time, even if read uncritically. Then Zhuangi ratchets it up to 11. It's more dialectic rather than axiomatic. The Leizi is actually closer to the legalist tradition than the zhuangzi, but through parable. Zhuangzi is like... actively deconstructing your frame of reference, rebuilding it, breaking it again, and hoping the dao sticks.
>>25403478Thanks so much for this, anon.
Amazing work anon! Such a shame that Mohism had to die out so soon, seeing that it was so ahead of its time
>>25403626>I used to despise China before I had to visit the PRC. I still despise them, but there is no doubt that something in their culture and civilization is vastly superior to ours.The Zhangs hit this nigga with the 5G Xi-beam and now his brains are scrambled
>>25404776Mohism was just too hardcore for most people. Besides, in the end it was the Legalists (Fa) who won the wars despite officially being opposed, it was promulgated among the ruling officials who were nominally Confucian
I've started reading Robin Wang's Yinyang, is this a good introduction or is there a better starting point?
>>25403626The communist Chinese era spits on Chinese tradition, Chinese communism is a blight on the once great Chinese civilization.
>>25404379The thing about translations is that they do half of the work of reading for you, classical Chinese is difficult because it's very open to interpretation. For example the line >Small ambitions are achievedIs just 少則得 in the original, it doesn't mention "ambition", that's an interpretation from the translator.So I can see how a translated ddj would be easier to understand than translated Zhuangzi, but reading in Chinese ddj seems much harder to me because the difficulty is in interpreting single words and sentences whereas Zhuangzi is in interpreting the passage
Reminder the Art of War was written for sheltered princes that had literally no fucking idea what they were doing at a time where basically the only way to git gud at war was to not die at war in a time and place where body counts would make the fucking Punic Wars jealous, and there basically isn't anything of value in there for any adult with a passing familiarity with discipline, strategy, and logistics, and a functioning prefrontal cortex.>But aren't there multiple high profile examples of people fucking up basic shit from the Art of War in recent yearsAlcoholics that have drunk away most of their brain cells, and only got their jobs by sucking the right dick obviously don't have a functioning prefrontal cortex.
>>25403626>Asians build to lastPossibly, but I'd say it's much too early for Asian triumphalism. Their rapid growth, high degree of social cohesion and capacity for long-term planning are enviable. However, the PRC and many of the Asian Tiger nations are more acutely facing the same issues as the liberal West, like aging populations and cost-of-living crises. Meanwhile, these nations' vulnerability to eacalating geopolitical tension and supply chain disruption present unique challenges not faced by the liberal west. Anecdotally, the young population in Asia seems to misunderstand (see: underestimate) the cultural and sociological factors behind their success, and if you're argument is that western cultural decadence or idealism is the source of our relative decline then I see no reason that the sinosphere won't follow suit a generation later.>t. western/chinese mutt living in Asia ~10 years
>>25403478What about mythology?
>>25404971Mostly contained within the Shiji 史记 and various poems, some collected in the Shijing 诗经. Chinese mythology, like their creation myth and flood myth are traditionally seen as part of history, not separate from real events. The division between myth/fact is blurry, for example the Xia dynasty is probably mythological but some Chinese historians think it actually existed, while the Shang dynasty was thought to be mythological by historians for a time until conclusive historical evidence of its existence was found in the oracle bones.
Guanzi is very good if you can read it, I have my own Vietnamese translation
>>25405018(cont.) was testing if I was banned or not. Anyhow, its content is roughly ~400 pages with some chapters lost to history. Guanzi has its (or his) own unique thing compared to other confucionist: he actually laid out economic plans and stressed the importance of controlling grain-gold prices in order to maintain economic power balance, helps people in need and to cover for unexpected famines or other circumstances, and other things in statecraft. Left book is Guanzi. Pretty nice cover. Right book is an introduction to Confucionism in general, about 1 thousand pages, I had it on my Kobo. It's nice reading these altogether and compare philosophists' ideas on the go.
What was this all about?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xuanxue
>>25403500right wing liberalism and, sadly, democracy, have led to the dictatorship of fools and plutocratic shadow governments. Technocratic despotism like modern that ruling modern China is the only way forwards if humanity is going to survive this century with a modicum of civilizationI wish it wasn't so. I've decided not to have children mainly because of that
>>25405094Thanks, very cool, I didn't think someone had tried to combine them.Dao represents the unconditioned consciousness, Confucianism was about intellectual wisdom. These are usually in conflict with eachother. Xuanxue was an attempt to reconcile them, xuan meaning dao and xue meaning study, so the study of dao, the word is interesting because it's almost like the word philosophy, love of wisdom, as it says in the wiki article some of them found the study of dao contrived and obscuring of the dao, i'll have to read more about it.
>>25405100Sounds very foolish and I don't think you've thought much about what you've just said.
>>25403478I wouldnt consider the I Ching as core part of confucianism. It might as well lean towards Daoism. Its a technical book made for the purpose of divination, and while it helps one understand the underlying current of thought in ancient china it is nowhere near essential reading. If people want to read the Confucianism just start with the Analects
