Is there a such thing as Eastern canon? What would be included?

I'm guessing this is pseudo-troll-memeing but if you pause for a moment I want you to ask yourself what your opinion is on the status of Eastern literature as compared to Western literature. What's your honest opinion or suspicion?

Now ask yourself how many Chinese books or authors you can name. Ask yourself if you really know anything about China at all.

Then realize that you don't have the equipment (knowledge) necessary to make the comparison.

Then, hopefully, you'll be curious and you'll go start filling in your lacunae with reading.

I'm not terribly familiar with China but the bits I've run across have been absolutely wonderful. They have the only substantial literary output in ideogramatic language. Just using the Chinese language to do philosophy/poetry seems to produce really unique ideas.

Like most people, China is a mystery to me dude. I doubt much of its written history or cultural artifacts, literature included, survived the Cultural Revolution. The official history of China is likely pseudo-history, written by the Chicoms.

You're intellectually feeble and inclined to seeking out literature that reinforces your existing views.

Congratulations. That's not exactly a terrible disposition to have. But when you go around talking about ideas like you're really interested in them, you're part of the problem, spreading ignorance and confusion. Just say you don't know and move on.

>Then, hopefully, you'll be curious and you'll go start filling in your lacunae with reading.
It's probably more productive to study the literature of your own civilization than that of an alien one which you will never understand to any significant degree without specialist education. But to each their own.

>You're intellectually feeble and inclined to seeking out literature that reinforces your existing views
Thanks Dr. Freud, how much do I owe you for this session?

There's a reason philologists are the first pioneers into foreign literature. I'm not too hung up on translations and I trust the experts to be good communicators of the traditions they study.

You are quite right that there is no time to learn everything we should want to, but you can do a shocking amount of reading if you apply yourself.

I knew an old man who was as comfortable talking about Greek philosophy as he was talking about Vedanta. His language abilities were extraordinary-- Chinese, English, French, Japanese, Vietnamese, Sanskrit. He was a professor. But in that capacity he illustrates just how much work it is possible for us to get done with steady application and inexhaustible curiosity.

>Just say you don't know and move on
As I said, China is a mystery to me dude.

Someone previously mentioned the Four Great CLASSICAL novels, but there is one curious omission, one that forgets arguably the best one of all: Jin Ping Mei, the Plum in the Golden Vase or occasionally The Golden Lotus.

It's a book about mannerisms written anonymously by a guy who called himself the Scoffing Scholar of Lanling, and most translations/publications of it are censored.

The Tale of Genji is also a pivotal work in any Eastern Canon.

Still the question is peculiar: the Canon was formed due to a same religion and generally same philosophical timeline among European classics. Asian ones have maybe a Chinese, Indian, and Japanese Canon, but to combine them is more like a list of culturally important books than any Canon. You'd read Water Margin and reflect on the Chinese legalistic themes before flying off to Brahimic social orders and finish with the prose style of early Japanese literature. It'd be a mess.

I'm not talking about translation, I'm talking about the fundamental disconnect that exists between different civilizations, which do not share the same paradigms of thought. A text may be translated accurately, but without possessing the broader cultural "mind" it can still remain incomprehensible.

Moby Thick

Yuck.

I understand what you're saying, but I think it's just difficult, not impossible. Moreover there are enormous parts of the western canon that are so temporally, culturally or linguistically remote (like the Hebrew Bible or Greek philosophy/poetry) that they present almost the same level of difficulty to the modern reader as, say, the Upanisads.

No.

Journey to her Yeast

Will I ever grip a woman by her thick hips and sway her into my kiss, senuous pleasures of the flesh

china btfo?

yeah, this. Throw in the 13 Histories too.
and the 4 Books of Confucius (just 1 really, a boring list of history stuff and 2 little essays from somewhere else, so not even 4 full 'books' as we know it).

The Five Classics are unreadable except maybe some of the poems but they're quite gay to be honest.

>It's a book about mannerisms
understatement of the current year

Who is this sperm wyrm?

>eastern canon
yep, read the early church fathers and eastern orthodoxy. see The Philokalia.

Best post in this thread

Does Tartarian literature have a place in the Eastern canon?

my sides!

>I doubt much of its written history or cultural artifacts, literature included, survived the Cultural Revolution
100% wrong. Granted, you say 'I doubt' so you obviously don't know anything about it, but even so...

Do you really think an event that began in the 1960s, lasted a decade at most, and didn't even cover all of the Chinese-speaking world could somehow magically wipe out most of the Chinese literary heritage and historical records?

based Ivan

yeah, thank the Jade Emperor for Free China-Taiwan, Hong Kong and the overseas Chinese communities.

Does any Chinese literature or history you have read document any sort of trade, diplomacy, warfare or cultural exchange with their mysterious neighbour to the north that seems to have been written out of history?

>100% wrong
Lol you seem pretty sure of yourself, but I know you're full of shit and as clueless about China as I am dude

Even then, user seems to have a massively exaggerated picture of the Cultural Revolution. They didn't systematically burn all of the libraries, bookshops and printing presses. In fact I remember reading that they printed more copies of the Analects than ever before in history in that period- the leftists launched a 'criticise Confucius' campaign, but realised that most people wouldn't have a clue what they were talking about so they had to print the books with negative annotations and notes.

Wrong again. Don't assume everyone on this site is equally clueless about everything.

>magically wipe out most of the Chinese literary heritage and historical records
Not magical at all. Culture, literature and records are usually centralized in major cities. Purge an entire generation of intelligensia and state bureaucrats, and voila! Brand new society with a new official history. Any documents that happen to survive into the new era can be written off as "myths" or "anomalies" once the new consensus is established in the new generation. Do you not know how revolutions work dude?

you might want to put it into perspective though, to be honest: perhaps only the campaigns of the maniacal First Emperor, the Taiping Rebellion, and the anti-Buddhist destruction of the random emperors involved wrought as much damage on Chinese culture as did the CR, and even then, Map liked to boast about how much more they'd destroyed than their predecessors.
Perhaps the worst thing about all this was not the sheer destruction, but the alteration of the mentalities into one of fear so people would destroy the books and stuff themselves for fear of being found out and persecuted or suicided or whatever.
Culturecide, pure and simple.

And that's actually been done where? Because it didn't happen in China, and I have to doubt any purge could be so effective. Revolutionaries might -want- to completely rewrite history, but that doesn't mean they get to.

In any case, user was talking about the literal destruction of literature- which in China's case would mean tracking down and burning hundreds of thousands of copies of things. Outside dystopian fiction, what dictatorship could even have the resources for that?

The thing about purges and the application of terror to a populace is, you dont need to completely rewrite history. Scared and demoralized societies will generally act with obedience and be compliant with the new order, no-one is going to be a martyr or put their families lives at risk for "muh historic accuracy"

Once the new order is established, what makes you think the state needs to go around destroying literature? People will do it of their own accord if they're afraid of reprisals. Political correctness is a powerful mechanism of social control.

>you dont need to completely rewrite history
I know- that's what I've been saying. It's not necessary and it's logistically impossible anyway.

>what makes you think the state needs to go around destroying literature?
I don't. That's what user (maybe you) implied.

>People will do it of their own accord
Certainly, stuff got destroyed. But to back up the claim that any literature was literally completely destroyed- as in, a work which was known before 1949 but which was completely expunged from the PRC with no surviving copies - I'd need examples. user's claim that this could happen to 'much of' China's literature is massively implausible and seems based in a fantasy version of Chinese history.

the First Emperor of China, for starters, dipshit.

The Qianlong Emperor also disappeared all documents relating to the court case involving Zeng Jing's libel against the Yongzheng Emperor. They only survived in the secret imperial archives as well as some libraries in Japan from being smuggled overseas.

>documents relating to a very specific legal case
>and even they weren't completely destroyed
Nice. So how exactly is that a 'Brand new society with a new official history'? The posts above describe most documents in the entire culture being destroyed (hence 'any documents that happen to survive', implying a fortunate minority). Is that really what happened under the Qing, user? Would Qing China be completely unrecognisable to a time traveller from the Ming?

As for Qin Shihuang- that stuff's clearly exaggerated (ironically, by the Han who were of course busy writing their own official history and had a vested interest in making the guy they overthrew look bad).

It's probably closer to what user's talking about, but again it's nothing nearly so radical as a 'brand new society'. To state the painfully obvious... if the Qin completely destroyed the classics and erased the historical records, how come the classics still exist?

I want to east her canon, if you catch my drift.

this refers to the destruction of a very specific piece of literature (not just the court documents - the book the Yongzheng emperor had especially compiled and widely published throughout the empire). The fact that they were able to pull it off raises many other questions. That copies were preserved by the government itself or in Japanese libraries is irrelevant except to historians since we are talking about Chang Public here.

And yes, the damage wrought by the so-called cultural revolution was inestimable. But you presumably either have not been to China or are some post-90s PRC golden-spoon pleb studying abroad, and thus with vested interested in supporting your present government.

Jesus, I come into this whole thread to see a bunch of hot slope bitches and am thoroughly disappointed Veeky Forums. Great job, retards. This board sucks now

>Productive
Kys

...

This board is for literature you brainlet, not for thots and their tricks

>this refers to the destruction of a very specific piece of literature
Yes, and that's my point. I don't doubt that this can be done for specific books- what I'm saying is that that nobody's been able to erase an entire pre-existing literature / culture, or even come close to that.

...having said that, of course, as I'm typing I've realised that this has actually happened with imperialism- civilisations of the Americas must have come close to complete wipeout. But these were (a) invaded by a completely different and technically superior culture, and (b) I don't think they had all that much literature in the first place, although obviously now it's hard to say. I'm fairly sure nothing like that has happened in China though, except possibly on a local level- it certainly didn't happen on an empire-wide or national level under the Qin, Qing or CCP.

>the damage wrought by the so-called cultural revolution was inestimable
No doubt, but that damage didn't include erasing a large amount of China's literary record, which is what user claimed.

>you presumably
Better to stick to the actual arguments- if you try making assumptions about anons you're generally going to be wrong, as you are in this case, and anyway it's not relevant.

>although obviously now it's hard to say.

Thank you.

Cas closed, m'lud.

>reading shit written by chinks in funny made up characters
WEEB ALERT
Look at these Chinks' "civilization"
Nothing but despotic regimes or cuckoldry and lapdoggery to the west. They are worthless

do you think there are girl forums where they make fun of all the dudes they duped with pictures of their butt?

> Thanks Dr. Freud, how much do I owe you for this session?
One buttsex.

what's wrong with a dose of good old Oriental Despotism?

This is a good list I found recently. (Originally from http ://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?82862-list-of-grounbreaking-books)

*http ://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?82862-list-of-grounbreaking-books

Bai Juyi

damn shame about the face

They've got Mishima I guess

Their philosophers maybe but nothing like Homer really took off

I would like to bump her

I'd shoot her with my Yeast Canon