ToastWen

The Sinosphere canon,
read closely.

Texts written in Literary Chinese — the shared written language of China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam until the twentieth century — with parallel translations, character-by-character readings in Mandarin, Sino-Korean, and Sino-Japanese, and a glossary that follows each key term across the whole corpus and across the traditions that argued over it.

Phase 0 · 580 passages · 1,623 characters · 3 concepts. What's here and what's coming →

Texts

論語 The Analects China · compiled c. 5th–3rd c. BCE Sayings of Confucius (孔子) and his disciples, gathered by later followers. 道德經 Tao Te Ching China · c. 4th c. BCE (oldest excavated text late 4th c. BCE) Eighty-one short chapters ascribed to Laozi (老子), the "Old Master." The root text of philosophical Daoism: the Way (道) that cannot be named, non-action (無為), and the power (德) of yielding.

Concept of the moment

rén — benevolence · humaneness · co-humanity · Goodness
仁 is the master virtue of the Confucian tradition and the hardest of its terms to translate — Legge's "perfect virtue" and "true virtue," Waley's "Goodness," Ames and Rosemont's "authoritative conduct," Slingerland's "Goodness." The graph combines 人 *person* and 二 *two*: virtue as it exists between people. See how Zhu Xi and Ogyū Sorai read it →