with a minimum of diacritical marks. The Sanskrit s$ and s. have been phoneti-
cized as sh.
The century, the period of 100 years, is an arbitrary unit, based on the
conventions of our decimal system. It corresponds to nothing significant about
the long-term movement of social communities. The convention of referring
to centuries merely lulls us into misleading reifications such as “the seventeenth
century, the Century of Genius,” or “the Golden Age of the Greeks, the fifth
century b.c.” It would be theoretically more illuminating to describe intellec-
tual history in terms of active generations, about 3 per hundred years. A
33-year period is the approximate length of an intellectual’s creative work. By
the end of that time, a cohort of thinkers will be virtually replaced by a new
adult generation. Generational periods constitute a more or less minimal unit
for structural change in an intellectual attention space. It is useful to think of
Chinese intellectual chains as building up in 6 generations from Confucius to
Mencius and Chuang Tzu—the same distance as from Thales to Socrates and
Democritus. We ourselves are living 5 generations after Hegel (an early groping
world historian), and 10 generations after Descartes.
I will not be so bold as to rewrite familiar dates in a totally new system.
It is desirable at least to step outside the Western religious framework which
undergirds “Anno Domini” and “Before Christ,” and the equally parochial
years since the hegira of Muhammad (a.h.), or the mythical Emperor Fu Hsi
who anchors Chinese chronology at the equivalent of 2698 b.c. I use the
notation b.c.e. (Before Common Era) and c.e. (Common Era), which, although
arbitrarily modeled on the Western calendar, represents an attempt by world
historians to establish a trans-parochial time frame. As much as possible, I
refer to time periods numerically—“the 300s b.c.e.” or “the 1200s c.e.,”
avoiding the reification of centuries as nouns, although there is an almost
irresistible temptation to lapse into common usage in referring to our own
times.
The bibliography is far from short, but I have not covered the entire
specialized literature, even in the Western languages familiar to me. As W. K. C.
Guthrie wrote in introducing his History of Greek Philosophy, it seemed better
to finish the work in my own lifetime.
Preface • xix