Lin Yutang’s Philosophy of Living
Abstract
The purpose of this article has been to present an interpretation of the writings of Lin Yutang (1895–1976), Chinese writer, thinker, translator, linguist, and inventor, from a philosophical perspective. Lin Yutang was, above all, a bilingual author and thinker, raised and educated simultaneously in two cultures, i. e. the circle of Chinese tradition and Christian culture of the English-speaking world. His immense erudition and intellectual ability naturally marked him out– in both a literal and a metaphorical sense – as a go-between the Chinese tradition and 20th-century and the Western civilization. In his long life, Lin published more than sixty books, forty of which came out in English and only six of these were novels. The list of his non-fiction books is much longer and includes short and long essays, monographs on ancient Chinese sages, such as Confucius, Laozi or Zhuangzi, and their translations and anthologies. Lin gained remarkable popularity with several highly applauded fiction books and an effort to transplant Chinese culture in the West. And yet, even though he rose to great fame as a “Chinese philosopher” after the publication of My Country My People (1935) and The Importance of Living (1937), his philosophical thought, scattered throughout his many writings, has rarely been the subject of academic research.
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