Despite the multiplicity of appropriate responses to the questions, however, the reasons for asking them basically reduce to two, and they hold not only for Chinese writings, but all foreign philosophical texts. We translate and interpret them in order to 1) learn more about the people in the culture whence the text came; and/or 2) to learn more about ourselves and our own culture. That is to say, most texts worthy of translation and exegesis are both windows on the culture that produced them and mirrors of our own.