Best Selling Books by Lin Yutang

The Indian sub continent has been one of the world''s greatest fonts of knowledge and religious concepts. The Rig Veda, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, Ramayana, Patanjali Yoga texts, parables of Buddha all are to be found collated within this one book. This is a particularly valuable contribution to the story of human development. Being under one umbrella, these texts can easily be studied and compared for the themes that are common and those that are not.

Against the background of Red China today, Lin Yutang tells the lush, explosive story of a white man and his beautiful Chinese mistress who, together lead a band of refugees along an incredible escape route to freedom.

Romantic story of a rebellious young Chinese widow who, at the turn of the century, refuses to conform to convention in her search for a new life and love.

T JOHN DAY book REYNAL HITCHCOCK NEW YORK is not truth that makes man great, but man that makes truth great. CONFUCIUS Only those who take leisurely what the people of the world are busy about can be busy about what the people of the world take leisurely. CHANG CHAO. PREFACE: THIS is a personal testimony, a testimony of my own experience o thought and life. It is not intended to be objective and makes no claim to establish eternal truths. In fact I rather despise claims to objectivity in philosophy the point of view is the thing. I should have liked to call it A Lyrical Philosophy, using the word lyri cal in the sense of being a highly personal and individual oudook. But that would be too beautiful a name and I must forego it, for fear of aiming too high and leading the reader to expect too much, and because the main ingredient of my thought is matter-of-fact prose, a level easier to maintain because more natural. Very much con tented am I to lie low, to cling to the soil, to be of kin to the sod. My soul squirms comfortably in the soil and sand and is happy. Sometimes when one is drunk with this earth, ones spirit seems so light that he thinks he is in heaven. But actually he seldom rises six feet above the ground. I should have liked also to write the entire book in the form of a dialogue like Platos. It is such a convenient form for personal, inadvertent disclosures, for bringing in the significant trivialities of our daily life, above all for idle rambling about the pastures of sweet, silent thought. But somehow I have not done so. I do not know why. A fear, perhaps, that this form of literature being so little in vogue today, no one probably would read it, and a writer after all wants to be read And when I say dialogue, I do not mean answers and questions like newspaper interviews, or those leaders chopped up into short paragraphs I mean really good, long, leisurely dis courses extending several pages at a stretch, with many detours, and coming back to the original point of discussion by a short cut at the most unexpected spot, like a man returning home by climbing over hedge, to the surprise of his walking companion. Oh, how I love to reach home by climbing over the back fence, and to travel on bypaths At least my companion will grant that I am familiar with the way home and with the surrounding countryside ., . But I dare not. I am not original. The ideas expressed here have been thought and expressed by many thinkers of the East and West over and over again those I borrow from the East are hackneyed truths there They are, nevertheless, my ideas they have become a part of my being. If they have taken root in my being, it is because they express something original in me, and when I first encountered them, my heart gave an instinctive assent. I like them as ideas and not because the person who expressed them is of any account. In fact, I have traveled the bypaths in my reading as well as in my writing. Many of the authors quoted are names obscure and may baffle a Chinese professor of literature. If some happen to be well known, I accept their ideas only as they compel my intuitive ap proval and not because the authors are well-known. It is my habit to buy cheap editions of old, obscure books and see what I can dis cover there. If the professors of literature knew the sources of my ideas, they would be astounded at the Philistine. But there is a greater pleasure in picking up a small pearl in an ash-can than in looking at a large one in a jewelers window, I am not deep and not well-read. If one is too well-read, then one does not know right is right and wrong is wrong. I have not read Locke or Hume or Berkeley, and have not taken a college course in philosophy. Technically speaking, my method and my training are all wrong, because I do not read philosophy, but only read life at first hand. That is an unconventional way of studying philosophy the incorrect way...

Nul autre que Lin Yutang, lettré chinois pétri de culture occidentale - qui disait " penser en chinois avec un pinceau et en anglais avec une machine à écrire " - pouvait réussir à nous éclairer sur le sens que nous donnons au mot " bonheur " en Occident et en Chine. " Quel peut être le but de la vie, si ce n''en est la jouissance ? " Avec cette formule pour postulat, Lin Yutang ne se soucie pas de philosophie, mais de " la vie toute chaude ". Et cette vie qui est la nôtre, déjà en 1938, date où il écrit ce livre, il déplore qu''elle soit " trop compliquée, notre science trop sérieuse, notre philosophie trop sombre et nos pensées trop embrouillées ". Aux petits soldats obéissants que nous sommes, l''antique sagesse chinoise oppose la figure du " vagabond " : recherchant l''oisiveté, cultivant un esprit libre, dont l''aspiration à l''idéal se tempère d''un désenchantement rieur. Convoquant ses " compagnons spirituels ", poètes et philosophes chinois, mais aussi Thoreau ou Nietzsche, il fait l''éloge d''un homme pleinement homme, capable de goûter à toutes les saveurs de l''existence. Car le banquet de la vie est devant nous et la seule question qui se pose est celle de notre appétit.

Interprétation personnelle de toute une culture, vaste fresque de toute une civilisation, cet essai demeure un livre clé sur l''individu et la société en Chine, tant Lin Yutang (1895-1976) a su puiser aux racines culturelles de la civilisation chinoise.

En su novela Una hoja en la tormenta Lin Yutang nos ofrece un cuadro vivo de la China contemporanea. En medio de las escenas de combate y del exodo de millones de seres, tres entranables personajes viven un drama de intensa emocion: Poya, joven y rico, analiza la guerra criticamente; Lao Peng, un budista austero, se interesa solo por los seres humanos, y Malin, bella y misteriosa, busca la paz de un hogar.