This book takes up one of the most important themes in Chinese thought: the relation of pleasurable activities to bodily health and to the health of the body politic. Unlike Western theories of pleasure, early Chinese writings contrast pleasure not with pain but with insecurity, assuming that it is right and proper to seek and take pleasure, as well as experience short-term delight. Equally important is the belief that certain long-term relational pleasures are more easily sustained, as well as potentially more satisfying and less damaging. The pleasures that become deeper and more ingrained as the person invests time and effort to their cultivation include friendship and music, sharing with others, developing integrity and greater clarity, reading and classical learning, and going home. Each of these activities is explored through the early sources (mainly fourth century BC to the eleventh century AD), with new translations of both well-known and seldom-cited texts.

Translation of the first grand synthesis of classic Chinese thought.

This is a translation, with a commentary and a long contextualizing introduction, of the only major work of Han (206 B.C. to 220 A.D.) philosophy that is still available in complete form. It is the first translation of the work into a European language and provides unique access to this formative period in Chinese history. Because Yang Hsiung's interpretations drew upon a variety of pre-Han sources and then dominated Confucian learning until the twelfth century, this text is also a valuable resource on early Chinese history, philosophy, and culture beyond the Han period.

The T'ai hsüan is also one of the world's great philosophic poems comparable in scale and grandeur to Lucretius' De rerum naturum. Nathan Sivin has written that this is one of the titles on the short list of Chinese books every cultivated person should read.

Han thinkers saw in this text a compelling restatement of Confucian doctrine that addressed the major objections posed by rival schools including Mohism, Taoism, Legalism and Yin-Yang Five Phase Theory. Since this Han amalgam formed the basis for the state ideology of China from 134 B.C. to 1911, an ideology that in turn provided the intellectual foundations for the Japanese and Korean states, the importance of this book can hardly be overestimated.

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 immortality, wealth, and power while it situates human endeavor within the larger framework of cosmic energies.

The complete text of The Elemental Changes and its ten autocommentaries are here translated into accessible and, whenever possible, literal English. Following the Chinese tradition, supplementary comments are appended to each tetragram in order to indicate the main lines of interpretation suggested by earlier commentators.

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, discussing when they were written, how they were transmitted and edited in later periods, and what political, historical, and ethical themes were associated with them through the ages. Finally she deliberates on the intertwined fates of Confucius and the Five Classics over the course of the twentieth century and shows how the contents of the Five Classics are relevant to much newer concerns.

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 bamboo in the courtyard and trickled in through her latticed window. The first light that peeked over the roof-tiles of the east wing of the family compound made the soft green of the spring bamboo almost glow. A softer light caressed the petals of the plum blossom sprig in the vase on the table beneath her window. Her name, Meike, with its soft may and harder kuh, meant Plum Blossom - soft petals, hard branch - and every Spring, on Meike's birthday, her mother placed a cutting in her room. In a few minutes, Ahmei would call her name, then call again when Meike didn't hop out of bed as ordered. She knew that if she waited, her father would creep in, slowly lift her cover, then grab her belly in a tickling claw. But then, all of a sudden, she had this unsettling feeling that today would be different.

Recent archaeological discoveries, including manuscripts, have shed new light on China's history, in particular Qin and Han (221 BCE-220 CE), this volume's main focus. They make possible a deeper account of the growth of cities and of the spread of Chinese influence over distant areas. This book provides the first comprehensive survey of recent developments, evaluating the newly-found evidence in the light of earlier conclusions from China, Japan, Europe and America. Through cross-cultural comparisons and a close study of both the excavated and received literature, new conclusions are presented with respect to relatively understudied topics, such as gender, history of science, and modes of persuasion, while challenging the 'common wisdom' in such fields as Buddhism, Daoism and social history. Thus the volume provides a supplement to Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of China (1986) and shows how subsequent archaeology has enriched our perception of China's history in this period.

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 only the institutions of the Eastern Han (25-220 CE) but also the rest of imperial China until 1911.

Although thousands of studies document imperial Rome's glory, until now no book-length work in a Western language has been devoted to Han Chang'an, the reign of Emperor Chengdi (whose accomplishments rival those of Augustus and Hadrian), or the city's impressive library project (26-6 BCE), which ultimately produced the first state-sponsored versions of many of the classics and masterworks that we hold in our hands today. Chang'an 26 BCE addresses this deficiency, using as a focal point the reign of Emperor Chengdi (r. 33-7 bce), specifically the year in which the imperial library project began. This in-depth survey by some of the world's best scholars, Chinese and Western, explores the built environment, sociopolitical transformations, and leading figures of Chang'an, making a strong case for the revision of historical assumptions about the two Han dynasties. A multidisciplinary volume representing a wealth of scholarly perspectives, the book draws on the established historical record and recent archaeological discoveries of thousands of tombs, building foundations, and remnants of walls and gates from Chang'an and its surrounding area.

Yang Xiong (53 BC-AD 18), the Han philosophical master remarks at one point in his Exemplary Figures, Books are as sexy as women. Modern readers may frown at a comparison they regard as less than apt. Yang was supremely aware, however, of longstanding traditions, ascribed both to the sages and to the Classics, contrasting the unusual strength of the basic drives for food and sex with the general weakness of the acquired inclinations toward moral behavior. To say that books are as sexy as women was to make bold to add to those traditions, adopting the manner of a sage; also to elevate the value of certain texts, at least, to the level morality itself, insofar as they represented acquired tastes leading to the most desirable aspects of civilized life.

Michael Nylan and Thomas Hahn open up new vistas for thinking ecologically in this introduction to ancient and modern thought in China.

Together they explore the environment in the Chinese philosophical tradition and contemporary China through the lens of intergenerational justice. Nylan's analysis of lesser known texts from ancient China changes our thinking of Chinese political philosophy and legal antiquity codes. Hahn's comprehensive overview of recent data from China offers a response to the present crisis. Their original approach underscores why environmentalism is always more than a Western issue.

By applying ancient ideas to an urgent topic with a unique emphasis on East Asia, this one-of-a-kind guide to environmental thought challenges standard narratives. It is essential reading for anyone looking to understand how classical Chinese concepts can provide the necessary tools to improve how we think about the world we live in.

Michael Nylan and Thomas Hahn open up new vistas for thinking ecologically in this introduction to ancient and modern thought in China.

Together they explore the environment in the Chinese philosophical tradition and contemporary China through the lens of intergenerational justice. Nylan's analysis of lesser known texts from ancient China changes our thinking of Chinese political philosophy and legal antiquity codes. Hahn's comprehensive overview of recent data from China offers a response to the present crisis. Their original approach underscores why environmentalism is always more than a Western issue.

By applying ancient ideas to an urgent topic with a unique emphasis on East Asia, this one-of-a-kind guide to environmental thought challenges standard narratives. It is essential reading for anyone looking to understand how classical Chinese concepts can provide the necessary tools to improve how we think about the world we live in.