Literatures of Asiahas been designed to present teachers and students with a textbook representative of the finest works of Asian literature, one that is s amenable to many different teaching approaches. This book includes a wealth of materials so as to give teachers choices that they can tailor to their own preferences, needs, and expertise. This capaciousness will allow students to read around in authors, periods, and traditions that particularly excite them, supplementing assigned reading and providing an essential source book for their individual research. Teaching such a broad spectrum of texts may be challenging, and with this in mind I have supported the literary texts with a full apparatus: a general introduction, section introductions, and extensive headnotes. These supporting materials provide broad and specific contexts, placing literary texts within important cultural, linguistic, and historical movements. In addition, the headnotes include up-to-date bibliographies to guide students for further research. Translations have been selected primarily for their literary quality because I firmly believe that it is a disservice to students, professors, and authors to present a great work of literature in an English translation that does not read as literature. The depth and quality of these texts demand excellent translations, so that students and professors may encounter them in a form that preserves their artistic integrity and delight.

The translators featured here are among the finest in their fields, and many are themselves prominent writers. They include Burton Watson, Barbara Stoler Miller, A. K. Ramanujan, Arthur Waley, Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth, Helen Craig McCullough, Donald Keene, and Robert Bly, among others. My one rule has been to include no translation that is merely adequate. In a sense, then, this text is a showcase for the art of literary translation, and my hope has been to compile an anthology that students will want to take home with them and to read around in long after the course is completed. In addition to literary texts,Literatures of Asiaincludes selections from religious and philosophical texts that have literary merit, such as the Rig Veda; the Upanishads; Mahayana and Theravada Buddhist texts; the Bhagavad-Gita; classical Indian devotional (bhakti) verse; theAnalectsof Confucius; the Dao-De Jing; and Zen poems, essays, and stories. These beautiful texts also provide a cosmological and cultural context for literary movements.

Extensive headnotes and introductions trace religious movements and influence, giving students a broad overview of Asian religions, which, in the East as in the West, have often inspired and been an essential part of world literatures. The book also includes important examples of the secular essay, including Mahatma Gandhi writing on passive resistance; a selection of classical Chinese and Japanese literary criticism;ars poeticasand meditative essays; along with a memoir by Liang Heng. These essays are themselves of immense literary importance and at the same time provide political, esthetic, philosophical, historical, and biographical supplements to the literary selections. In addition to providing context for the literary selections, the essays provide students with a valuable resource for writing and researching their own essays. In dealing with many literatures written in many languages, a special problem is presented by the question of orthography. In the literatures of India, China, and Japan, there are alternate and warring systems of transliteration. Generally speaking, I have chosen to use those transliteration systems that are best designed for the general, nonspecialist reader, for whom a more scholarly orthography would prove less informative. However, I did not wish to tamper with the integrity of translators' choices, and so in some cases the headnote is rendered in simplified orthography (reflecting E.