THE THREE WAYS ARE ONE


sanjiao: the three teachings
Living in the Chinese Cosmos: Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism
Chinese modes of thinking
DAVID HALL & ROGER AMES
The dramatic contrast between Chinese and Western modes of philosophic thinking…
Tao Te Ching - an introduction
BURTON WATSON
On sheer power of language in expounding its ideas, the Tao Te Ching comes closer to pure poetry than do any of the other philosophical texts



Tao Te Ching - excerpts
URSALA LE GUIN
The Tao Te Ching, translated by Ursala Le Guin with J.P, Seaton.
 
The Poetry of Zen
J.P. SEATON
Introduction to Chinese poems in The Poetry of Zen
The Tao of Chinese Poetry
STUART CARDUNER
Zen, Tao, Dharma, shamanism… – the Ways of the Chinese poets
coming soon
 
Story of Zen
DHARMANET
An online course exploring the development of Buddhism, particularly Ch’an, in China
The Legacy of Chan
DHARMANET
An online introduction to present-day Ch’an and Ch’an practice
“Confucianism” is a Western term that has no counterpart in Chinese. It encompasses a worldview, a social ethic, a political ideology, a scholarly tradition, and a way of life. Sometimes viewed as a philosophy and sometimes as a religion, it may be understood as an all-encompassing way of thinking and living that entails a profound human-centered religiousness. Even when professing themeselves to be Taoists and/or Buddhists, the Chinese poets seldom ceased being Confucian.

Confucius and the 'Confucian Tradition'
ASIA FOR EDUCATORS
An introduction to Confucius and Confucianism.
Confucius and Confucianism
DAVID HALL & ROGER AMES
 All of Chinese thinking is a series of commentaries on Confucius

The Shih Ching , usually translated as either The Book of Songs or the Classic of Poetry, is the first great collection of Chinese poetry. Tradition says that it was edited into its present form by the Sage of Sages, Confucius himself. In fact the book was assembled before, during, and after the life of Confucius. Its more than three hundred poems include fragments of works as old as the Shang Dynasty (traditional; dates 1766-1154 BCE) as well as “contemporary” poems from the Chou feudal states written or spoken by both aristocratic court figures and just plain “folks”. A great deal has been said about the origin of many, if not the majority of the poems as oral “folk” art, but it is clear from the artistry of the written language in which they have been handed down that, like the scribes who improved upon the originally oral poetry attributed to “Homer” in the West to create the Iliad and the Odyssey, the people who converted Chou folk songs and court verses into poetry in written Chinese characters clearly thought of themselves as (and were) artists. So the characters used to render simple and direct lyrical utterances of the illiterate peasant folk often honor them with carefully chosen written vocabulary: the heart and soul of folk art remains clearly present, but literary subtleties are introduced. The scribes who created the Shih Ching were poets, not tape recorders. They chose the best of what existed, and they honored it with their own art.

In its present form, the Shih Ching consists of three major sections, the Kuo Feng, or Odes of the States, comprising 160 of the 300 are generally but not always folk songs. The Ya (Elegant Verses) subdivided with no obvious criteria into greater and lesser, include poems 161-265, and the Sung or Temple Odes high ritual songs and bits of dynastic myth, include poems 266-305. The present selection is comes, all but a single longer poem on drinking and its positive and negative consequences from the “Lesser Elegants”, all come from the Kuo Feng Sections.

Knowledge of the Shih Ching poems was a necessity of diplomatic practice around the time of Confucius, when it was a common practice to deliver or at least support the delivery of diplomatic messages among the feudal domains (the “States or Guo of the Guo Feng) by oral presentation of relevant lines from the Classic. From the Han on many of the poems where imbued with very specific allegorical interpretations, but it is clear that later poets, who memorized the book word for word, used it as allusive material in their own poems at least as often for its plain “folk” messages as for its orthodoxly approved allegorical ones.