The 62 short poems of the recently discovered Chinese manuscript known in English as Tree Talks constitute an invaluable addition to our understanding of not only early Chinese culture but of human culture generally. Filled with the usual qualities of paradox and metaphysical presumptuousness well-known from other early Chinese works, Tree Talks sheds the puritanical obfuscation of the I Ching and the Tao Te Ching and enters lustily, without inhibition, into all areas of human behavior: sexual, religious, political, philosophical, scientific.
