Sources of Chinese Tradition: Volume 1

Bought this book for a course. Comprehensive - very detailed accounts of history and philosophy. The professor doesn't really "teach," so this book has been an invaluable resource.

This book is excellent for anyone wanting to read primary source information. It is a great help for any college student or proffessor interested in the Chinese Culture. I highly recommend this to any one who is interested in Chinese history.

This book gets the majority of its bulk from direct translations of actual Chinese texts, and as such it is an indespensible tool for any student interested in Chinese religions and philosohpies. There is very little input on the part of the editors and I, personally, was very thankful this. It can be dreadfully difficult trying to find sources that aren't mired in thousands of pages of theory and speculation, and sometimes a person just needs the root text! An awesome book.

I'll make this short...For anyone interested in Chinese history, literature, or culture, this volume is an absolutely essential collection of primary sources, and includes prefaces and explanations by China scholars. There is no one better than de Bary, and this new edition includes everything from the 1960 edition up through the Jiang Zemin era.

I've read a little of this and that about Chinese history and religion, and I needed a book to fill in the basics and the details. This was perfect.First, the selections included excerpts of almost everything I'd ever heard of: Shang Oracle Bones, the Analects of Confucius and the Confucian classics including the I Ching; Mozi; the Tao Te Ching; Zhuangzi (who famously dreamed that he was a butterfly); Mencius; Xunzi; the Zuozhuan; Sun Tzu's art of war; all kinds of stuff about Chinese schools of Buddhism including the Lotus Sutra and the Flower Garden Sutra and the history of Guanyin and Wutai Shan; Li Po (Li Bo) and Tu Fu (Du Fu); and neo-Confucianism (which was so influential in Korea). In short, this is really, practically the "Eatern Canon" and the selections are deserving of such a label. I was in turns morally and intellectually challenged, uplifted, informed and surprised; but rarely bored and never disappointed.Second, the introductory essays were exactly what I wanted to know: who might have written it, and when, and who read, and what it meant to them. For all that information, they were still brief and the bibliography was sufficient to help me chase the points that left me curious. An important thing these essays did was to cover the political, historical and social backgrounds (and foregrounds) of the texts, so I learned about Chinese history as well as literature and religion. If that is what you want to do, this book will serve you well.The binding is excellent, and while the price might look steep I have to say it's a bargain considering what you get.I didn't read Volume Two, and so I don't know if it is as good. It is certainly a lot smaller!