Essays from the Academy

The Four Books with Collected Commentaries: How to Use the Four Books App (2026, v1)

“The principal design choice in creating the present edition was to form a ‘translated replica’ of the Chinese text, one that follows the source character by character …”

The Four Books with Collected Commentaries: On the Structure of the Text (2026, v3)

“By understanding the structure of the Chinese text we gain immediate insight, not only into the present English translation, but into the mind of the narrator himself …”

The Four Books with Collected Commentaries: On Translation (2025, v1)

“In the transmission of the Classics, a lexicon forms a linguistic bridge between cultures where the ineffable terms of one conjoin with the available terms from the other …”

GitHub Repositories

The Daoxue Academy public GitHub has Classical and Medieval Chinese source texts, and in the future will also include reference translations. These are plain text files, designed for use in the AI era, which you download (“clone”) to your hard drive and then query into using Claude Code or other tools. This just launched, so more texts are coming soon…

Collected Conversations of Master Zhu (朱子語類)

The complete 1.5 million characters of the Collected Conversations of Master Zhu 朱子語類. This is a punctuated, AI-searchable source text (ST) of the Qing 1782 Wenyuange SKQS edition.

Collected Literary Works of Master Zhu (朱子文集)

The complete 1.8 million characters of the Collected Literary Works of Master Zhu 朱子文集. This is a punctuated, AI-searchable source text (ST) of the Ming 1532 SBCK edition.