Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Preamble -- Previous comparative studies of ancient Greece and China -- The sage -- The siren -- Part I: Intimations of intentionality: the Classic of Poetry and the Odyssey -- 1 Poetry and the experience of participation -- 2 Participation in family and in society -- China -- Greece -- 3 Participation in the natural world -- Nature and nature imagery in the Classic of Poetry -- A simile from the Odyssey and Classic of Poetry 23: views of nature -- Nature and nature imagery in the Odyssey: between meadows -- Nature and the feminine: the Odyssey -- Nature and the feminine: the Classic of Poetry -- Summary and conclusion -- Part II: Before and after philosophy: Thucydides and Sima Qian -- 1 History and tradition -- Sima Qian and his predecessors -- Homer, Herodotus, and Thucydides -- 2 The structures of written history -- Records of the Historian -- The tragic structure of Thucydides' report -- 3 The tempest of participation: Sima Qian's portrayal of his own era -- 4 Thucydides' tragic quest for objectivity and the historian's irrepressible "I" -- Summary and conclusion -- Part III: The philosopher, the sage, and the experience of participation -- 1 Contexts for the emergence of the sage and the philosopher -- The emergence of the sage -- The emergence of the philosopher -- 2 From poetry to philosophy -- Confucius and the Classic of Poetry -- The reduction of poetry to depicting the "ten thousand things" and Plato's critique -- 3 The sage, the philosopher, and the recovery of the participatory dimension -- Confucius and participation in society -- Laozi's return to the Dao -- Zhuangzi's participationist response to Huizi's intentionalism -- Plato's Symposium, Euripides' Bacchae, and noetic participation -- Summary and conclusion -- Afterwords -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G.

H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- X -- Y -- Z.