Finding Wisdom in East Asian Classics

THE ASIAN CLASSICS may not be included in the “Hundred Great Books” or the “Hundred Great Ideas”¹ today, but the idea of books so challenging to the mind, so close to the human heart, and of such impressive depth or stature as to command the attention of generation after generation is certainly not confined to the Western world. Each of the major Asian civilizations has had its canonical texts and literary classics. Significant differences appear, however, in the way that the classic canon is defined—by whom, for what audience, for what purposes, and in what form. To Muhammad, “the people of the book” was an important concept for locating the spiritual roots of Islam in an earlier prophetic tradition and for affirming a common religious ground in the Bible among Jews, Christians, and Muslims.² Yet it is by no means clear that the books of the Old Testament, or such of the New as he in any way recognized, were thought to be essential reading for his own followers, let alone for the other “people of the book.” Anyone who today reads the great Muslim philosophers and theologians would know that they, no less than St. Augustine and St. Thomas, engaged in significant dialogue with the Greek philosophers and were long ago party to the “Great Conversation” that Mark Van Doren, Lyman Bryson, and Jacques Barzun used to talk about at Columbia and on CBS radio. Though the contributions of Islamic philosophers were rarely acknowledged in the discussion that Bryson held on CBS’s Sunday morning “Invitation to Learning,” in 1978 a published series on Western spirituality recognized that they do indeed belong in this company.³ Here too, however, it is doubtful that in the Muslim world itself the writings of Plato and Aristotle would have been thought essential reading for any but the scholarly few who studied Al-Ghazālī, Avicenna, Averroes, or Ibn Khaldūn.

Hindus had their own sacred scriptures, some lines of which would be on the lips of pious Indians, but for the most part these texts were considered the sacred preserve of learned pandits, not to be read—much less discussed—by the faithful. Among the latter, oral texts had far more currency than written. In China too there were the classics of the Confucian tradition, but again they were the property principally of a learned elite, though Daoist works such as the Laozi and Zhuangzi also figured in cultivated discourse among the literati and thus in a sense qualified as great books even if not as canonical literature.

In Japan, eminent Buddhist monks such as Saichō and Kūkai in the ninth century advanced the idea that, for those who would occupy positions of social as well as clerical importance, a proper training should include the reading of at least some Confucian classics, together with the major scriptures of Mahāyāna Buddhism. So assiduously cultivated in Heian Japan was this classical study that even court ladies such as Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shōnagon, great writers in the vernacular Japanese literature of the eleventh century, had themselves read the major Confucian classics along with the monumental Chinese histories and leading Tang poets, and they would have disdained as uncouth and illiterate anyone who had not done the same. Important later writers in Japan as diverse as the monk-essayist Kenkō in the fourteenth century, the teacher of military science Yamaga Sokō in the seventeenth century, and the great nativist scholar Motoori Norinaga in the eighteenth all had read the classic Confucian and Daoist texts as part of their mixed cultural inheritance, whether or not they identified themselves with either of the traditions from which these works derived. Thus the latter were read by non-Chinese too as great books that commanded attention even when not compelling assent.

In this respect, the Japanese (along with the Koreans and Vietnamese, who shared the same Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist literature) may have been more accustomed to multicultural learning than some other Asian peoples who rarely recognized as classics the major works of traditions other than their own. As a general rule, certainly, the traditions transmitting these texts were apt to be socially circumscribed and more or less culture bound within the limits of a common “classical” literature. As religions, their appeal might be more universal, but in the transmission of texts they stood out as high classical traditions—“great traditions” for the few rather than little traditions shared in by the many. Their “great books” were most often scriptures preserved and read by particular religious communities or classics cherished by the bearers of high culture. A main reason for this lay in the fact that most classics and scriptures were preserved in difficult classical or sacred languages, and even popular works in the vernacular tended over time to become inaccessible, because spoken tongues, more subject to change (being less fixed and disciplined than classical languages), tend toward their own kind of obsolescence. The recognized “classics” of popular fiction too, as well as philosophical and religious dialogues in the vernacular (such as Zen dialogues or Neo-Confucian “recorded conversations”), could be so studded with colloquialisms as to present special difficulties for readers of a later age.

One can hardly exaggerate the persistence and pervasiveness of this problem in communication. Modern writers sometimes assume that the restricted readership of classical literature in Asian societies is mainly attributable to an exclusivity or possessiveness on the part of the custodians of the high tradition. Their monopoly of learning, it is supposed, gave them a vested interest in preserving sacred knowledge as something precious, recondite, and out of the ordinary man’s reach. The Confucian literati, one is told, both jealously guarded the purity and reveled in the complexity of a written language the masses were not supposed to touch. Buddhist monks of Heian Japan, historians often say or imply, deliberately mystified religious learning so as to insure their own dominance over credulous masses.

Such imputations are not without some basis, as for instance in the case of the Confucian literati in fifteenth-century Korea who resisted the development and use of a new alphabet for their native language because it would compete for attention with Chinese language and literature—an argument not unmixed with the concern of some to maintain their own privileged position as dispensers of the Chinese classical tradition. Yet there are contrary cases. For example, the leading Japanese monk Kūkai, himself a spokesman for the so-called Esoteric School of Buddhism, advocated public schooling in the ninth century, and Zhu Xi, the great Neo-Confucian philosopher of the twelfth century, was a strong advocate of universal education through public schools. Zhu devoted himself to editing and simplifying the classics with a view to making them more understandable for ordinary persons. Since other leading Neo-Confucians after Zhu Xi took up this cause in their writings, the limited success of their efforts must have been due to factors other than the lack of good intentions. Chief among these were probably (1) the perception of peasants in a predominantly agrarian society that learning yielded few economic benefits unless one could convert it into official position or status and (2) the government’s lack of interest in the matter beyond the needs of bureaucratic recruitment. In such circumstances, for those with little leisure to dispose of, the difficulties of mastering the great books in classical languages might not seem worth the costs.

In some ways Zhu Xi, as an educator trying to reach beyond his immediate scholarly audience, was the Mortimer Adler of his time, but he would probably have thought a reading list of One Hundred Great Books too ambitious. His goal was to reach the aspiring youth of every village and hamlet in China, for which he recommended a shorter list: a program based on the Confucian Four Books and his own compact anthology of Song-dynasty thought, Reflections on Things at Hand (Jin-si-lu). Zhu’s competition in those days, the Chan (Zen) masters, were offering enlightenment at no cost in terms of reading, and Zen painters even portrayed sages tearing up the scriptures. Too much booklearning was already seen as injurious to the health, and Zhu Xi himself, as well as his Neo-Confucian predecessors, favored the careful reading of a few books, as well as reflection over them and discussion with others, instead of a superficial acquaintance with many. Hence he was modest in his initial demands, trying to keep his reading program simple and within people’s means and capabilities.

In his efforts along this line, Zhu very early reached the Aspen phase of his Great Books movement, when snippets and selections would often have to serve in place of whole books if the reading was to be done by other than scholars. Two of his Four Books, in fact, were selected short chapters from the classic Record of Rites: “The Great Learning” and “The Mean.” These he further revised and edited in order to make the texts more coherent, systematic, and integral—shaping them according to what, in his mind, the classic form must have been.

Zhu Xi also had his rough equivalent of Aspen in sylvan retreats such as the historic White Deer Grotto near Mount Lu, at the deep bend in the Yangzi River, where he conducted colloquia on the Confucian classics for his students and other literati of the day. But so concerned was he with the larger educational needs of his society and with developing a cradle-to-grave approach for the individual that he even directed the compilation of a preparatory text called the Elementary Learning (Xiao xue), as a guide to the training of the young before they took up the Four Books and Five Classics.

For all of these efforts at providing a Reader’s Digest of the Confucian classics, Zhu never attempted to translate his scriptures into a Vulgate. Even the Elementary Learning was composed of so many excerpts in classical Chinese that it would serve better as a teacher’s manual than as a student’s primer. Followed or accompanied by the Four Books and then by the Five Classics, it became part of the standard classical curriculum throughout East Asia and had a remarkable diffusion for premodern times, yet it remained constrained by the severe limits that the classical Chinese language imposed on its adaptability to popular audiences and changing times. In China, this system lasted down to 1905, when the pressure to adopt Western scientific learning led to the scrapping of Zhu’s humanistic core curriculum based on the Chinese classics.

Half a world away and by a curious historical coincidence, at about the same time that Chinese classical learning was being abandoned, American college education was being cut loose from its old moorings in classical studies. At what was sometimes called the new “Acropolis on the Hudson,” which Columbia presidents Seth Low and Nicholas Murray Butler were erecting on Morningside Heights in the early decades of this century, the old language requirements in Greek and Latin, along with the reading of the classics in the original, were giving way to a new educational approach. John Erskine, following George Woodberry, championed the idea that all the benefits of a liberal education in the classics need not be lost even if Greek and Latin were no longer obligatory, provided that undergraduates could read and discuss the classics in translation. This was the germ of Erskine’s Honors course, first offered just after World War I, out of which grew the later Great Books movement.

When purists objected that something of these classics would be lost by reading them in translation, Erskine countered by asking how many readers of the Bible in his day felt able, or found it necessary, to read the Good Book in its original languages. If that rhetorical question answered itself in Erskine’s favor, it was at least partly because his largely WASP audience (a convenient example, by the way, of a colloquialism that may well, a century or so from now, require a footnote to make it understood) was so accustomed to reading and appreciating the Bible in the King James version that they would no doubt have thought something would be lost by reading it in the original.

What Erskine at least implied, if he did not actually say as much, was that great books could be read like the Good Book—that the principal measure of a great book was its having something to say so universal, so perennial, and so personal that it could speak to the human individual even through the medium of translation. Strict logic or hermeneutic method might resist an argument so circular, considering how readily one could be persuaded of a book’s greatness if what one most wished to believe could be read into it through translation. As a practical matter, however, and for public purposes, some process of consensus among translators and readers has decided what would be thought sufficiently meaningful and of lasting value to be worth everybody’s effort. In this way, enough such books have been made available in translation so that there are plenty for the individual to choose from on his or her own terms.

If great books were to be read for something of the deep meaning found in the Good Book, something too of a missionary zeal went into propagating the Great Books idea. Its advocates brought to the new movement a depth of conviction and evangelical zeal rarely seen in academic enterprises. The original locale may have been the classroom, but the spread of the Great Books program well beyond the halls of academe had something of the old-time religion about it, as if the religious roots of the early Ivy League foundations had taken on new life in the liberal, cosmopolitan atmosphere of New York, later to be transplanted to Chicago, Annapolis, Aspen, or wherever the populist spirit and new technology—rather than a stuffy traditionalism—might carry it.

An essential feature of the new movement was its insistence on the discussion method. The Honors course, as a colloquium, reasserted not only the primacy of the classics but also the importance of reading the classics for what they had to say about life as a whole, combining ideas and value judgments that were increasingly, in Erskine’s day, becoming pigeonholed in one or another academic compartment. The discussion method rejected the idea that all learning should be presented in lectures, as specialized subjects taught by authoritative scholars to receptive—but largely passive—students. This latter method had become almost universal with the eclipse of classical education, but Erskine and his followers led a counterrevolution in American education to reassert the kind of intimate, personal engagement of teachers and students that has become increasingly recognized as a necessary antidote to the impersonality and passive ingestion so typical of large lecture classes.

Lionel Trilling once observed that the transition at Columbia from the old-style classical education for gentlemen of the Hudson Valley to the new liberal education was accompanied by a demographic shift toward the assimilation of bright young members of New York’s immigrant populations—especially Jewish, Irish, and Italian—into the educated class. Trilling did not himself mention it, so far as I know, but the published memoirs of Diana Trilling suggest to me that there was in this process a strong admixture of New York Jewish intellectuality, with its legacy of Talmudic discourse from the ghettoes of Europe. That intense speculative and probing mode of discourse could well, it has seemed to me, have entered into the Great Conversation over the Great Books at that particular time in our cultural history. In any case, I shall continue in this belief for more anecdotal reasons than it is appropriate to recite here, where I am dealing with the Great Books of the East rather than with the good news of the Great Books as carried by the apostles to the Midwest.

What was then newly depicted as a great conversation over the ages, among the great minds and in the great writings of all time, was not the less real for having been discovered in the twentieth century by teachers and students who converted it into something quite timely and immediate. It was a learning method appropriate to the discussion of classics now no longer read as classical-language texts for well-bred gentlemen but as the new “Great Books.” Later these were to be defined and literally packaged by Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler as the “Hundred Great Books,” in fulfillment of their modern function in democratic education.

When the distinguished British classicist Gilbert Murray wrote in 1938 about liberalism in the modern world, he chose to term it “liberality” in order not to identify it solely with the “liberalism” of contemporary Whig politics but to associate it with a broader, more long-standing tradition of liberal humanism coming down from Greece and Rome. The latter he saw as having a universal mission, taking a particular form in modern times as the bearers of this honored tradition sought to share it with a larger world. In this sense, they were conservatives as well as liberals, and of this combination Murray said: “The object of conservatism is to save the social order. The object of liberality is to bring that order a little nearer to what … the judgment of a free man—free from selfishness, free from passion, free from prejudice—would require, and by that very change to save it more effectively.”⁴ The classically educated gentleman and humanist was seen by Murray as the product of a leisured and in some ways privileged class, working “to extend its own privileges to wider and wider circles,” aiming at “freedom of thought and discussion, and equally pursuing the free exercise of individual conscience and promotion of the common good.”⁵

Perhaps one could compare it, in everyday experience, to the way in which the handclasp or handshake as a form of greeting has evolved from the gesture of gentlemen in a more courtly Western age. Originally, it signified openness and a meeting on equal terms of persons who shared the same aristocratic traditions of personal honor and good breeding; now it has become a nearly universal gesture of friendship and greeting shared equally among persons of almost every class, culture, social system, or ideology.

Something of that spirit, it seems to me, is to be found in the Great Books movement that arose at the same time in America, aiming to conserve as well as to extend the same humanistic tradition through new forms of liberal education. As Murray’s book was being written, the faculty of Columbia College, under the leadership of distinguished teachers who had already converted Erskine’s Honors course into a two-year upper college “colloquium,” was transforming this program into a required general-education course for freshmen, instituted under the title of Humanities A in 1937. It was an extension of the same process ten years later that led to the inauguration of a course in Oriental Humanities, dealing with what is here called the Great Books of the East.

The ideas underlying the course were simple. It was thought that any fairly intelligent person could read with profit any book (except, of course, highly specialized science) which had once made its way to fame among general readers. Even without the introductory study which usually precedes our acquaintance with classics in these various fields, any reader, it was thought, can discover, and enjoy the substance which has made such books remembered. It was thought, also, that a weekly discussion of the reading, such an exchange of ideas as might occur in any group which had read an interesting book, would be more illuminating than a lecture. It was thought, also, that the result of such reading and discussion over a period of two years would be a rich mass of literary information, ideas and principles, even emotions.⁶

Erskine was well aware that such a procedure challenged prevalent scholarly conceptions concerning proper methods of serious study. In the same essay quoted above, written as a preface to a reading list for the Colloquium, he argued:

Many scholars might object to certain implications in such a reading list as this. They might think that if we read, without assistance, Homer and the Greeks, Virgil and the other Romans, Dante and the other men of the Middle Ages, we shall probably get a false idea of each period, and we may even misunderstand the individual book. To a certain extent this is true. Undoubtedly we get a better historical approach to anything that is old if we have the time to study its environment and its associations. But in art it is not the history of a masterpiece which makes it famous so much as qualities of permanent interest. It is precisely those qualities which we recognize first when we take up an old book without prejudice, and read it as intelligently as we can, looking for what seems to concern our times. I personally would go rather far in protest against the exclusively historical approach to literature, or any other art.… As a matter of fact, the literature which grows up around a famous book is often composed less because the book needs the aid of interpretation than because it has inspired admiration, and man likes to express his affection. We all write essays about our favorite authors. It is well, however, if the world reads the favorite author, and mercifully forgets the baggage with which our approval has burdened his reputation.

(12–13)

Erskine’s claims bespoke his confidence in the intrinsic value of the works themselves and their ability to speak directly to the individual about human life in the broadest terms. An artist and musician himself, as well as a critic, he distinguished this kind of reading from anything which would serve as an introduction to “different fields of knowledge.” “It is the critic,” he said, “not the artist, who invents distinct fields of knowledge. In life, these fields all overlap.… Great books read simply and sensibly are an introduction to the whole of life; it is the completeness of their outlook which makes them great” (18).

When I said above that this meant reading a great book as if it were, in a way, the Good Book, that connection was suggested by the manner in which these “Classics of the Western World” were recommended for a larger audience by the American Library Association, which published Erskine’s Honors list for general use in 1927. A second edition in 1934 carried an introductory essay on “Sharing in the Good Books” by Everett Dean Martin of the People’s Institute of New York, who went so far as to distinguish this kind of reading from any kind of “popularization,” “uplift enterprise,” or even “education” that aimed only at utilitarian goals or social advancement. “Self-improvement is a praiseworthy aim. The pursuit of knowledge is the noblest of quests. But all depends upon the spirit with which one enters upon this adventure.” These were books “to be enjoyed for their own sake,” he said, part of the temple of learning of which the reader might judge for himself, on reading them, whether “when the temple is done there is ‘never a door to get in to the God’” (17–18).

Yet Martin, though representing the so-called People’s Institute of New York (at Cooper Union, where promising scholars like Adler and Barzun got their first experience of teaching to general audiences), also spoke for the old amateur ideal of gentlemanly learning against the increasing specialization of scholarship and its technical, analytic method, which tended to make the “good books” less naturally enjoyable and meaningful.

Doubtless the average reader does not turn to the masterpieces of literature because he imagines that such books were written by professionals for professional students and are not for such as he. Critics and commentators and pedantic instructors commonly give this impression of literature. They have sought to appropriate it to themselves. They have placed about it their own barricades of interpretation and have obscured it with historical and biographical irrelevancies. They have sought to reduce reading to a technique and have thus taken the joy out of it.

The literature which human experience has found to be most valuable is not the output of professional educators. It is amateur and was written as a labor of love. This fact cannot be too strongly emphasized. Most of the great books of the world were written by laymen for laymen. It is important that one read such books and not be content with books about books.… [This] often comes as something of a revelation to people when they first discover that they may read the originals and form their independent judgments. The original is always more interesting. It is better reading. If one has time for only a few books, let him confine his reading to the greatest. There are many commentaries: but the book itself, the original, is something that has happened only once in human history and he who lives through the experience of reading it will never afterwards be quite the same.

(19–20)

Today, more than seventy years later, one can marvel at the ease with which Martin separates the layman from the professional while deploring the substitution of vulgar popularization by second-rate scholars for direct access to the great minds of the past. He does not equate “lay” with “popular” but conceives of the layman rather as the true spiritual heir of the great humanists. Striking too is the ease with which he speaks of reading his “good books” in the “original,” though this could only have been in translation. He is hardly mindful, it seems, of what “original” had meant a few decades earlier to the defenders of reading the classics in the original language. That battle was now over, and the “good books” in translation had emerged victorious. Martin, no less than the apostles of the “great books,” could testify himself to a vital truth of his own and others’ experience as readers and teachers—the natural stimulation and exhilaration of mind that came from making contact with the great minds of the past and being powerfully challenged by them—even in translation.

Parenthetically, if I may return momentarily to the Confucian tradition, this view was shared by the great Neo-Confucian teachers like Zhu Xi and Wang Yang-ming, who kept insisting on the importance of the individual’s making his first reading a direct contact with the classics in the original text. For this to be done, of course, required that some kind of gloss accompany it, and Zhu Xi, digesting and refining earlier commentaries, provided a concise new one for this purpose. Yet it is significant that he too, while recognizing the need for this kind of “translation” into the current idiom, insisted on everyone’s confronting the original by himself. No doubt this reflected the persistence of an earlier oral tradition, which almost everywhere in Asia saw memorization and recitation of the text as the way to achieve a personal appropriation of the classics or scriptures. Ironically, in modern times it was this traditional practice of memorization and recitation, this making of the classic a part of oneself, which struck uninformed Western observers as mere rote learning—a meaningless process that could not but be stultifying for the individual.

Meanwhile, as this traditional reading practice was being attacked in China, a modernized version of Zhu Xi’s approach to personal appropriation of the classics was being recreated in New York. No doubt, in Everett Dean Martin’s case, this phenomenon exhibited the perennial truth that “each generation chooses its own ancestors,” asserting its independence by reaching back to the classics over the heads of its immediate predecessors. Yet at Columbia there proved to be more to it than that. A generation later, when the Humanities A course was subjected to reexamination, its position remained secure. A blue-ribbon committee chaired by the historian Fritz Stern was asked to undertake a thoroughgoing critique of the “great books” course, simply as a matter of curriculum review. This was during the 1967–1968 school year, a time when endemic student protest might well have been thought a spur to change. In fact, however, the Stern Committee could find no signs of dissatisfaction with the course among either students or staff, and even when it proposed the most modest revisions, the committee’s suggestions were met with almost total rejection. No other required course in living memory has enjoyed such powerful, perennial support from students, faculty, and alumni. Obviously, the experience spoken of by Erskine and Martin was not a momentary enthusiasm.

In Erskine’s day and for some time thereafter, the term “great books” was not well established at Columbia, and the further idea of a “Hundred Great Books” must have been a special revelation from on high to Dr. Adler or later Dr. Hutchins. Erskine himself disavowed any claim to having defined, in his list, any fixed number of such classics. In the direct successor to the Honors course, known in the thirties as “The Colloquium on Important Books,” the works read were referred to as classics, important books, or major works, but only occasionally as “great books.” Even Mark Van Doren made sparing reference to the term in his Liberal Education, published in 1943, and not often enough for it to appear in the index.

The terminological issue is not itself important, but a syllabus for the Colloquium first prepared in 1927 by J. B. Brebner (representing a stellar staff that included Mortimer Adler, Jacques Barzun, Irwin Edman, Moses Hadas, Richard McKeon, Lionel Trilling, Rexford Guy Tugwell, Mark Van Doren, and Raymond Weaver, among other distinguished scholars and teachers) was entitled “Classics of the Western World.” More significant than the word “classics” is the fact that even prior to the establishment of the required Humanities A, its advocates and collaborators were conscious of the parochial limits of the Columbia program at that time. I can testify myself to the feeling among prominent leaders of the College faculty in the late 1930s that something needed to be done about expanding the horizons of the general-education program, including both the older Contemporary Civilization course and Humanities A, so as to bring Asia into the picture. Perhaps the most significant aspect of this progressive ferment was that it arose among scholars and teachers who had no professional interest in Orientalism but who certainly exhibited the kind of intellectual breadth and educational zeal that Gilbert Murray would have appreciated as liberal.

It is true that what Murray saw as the world mission of liberal humanism could appear to others as only cultural imperialism in Sunday dress. In this view, classical Orientalism too would be seen not as progressive scholarship but only as the intellectual vanguard of the Western assault on other cultures. Yet in actual fact, as matters stood at Columbia in those times, classical Orientalism was in serious decline, if not almost defunct. It had no articulate spokesmen among the College faculty, and since its fortunes had been closely tied to biblical studies, Semitic languages, and the old language requirements, it had few vested interests left to defend or assert once the new liberal education had taken over.

The advocates of the new Oriental Studies program were amateur types, liberal-minded gentlemen who took education, and not just their own scholarly research, seriously. Typical of them were Van Doren himself; his colleague Raymond Weaver, an authority on Herman Melville with a deep appreciation of Japanese literature; Burdette Kinne, an instructor in French with a passion for everything Chinese; and Harry J. Carman, a professor of American history and a New York State dirt farmer who wanted to see Asian civilizations brought into the Contemporary Civilization program.

When the first experimental Oriental Humanities course was set up in 1947, about as soon after World War II as one could have mounted such a venture, the lead was taken by such scholars as Moses Hadas, the Greek classicist; Herbert Deane, a political scientist specializing in Harold Laski and St. Augustine; James Gutmann, in German philosophy; and Charles Frankel, the philosopher of Western liberalism. Naturally enough, on putting together the reading list for their first Oriental Colloquium (as it was initially called) Deane and Hadas consulted specialists on the Columbia faculty more learned than themselves in the several traditions to be included within the scope of the course. From the start, however, the reading and discussion of the Oriental classics were to be guided by the principles of the earlier Honors course, as stated by Erskine above, and not by the kind of textual scholarship that had long dominated the classical Orientalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The course’s distinctive character arose in large measure from the fact that it was conceived as part of a liberal education (later to be called by some “general education”) and was designed to supplement a core curriculum already set in place for the first two undergraduate years. In this program, priority had already been given to the study of Western civilization and the “classics of the Western World” (as the Erskine/Brebner syllabus put it). This is a fact I cite not to raise the issue of cultural bounds or to question the established educational priorities—which would take us beyond our purpose here—but simply as a historical given in this case (and obviously a given also for the Great Books program). In practice, our experience has shown this sequence to entail no disadvantage, since students come to the new course as a natural next stage in their core curriculum, already familiar with the ground rules of the reading-discussion method and prepared to take an active part in a discourse well underway. It did mean, however, that the choice of Asian classics would, in turn, be governed by the same high degree of selectivity as in the Western case and further still by the need to exercise this selectivity with respect to several major Asian traditions at once—indeed, all that might be included in the so-called non-Western world. In other words, it demanded a rare combination of both breadth and selectivity, which was much in contrast to the kind of specialized study that traditional Orientalism had favored; it went beyond even what advocates of the Hundred Great Books—for all their high standards of selectivity—would have suspected was necessary.

Exercising this selectivity in the multicultural East was far more difficult than it had been within the bounds of the more unified Western tradition. There was an added complication in that though the “East” had something like “great books,” it had nothing like the Great Books of the East. The latter is a Western idea, both in seeing the East as one and in imagining that there had been a common tradition shared by the peoples of this “East.” Each of the major Asian traditions tended to see itself as the center of the civilized world and to look inward—spiritually and culturally—toward that center rather than outward on the world or on one another. The famous “Sacred Books of the East,” as published at Oxford, was a Western invention. It sprang from the minds of nineteenth-century scholars in Europe as their intellectual horizons reached out along with the West’s expansion into Asia. “Asia,” a geographical designation, represented no common culture or moral bond among the peoples of that continent until, in modern times, a new unity was found in their common reaction to that same expansionism.

There being no common tradition in Asia to define the Great Books of the East, a reading list had to be constructed synthetically out of largely separate and discrete traditions—a construction made all the more difficult and delicate, in the absence of any Eastern canon, by the risk that the very process of its devising might be contaminated by Western preconceptions. Instead therefore of searching for “Eastern” equivalents of Western classics, we were looking for what each of the several Asian traditions themselves honored as an essential part of their own heritage.

Seemingly the least problematical way of doing this was to identify the scriptures or classics already well known within the distinct ethicoreligious traditions of Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, and so on. Similarly one could find recognized classics of the literary and intellectual traditions, though these might or might not run parallel to the religious traditions. This method, proceeding inductively from the testimony of Asians themselves rather than deductively from some Western definition of a classic norm or form, has produced what might appear to be an odd assortment of genres. Great poetry exists in each of the major traditions, though it varies considerably in form. Epics that bear comparison to the Odyssey, Iliad, and Aeneid can be found in Iran and India, but there is nothing like them in China and Japan. The same is true in reverse of the haiku or Nō drama, classic forms in Japan but found nowhere else. Histories as monumental in their own way as Herodotus and Thucydides have been produced in the Islamic world by Ibn Khaldūn and in China by Ssu-ma Ch’ien but by no one in traditional India or Japan. Perhaps the greatest diversity, however, is exhibited among the religious scriptures, some of which can barely be regarded as “texts” in any ordinary sense of the term (for instance, although the Platform Sūtra of the Sixth Chan Patriarch is presented in one sense as authoritative scripture, in another sense it points to an abjuration of all scripture). For the purposes of our reading program, however, if there were to be any real dialogue with the multiform East, all this variety has had to be taken in and, more than that, welcomed as a healthy challenge to Western conventions of discursive and literary form.

Other problems of selection arise from the choice of four major traditions to represent the “East.” The four we have identified—the Islamic world, India, China, and Japan—betray a lack of geographic and cultural congruence among themselves. The Islamic world, which covers almost half of Asia and North Africa as well, includes Iran, with its own language, civilization, and indigenous religious traditions (Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism). Our “coverage” of India (to be dealt with in a separate volume, along with the Middle East) includes Buddhism as well as Brahmanism and Hinduism, and in China and Japan, Buddhism as well as Confucianism and Daoism. Thus religion cuts across cultures even as it may also provide the underlying continuity in a given culture. For the most part, however, it is in literature that each tradition best reveals its distinguishing features and basic continuity. Hence each has had to be represented by enough classic examples to show both the unity and diversity of the traditions and to demonstrate how the great religions have assumed a different coloration in each historical and cultural setting, while also revealing the distinctive aesthetic and intellectual qualities of the tradition.

If, for instance, the case for Islam and our understanding of the Qur’ān depend heavily on how one views the distinctive claims made for it as prophecy and for Muhammad as the “seal of the prophets,” the significance of that claim cannot be judged from a reading of the Qur’ān alone. We must also see how the matter is later dealt with by Al-Ghazālī in relation to Greek philosophy and Sufi mysticism or by Ibn Khaldūn in relation to the patterns of human history. The contrasting claim of Hinduism that it transcends any such particular revelation and can accommodate all other religions may be difficult to evaluate except in some relation to Islam or to the Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy that Śankara is variously said to have refuted and assimilated into the Vedānta.

These religions or teachings, as represented by the texts we read, may not always have acknowledged each other openly, but if we know or even suspect that there was indeed an unspoken encounter among them, some reconnaissance of the alternative positions is requisite to an understanding of any one of them. By this I mean, to be more specific, that one cannot enter into any serious encounter with the early Buddhist sūtras unless one has read the Upanishads, nor can one later come to grips with Śankara if one knows nothing of the major Mahāyāna texts. Likewise, in China, while it is obviously unthinkable that one would take up such major Confucian thinkers as Mencius and Xunzi without first having read the Analects of Confucius, it would be no less an error to do so without reference to Laozi and Zhuangzi.

In China, though the inception of the Confucian tradition is most directly accessible through the Analects, if one stopped there and went no further into any of the later Confucian thinkers, one would get only an archaic, fossilized view of Confucianism. Only by going on to the Neo-Confucians Zhu Xi and Wang Yang-ming can one begin to appreciate how the classic teachings underwent further development in response to the challenge of Buddhism and Daoism. In the West, it would be like reading the Old Testament without the New, or the latter without St. Augustine, St. Thomas, or Dante. Yet it can equally well be argued that the encounter among the so-called Three Teachings in China is even more vividly brought to life in such great Chinese novels as the Journey to the West and the Dream of the Red Chamber (or, in C. T. Hsia’s rendering, A Dream of Red Mansions). Thus reading classic fiction can give access to the dialogue in China on levels not reachable through the classical and neoclassical philosophers.

The same—and more—can be said for Japanese literature as a revelation of Buddhism’s encounter with the native tradition. Often that tradition is identified with Shinto, but as there were no written texts or scriptures antedating the introduction of the Chinese script, the best one can do is look to the earliest literature in Japanese—such works as the Manyōshū, the Tale of Genji, and the Pillow Book, to name only a few of the finest examples—if one wishes to get, in the absence of open doctrinal debate, a more intimate glimpse of what was going on in the Japanese mind and heart behind the outward show of polite professions. This indeed is where the real struggle has taken place among the deep-seated aesthetic preferences and emotional inclinations of the Japanese as they strove to assimilate the more ascetic or moralistic doctrines imported from the continent. There too one may get a sense of the cultural situation into which Zen Buddhism was later introduced and judge from the outcome how much of contemporary Zen is actually Japanese or Chinese rather than Buddhist.

Thus unless other guests are invited, there will be no party for us to join—no way to renew the conversation with any of the great works or thinkers of the past without having others present who had engaged in the original dialogue. How long the list of participants may become is always a matter for local discretion, but in no case can just one or two works generate a real conversation. In the silence of Zen there may be such a thing as one hand clapping, but in the discourse we are entering into there is no book that speaks just to itself.

In this way, working through the natural, original associations among the recognized classics of the Asian traditions, one arrives, by the inductive process I referred to above, at a provisional set of the Asian classics or Great Books of the East. Admittedly a modern creation, it is put together from materials quite authentic to one or another of the Asian traditions. The linkages so identified within and among these traditions, though often obscured or suppressed in the past by cultural isolationism and national or religious chauvinisms, are nonetheless real and meaningful. According to this understanding, “The East” is no mere fabrication, made to serve as a foil for the West. Rather it is an East that has emerged in its true reflected colors only since it came to be observed in a modern light.

Rabindranath Tagore, the charismatic cosmopolitan from Calcutta who thought of himself above all as a citizen of the world, was perhaps the first to appreciate this. In his new perception of the “East,” brilliantly articulated in an essay on “The Eastern University” but only incompletely realized in his Visva Bharati University at Santiniketan, he saw the need for a multicultural curriculum in which the several Asian traditions would complement one another, highlighting each other’s distinctive features in a way that no solitary exposure could do.

Regrettably, the direction of modern education, whether in India or elsewhere in Asia, has taken a different turn, emphasizing technical learning and specialized training at the expense of any kind of humanistic education, Eastern or Western. In this situation, as in our own, the humanities are taught as discrete disciplines and each national tradition is a separate subject of specialization, a field in which to practice the new humanities technologies. The usual result of this process is that nothing can be seen whole and every great work is subjected by analysis to unmitigated trivialization. In most Asian universities today, it is only the student majoring, say, in Sanskrit, Chinese, or Japanese studies who learns anything of the classics of his own tradition beyond the high-school level, and even then it will most likely be to specialize in a single text.⁷

Against this pessimistic estimate of the present situation, a more positive view may be offered that microscopic studies of this kind are the necessary building blocks for the construction tomorrow of a macroscopic, global edifice of human civilization. Yet this conclusion itself leads to the further question: if nothing less than a total worldview is envisaged, why should one be trying to establish an intermediate position through the Asian Humanities, as if to promote a regionalized view of the Asian traditions? Given the present trend toward world history or world-literature courses, it might seem perverse—and probably unavailing—to resist the piecemeal incorporation into them of Asian materials. Recognizing too the impacted state of the college curriculum and the difficulty of finding any time at all in it for Asia, can one afford to pass up whatever opportunities do present themselves for the inclusion of Asia in the core, even if on less than ideal terms? Depending on local circumstances, the answer may well be, perhaps not.

Yet even while conceding this much to present realities, I would still argue the need to make a place, at some point in the curriculum, for a course that includes the Asian classics in something of their traditional setting rather than, as above, completely out of context. My ground for so arguing is the same need to face squarely the implications of the global view already projected. To me this requires not necessarily that an equal priority be given to Asia and the West but only that there should be some parity of treatment for them in the overall program. To understand why I make this distinction between priority and parity, however, it may be well to step back a bit and look at some basic premises.

In the study of other cultures or civilizations, some degree of self-understanding is prerequisite to an understanding of others, and similarly an understanding of one’s own situation or one’s own past may be accepted as a precondition for understanding another’s. Our experience with the Asian Humanities at Columbia shows how much deeper and more meaningful the new learning experience can be for those who have first come to an appreciation—or even just a keener awareness—of their own tradition. The same principle, I would readily concede, applies in reverse to the Asians’ understanding of the West, which may be just as advantaged or handicapped, depending upon how well they have come to know their own culture. Those who have been deprived by an almost total uprooting from their own cultural traditions, as in China during the long blight of the Maoist era and especially during the Cultural Revolution, may be no less disadvantaged in understanding the West for all the hunger to learn from it that they now show. Not to come to terms with one’s past or in some degree to master one’s own tradition is to remain a hostage to it, even though unconsciously so, and thus not to become fully master of oneself. In such a condition, being unable to take responsibility for oneself and one’s own past, one is in a poor position to become truly responsive to others’.

Another aspect of the “parity” issue is highlighted by the recent spectacular rise of China to a dominant role in world economics and politics. It is natural for departments and administrators to let such highly political developments influence their academic decisions and to want to mount courses that appeal to the interest or awareness generated by the headlines. A true core program must resist this if it promotes China at the expense of a long-term perspective that sees China’s importance in the context of Asian civilizations as a whole. Only in a global perspective can true parity and indeed true depth be recognized.

All this may verge on rhetorical overkill, but to me such considerations are bound to enter into what I have referred to above as “parity of treatment.” If one can appreciate what it would mean for the Great Books of the Western World to be represented only by Plato’s Republic or the Book of Job—a meaningless question for anyone who had not read considerably more of the Great Books than that—one can begin to appreciate why a reading of the Analects alone might not do sufficient justice to the Confucian tradition; why the Dhammapada by itself would be inadequate to represent Buddhism; and why one would face an impossible dilemma if one had to choose between the Dream of the Red Chamber and the Tale of Genji, Śakuntalā or the Nō drama, the Rāmāyana or Du Fu, as candidates for infiltration into a humanities sequence or world-literature course otherwise based on the Western tradition. If the selectivity that is always a prime factor in the design of core curricula or general-education programs should be taken to rule out more than token representation for the East, and if to include the Analects (or, as some generous souls even proposed twenty years ago, Mao Zedong) would mean dropping Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, John Locke, or Immanuel Kant from the list, one must wonder whether the result would do justice to either East or West.

Even while putting the question this way, I do not rule out the possibility of accepting such unpalatable choices, if only to serve the educational purpose of getting an East-West dialogue started. It all depends on knowing where you want to go and how, by what stages and means, you hope to get there. For this it is important to recognize that the risks of distortion or misrepresentation are great. If one knows how painfully abbreviated is even the usual one- or two-year sequence in the Western humanities, or how deficient the student’s familiarity often is with the great works of his own tradition, one will not rush to a solution that only compounds the difficulty.

Whatever is to be done, it seems to me, should be governed by two considerations. The first is that the reading and understanding of a text should work, as much as possible, from the inside out rather than from the outside in. Granted that we are indeed outsiders looking in, we must make the effort to put ourselves in the position or situation of the author and his audience. This means that no reading of an Eastern text should be undertaken that is so removed from its original context as to be discussable only in direct juxtaposition to something Western. Such a reading leads almost inevitably to one-sided comparisons and does not serve genuine dialogue. Party to this new dialogue must be enough of the original discourse (writings presenting alternative or contrasting views) so that the issues can be defined in their own terms and not simply in opposition to, or agreement with, the West. If a world-literature course or humanities program can include enough works of the original tradition to meet this test, the risks run may be worth taking.

Since the inclusion of more than a few such works will put a strain on any reading program that is part of an already crowded core curriculum, a second set of considerations will likely come into play: how can we conceive of a total learning process that makes the best use of scarce resources (deployment of instructional staff, provision of texts and teaching materials) and, above all, of the student’s time to provide a properly balanced and truly global program?

Most persons who face this question will be teachers and administrators in colleges and universities, but I do not mean to limit the discussion to academics. The need for global education is widely felt and cannot be met simply within the framework of the college curriculum. Granted that the undergraduate years are where the process should start, it is neither reasonable nor realistic to suppose that an adequate liberal education can be compressed simply within the typical four-year college program. I have long believed that there is a need for core curricula even in graduate schools, and this for more reasons than just to provide remedial instruction in matters neglected by many colleges (including the Asian humanities and much else that is antecedent to civilization). But this is not the place to argue the point, and whatever might be undertaken in graduate schools would still not do the whole job.

Having come to this point, it may be in order for me to suggest what are the classics I would consider essential to a basic reading program—a list that could be defined as what might be appropriate for an introductory, one-year course. A more generous selection is found in what follows, which gives the teacher or discussion leader more to choose from in meeting the needs of particular groups or to draw upon for somewhat more leisurely reading and a less pressured learning situation. In this light, what I propose here is not necessarily ideal, nor on the other hand does it represent the bare minimum, but rather something more like a Mean. As an introduction to the major Asian traditions, one could hope that it would not misrepresent them but rather provide enough pleasure in the reading and enough stimulus for discussion that most participants would emerge from the experience with an appetite for more and the wherewithal to pursue its satisfaction.

Rabindranath Tagore and Mohandas Gandhi: two contrasting views of the Indian tradition in its encounter with the West. These are the only modern writers on our list, but Tagore’s poems and plays and Gandhi’s so-called Autobiography, though admittedly not “classics,” have been perennial favorites for the way they juxtapose aspects of Indian tradition in response to the challenges of the West.

Major options not availed of above: the epic Mahābhārata; the Yoga sūtras of Patañjali; Kautilya’s Artha Śāstra, a guide to politics; the Little Clay Cart of King Śudraka (c. 400 C.E.), a most entertaining domestic drama; the famous collection of fables in the Pañcatantra; Bhartrihari’s verses on worldly life, passion, and renunciation; Rāmānuja, a rival to Śankara in religious philosophy, etc., as described in the Guide (n. 7.)

Waiting for the Dawn (Mingyi daifanglu), by Huang Zongxi (1610–1695): a concise critique of the Chinese dynastic system by a major seventeenth-century thinker who synthesized Neo-Confucian political thought with legalist-type statecraft and the encyclopedic scholarship of the Song and Ming. Considered a classic by modern Chinese reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Here it is worthy of special note that women are prominent as authors of the earlier classic works and as dominant figures in many of the later works of drama and fiction.

Alternative selections: Religious writings of the eminent Japanese monks Kūkai, Dōgen, and Hakuin, while important in the history of Japanese religion, were difficult even for the Japanese to understand and, though respected, did not have a wide readership. The more widely read literary and dramatic works were probably also more expressive of the actual religious sentiments of the Japanese, as well as of their literary preferences. These might include, in addition to the above, the major poetry anthologies Kokinshū and Shinkokinshū and the eighteenth-century drama Chūshingura.

The foregoing lists give, I hope, a fair representation of the different preferences and shared values among the great traditions of Asia. They include works that have withstood the tests of time not only in their own traditions but in at least sixty years of reading and discussion with American students of all ages. The optional or alternative readings have been tried from time to time and have their own strong advocates. It should be pointed out that not everything on the list is assigned in its entirety. This is especially true of the long epics and novels. We make concessions to what works in practice and accept compromises for the sake of getting the best overall mix.

The availability of adequate translations has also been a factor in our decisions, especially in the early days of the program, but it has become less of a problem as more good translations have been produced in recent years of a kind suited to our need, that is, in a form accessible to students. If earlier it was said that one test of a great book is how well it survives translation, now the test might well be restated as the classics’ ability not only to survive one translation but also to attract, withstand, and outlast several others.

Today, with more than one translation available of a given work, the layman naturally wants the scholar’s recommendation as to which is best. Not only laymen but even some scholars still have a touching faith in the idea that there is one “authoritative” or “definitive” translation of a work. In truth, it is possible for scholars of equal technical competence to produce translations of almost equal merit, each bringing out different meanings and nuances of the original. Burton Watson and A. C. Graham have each written excellent translations of the Zhuangzi; neither, I suspect, would claim his own was perfect, but Watson’s may appeal more to those whose interests and tastes are literary and Graham’s to the more philosophical. Interpretations like Thomas Merton’s of the Zhuangzi also have their place but should be understood for what they are and not regarded as translations. It is also possible for nonspecialists such as Ezra Pound, Witter Bynner, or Lin Yutang sometimes to capture the meaning of certain passages in Chinese works and render them in vivid English that is less literal than the sinologue would like but more meaningful or moving to the reader.

Our practice is to recommend at least one preferred translation (if only for the sake of having a common basis for discussion) but to urge students, wherever possible, to read more than one rendering and arrive at their own sense of where the common denominator among them may lie. In this process of triangulation—getting a bearing or fix on a text from several translators’ different angles of vision—the reader has his own proper judgmental part to play, bringing his or her own learning and experience to bear on the assessment of what the original might mean. If so used, translations need not stand in the way of the reader having some active, personal encounter with the text, which the great thinkers and teachers have so often called for.

Further to assist the reader in knowing what to look for in these books, I have asked colleagues knowledgeable in the several traditions to write brief essays on what they perceive to be the most essential values in the works they know well or most enjoy. Among these guest essayists are several distinguished scholars who have themselves contributed substantially to making the classics available in translation. In responding to this opportunity they have, in several cases, chosen to write about works somewhat less well known in the West than those already highly acclaimed.

In conclusion, I should like to make one further point concerning the importance of reading the “Asian classics.” The basic criterion for recognizing them as classics has been that they were first so admired in their own tradition. In quite a few cases, this admiration spread to other countries, and these works came to be regarded as either scriptures or great books outside their own homeland. Further, after substantial contact was made by the West with Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many of these works came to be translated and admired in the West as well. Some of the exotic appeal of the unknown and “mysterious” East may still attach to them, but for at least two centuries they have been essential reading for many of the best minds in the West—philosophers, historians, poets, playwrights, and indeed major writers in almost every field of thought and scholarship. Thus one whose education does not include a reading of the Asian classics today is a stranger not only to Asia but to much of the best that has been thought and written in the modern West. Many of these works and their authors have already entered the mainstream of the conversation that is going on in the West today. As that conversation is broadened to include a fairer representation of the Asian traditions, bringing out the implicit dialogue within and among them, it could indeed become a Great Conversation for all the world.