In Search of the Ultimate Goal of Life: Sri Ramananda Samvada Book

I've been using this as a kind of supplement while teaching the Chinese texts this semester. I think there are a lot of good things about it - it's meticulous, and Liu will often schematize arguments in a way that's probably useful for a lot of readers. (And would make it a good teaching resource.) It also gives good discussion of the secondary literature, the contemporary interpretations of the texts.

But there's something sort of anachronistic and vaguely uncharitable about a lot of Liu's analysis. There's a lot of laying out of, for example, Mengzi's argument for human nature being good and then saying, "this argument fails." But I suspect that is not a terribly fruitful way to approach these texts - I prefer Joel Kupperman's approach, on the whole. Liu seems to be trying to break them down, rather than find out what makes them appealing.

Though of course I haven't read as closely as it deserves; and I am genuinely looking forward to the chapters on Chinese Buddhism.