This book interprets the Tao Te Ching from the perspective of personal cultivation. The Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu is regarded as one of the greatest books of wisdom ever written in history, but few can grasp what it says in entirety. Embedded in each of its 5,000 Chinese characters are highly profound messages. Master Sim Pooh Ho is a Tai Chi Master and the leader of a Tai Chi lineage that traces back centuries. In his book Decoding the Tao Te Ching, he combines the ancestral teachings of Tai Chi with his practice and provides readers with unique insights into Lao Tzu's ancient book.The Tao Te Ching is difficult to comprehend because many of the concepts it introduces are elusive. What is Tao and Te, being and non-being or yin and yang? The concepts, however, are discernible in Tai Chi because they are what make the practice work. Decoding the Tao Te Ching is written in a simple manner by a Tai Chi master, and translated in an accessible way by his senior disciple Tekson TEO, thus making it an enlightening read to all English readers interested in this topic.

A major figure in the Anglo-American analytic tradition, Ernest Sosa is a pioneer of contemporary virtue epistemology. Engaging with his important work for the first time, a team of renowned scholars of Chinese philosophy bring Western analytic epistemology into dialogue with themes and issues in the history of the Chinese tradition in order to reveal multiple points of connection. Drawing on thinkers and texts from Confucianism, Daoism, and Chinese Buddhism, chapters explore issues central to virtue epistemology, such as the reliabilist and responsibilist divide, the distinction between virtues constitutive of knowledge and virtues auxiliary to knowledge, epistemic competence, and the role of testimony. Including Sosa’s constructive and systematic responses to each scholar’s interpretation of his work, this volume demonstrates the value of cross-cultural dialogue, advancing the field of virtue epistemology, and paving the way for further engagement between philosophical traditions.

Understanding Chinese philosophy requires knowledge of the referential framework prevailing in Chinese intellectual traditions. But Chinese philosophical texts are frequently approached through the lens of Western paradigms. Analysing the most common misconceptions surrounding Western Sinology, Jana Rosker alerts us to unseen dangers and introduces us to a new more effective way of reading Chinese philosophy. Acknowledging that different cultures produce different reference points, Rosker explains what happens when we use rational analysis, a major feature of the European intellectual tradition, to read Chinese philosophy. We rely on impossible comparisons, arrive at prejudiced assumptions and fail to arrive at the truth, the consequence of applying a different methodology to the process of perceiving, understanding and interpreting reality. Instead of transferring concepts and categories from Western sinology onto socio-cultural Chinese contexts, Rosker constructs a new methodology of reading, understanding and interpreting Chinese philosophy. She opens our eyes to the basic problems of Western paradigms, encourages intercultural approaches and allows us to master a more autochthonous understanding of Chinese philosophy.

Here is a lucid, accessible, and inspiring guide to the six perfections--Buddhist teachings about six dimensions of human character that require "perfecting": generosity, morality, tolerance, energy, meditation, and wisdom. Drawing on the Diamond Sutra, the Large Sutra on Perfect Wisdom, and other essential Mahayana texts, Dale Wright shows how these teachings were understood and practiced in classical Mahayana Buddhism and how they can be adapted to contemporary life in a global society. What would the perfection of generosity look like today, for example? What would it mean to give with neither ulterior motives nor naivete? Devoting a separate chapter to each of the six perfections, Wright combines sophisticated analysis with real-life applications. Buddhists have always stressed self-cultivation, the uniquely human freedom that opens the possibility of shaping the kind of life we will live and the kind of person we will become. For those interested in ideals of human character and practices of self-cultivation, The Six Perfections offers invaluable guidance."

Informed by Gloria Anzaldua's and Jose Carlos Mariategui's work, as well as by Andean cosmology, Omar Rivera turns to Inka stonework and architecture as an example of a "Cosmological Aesthetics." He articulates ways of sensing, feeling and remembering that are attuned to an aesthetic of water, earth and light. On this basis, Rivera brings forth a corporeal orientation that can be inhabited by the oppressed, one that withdraws from predominant modern/Western conceptions of the human. By providing an aesthetic analysis of cosmological sensing, Rivera sets the stage for exploring physical dimensions of anti-colonial resistance, and furthers the Latinx and Latin American tradition of anti-colonial and liberatory philosophy. Seeing aesthetic involvements with the cosmos as a source for embodied modes of resistance, Rivera turns to the work of Maria Lugones and Enrique Dussel in order to make explicit the aesthetic dimensions of their work. Andean Aesthetics and Anticolonial Resistance creates a new dialogue between art historians, artists, and philosophers working on Latin American thought, phenomenology, and hermeneutics. It weaves together a Latin American philosophy that connects pre-Columbian cosmologies with contemporary thinkers. Rivera's original approach introduces us to the living, evolving and aesthetic alternatives to coloniality of power and of knowledge, overhauling current understandings of decolonial theory and opening the tradition in transformative ways.