This podcast we take a look at a story from a strange Daoist classic, the Huainanzi 淮南子. The tale is called Old Man on the Border Loses his Horse 塞翁失馬. The story title is, itself a chengyu, that means something like you never know if something that seems unfortunate is actually fortunate. Here is the […]
Greek philosophy has the dialogues of Plato. Chinese philosophy has those of Mencius. As one half of the “Kong-Meng” 孔孟 duo (Confucius and Mencius), Mencius was more responsible than perhaps anyone in history for the spread of a kind of thought that later generations would call Confucianism. In this podcast, we talk about a famous […]
50th Podcast Anniversary We Made it to 50! No one expected it, least of all us, but this is our 50th episode with the podcast. Today, Rob and Lee are going to celebrate just like the ancients used to….with a Top 5 Countdown! The pair will share what the top five works of Chinese literature […]
This story, The Great Maudgalyayana Rescues his Mom from Hell, is one of the earliest in Chinese vernacular fiction. The version we are reading was found in Dunhuang by Aurel Stein, the Hungarian Britisher who discovered the world’s oldest known book. Today’s story looks at Maudgalyayana, the Indian Buddhist who travels into the depths of hell […]
We here introduce one of the great duos in Chinese literary history: Zhuang Zi and his less-than-intelligent foil, Huizi. In this classic passage, the pair discuss whether it is possible to know how others feel, and on what basis one can make those kinds of assumptions. As is usual with Zhuangzi, nothing is fixed, so […]
Tao Yuanming’s Peach Blossom Spring is one of the most famous in all of Chinese literature. A fisherman wanders into a cave and stumbles upon a utopia, but leaves it all because he wants to tell others. Join us as we dive into the cave with Tao Yuanming. http://traffic.libsyn.com/chineseliteraturepodcast/Peach_Blossom_-_finished.mp3
Confucius, Confucius, Confucius. What more can be said about the man who, since two and a half millinea after he lived, has defined China. In this podcast, we will focus on how a single passage, just eight characters echoes throughout Chinese literature and beyond, even into the contemporaneous Communist Party shindig happening in Beijing this […]
Well, this is it: our Aerosmith-on-Wayne’s-World podcast, the one where someone way out of our league is gracious enough to pay us a visit. We recently had the distinct privilege of sitting down with one of the U.S. academy’s most respected scholars on ancient Chinese texts: Professor Emeritus Stephen Durrant. Prof. Durrant is the […]
Are you listening to the world’s only Chinese Literature podcast right now? Or are you just a butterfly floating around who is dreaming that you are a human who is listening to this podcast? How can you prove that you are actually the human rather than a butterfly dreaming they are a human? Is it […]
The multi-volume Records of the Grand Historian, by Sima Qian, is one of the masterworks of Chinese history and literature . Even today it is the only source for much of our information on pre-Han (206 B.C.E.) China. One of the classic stories from the collection is The Biography of Xiang Yu (《项羽本纪》). Lee and I […]