Thomas Cleary
1949–2021 · American
American translator of Buddhist, Taoist, Confucian, and Islamic classics who brought Eastern philosophical traditions to English-speaking audiences.
In the record
- Died
- 2021, Oakland, California
- Training
- Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University; JD from Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley
Key works
- The Blue Cliff Record (1977)
- The Art of War
- The Flower Ornament Scripture: A Translation of the Avatamsaka Sutra (1993)
- The Taoist Classics (2003)
- The Book of Five Rings: A Classic Text on the Japanese Way of the Sword (2005)
- Classics of Buddhism and Zen (2001)
Sebastian reads Cleary
Cleary is not a thinker but a conduit — and conduits can be decisive. What he supplied to the depth tradition was access: the raw textual body of Hua-yen cosmology, Zen mondo, Taoist quietism, and the martial-philosophical literature of medieval Japan, rendered into English prose clear enough to read without a specialist at one’s elbow. For readers working through Jung on Eastern parallels, or through Hillman on the polytheism implicit in Asian thought, Cleary provides the primary texts that make those arguments testable rather than impressionistic. The limits are real: his translations are often elegant but philosophically neutral — he tends to carry the text across without dwelling in its difficulties — and you will want a scholar of the tradition nearby when the argument turns technical. But turn to Cleary when you need the source material under your hands, when you want to feel Hua-yen’s mutual-interpenetration or a Zen master’s refusal of abstraction as text rather than commentary about text. He is the library shelf you reach for before the secondary literature closes in.