Tai Chen's Inquiry into Goodness

Tai Chen's Inquiry into Goodness
Author: Chung-Ying Cheng
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2019-03-31
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 082488082X

From Sung times, and throughout the Ming period, one of the dominant philosophies of China had been a dualistic rationalism thought to be firmly grounded on the classics. Tai Chen (1723-1777) was a scholar and philosopher during the Ch'ing period- a time when China produced few philosophic thinkers. He was the greatest of these, and his views are embodied chiefly in Yuan Shan and in Meng Tzu txu-yi shu-cheng. In place of the prevailing Sung dualism, Tai Chen propounded a rationalistic monism seldom before insinuated in a Chinese philosophy. He declines to accept current dogmas and preferred to seek his own truths. His commentaries opposed the time-honored interpretations of Chu Hsi, and he discredited them on purely philosophical grounds. But with few disciples to carry on his teachings, he was virtually forgotten or ignored in China for more than a hundred years after his death. It was not until early in the present century- with China under the pressures of Western aggression and internal disorders-that Tai Chen's nearness to Western thought was rediscovered and his important role in the history of philosophy recognized. Curiously, this first of China's Western-oriented philosophers even today remains little known in the West and his major writings largely untranslated.

Tai Chen on Mencius

Tai Chen on Mencius
Author: Zhen Dai
Publisher:
Total Pages: 222
Release: 1990
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780300046540

The Ch'ing scholar-thinker Tai Chen (1724-1777) was a passionate explorer. He loved words, and his most important philosophical treatise, the Meng Tzu tzu-I shu-cheng (An evidential study of the meaning of terms in the Mencius), is an exhaustive search for the meaning of the words first uttered by Mencius in the fourth century B.C. This book by Ann-ping Chin and Mansfield Freeman is the first complete and annotated English translation of that treatise. Drawing on scholarship from the eighteenth century to the present, it also includes two essays that reconstruct Tai Chen's life and time and reinterpret his thought. Unlike most of the evidential scholars of his day, Tai Chen was not satisfied merely with providing reason and proof for his reading. He was interested in the life of words as their meaning changes with the vicissitudes of time. Tai Chen felt that the terms in the Mencius, garbled by the Sung and Ming thinkers who had come under the influence of Buddhism and Taoism, would no longer have made sense to Mencius himself. Key Confucian concepts, such as "principle" and "nature," had become "blood-less" moral constructs. Tai Chen preferred their primeval meaning. Intellectual historians of this century have hailed him as a progressive thinker and a social critic, but he saw himself in a simpler role: as a reader striving to understand every word in his text.

Way, Learning, and Politics

Way, Learning, and Politics
Author: Wei-ming Tu
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 230
Release: 1993-01-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780791417751

Tu (Chinese history and philosophy, Harvard U.) offers a panoramic view of the core values of Confucian intellectual thought that have kept it vital for more than two millennia, and underlie the recent resurgence in eastern Asia. Of interest to students of either China or religion and ethics. Paper edition (unseen), $14.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Chen Style Taijiquan Collected Masterworks

Chen Style Taijiquan Collected Masterworks
Author: Mark Chen
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019-09-10
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 1623173930

The first-ever English translation of the most important masterworks of Chen Style Taiji, as originally published by the renowned grandmaster Chen Zhaopi Chen Zhaopi (1893-1972) is universally recognized as a preeminant grandmaster of Chen Style taijiquan, an ancient martial art that is the foundation of all taijiquan schools. During his lifetime, Chen was lineage successor and teacher to Chen Village's current generation of senior masters, including Chen Xiaowang, Wang Xi'an, Chen Zhenglei, Zhu Tiancai, and the late Chen Qingzhou. This book is the first-ever English translation of key selections from his seminal 1935 publication, Chen Style Taijiquan Collected Masterworks. Gathered together are taijiquan's most important texts dating back to its earliest period of development. These include the writings of its putative creator, Chen Wangting, and its reorganizer, Chen Changxing, and the biographies of eminent family members such as Chen Zhongshen. Author and translator Mark Chen's commentary provides readers with the most complete picture of taijiquan's origins, evolution, and theory to date. Also included is a step-by-step, pictorial exposition of Chen taijiquan's "old frame" first form, demonstrated by Chen Zhaopi himself.

Tai Chi

Tai Chi
Author: Paul Brecher
Publisher: HarperThorsons
Total Pages: 104
Release: 2000
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 9780007103393

This comprehensive introduction to Tai Chi includes a discussion of all the main Tai Chi styles and explains the difference between the various lineages.

Don't Cry, Tai Lake

Don't Cry, Tai Lake
Author: Qiu Xiaolong
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2012-05-08
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1429973544

"Dark, gorgeous...feels authentically Chinese and it works like a charm." --Washington Post Book World on A Case of Two Cities Chief Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai Police Department is offered a bit of luxury by friends and supporters within the Party – a week's vacation at a luxurious resort near Lake Tai, a week where he can relax, and recover, undisturbed by outside demands or disruptions. Unfortunately, the once beautiful Lake Tai, renowned for its clear waters, is now covered by fetid algae, its waters polluted by toxic runoff from local manufacturing plants. Then the director of one of the manufacturing plants responsible for the pollution is murdered and the leader of the local ecological group is the primary suspect of the local police. Now Inspector Chen must tread carefully if he is to uncover the truth behind the brutal murder and find a measure of justice for both the victim and the accused.

Conflict and Accommodation in Early Modern East Asia

Conflict and Accommodation in Early Modern East Asia
Author: Leonard Blussé
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2021-09-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004483373

This collection of essays written by his former students and colleagues represent the many foci of interest that Erik Zürcher has shared with them during his tenure as professor at Leiden University. They include discussions of Confucian philosophy, Buddhist and Christian polemics, the spread of Jesuit literature and anti-Christian attitudes among the literati, Ming aphorisms, the Chinese pictorial of skulls and skeletons, the Ch'ien-lung Emperor's eightieth birthday celebrations, Sino-Korean relations, and the "little traditions" in Chinese historical development, secret societies and kongsi. The book demonstrates how Zürcher inspired a wide range of interests in problems of Chinese history from heterodoxy, to local development, to hsiao-shuo traditions, but always in the highest traditions of philological scholarship.

Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 2, History of Scientific Thought

Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 2, History of Scientific Thought
Author: Joseph Needham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 746
Release: 1956-01-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521058001

The second volume of Dr Joseph Needham's great work Science and Civilisation in China is devoted to the history of scientific thought. Beginning with ancient times, it describes the Confucian milieu in which arose the organic naturalism of the great Taoist school, the scientific philosophy of the Mohists and Logicians, and the quantitative materialism of the Legalists. Thus we are brought on to the fundamental ideas which dominated scientific thinking in the Chinese middle ages. The author opens his discussion by considering the remote and pictographic origins of words fundamental in scientific discourse, and then sets forth the influential doctrines of the Two Forces and the Five Elements. Subsequently he writes of the important sceptical tradition, the effects of Buddhist thought, and the Neo-Confucian climax of Chinese naturalism. Last comes a discussion of the conception of Laws of Nature in China and the West.

Fifty Key Works of History and Historiography

Fifty Key Works of History and Historiography
Author: Kenneth R. Stunkel
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2012-05-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1136723668

Fifty Key Works of History and Historiography introduces some of the most important works ever written by those who have sought to understand, capture, query and interpret the past. The works covered include texts from ancient times to the present day and from different cultural traditions ensuring a wide variety of schools, methods and ideas are introduced. Each of the fifty texts represents at least one of six broad categories: early examples of historiography (e.g. Herodotus and Augustine) non-western works (e.g. Shaddad and Fukuzawa) ‘Critical’ historiography (e.g. Mabillon and Ranke) history of minorities, neglected groups or subjects (e.g. Said and Needham) broad sweeps of history (e.g. Mumford and Hofstadter) problematic or unconventional historiography (e.g. Foucault and White). Each of the key works is introduced in a short essay written in a lively and engaging style which provides the ideal preparation for reading the text itself. Complete with a substantial introduction to the field, this book is the perfect starting point for anyone new to the study of history or historiography.

The Rise of Confucian Ritualism in Late Imperial China

The Rise of Confucian Ritualism in Late Imperial China
Author: Kai-wing Chow
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 358
Release: 1996-12-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0804765782

This pathbreaking work argues that the major intellectual trend in China from the seventeenth through the early nineteenth century was Confucian ritualism, as expressed in ethics, classical learning, and discourse on lineage. Reviews "Chow has produced a work of superb scholarship, fluently written and beautifully researched. . . . One of the landmarks of the current reconstruction of the social philosophy of the Qing dynasty. . . . Chow's book is indispensable. It has illuminating analyses of many mainstream writers, institutions, and social categories in eighteenth-century China which have never previously been examined." —Canadian Journal of History "Chow's monograph moves ritual to center stage in late imperial social and intellectual history, and the author makes a powerful case for doing so. . . . Because the author understands the intellectual history of late Ming and Qing as the history of a movement, or successive movements, of fundamental social reform, he has also made an important contribution to social and political history as these were related to intellectual history." —Journal of Chinese Religion "Chow's book is an excellent contribution to recent scholarship on the intellectual history of the Confucian tradition and provides a balance for other studies that have emphasized ideas to the exclusion of symbols." —The Historian