Chinese Text

There is a scattering of Chinese text on this site. I am in no way fluent in Chinese, but it is important and fun to have some understanding of the language when exploring the philosophical ideas expressed by the ancient sages.

Some of this text is in the form of graphics files which should be visible to everyone regardless of the local setup of their computer. An example of such text is given on the left. This says Zhong Wen, literally "middle pattern", the name that the Chinese give to their language.

However, most of the Chinese text on this site is presented using unicode Chinese font characters. For example, the Chinese term for metaphysics is 形而上學 (xing er shang xue)- literally meaning the study of what is beyond form. If you cannot see Chinese characters there, but only four square boxes, then you do not have the appropriate fonts installed on your computer.

Chinese True Type fonts for Windows are easy to get. I recommend either PMingLiU or SimSum. Both of these fonts can be downloaded from Steve Marshall's site. Once you have the fonts, use the Windows font installer to add them to your system. For Linux or Mac users, I'm afraid you'll have to figure it out for yourselves.