Two Letters of Liu Yiming

A letter in answer to General Su

Yesterday at the provincial capital  you honoured me with your elder presence and did not disdain the wilds of the mountains for our talk, and the [Daoist] mnemonic rhymes you passed on I have found very beneficial.

It is true when they say “when old friends meet, the warmth exceeds all class distinctions.”

When this patch-robed monk  was young, I had no discernment of what was deviant or correct. I would ask anyone and study anything, one day with Wang, another day with Li, a little bit of one thing then a little bit of something else.

Nothing came of this.

Then I met a Daoist who taught stillness techniques and …

Two Letters of Liu Yi Ming

(translated by Xiaoyao, these letters have, as far as we know, not been previously translated into English)

2 responses »

  1. Thank you for translating these documents, is there any chance that you have a Chinese copy of them I could read? Many thanks for a great blog! Ben

    Reply
    • Hi Ben,

      Thanks for the query and the kind words! These letters and much other as-yet-untranslated material appears in a book called 刘一明栖云笔记 by 孙永乐 and published by the 社会科学文献出版社 in 2011. I got it from Chinese Amazon.

      Reply

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