Audiobooks by Lionel Giles

The Art of War: The Classic Work With Comprehensive Annotations From The Greatest Chinese Commentato

There are many versions of this work in English, and it is included as a useful reflection once one has pondered Daoism’s key texts. The title is properly ‘'Sun Tzu's Military Method'. It was written at the time of the Dao and Zhuang Zi, several centuries before the Lieh Tzu. For fifteen hundred years, it was part of China’s canonical strategic anthology, which became known as the Seven Military Classics. In modern Anglophone culture it is often the only strategic text someone has read, supplanting and exceeding the previous dominant strategic text (von Clausewitz’s On War, 1832, tr. 1874). Leaders from Mao Zedong and Takeda Shingen to Võ Nguyên Giáp and Norman Schwarzkopf Jr. have explicitly acknowledged the book’s influence on them. This translation is notably the second major version of it in English. It follows a translation by Everard Ferguson Calthrop that Giles found deeply contemptible, as one can see from the introduction. It is important to note that most scholars do not consider the Art of War one of the classic Daoist texts. While it is a product and application of the philosophy, it is more of an exegetical monograph than a consideration of the philosophical underpinnings of Daoism. Much like the Zhuang Zi, it takes the core ideas and realizes them in specific practical situations. It does so with such certainty that many contest it as a ‘true’ Daoist work. As you will see from the discussions embedded elsewhere, the key Daoist texts value contradiction and paradox far too much to be as procedurally simple as the Art of War is. It is not clear that this criticism is fair, however. A much kinder perspective is that Daoism’s great failure is in its apparent lack of any utilitarian or social value. While Confucianism provides a balance, Sun Tzu’s work attempts to build a more practical version of Daoism than the key texts allow for.

Lionel Giles, Sun Tzu (Author), Charles Featherstone (Narrator)

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Essentials of Daoism: Including: The Sayings of Lao Tzu, The Dao De Jing, Zhuangzi, Lieh Tzu, and Su

This book comprises five classic works of Chinese mysticism. Culturally, these are the companion works to Confucius’ thoughts, as expanded by Mencius. Confucianism is very much the Apollonian side of Chinese culture. It focuses on matters of ethics, hierarchy, responsibility, and social obligation. Daoism is the other side of the coin, focused on abstraction and uncertainty. The two translators included in this volume were very different men. While they wrote in the same period, their audiences were distinct from one another, and this comes through in their differing approaches to the original texts they are working with. One was a missionary, looking to ensure that his fellow spreaders of the word could understand as completely and correctly as possible the culture that they had come into. The other was a curator at the British Museum, who popularized the first English translations for a thoroughly domestic market.

Chuang Tzu, James Legge, Lao Tzu, Laozi, Lie Yukou, Liezi, Lionel Giles, Sun Tzu, Sun Wu, Zhuang Zhou (Author), Charles Featherstone (Narrator)

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The Sayings of Lao-Tzu: An accessible narrative prose translation of the Dao De Jing

A prose translation of the Tao that focuses on bringing out the subtlety and depth of the classic Way. Translations of the famous Way and Virtue (Dao De Jing/Tao Te Ching) focus on the poetics and depth of the original. In contrast, Giles’ translation focuses on telling stories with the text, drawing out the nuances in a way that is more familiar to Western audiences from philosophical and religious texts. “Few can help being struck by the similarity of tone between the sayings of Lao Tzu and the Gospel enunciated six centuries later by the Prince of Peace. There are two famous utterances in particular which secure to Lao Tzu the glory of having anticipated the lofty morality of the Sermon on the Mount. The cavilers who would rank the Golden Rule of Confucius below that of Christ will find it hard to get over the fact that Lao Tzu said, 'Requite injury with kindness,' and 'To the not-good I would be good in order to make them good.' It was a hundred and fifty years later that Plato reached the same conclusion in the first book of the Republic. It is interesting to observe certain points of contact between Lao Tzu and the early Greek philosophers. He may be compared both with Parmenides, who disparaged sense-knowledge and taught the existence of the One as opposed to the Many, and with Heraclitus, whose theory of the identity of contraries recalls some of our Sage's paradoxes. But it is when we come to Plato that the most striking parallels occur. It has not escaped notice that something like the Platonic doctrine of ideas is discoverable in the 'forms' which Lao Tzu conceives as residing in Tao. But, so far as I know, no one has yet pointed out what a close likeness Tao itself bears to that curious abstraction which Plato calls the Idea of the Good.” eBook Includes images of Wang Bi's classic commentary to the Dao.

Lao-Tzu, Lionel Giles (Author), Chirag Patel (Narrator)

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