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Figure · Seba Knowledge Graph
Thomas Cleary
Thomas Cleary
American translator of Chinese, Japanese, Sanskrit, and Pali texts, prolific to a degree unmatched in the field of Asian religious literature. Cleary held a PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard and produced during his career some eighty translations — Zen classics, Taoist alchemical texts, Buddhist sutras, Sun Tzu’s Art of War, and the Taoist and Buddhist readings of the I Ching.
For the Seba KG his most load-bearing work is The Taoist I Ching (1986), the translation of Liu I-ming’s eighteenth-century commentary that reads the hexagrams as stages of inner alchemical cultivation. The book installs iching-as-spiritual-alchemy as a thread and provides the Eastern counterpart to the Hermetic-alchemical texts at the Western end of Seba’s spine. Cleary’s Understanding Reality (1987, Chang Po-tuan’s Wu Chen P’ien) and The Inner Teachings of Taoism (1986, Chang Po-tuan with Liu I-ming commentary) extend the Taoist-alchemical transmission the Taoist I Ching opens.
Cleary’s translations are working tools rather than philological monuments — he preferred the clear English rendering over the annotated critical edition. For readers approaching Chinese inner alchemy without classical Chinese, his corpus is the primary access point.