China and the West

Dodsley, Robert. The oeconomy of human life [ID D26916].
A. Owen Aldridge : The oeconomy of human life is one of the major works to reveal the influence of Chinese culture in the West. It consists of a series of moral precepts printed under seven headings and expressed in an artificial style resembling that of the Old Testament. According to its preface, the work consists of a translation of an ancient manuscript in the possession of the Grand Lama of Tibet. The emperor of China, sharing the opinion of the learned men of his country that the great temple of the Lama contained many ancient writings, had commissioned one of the eminent scholars of his reign to visit the Lama in order to inquire into the truth of this opinion.
The style of the Oeconomy, combining the plain with the sublime, has slight resemblance to that of the early translations of Confucius, but instead derives from the King James version of the Bible. Its major theme is that a life of virtue and integrity is the most pleasant and palatable of all opinions available in the earth. The work represents a major advance in the penetration of Chinese culture in the West. It was presented as Chinese philosophy translated from the Chinese language, and its was almost universally accepted as such. It constituted recognition in the West that another great culture existed in the world besides the Judaic-Christian and the classical Greek-Latin, the two which until the eighteenth century had completely monopolized Western thought. As a result of the extraordinary popularity of Oecononmy of human life, China now represented for many Western readers a completely new and independent system of morality and social relationships only vaguely suggested in previous oriental tales and accounts of travelers.