Balanced Discourses

Xu Gan, one of the Seven Masters of Jian'an, wrote Balanced Discourses on learning, virtue, fame and government as the Han dynasty fell apart around him. Clear and earnest, it defends real learning against empty reputation and offers a moving portrait of a scholar trying to live rightly in an age of collapse. This is a complete new English translation, with names in modern pinyin and the text rendered as plain, readable English prose. It is short enough to read in an evening and deep enough to return to for years, and the English keeps the paradoxes and stories intact. The early Chinese thinkers argued about the same questions we still ask: how to live, how to govern, what is natural and what can be known.