Anyone who has attempted to translate Classical Chinese texts into a Western language will have to establish the networks of relationships and categories that are essentially different from those of the original language. The terms used in the Chinese texts represent different categories of meaning than those of language, which they are translated. When languages have no common historical origins, the conceptual schemes are distantly behind the linguistic facades, the distance between the meaning of the original and the translation becomes inevitably great. There are certain key terms often mistreated and overlooked in English translations. The following comments are a brief illustration of the fundamental conceptual scheme of Chinese philosophical thinking.
A widely circulated Chinese book in the seventeenth century was published in 1615 (from the YCS collection).
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