Books by Stephen Little (editor)
“This is a super cool book about art and Daoist aesthetics. Even though this is a book-centered interview, I wanted to articulate dimensions of the Daoist tradition that aren’t just literary. It’s one of these fallacies that’s been baked into the Western reception of Daoism, that it’s somehow about books. The earliest sinologists engaging with these Daoist texts were Protestant missionaries who brought all of their Protestant baggage, the sola scriptura, with them: ‘Where is the Bible of Daoism? Once we have its Bible, then we can understand it.’ But, as I said, that fundamentally does not map onto the reality of the chaos of Daoist history.” Read more...
Simon Cox, Historian
Interviews where books by Stephen Little (editor) were recommended
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1
The Taoist Experience: An Anthology
by Livia Kohn -
2
The Daode jing Commentary of Cheng Xuanying: Daoism, Buddhism, and the Laozi in the Tang Dynasty
by Friederike Assandri (translator) -
3
Zhuangzi: A New Translation of the Sayings of Master Zhuang as Interpreted by Guo Xiang
by Richard John Lynn (translator) -
4
Taoism and the Arts of China
by Stephen Little (editor) -
5
Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life
by John Gray
The best books on Taoism, recommended by Simon Cox
The best books on Taoism, recommended by Simon Cox
In the West, Daoism (also spelled ‘Taoism’ in English) has sometimes been reduced to a ‘go with the flow’ approach to life, but there’s a lot more to it than that. Simon Cox, a scholar and martial arts teacher, recommends five books that demonstrate Daoism’s “robust intellectual and aesthetic traditions” since the movement first appeared in China two-and-a-half millennia ago.
