The Transcendental and the Mundane

Revisiting the foundation of Chinese spiritual life, the prestigious historian Cho-yun Hsu seeks a way to connect Chinese culture with the world.

This book is an insightful and lively discussion of the spiritual life of the Chinese people. Through investigation of cultural ideals and life practices, Professor Cho-yun Hsu constructs an original portrait of Chinese cultural values. Apart from the exalted subtleties of the scholarly elite, he pays much attention to everyday people’s daily practices and collective memory, seeking to clarify Chinese ideas concerning the universe, human life, and nature, from traditional times down to the present day.

Professor Hsu contends the problems Western civilization is facing nowadays, including various crises of alienation and separation from nature, are ones that it lacks resources to solve. He believes Chinese humanistic culture might offer another way forward and be of benefit to the future of the world.

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A work of passionate humanism, this book is a heartfelt call to the world to take seriously the best aspects of traditional Chinese culture in order to avoid a looming catastrophe.

—Ian Johnson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author

Professor Hsu is deservedly a legend in Chinese Studies, and this book only adds to a long and distinguished publication record by an innovative scholar who has contributed to an enormous range of disciplines. Like all of Hsu’s works, this can be read with pleasure and profit, as it is studded with insights drawn from antiquity to contemporary history. Highly recommended.

—Michael Nylan, Sather Professor of History, University of California at Berkeley

Professor Hsu undertakes a sweeping review of the beliefs, values, and visions that constitute Chinese civilizations from the ancient times to the present. Historically engaged and critically provocative, it is a must-read for anyone interested in Chinese Studies.

—David Der-wei Wang, Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature, Harvard University

This account of traditional Chinese ways of thinking and being by one of the world’s most eminent Sinologists is an invaluable witness to lived Chinese cultural history and its overriding ideal of harmony. Not since Lin Yutang’s My Country and My People has there been such an accessibly erudite tribute to one of the world’s great civilizations.

—John Lagerwey, Research Professor of Chinese Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

It is a masterpiece that digs deeply into the roots of problems and their underlying values in modern Chinese society in a tradition that goes as far back as to the formative stage of Chinese civilization. Reading through the lines of the book, there is a deep sense of passion and concern for the future of the humankind.

—Li Feng, Professor of Early Chinese History and Archaeology, Columbia University