Mencius by David Hinton

Mencius by David Hinton

This ancient text records the teachings of Mencius (4th c. B.C.E.), the second originary sage in the Confucian tradition which has shaped Chinese civilization for over two thousand years.

In a culture that makes no distinction between those realms we call the heart and the mind, Mencius was the great thinker of the heart, and it was he who added the profound inner dimensions to the Confucian vision. Given his emphasis on the heart, it isn't surprising that his philosophical method is very literary in nature- story and anecdote full of human drama and poetic turns of thought. Indeed, the text is considered a paragon of literary eloquence and style.

Mencius' strikingly contemporary empiricism represented a complete secularization of the spiritualist concepts of governance that had dominated China for over a millenia. He invested the humanist Confucian vision with its inner dimensions by recognizing that the individual is an integral part of a self-generating and harmonious cosmos. He saw all the spiritual depths of that cosmology inside us, and this led to a mystical faith in the inherent nobility of human beings. In his chaotic and war-ravaged times, he was therefore passionate in his defense of the people. Indeed, he advocated a virtual democracy in which a government's legitimacy depended upon the assent of the people. Such is the enduring magic of the Mencian heart- full of compassionate and practical concern for the human condition, and yet so empty that it contains the ten thousand transformations of the entire cosmos.

Hinton, David: - David Hinton's translations of classical Chinese poetry have earned him wide acclaim for creating compelling contemporary poems that convey the texture and density of the originals. He is the editor of numerous anthologies of Chinese poetry and the first in over a century to translate the four seminal masterworks of Chinese philosophy: Tao Te Ching, Chuang Tzu, Analects, and Mencius. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Landon Translation Award, the PEN Translation Award, and most recently the Thornton Wilder Award for Translation from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781619025554
ISBN 10	1619025558
Title	Mencius
Author	David Hinton
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Counterpoint
Year published	2015-06-09
Number of pages	204
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.