Welcome to this course which is called Classics of Chinese Humanities, Guided Readings. My name is Leo Lee, Lee Ou Fan. I am a professor of Chinese Culture at this university. I've been teaching for the past ten years. Before that I taught at several American universities. So I'm trying to design this course in a bilingual way. There is a Chinese version and there is an English version. This course is designed for the general audience, or the general readers with no background. Or it could be used by freshmen in colleges with some interest in Chinese culture. For this course I plan to give four lectures to be assisted by several others' materials as well as some other audiovisual material. The purpose is to encourage you to develop or to increase an interest in the complexities and richness of the Chinese cultural tradition. Since my specialty is literature, especially Chinese literature, so I would like to use mainly literary texts as a basis for my illustration. The course consists of four lectures, each based on one or two basic texts, mostly literary texts. The first lecture is titled The True Face of Hero. And the basic text is the very famous Biography of Xiang Yu from the Records of the Grand Historian. In Chinese it's called [FOREIGN]. This is a very famous text which has been read by countless Chinese readers and students of all ages. The second lecture is called the Way of the Confucian Tradition. It is based on another famous Tang dynasty intellectual text which discusses the transmission of the Confucian orthodoxy from the ancient times to that period. The third lecture is called Landscapes of Immortality. As the title suggests, it's about nature and art. The text I like to use, again, is a very popular text, called Red Cliff, or Ode to the Red Cliff, two parts, by the famous Song literatus Su Dongpo. The last one is called In Search of the Chinese Soul, which is based on the foremost modern Chinese writer Lu Xun and his two famous short stories, Diary of a Mad Man and The True Story of Q. As you can see, each of these lectures and texts define or delineate one facet of Chinese culture. Of course, my contention is that there are many facets of the Chinese cultural heritage, both past and present. So these four texts or four lectures can serve as modules which may be expanded in the future with supplementary modules and topics. In doing so I have been trying to share with you not a kind of a textbook introduction of Chinese culture, but my own way of reflecting or rethinking about some of the aspects of Chinese culture that I'm really interested in. So my way of teaching is more exploratory than didactic. I really welcome debates and discussions and hopefully you will be able to join us over the web. So of course, if you know Chinese or if you're a bilingual reader, you should by all means consult the syllabus and the Chinese program of this course. If you're English or you're English speaking, you may just want to look into the readings and other materials in this course and listen to my lectures. I have no prerequisite except an interest in China. Of course, if you know something about Chinese history, so much the better. There are any number of Chinese histories in English available. You can pick any one of them. Over my lectures, I will be introducing some of the essential scholarly books and translations that I would like to use for this course. So I think I will not bother anymore, except to say that I really welcome this opportunity, and this is my first experiment in trying to share my views with my prospective and imaginary audience, you. Let me, if I may, give a little detail about each of my four lectures as well as the texts I plan to use. The first one, called The True Face of Hero, is my way of trying to explore the dimensions of the ancient Chinese heroic prototype, based on this very famous historical text by Sima Qian, the Grand Historian of China. Xiang Yu is a name that is known to all Chinese people, old and young. And he has been glorified in countless legends and folktales. And yet he is a man of tremendous complexities of character and deed. In fact, that text made famous by the Grand Historian about his heroism has been subject to so many debates. So I would like to join my voice in this chorus of debates throughout the last millennium, in order to hope to gain a further understanding of this very complex figurative. The second lecture is called The Way of the Confucian Tradition. It sounds very orthodox. It's my way of approaching Confucian legacy. I did not choose Confucius, I did not choose Maicius, because these topics have been covered by many scholars. But rather as a Chinese literature scholar, I have chosen one famous piece called The Origins of the Way, Yaundao, by the Tang Dynasty literatus Han Yu, who himself is a very complex figure. He is known for having written at least scores of essays read, again, throughout the ages. His classical prose is by no means are simple, and yet it contains a richness that can be explored in many ways. One way of doing this text is to see his connections with the Confucian orthodoxy. He quotes Confucius, he quotes Analects and some of the other classics. And yet at the same time he tries to fight against the Buddhist input by sharpening the focus of Confucianism, thereby bequeathing a tremendous legacy which later on was developed by the Song and the Ming intellectual figures. The third topic, called Landscapes of Immortality, is, as the title suggests, a kind of artistic one. I used the two famous Odes to the Red Cliff by Su Dongpo, a Song poet, in order to delineate a very entrenched artistic and aesthetic dimension of Chinese culture. That can be traced all the way back to Zhuang Zhou, the Taoist philosopher. It has a close relationship to Chinese landscape painting, and I'll be using, in fact, the Chinese landscape paintings as a way of illustrating this famous pair of odes by. And finally, I have to bring the whole story down to modernity. Everybody knows that perhaps the foremost modern Chinese writer is Lu Xun. I once did a book on Lu Xun, and I continue to be interested in Lu Xun's complex mind. He has written two very famous founding stories, if you like, of modern Chinese literature, one called Diary of a Madman, the other called The True Stories of Q. Both, in fact, are allegories. Trying to rethink and critically reassess the darker side, in my judgment, of the Chinese tradition, hoping thereby to pose a certain set of modern problems and modern sensibility to this long-entrenched and somewhat declining Chinese tradition. So hopefully with these four lectures, I would like to sort of round up my view, which may be perhaps described as a kind of a contemporary or modern perspective, or another look at a Chinese tradition. Again, let me say that my own specialty is really not classical Chinese literature. But as a modernist I would really like to share with you some of my ideas and perhaps we can join in exploring some of the further complexities as we go into these very interesting texts. Since this is a general course with no prerequisites, there may be some viewers and readers who feel that since they have no background, to approach China this way may pose some difficulties. Let me assure you that we will provide you with all the necessary background material. Suggested titles of books you may be interested in reading, other materials that help you to get into the Chinese world, especially with these names, places and other historical data. We will try to help you along the way, in a very sort of graduated matter, so from the beginning step all the way perhaps to an intermediate and advanced stage. Hopefully, after you have listened to the four lectures and joined in the discussion, you may be able to perhaps go into the museum, look at some of the Chinese classical paintings, or to the bookstore, to your nearby library, to check into the countless number of Chinese books or Western scholarly books on China. It is my own feeling that to understand contemporary China you must understand pre-contemporary, or traditional, China. China as a whole presents perhaps the most fascinating picture. So without further ado, let's go into our next lecture.
