Considered the most inovative study of Chinese poetry ever written, François Cheng's Chinese Poetic Writing--now in its first expanded, English-language edition--is an essential read for fans and scholars of Chinese literature and the art of poetry in general.   Since its first publication in French in 1977, Chinese Poetic Writing has been considered by many to be the most innovative study of Chinese poetry ever written, as well as a profound and remarkable meditation on the nature of poetry itself. As the American poet Gustaf Sobin wrote, two years after the book’s appearance, “In France it is already considered a model of interdisciplinary research, a source book, and a ‘star’ in the very space it initially explored, traced, and elaborated.”   Cheng illustrates his text with an annotated anthology of 135 poems he has selected from the Tang dynasty, presented bilingually, and with lively translations by Jerome P. Seaton. It serves as a book within the book, and an excellent introduction to the golden age of Tu Fu, Li Po, Wang Wei, and company.   The 1982 translation, long out of print, was based on the first French edition. Since then, Cheng has greatly expanded the book. This is the first English-language edition of the expanded version, with the original translators returning to accommodate the many new additions and revise their earlier work.

Chinese poetic writing (Studies in Chinese literature and society)

Cheng, François

Literature & Fiction

Indiana University Press

Chinese Poetic Writing: With An Anthology of T'ang Poetry (Studies in Chinese Literature and Society)

Poetry

Indiana Univ. Pr

In a medieval abbey near Paris, in a room piled high with old Chinese texts, lies a manuscript gathering dust. Though ordinary in appearance, it first captures the eye of the narrator of François Cheng's novel. Then, once he begins to read, it captures his imagination and his heart. The book dates from the mid-seventeenth century, during the twilight of the Ming Dynasty. Barbarian armies are massing along the Empire's Northern borders, and a vast and sophisticated civilization-during whose heyday China had begun to emerge from its long isolation and undergone an explosion in the arts equal in its way to Europe's Renaissance-teeters on the brink of monumental and perhaps catastrophic change. Yet rather than filled with lore of military heroism, or with tales of palace intrigue, or with nostalgic memories of better days, the book tells a simple and very powerful love story. It opens to a spring day, when a middle-aged doctor named Dao-sheng leaves the mountaintop Taoist monastery where he has been living and sets out for the Region of the South, to the city he had once visited thirty years earlier and where his life had been irrevocably changed. He had then been a strapping but poor young musician traveling with theater troupe. One evening, during a performance, he caught the eye of well-born young woman named Lan-ying. Their contact lasted but a minute, but to them it felt like an eternity. For this act of audacity he was banished to hard labor by the girl's jealous fiancée, the dissipated scion of a powerful family, who had witnessed their exchange and grasped its significance. Across the decades of a life spent either on the run or hiding out in monasteries, where he mastered medicine and divination, Dao-sheng never forgot Lan-ying. One exchange of glances had sealed something forever, something whose enduring power would decide their fates. Written with radiant simplicity and wisdom, simultaneously heartbreaking and heart-warming, Green Mountain, White Cloud is a suspenseful tale of passion and revenge set against the backdrop of a great empire's last days. François Cheng gives us star-crossed lovers whose rekindled passion makes the pages of this novel glow. More than a love story, it takes us on a quest as much spiritual as physical, exploring the very essence of love's ageless and transformative power.

Green Mountain, White Cloud: A Novel of Love in the Ming Dynasty

St.Martin's Press

Chinese painting might be called "philosophy in action," for it is one of the highest expressions of Chinese spirituality. Both a medium for contemplation leading to self-transcendence and a microcosm embodying universal principles and primal forces, it is a means for making manifest the Chinese worldview. At the heart of this worldview is the notion of emptiness, the dynamic principle of transformation. Only through emptiness can things attain their full measure and human beings approach the universe at the level of totality. Focusing on the principle of emptiness, Francois Cheng uses semiotic analysis and textual explication to reveal the key themes and structures of Chinese aesthetics in the practice of pictorial art. Among the many Chinese writers, poets, and artists whose writings are quoted, he gives special emphasis to a great Ch'ing dynasty theoretician and painter, Shih-t'ao. Twenty-seven reproductions of the words of Shih-t'ao and other masters illustrate the interpretive commentary.

Empty and Full: the Language of Chinese Painting

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Shambhala

In this work of startling lyricism and beauty, a bestseller and winner of a major prize in France, Francois Cheng delivers a piece of art to be cherished and treasured.

The River Below

Contemporary

Welcome Rain Publishers

The poetry selected for this volume comes from the Tang Dynasty (618907), an era when the influence of Buddhism was at its strongest in China. The best loved and most influential of all Chinese poems come from this period. Like all books in the Shambhala Calligraphy series, In Love with the Way takes a classic spiritual text that has been a subject for calligraphers for many years—and uses it to showcase a uniquely modern example of the calligrapher's art, bringing the text to life in a striking new way. In Love with the Way is accompanied by François Cheng's introductory essay on poetry of the Tang period, and by a closing essay on the work of the calligrapher, Fabienne Verdier. Calligraphy (from the Greek for "beautiful writing") is an art where word and image meet, where the artist strives to give visual expression to the meaning of words in a way that transcends the text while remaining completely faithful to it. It is a discipline that has been invested with spiritual significance wherever it has arisen—and it has arisen throughout the world in every age, in virtually every language, culture, and religion. The Shambhala Calligraphy series is a collection of books devoted to contemporary expressions of this "art of the word," featuring contemporary calligraphers' striking new interpretations of texts that have been traditional subjects for calligraphic interpretation. Whether in Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, or Chinese pictographs, the characters, words, and sentences are brought to life anew here in a choreography of mind, hand, and heart by which letter and spirit fuse in a single stroke.

In Love with the Way: Chinese Poems of the Tang Dynasty (The Calligrapher's Notebooks)

Five meditations on the role of beauty in human life and its direct connection with the sacred • Looks at how beauty has the power to elevate and counterbalance the negative side of the reality facing us • Presents the role of beauty in transforming individuals and transforming the world from a Taoist perspective In a time of mindless violence and widespread ecological and natural catastrophes, François Cheng asks if talking about beauty may not seem incongruous even scandalous. Yet this is actually the most appropriate time to revisit a subject that was a philosophical mainstay for millennia. The power of beauty to elevate and transcend counterbalances the negative side of the reality facing us. As John Keats noted in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” beauty is inseparable from truth: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” The ultimate human reality pivots on these two extremes of the living universe--beauty and evil. Cheng begins his teachings with the intrinsic sense of beauty revealed by the landscape, symbolized by the staggeringly beautiful Lu Mountain of his native province in China. His five meditations carry the reader from the understanding of beauty being in the mind of the beholder to its intimate relationship with the sacred, both from a Western and Taoist perspective. He shows that the most telling indication of the importance of beauty in human life and for individual spiritual realization can be grasped by simply imagining a world without it.

The Way of Beauty: Five Meditations for Spiritual Transformation

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Alternative Medicine

Inner Traditions

Philosophical discussions on the ways that death makes life meaningful and sacred • Reveals how being conscious of death gives our fate its full meaning, inviting the reader to contemplate life in the light of their own death • Examines the author’s experience of ancestor worship in his native China and the beliefs that underlie it • Explains how death is a transition in a longer living process not visible from the modern “black and white” view of life and death • Translated by award-winning translator Jody Gladding Born from intimate discussions with friends, these five meditations on death from poet-philosopher François Cheng examine the multiple ways the prospect of death significantly shapes life and is, in fact, what makes life meaningful and sacred. Written at the age of 84, in the twilight of life, these meditations each approach the human understanding of death from different yet intertwined perspectives, effortlessly returning to certain themes and ideas, questioning them again more deeply with each passing. The author shows that death is a transition in a longer living process not visible from the modern “black and white” view of life and death. He examines his experience of ancestor worship in his native China and the beliefs that underlies it: Our ancestors are alive in another form, that what is living can never die and what is dead has never lived. Cheng looks at the consequences of a world that has abandoned the sacred and avoids the mention of death, a world now blindly staggering through the chaos it has created, yet which can return to balance if we once again embrace the essential sacredness of life as well as death. Throughout these five heart-baring meditations, Cheng invites us to contemplate life in the light of our own death. He reveals that to be conscious of death gives our fate its full meaning. Our death is an integral part of our great adventure in becoming. For if birth is a seed, then death is the fruit--the final sacred product of a life well lived.

Five Meditations on Death: In Other Words . . . On Life

Self-Help

Death & Grief

L'écriture poétique chinoise: Suivi d'une anthologie des poèmes des Tʻang (French Edition)

History

Asia

SEUIL

Vide et plein: Le langage pictural chinois (French Edition)

Reference

Foreign Language Study & Reference

Editions Du Seuil

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