Hogwarts before there was Hogwarts. Heck, Dorian Gray before there was Dorian Gray! Pu Songling was there first. Take a listen as Lee and Rob discuss the story of two men, a priest, and a painting that gets a little too lifelike.
There aren’t a lot of things we agree on, but one of them is Pu Songling. The author of Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio 聊斋志异 (1740), which is exactly what it sounds like: a collection of strange tales. Very strange. Strange and wonderful. Today we start a three-part series where we dig into this […]
Today, Rob is off doing research in China, so Lee interviews Professor Van Norden. Professor Van Norden is a philosophy professor at Vassar, and he works on early Chinese philosophical texts. He recently published a textbook for learning Classical Chinese (文言文). The book, called Classical Chinese for Everyone, is the outgrowth of Professor Van Norden’s […]
Today, Rob and Lee say goodbye, or, at least, say goodbye to the face to face format of podcasting. Rob has earned a Chateaubriand Scholarship to the Sorbonne in Paris, where he will be researching the nexus of Chinese and French culture in the late Qing. That means Lee and Rob may have to change […]
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 […]
Man drinks with his buddies. Man upgrades and becomes drinking buddies with one of the grand poobahs of the underworld. Man dies. Man becomes high-ranking bureaucrat in the afterlife. Man becomes more present and caring father and husband from his place in the underworld. That kind of thing happens every day, right? It does in […]
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 […]
Tao Yuanming, who we’ve already covered in a previous podcast, was not only a skilled prose writer but also a poet. In today’s podcast, we look at one of his most famous poems. http://traffic.libsyn.com/chineseliteraturepodcast/Tao_Yuanming_-_Return_to_the_Fields_and_Gardens_-_Edited.mp3