The Upanishads
Author unknown
500 BC · 446 pages
You are that, an Indian sage tells his son: the self inside you and the power holding up the universe are one thing. Elsewhere a boy corners Death and demands answers.
★ 7.4
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500 BC
Showing 5 books from the 500 BC
The Art of War
500 BC · 109 pages
Win without fighting, Sun Tzu writes, and he means it literally. Twenty-five centuries ago this Chinese general reduced war to deception, terrain, and knowing the enemy as thoroughly as you know yourself.
★ 7.3
Early Greek Philosophy
Various and Jonathan Barnes
500 BC · 282 pages
Heraclitus said you cannot step into the same river twice. Parmenides said nothing changes at all. Before Socrates, Greek thinkers asked what the world is made of and answered without appeal to gods.
★ 6.9
The Book of Psalms
500 BC · 560 pages
One hundred fifty poems of praise, terror, and rage at God, restored to their Hebrew compression by the translator Robert Alter. The shepherd psalm sits beside one ending with infants dashed on rocks.
★ 6.7
The Ramayana
Valmiki and Arshia Sattar
500 BC · 157 pages
Rama accepts fourteen years of exile to keep his father's promise, and the demon king of Lanka carries off his wife. Indian towns still act the story out in the streets each autumn.
★ 6.7