The Path: A New Way to Think About Everything: What the Great Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life - Softcover

Puett, Professor Michael; Gross-Loh, Christine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241004500 ISBN 13: 9780241004500

Publisher: Viking, 2016

Synopsis

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Harvard's most popular professor explains how thinkers from Confucius to Zhuangzi can transform our lives

The first book of its kind, The Path draws on the work of the great but largely unknown Chinese philosophers to offer a profound guide to living well. By explaining what these teachings reveal about subjects from decision-making to relationships, it challenges some of our deepest held assumptions, forcing us to "unlearn" many ideas that inform modern society. The way we think we're living our lives isn't the way we live them.

The authors show that we live well not by "finding" ourselves and slavishly following a grand plan, as so much of Western thought would have us believe, but rather through a path of self-cultivation and engagement with the world. Believing in a "true self" only restricts what we can become - and tiny changes, from how we think about careers to how we talk with our family, can start to have powerful effects that will open up constellations of new possibilities.

Professor Michael Puett's course in Chinese philosophy has taken Harvard by storm. In The Path, he collaborates with journalist and author Christine Gross-Loh to make this timeless wisdom accessible to everyone for the very first time.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Puett is Professor of Chinese History at Harvard and has lectured widely at the world's leading universities. His course in Chinese philosophy is among the most popular at Harvard and in 2013 he was awarded a Harvard College Professorship for excellence in undergraduate teaching. This is his first trade book. Christine Gross-Loh has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic and the Huffington Post. She has a PhD in East Asian history from Harvard and is the author of Parenting without Borders.

From the Back Cover

We tend to believe that to change our lives, we have to think big.

But the great Chinese thinkers would say: don't forget the small.

We only begin to really change when we start with small changes in how we live.

"Smart...views our Western tradition through an entirely different lens"
Sunday Times

Edition details

• Publisher: Viking
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0241004500
• ISBN 13: 9780241004500
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224