# About ToastWen

ToastWen is a close reader for the Sinosphere classical canon — the body
of texts written in Literary Chinese (文言文 / 漢文 / 한문 / 漢文 kanbun), which
served as the shared written language of China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam until
the early twentieth century. A scholar in Joseon Korea, an Edo-period Confucian
in Japan, and a Qing literatus all read the same Analects in the same
characters — pronounced differently, and glossed by different commentarial
traditions.

## What's in Phase 0

580 passages · 1,623 distinct characters · 3 concept entries — built 2026-09-01.

- The Analects (論語) — all 20 books, 499 passages, with James Legge's
translation alongside the traditional Chinese.
- The Dao De Jing (道德經) — all 81 chapters (Wang Bi recension), with Legge's
Tâo Teh King.
- Character readings — every character in the corpus is tappable, with its
pronunciation in Mandarin, Sino-Korean (한자음), and Sino-Japanese (音読み), plus
its radical, stroke count, and every other place it appears.
- One worked concept — 仁 (rén), followed across both texts and read side by
side by Zhu Xi and Ogyū Sorai, whose interpretations diverge sharply. 道 and 天
are stubbed as a preview of the format.

## What's coming

Phase 1 fills in the Chinese core (the Four Books, the Five Classics, the
Masters), a full concept glossary of 12–15 terms, the cross-reference graph
between texts, and Zhu Xi's Collected Commentaries. Phases 2 and 3 add the
Korean and Japanese layers — the Four–Seven Debate, Dasan, Itō Jinsai, Ogyū
Sorai — and the Japanese kundoku reading apparatus. See the project notes for
the full plan.

## Sources & licensing

- Seed texts and translations — Wikisource:
The Chinese Classics, Vol. 1 (James Legge, 1893) for the Analects; the Wang Bi
Daodejing (zh.wikisource) and Tâo Teh King (Legge, Sacred Books of the
East Vol. 39, 1891) for the Dao De Jing. All public domain.
- Character data — the Unihan database
(Unicode, Inc.), used under the Unicode licence: Mandarin, Korean, and Japanese
readings, radical/stroke data, and definitions.
- Concept essays and commentary summaries are editorial, written for this
site. Where they characterize a thinker's position (Zhu Xi, Ogyū Sorai) they
summarize the scholarly consensus; they are not translations of the primary
commentaries, which remain under copyright in their modern editions.

Contact: [email protected]