Huainanzi

Last month I received an email message from Better World Books that they were having a one-day 50% off sale of their already inexpensive bargain books. Since our meager budget has grown tighter these days, I jumped at the opportunity to purchase several books for not a lot of dough. I ended up with 7 used books for less than $15! A darn good deal, I say.

One of these books is The Book of Leadership and Strategy by Thomas Cleary. It features snippets from the Huainanzi. In his introduction, Cleary describes this book as a collection of extracts from

"The Master's of Huainan," an early Taoist classic following the ancient tradition of Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu. Composed over two thousand years ago, Huainanzi is one of the oldest and most prestigious works of the Taoist philosophy.

Since I do not have the entire text at my disposal, I will be unable to feature it in serial form (like the Analects of Confucius). Instead, I will begin a series that looks at several of the passages and my commentary or observations about each.

From the little I have read thus far, this book appears to be very interesting AND illuminating!