Category: China

One’s Favorite Author

I regard the discovery of one’s favorite author as the most critical event in one’s intellectual development. There is such a thing as the affinity of spirits, and among the authors of ancient and modern…

Today’s One-Liner (#300)

Reading or the enjoyment of books has always been regarded among the charms of a cultured life and is respected and envied by those who rarely give themselves that privilege. –Lin Yutang, The Importance of…

Today’s One-Liner (#122)

The work of extending your goodness and correcting your faults must never stop.  –Liu Wenmin,  J. C. Cleary, Worldly Wisdom: Confucian Teachings of the Ming Dynasty

Know Your Purpose

By refusing to distract himself from the main task, by jealously guarding his energies for what really mattered, [Arthur] Waley was able to produce his vast corpus of work. Title is a key theme in…

Things Fall Apart

I had returned to China looking for my old country. I found an even older and more decrepit one. It called itself new and belittled everything old, such as courtesy, culture, civilization. No one under…

Honesty & Humility

There is a story that Po always showed his poems to an uneducated old servant-woman, and anything she couldn’t understand, he rewrote. –David Hinton on Po Chü-i, in The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese…

Today’s One-Liner (#4)

bi you shi yan. –Mengzi, “Always have a task” Wang understood Mengzi’s teaching of bi you shi yan as “always have a task.” One must maintain a constant vigil over one’s thoughts and ideas and…

Thus Spoke a Chinese Dissident

There is no revolution like the Communist revolution. You simply burn all the books, kill all of the thinking people and use the poor proletariat to create a very simple benchmark to gauge social change….