@jim Which books did you read?

@EnopoletusHarding He says he's read the Great Learning and Analects.

I read the Le Guin and Gia-Fu Feng / Jane English translations of the Tao Te Ching side-by-side, and it’s amazing how different they are, sometimes even contradicting each other.

Part of that is probably that Le Guin’s is explicitly loose and she reads her own politics into it, but I think that’s also naturally part of the original obtuse, mystic classical Chinese. Sort of got the tarot/rorschach quality of incomplete stimuli that lets you fill in whatever you yourself find especially profound.

Does Romance of the Three Kingdoms count? Do I have to have finished it?

@AlexanderTheGreater No and yes.