No More Learning

This brings up an important point I would like to stress: the instructor should do the same preparation for each class as the students do. If reading the Daode jing is to be more than just the dry recapitulation of what others have said, then it requires our engagement each and every time we take it up. In the humanities we are trying to encourage critical and reflective thinking, a willingness to try new things, and the ability to appreciate different perspectives. The Daode jing gives us the perfect opportunity to do this in a classroom situation. It is one of those few books for which we are all students
imagine teaching the daode jing! 101
with much to learn. As Wing-tsit Chan rightly notes, ''You may not like it, or you'll like it a lot because it's boldly vigorous, provocative, and stimulating. ''14 After having read the text many times in various translations over the years, I swear the book changes from day to day depending on my mood, the weather, and just how many deadlines are pressing in on me at the time! Perhaps I should end on that note. Or better yet, let me end by asking one question: Is it just me who's muddled?
notes
1. Frederick W. Mote, The Intellectual Foundations of Ancient China. 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989).
2. As noted above, if the Daode jing is being taught in the context of classical Chinese thought and religion, the question can be framed as responses to positions already discussed in previous sessions.
3. Differences in terminology follow differences of various translations. I par- ticularly recommend those of Stephen Mitchell, Tao Te Ching (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), and D. C. Lau, Lau Tzu Tao Te Ching (New York: Penguin Books, 1963), both of which are affordable paperback editions. I encourage teachers to design their own groupings of chapters. The chapters selected in each grouping will shape the issues and questions raised by students in discussion. Teachers need to think strategically about how the chapters they choose will function in this respect, in- cluding or highlighting those deemed most promising and de-emphasizing or even excluding chapters that may raise distractions or confusions. Which groupings work will also depend on the translation(s) used.
4. Ellen Chen, The Tao Te Ching: A New Translation with Commentary (New York: Paragon House, 1989), 44-47, 157-159.
5. The Chinese language does not require a pronoun to indicate second and subsequent references, and thus gender is linguistically indeterminate.
6. Chen, The Tao Te Ching, 60-71, 157-160.
7. Ibid. , 3-48.
8. A. C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China
(LaSalle, Ill. : Open Court Press, 1989), 215-235; D. C. Lau, introduction to Lau Tzu Tao Te Ching.
9. Herrlee Creel, ''What Is Taoism? '' (1956), in What Is Taoism? And Other Studies in Chinese Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); Wing- tsit Chan, ''Influences of Taoist Classics on Chinese Philosophy,'' in Literature of Belief: Sacred Scripture and Religious Experience (Provo, Ut. : Religious Studies Center, Brig- ham Young University, 1981).
10. Because this model explores a variety of forms of Daoism and interpretations of the Daode jing with which the nonspecialist may not be familiar, I specify the chapters I consider relevant to each session to give readers a concrete idea of which motifs of the text inform which session.
102 approaching the daode jing
11. Xuanxue (dark learning) was the reigning intellectual movement in the third to fifth centuries c. e.
12. For those teaching in institutions where such a museum is unavailable, the exercise could be to browse in one of a range of books on Chinese art.
13. A useful resource for this exercise is the title essay from Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1980).
14. Wing-tsit Chan, ''Influence of Taoist Classics,'' 142.
part ii
Recent Scholarship and Teaching the Daode Jing
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? My Way: Teaching the Daode Jing at the Beginning of a New Millenium
Norman J. Girardot
The Dao that can be Dao'ed is not the Dao.
--Laozi/Daode jing, chapter 1
That was Zen. This is Dao!
--Bumper sticker observed on an aging Volvo
Dao Now
Daoism is as Daoism does. Or, as the diarrheal ''Forrest Gump and Pooh Bear Going-with-the-Flow School of Daoist Studies'' declares, ''Daoism, like shit and a box of chocolates, just happens! '' Doesn't the excremental vision of the Zhuangzi remind us that the Dao is in both the high and low of the world, in the piss and shit as well as in the mountains and valleys? And doesn't that overweight slacker, Steve, tell us in the ''Tao of Steve'' that Daoism is, after all is said and undone, the most perfect and natural way to pick up chicks? Isn't this crappy lesson, then, the pointless point of it all? 1 Shouldn't we recognize that, during these meandering MTV days at the start of the third millennium, the teaching of the Dao may indeed be reduced to a boldly tasteless T-shirt slogan about guru guano; Bruce Lee's warbling falsetto scream of kung-fu revenge; the amazingly obscure lyrics from a song by the deadhead wannabe band known as Phish; the rhythmically choreographed violence of a John Woo and Jackie
106 recent scholarship and teaching the daode jing
Chan film or (most transcendentally of all) Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; the muddled message of a particularly puerile Pooh parable; the pretty pastel poems on the side of environmentally friendly herbal tea boxes; the earthy blue-collar mysteries of the Tao of Elvis; or (finally and most im- portant) a single pithy text like the ancient Laozi-Daode jing, a. k. a. the ''Bible- Book of the Wiggy Way and Its Pulsating Power''?
Along with feng shui kits at Wal-Mart, the I Ching on CD-ROM, and McDonald's in Beijing, should we not ask why, in this apocalyptically fright- ened post-9/11world, there were not more Enron executives who studied the Zhuangzi along with their tattered copies of Sunzi's Art of War? After all, do not the darkly ironic teachings of the Daode jing, the most provocatively enigmatic of all world scriptures, tell us that ''the Dao that can be Dao'ed is not the Dao''? Isn't Daoism clearly the religion of choice for a postmodern 9/11 age when all systems of representation have been so completely depleted and deconstructed, so thoroughly destroyed as were the twin towers of the World Trade Center? Doesn't the Old Boy himself, Laozi, teach us that all meaning resides in the pregnant void of ground zero, within the gaping mouth of language and laughter that, with freely running saliva, opens and releases the body? Doesn't the holy Book of the Way and Its Power, the ''gate of all mysteries,'' assure us that knowing derives not from the eyes and brain, but from the instinctual rumbles of the belly? Thus Daoists, like Nietzscheans, have always preferred existence to essence, tumbling turds to the totalizing shine of Shinola. Finally, is it not the saving grace of Daoism to be one of the very few world religions to cling firmly to a sense of humor about the profane and the sacred, the pissy-prissy and the pure, the ridiculous and the sublime, the historical tradition of Daoism and the ineffable Dao itself? Weren't the early Daoists, mumbling the Mandelbrot- mantra of hun-hun-dun-dun, the ones who saw into the silly-serious heart of a sacred cucurbitic chaos? Zhuangzi, in his Chinese Frank Zappa persona as an Andy Kaufman ''Foreign Man'' or seedy Elvis impersonator, put it best: ''Now I have just said something, but I'm not sure if I've really said something or nothing at all! 2 Tank you berry much. '' Laozi has left the building.
Yes, it sometimes seems that the Way is that way, whether spelled with a t or a d. Moreover, I dare say that many teachers of the Dao in North American colleges and universities during this past quarter century have had to contend with student wayfarers much too certain of the method and destination of their Daoist journeys. Too certain, for example, that a close reading of Stephen Mitchell's ''new English version'' of the Daode jing, along with a well-thumbed copy of Benjamin Hoff's The Tao of Pooh and repeated exposure to Kevin Smith's Silent Bob opus on director's cut DVDs, give them everything they need to know about going fully with the flow. And if in the course of their
my way: teaching the daode jing 107
travels they've done a little sitting meditation, Taiji or Gongfu on the side, so much the better--so much transpires, it seems, that is just plain ''self-so'' (ziran). Shit happens. Such is the Business of Isness. So also I suspect that numerous contemporary practitioners of the Dao outside of the academy have encountered many Western students with an overly romanticized apprecia- tion of the nature and history of Daoism.
There is, in fact, a growing number of knowledgeable and articulate practicing Daoists teaching and writing about the tradition these days in North America who impressively combine extensive academic and experien- tial understandings of the tradition. 3 But whether academically or practically oriented, or possessing some real combination of mental and bodily learning, all teachers today must contend with an often aggressively predetermined climate of opinion about the how of the Dao. How now? Dao Now! To be religiously hip these days is to know that ''Zen was then; Dao is Now! '' Or, as suggested by a recently observed bumper sticker on an aging Volvo mysteri- ously parked by my house in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania: ''That was Zen. This is Dao! '' While the Beatles, the Maharishi, Ken Kesey's merry pranksters, and D. T. Suzuki's Bent Zen defined an earlier precybernetic age of pop-enlighten- ment, it's now the age of the Cremaster Cycle, ''Reality TV,'' Jackass the Movie, Kill Bill, and Daoism--Dao-Lite if you will.
Despite these shortcomings in the state of Daoist learning in North America, it is partially comforting to know that there are some active students of the Dao in the West these days. Unfortunately, in the ancient Central Kingdom of its origins and efflorescence, Daoism has been culturally and politically compromised during much of the modern period--even to the point of its near extinction in the land of its birth. Imperiously condemned by Pro- testant missionaries in the nineteenth century, stridently spurned by the Chi- nese literati and Manchu court throughout the Qing dynasty, and violently emasculated during the Chinese communist cultural revolution, Daoism has encountered the ebb without any flow. 4 There are some hopeful signs that in post-Mao and post-Tiananmen China the serious study and appreciation of the age-old Chinese religious heritage is being revived, but it is still the case that, whatever the Orientalistic distortions of the tradition in the West, the torch of Daoist book learning in the twentieth century has mostly been kept burning outside of China itself. Thus we have the haunting situation of Chinese stu- dents traveling to Paris, Kyoto, Berkeley, Boston, and Bloomington to redis- cover and study the discursive ways of the Dao in the world today.
There is reason to be encouraged by recent developments in the native Chinese and worldwide appreciation of the Daoist tradition, which was, until quite recently, the least understood of the major world religions. But for the
108 recent scholarship and teaching the daode jing
time being I would like to emphasize the problem of earnest American stu- dents of the Dao too often relying on a whole set of questionable assumptions about what an Asian ''mystic'' tradition like Daoism must be like. Speaking personally from the background of a thirty-year teaching career that embraces Notre Dame University, Oberlin College, and Lehigh University, I have re- ceived too many course papers consisting of a title page and a final bibliog- raphy framing fifteen absolutely blank pages. At times a vague twinge of conscience would generate an attached note quoting the Daode jing about ''those who know, do not speak,'' and pleading with me to be ''Daoist'' enough to realize how perfectly and preciously the paper conveyed the inner wuwei emptiness of the assignment! Woe to the teacher of Daoism when confronting the presumptions of the Dao-Wow crowd.
Some students these days are indignantly resistant even to the possibility that there may be more to the Daoist tradition than a single short text, some whimsical Pooh Bear commentary, some vague Dao-Zen affinities, and a few basic Taiji movements. They have already been duly warned of the excessively clever and rational procedures of various owlish and poorly dressed university professors who only seek to complicate the simplest thing of all: that Daoism, in its essentially Zennish, Gumpian, Poohish, and New Age way, speaks intui- tively and organically about politically correct self-cultivation, ''buns of steel'' physical rejuvenation, the spiritual ''joy'' of sex with green tea-flavored con- doms, sects without guilt, a prescient proto-feminism and manifest penis power, the satisfactions of a cleansing bowel movement, and an acutely green (if not chartreuse) environmental awareness. Among the upper-middle-class students at many expensive private colleges and universities, there is also the implicit addendum that it is possible to accomplish all of this while driving a Saab, Lexus SUV, or aging Volvo station wagon. And please note that the Office of Homeland Security has just declared that we are now on a Magenta Alert status. All of this is rather surprising since traditional Chinese civilization had no conception at all of Enlightenment-style ideals of personal authenticity, American commercialized individualism, Thoreauian ''back to nature'' mysti- cism, Emersonian pragmatism, bourgeois feminism, or trendy principles of vegan and Gaian ecology. But never mind, say some self-styled Telluride Daoists and BMW Buddhists, that's what Daoism is really all about. He who knows does not speak! And those who speak may be university professors!
Pop-Daoism, or Dao-Lite, of this kind--like the earlier Kerouac stream-of- consciousness Zen of the '50s, the Suzuki-Wattsian ''fundamental'' Zen of the '60s and '70s, and the ''engaged'' Zen-Tibetan Buddhism of the '80s and '90s--seems to suggest that knowledge and religious experience are com- pletely independent of cultural context, social history, and linear textuality. 5
my way: teaching the daode jing 109
There's only a cybernetic immediacy and a frenetic now--oh wow! Speed kills, but within the Matrix or the Fight Club of life it is the Keanu Reeves- Siddhartha-Brad Pitt-Richard Gere-Dalai Lama who saves. Dao Now. Dao Wow. And De, by the way, is pronounced like a second tone ''DUH. '' Or, as the Discordian Religion of Bob would say, it's the chaotic flicker of superficial information that dictates the fractal patterns of human life. Along with T-shirt and bumper sticker slogans, everything has been reduced to digitized and prepackaged pellets of ''information. '' It's the frenzied bombardment of Quentin Tarantino images and digital I-Ching-yin-yang-on-off factoids that fleetingly stimulate and temporarily focus one's attention amid the ''booming and buzzing confusion'' of the void (the perfect simulacrum of the traditional Chinese concern for the leaping-bleeping ''monkey mind''). There's no meaning, no interpretation, no real imagination--only the sentimental om- nipresence of the Home Shopping Network and the Office of Homeland Security. Cultural garbage in, colonic garbage out. Where is Monty Python when we need them? The eerily apocalyptic implication of this real and imagined terror is that, unlike the hopelessly combative religions of the Abramic tradition, Daoism becomes the perfect inheritor of the mystic mantel of ironic Zennish pluck and Dalai Lama smiling nonviolence. Cheshire Cat shit-eating grins abound! Thus it seems that Pooh Bear Pop-Daoism, Planet Hollywood Tibetan-style Buddhism, flannel-shirt-ecologically-sensitive Zen, and Barbra Streisand botox-injected Kabbala become the preferred religions and theme restaurants of the twenty-first century. 6 Heaven's Gate opens; crop circles are found in Roswell, New Delhi, and Shanghai; and within the hal- lowed space of ground zero a black monolith appears replete with myriad tiny American flags, Nike slashes, and yin-yang emblems. Shitty stuff happens.
The Way Trodden
So Zen was then and now it's Dao. Whatever. But that's really too much of a wimpishly relativistic and blithely Daoistic answer to give to serious seekers of the Way. More pointedly and neoconservatively, let me just say no. No, hardly anything that popularly parades as Daoism and the mesmerizing message or mental massage of the Daode jing has much relation to the historical Daoist tradition or, for that matter, to the amazingly malleable text attributed to the wizened and pointy-headed Chinese Yoda known as the Old Boy. It's not that I think Mitchell's Zennish pseudo-translation of the Laozi, Hoff 's New Age Pooh Bear Dao, or Kevin Smith's Silent Bob are intrinsically evil. 7 They assuredly are not, and I have used both Mitchell's and Hoff 's works in the classroom. When
110 recent scholarship and teaching the daode jing
employed strategically and contextually, they constitute an effective way to begin and end a course on Daoism. First, before the long hard journey into the murky byways of the tradition, these works give temporary comfort and con- fidence to the wayfarers. Besides being appealingly well written and broadly accessible, they accomplish this by articulating prevailing sentimental expec- tations and desires about the tradition. But it is exactly this consciousness raising about our cultural preconceptions concerning the text and the tradition that helps to set up and significantly problematize the meaning of ''Daoism'' in both Chinese and Western cultural history. Contrary to Pooh Bear Daoism, the Laozi never announced that the Disney World secret of the cosmos is that ''life is fun. '' Nor was the actual Daoism of Chinese tradition intrinsically nontheistic, nonritualistic, or nonclerical. Indeed, the Daoism of Chinese his- tory, like Buddhism for that matter, was never a tradition that focused exclu- sively on the individualistic practice of meditation or the ''idiot savant'' purity of Pooh Bear intuition.
I regularly begin my current writing-intensive seminar on the Daoist tra- dition at Lehigh University with an initial short evaluative essay on the ''life is fun'' Daoism as presented by the Tao of Pooh and as contextualized by Nathan Sivin's brilliantly vexing article ''On the Word 'Taoist' as a Source of Per- plexity. ''8 I conclude the course with an assignment that requires my students to write a final brief reflective paper on the accuracy of the Hoffian vision of Daoism in light of the course's semester-long struggle with pooh-perplexing issues of comparative interpretation, Daoist history, and other, much more obscure and awkwardly off-putting Daoist texts. More than anything else, it is my hope that, by the end of the term, my students will continue to dance with the Dao as portrayed by Hoff and Mitchell (a disciplined tango rather than the formless abandon of a mosh pit), but that they will also have learned critically to appreciate the stubborn historical, cultural-social, and religious otherness of the tradition. The slippery truth is that it is extremely difficult to know how easy knowing the Dao really is. One must suffer to experience the transmutation of new knowledge. Shit happens, but only after ingestion, mastication, digestion, and colonic absorption. After all, both Chinese and Western alchemists agree that the secret formula of creative knowing is always solve et coagula. That is, all things must be dissolved down to a state of utter confusion so that real knowledge can congeal and emerge--so that there may be, as Coleridge once said about the alchemy of translation, a ''transparent defecation'' of meaning.
I do not want to sound smugly superior regarding Hoff's Tao of Pooh, Mitchell's Daode jing, the Dao of Steve, Silent Frigging Bob, the Idiot's Guide to Daoism, or other works of this ilk. Hoff and Mitchell, in particular, beautifully convey much that is in keeping with the early texts, if not some essentialized or
my way: teaching the daode jing 111
purely mystical ''Daoism. '' We must always keep in mind that, even with the wealth of pioneering Daoist scholarship and new translations now becoming available, many well-intentioned, and more philologically and technically so- phisticated, studies by sinologists and scholars of comparative religions fail miserably at communicating either the letter or the spirit (thought and practice, myth and ritual, head and belly) of the Daoist tradition to a general audience. I must also say that, despite my various caveats, I truly appreciate the often marvelously foolish productions of American popular culture. A strong case can be made that an Americanized pop-Daoism, along with the more seriously acculturated Daoism of practicing resident masters, legitimately represents an aspect of the latter-day diasporic history of the tradition, as well as the progressive global unfolding of the Dao. I confess to sentimental attachments to some of these ideas, but I also believe in my owlish heart of hearts that we need to know where something came from and how it has discursively walked down its own cultural path. We need to take these first baby steps before, in a heroic act of interpretive license and mixing metaphors, we plunge head- long into the ambiguous waters of Daoism's contemporary cross-cultural transformations.
During my long teaching career, the study of Daoism has become one of the most exciting and revolutionary areas in sinology and in the overall com- parative history of world religions. In this sense, my real grievance is not so much with the inevitable sway of popular conceptions about Daoism on stu- dents and teachers, but rather with the realization that so few of these dramatic new findings have made much of an impact on the general academic or public awareness of the tradition. This is truly unfortunate because it is already abundantly clear that Daoism as the ''indigenous national religion'' of China had a textual and social history as richly complex and fascinating as anything seen in European Christian history. Hoff and Mitchell cannot be blamed for this oversight. Rather, we are the ones largely at fault. That is, we (the profes- sional teachers of Chinese tradition and the comparative history of religions) are the ones who have failed to imaginatively synthesize and effectively commu- nicate the findings of specialized scholarship.
To some degree this state of affairs is understandable since it has only been within the past two decades that significant new translations and research findings have become widely disseminated. We are also starting to get some helpful synthetic treatments and textual anthologies appropriate for use in an undergraduate classroom. 9 For the first time, also, several state-of-the-art classroom introductions to the overall Daoist tradition have appeared. 10 How- ever, it remains to be seen whether these introductory works will do for Daoism what Laurence Thompson's groundbreaking undergraduate textbook accom-
112 recent scholarship and teaching the daode jing
plished for Chinese religions more than thirty years ago. 11 The field of Daoist studies is expanding so rapidly (and, most significantly and thankfully, the field is on the verge of passing back into the hands of native Chinese scholars versed in the latest Western research and methodological perspectives, especially the academic study of comparative religions) that it is becoming increasingly dif- ficult for any single scholar and/or teacher to keep up with all of the latest developments. In the meantime, we are too often left with only yesteryear's Beatnik Daode jing and miscellaneous mystical leftovers. In this respect, an earlier generation's Zennish approach to Daoism and the Old Boy's text has only been transposed today into Poohish terms. So shall the twain meet and merge in the blur of popular sentiment. In the end, and despite all evidence to the contrary, we (the people, both students and teachers) tend to prefer the familiarity of the Disney version to the alien peculiarities of the real thing. But that does seem to be the Way of the World.
So Daoism is as Daoism does. But such a saying only has meaning in the course of time and with a little help from its intertextual friends. Daoism, or rather the discursively constructed meaning of Daoism and important textual artifacts like the Daode jing, has a complex cultural history. But even more pertinent to our concerns here is that the teaching of elusive and intrinsically foreign Chinese productions like the Daode jing and Daoism also has a sig- nificant cultural history that should not be ignored. 12 Both text and tradition in the contemporary Western academy are embedded in a pedagogical phan- tasmagoria of shifting cultural shapes, mythologies of political correctness, shadows of academic careerism, changing student expectations, institutional transformations, and the ritual actions of the prevailing civic religion of cor- porate capitalism.
There is, then, no single, original, fundamental, or pure Daoism that is somehow ''defined'' by the Daode jing. And there is no single, original, funda- mental, or pure way to teach the Way to American students. A sinuously in- sinuating path has been staked out over the past quarter century, however, and it should be our mission, should we as teachers of the Dao decide to accept it, to walk resolutely down this discursive path while watching over both shoulders and protecting our hindquarters. This is a ritual perambulation that requires that we pay equal attention to where we have come from and to the sporadic markers and clearings that blaze the trail ahead. I will, therefore, proceed autobiographically in the pages that follow with an eye to sketching out some of my own struggle with the artless art of teaching such a mesmerizing text and such a little-known tradition. This will involve a descriptive appraisal of the three primary phases of my career that roughly correspond to the cultural history of the '70s, '80s, and '90s. The Dao that can be trodden is not the Dao,
my way: teaching the daode jing 113
but it nevertheless may be revealing (if not amusing and embarrassing) for me to retrace some of the stumbling steps I have taken along the way.
On the Way in the 1970s
I am not exactly sure when I first taught a course on Daoism and the Daode jing. I think it was in the spring of 1972, during my second semester of teaching at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana. It was at about that time that I offered an undergraduate course devoted solely to the Daoist tradition--or, more accurately, a class that began with the Daode jing and went on to Burton Watson's Chuang Tzu, selections from A. C. Graham's Lieh Tzu, James Ware's quirky Pao P'u Tzu/Nei P'ien, and various messy purple mimeographed copies of Ch'en Kuo-fu and Tenny Davis's renditions of ''outer'' and ''inner'' al- chemical texts. Background readings for this course in the 1970s included Holmes Welch's Taoism, The Parting of the Way, which is a popularly written and still helpful guide to the Daode jing (the second half of the book on the ''Taoist Church'' is now hopelessly outdated), and Max Kaltenmark's Lao Tzu and Taoism, which covered both the Zhuangzi as well as the Daode jing and introduced students to the important French school of Daoist studies (it also dealt intelligently with the ''Daoist Religion,'' albeit in an extremely truncated way).
In addition to these works, I often assigned various selections from Jo- seph Needham's monumental Science and Civilisation in China, the Bellagio conference on Daoist studies, and (after 1974) the new macropedia edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. I must also confess that, at times throughout the 1970s, I used such secondary materials as John Blofeld's The Secret and Sub- lime: Taoist Mysteries and Magic, Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics, and the Richard Wilhelm and C. G. Jung version of the Secret of the Golden Flower. These works were not only titillating crowd pleasers, but also played into my lingering graduate school fascination with alchemical ''mysteries. ''
With regard to the Daode jing during much of the 1970s, I primarily used the Wing-Tsit Chan (The Way of Lao Tzu, 1963) or the Gia-fu Feng and Jane English translation (Tao Te Ching, 1972), supplemented or replaced by Arthur Waley's ''mystical'' version (The Way and Its Power, 1958) and D. C. Lau's neo- Confucian rendition (Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 1963). This became a pattern in my teaching of the text that persists down to the present day--that is, an insistence that, since most of my undergraduate students had no command of the Chinese language (although over the years at Oberlin and Lehigh I have had a number of students who majored in Asian studies and knew modern, if not classical, Chinese), it was crucial to come to grips with the intertextual and
114 recent scholarship and teaching the daode jing
cross-cultural multiplicity of translations, readings, and interpretations of such an ancient and ironically terse text. This was a text that was already in its received form a composite and redacted document. Furthermore, the allusive ''Laozi'' helped to raise several premodern and postmodern issues of authorship and the locus of intentional meaning. Given my own background and training as a historian of religions and a fresh-from-graduate-school assistant professor, I am sure that at this time in the 1970s I mainly focused on methodological issues concerning the philosophical and/or religious nature of the text and attempted to frame the discussion and reading of the text with interpretive quasi-Eliadian structures of myth, symbol, and shamanism. 13 Let me only say that over the years, while using multiple translations, I have moved away from such prescriptive tactics to a more open-ended interrogative approach that emphasizes the importance of multiple questions, multiple readings, and multiple meanings of the text--especially, to borrow from Michael LaFargue and reader response theory, the interplay of a latter-day scriptural ''meaning for us'' and the historical ''meaning for them'' interpretations.
From these beginnings down to the present, I have taught some kind of specialized course on Daoism almost every other year of my career (as well as a regular survey course on the religions of China, an offering that regularly assigns the Daode jing). These have mostly been small-enrollment, seminar- style undergraduate courses, but I have also taught Daoism as a graduate course in the history of religions at Notre Dame and at Lehigh have mounted one (never to be repeated) mega-enrollment and multimedia Daoist extrava- ganza (''The Daoist Phantasmagoria,'' given in the spring of 1995; on this course, see below). It is noteworthy that, in keeping with my methodological bent in the 1970s and as a way to combat various pious fictions about ''Daoism,'' I spent considerable time tilting at windmills concerning the assumed two, and utterly distinct, forms of Daoism (the so-called daojia ''philosophical'' and daojiao ''religious'' forms). Thus throughout most of the 1970s, the dominant scholarly and popular construct of Daoism was that it was an interesting, but relatively obscure and certainly minor, sinological subject which, according to both native Chinese and Western scholarly opinion, rather neatly divided itself into an early classical, elite, or philosophical phase and a later ritualistic, su- perstitious, popular, or religious tradition. 14
Not surprisingly, the philosophical power and scriptural authority of the early tradition were mostly defined by the gloriously evocative verses found in the Daode jing, one of the very few ''Daoist'' texts then readily available in multiple English translations. The foundational significance of the text seemed ratified by the simple fact that there were so many translations. It was often said that the Daode jing was second only to the Christian Bible in the ranking of the
my way: teaching the daode jing 115
most frequently translated sacred books in world literature. Whether or not this judgment is truly accurate is largely beside the point. The more important fact is that there were at that time dozens of English translations of the Daode jing, a handful of which were decent scholarly versions in an affordable paperback format. 15 Almost nothing else of the vast Daoist literature was easily avail- able for classroom use. This situation reinforced the too easy assumption that Laozi's little work was certainly the crucial source for fathoming the ''original'' spiritual ''essence'' of East Asian culture. Moreover, given its five-thousand- Chinese-character brevity and poetic fluidity, it was a text that naturally lent itself to multiple translations and to quasi-plagiarized renditions of previous translations. So it was that ''Daoism'' at this time, and in keeping with a tra- dition canonized by the great Scottish missionary translator James Legge in the 1890s, was primarily a matter of what was alluded to in the Daode jing, along with some parabolic adumbration from the other early texts attributed to the shadowy sages known as Zhuangzi and Liezi. The incredible riches of the Daozang, or the so-called Daoist canon, were still known to only a very few scholars working primarily in Paris, Japan, and Taiwan.
Also directly relevant to the general understanding of Daoism in the early 1970s was--amid the ongoing Vietnam war, Richard Nixon's opening of Maoist China, and the beginning of the Watergate affair--the heightened fascination with direct religious experience and a flirtation with non-Western religions, especially forms of Hinduism and Buddhism that seemed to be fundamentally ''mystical'' in nature. Given the literary and cultural influence of the beatnik and hippie generations in the '50s and '60s, the one Asian religion (aside from the Beatles' temporary infatuation with the Maharishi Yogi and transcendental meditation) that epitomized these concerns for experiential ''highs,'' methods of spiritual self-cultivation, and immediate personal en- lightenment was the kind of Japanese Zen Buddhism promulgated in North America by charismatic cultural entrepreneurs like Jack Kerouac, Alan Watts, Gary Snyder, and D. T. Suzuki. Associated with these trends, and something that had semi-cult status among some faculty and students at Notre Dame in the 1970s (and in many other academic and intellectual circles at that time), was the romantic passion for the archetypal dream psychology of Carl Jung. Coming under the esoteric Jungian spell at this time were also the best-selling English translations of Richard Wilhelm's German versions of the ancient Chinese Book of Changes and the crypto-Daoist Secret of the Golden Flower. 16 Finally, it is worth noting that the works by comparative religion scholars like Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade were fashionable and were often identified with a pervasive counterculture-Jungian-Zennish-Shamanistic myth of individualistic spirituality. Whatever was popularly (or, for that matter,
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scholastically) known about Daoism at this time was largely subsumed under the more overarching categories and hip sensibility of Zennish mysticism. Thus it was often intimated that the unique Protestant ''genius'' of Zen had something to do with the Chinese transmogrification of a corrupt ritualistic Buddhism. Moreover, the crucial agent of this reformation was (in some in- choate fashion) the pure ''philosophical-mystical'' Daoism of the Daode jing and the bluntly scatological and humorous spirit of the Zhuangzi. 17
All of these factors led to a situation in the 1970s where the eclectic study of world religions (or, still in those innocent times, the ''religions of man'')-- as well as things like mysticism, tribal religions, new religions, altered states of consciousness, shamanism, and occult traditions like alchemy--were ex- tremely popular subjects for undergraduate course offerings. Furthermore, the cultural and academic climate was such that, in response to the growing demand, new nontheological departments of religion (or religious studies) were being created at many colleges and universities. As a personal exem- plification of these developments I should point out that my arrival at Notre Dame in the fall of 1971, after graduate studies at the University of Chicago and Chinese language study in Taiwan, depended entirely on the decision of the Theology Department to establish for the first time a regular position in the comparative history of non-Christian religions.
Even though Daoism was still largely understood in canonical, philo- sophical, Zennish, shamanistic, and mystical terms linked with the Daode jing, there were signs that there was something seriously wrong with this perspec- tive concerning the Daoist tradition in particular and Chinese religions in general. It was almost as if the sinological Orientalists woke up one day from several hundred years of dogmatic philological slumber and discovered that China actually had religious traditions that were critical to an understanding of the larger civilization (beyond the orthodox ''great tradition'' of the Ruist or Confucian scholar-bureaucrats). The trigger for this scholarly satori was in many respects the interdisciplinary revolution in the study of Daoism that started to manifest itself in the late 1960s. There were earlier indications of an impending reformation of the mostly unimaginative, nonmythological, and irreligious ''classical'' narration of Chinese tradition--for instance, the work of French masters like Henri Maspero, Marcel Granet, Rolf Stein, and Max Kal- tenmark; the maverick studies of the Chinese American scholar C. K. Yang in the sociology of religion; and the iconoclastic interpretations of the Cambridge polymath and historian of traditional Chinese science Joseph Needham--but it was not until the pioneering First International Daoist Conference in Bellagio Italy in 1967 and the work of Kristofer Schipper that the axis of sinological understanding really started to shift (Schipper's work being significantly fur-
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thered by a bevy of other sibilated scholarly s's: Edward Schafer, Michel Strickmann, Michael Saso, Anna Seidel, along with Isabelle Robinet). Equally significant in this regard was that the groundbreaking papers from the con- ference were published in Mircea Eliade's History of Religions journal, an event that, along with the creation of the interdisciplinary Society for the Study of Chinese Religions at an American Academy of Religions meeting in Wa- shington, DC, in 1974 (led by Laurence Thompson and Daniel Overmyer), signaled the collapse of the traditional sinological aversion to most interdisci- plinary interlopers and comparative approaches.
The revelatory nature of these new perspectives was that they immedi- ately and radically challenged the artificially dichotomized understanding of Daoism as comprised of a philosophical tradition largely defined by the Daode jing and a later, mostly degenerate and superstitious, Church religion of rit- uals, ''priests,'' and ''popes. '' After the Ma-wang-tui archaeological discoveries in 1973, it was also gradually becoming evident that the text we thought we knew so well had, in its earliest extant form, turned into a Han-period Huang- Lao political treatise known as the Te Dao Ching. Whatever the interesting implications of these developments, it was basically evident that very little could be taken for granted about this text or the tradition. This was exhila- rating but also bewildering, since the simple mystical purity of the Daode jing was in the process of being absorbed into the labyrinthine literary and reli- gious caverns of the Daozang. 18 And the recognition of the Daozang as the defining textual and intertextual body for Daoism, along with the newfound appreciation of the living sectarian tradition in Taiwan by scholarly partici- pant-observers like Kristofer Schipper and Michael Saso, meant that we were forced to contend with a vast universe of meaning in the past and present that was almost totally unexplored. Furthermore, the highly esoteric vocabulary of Daoist texts associated with the visionary Shangqing/Highest Purity and li- turgical Lingbao/Numinous Treasure traditions seemed hopelessly arcane and off-putting. But this condition of bafflement was understandable given the fact that the decipherment of the technicalities of Daoist literature was just beginning. The state of Daoist studies at this time was roughly the way Buddhist studies were some one hundred years earlier.
I do not want to rehearse any more of this scholarly history here, but it is terribly important for a younger generation of students, teachers, and schol- ars, whether sinologically or comparatively inclined, to remember what it was like just twenty or thirty years ago. If one was a sinologist at that time, there was really not very much worth studying with respect to Chinese religion or Daoism. If one was a comparative scholar, China also seemed singularly impoverished when contrasted with the lush religious riches of the Indian
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subcontinent and the Indo-European tradition. Both sinology and the com- parative history of religions were peculiarly insulated disciplines in relation to the emergence of the human sciences and the professionalization of academic life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--themes that I have written about in my recent book on sinological Orientalism and compar- ativism. 18 By the mid-1970s, however, there were portents in the air that the Kingdom of Dao, and the classical and scriptural centrality of the Daode jing, were not as they had been imagined for centuries by loyal Chinese scholar- bureaucrats, clever Catholic priests, righteous evangelical Protestant mis- sionaries, furtive sinological Orientalists, hesitant comparative scholars, and romantic popularizers of the ''mysteries of the East. '' The '60s and '70s were a significant turning point in the meager history of the Western understanding of Daoism and the tantalizing text attributed to Laozi. We are only now at the end of the century, and at the threshold of a new millennium, starting to assimilate and understand the implications of the revolution in Chinese studies and the comparative history of Chinese religions associated with these developments in Daoist studies.
Part of the Way in the 1980s
By 1979-80, I had left Notre Dame to move on to Oberlin College in Ohio and then to take up a more permanent residency at Lehigh University in Beth- lehem, Pennsylvania. The times had changed and I had changed. No doubt, my teaching had also changed. I was battle hardened in the petty political ways of academe by this time, yet strangely enough I found myself ensconced in the position of chair to the Lehigh Religion Studies Department, then the smallest departmental unit in a university known more for engineering and Lee Iacocca than Laozi. I will not bore you with a description of my activities as the tiny administrative poobah of the minuscule Religion Department, except to say that, contrary to almost everyone's expectation, the department grew and prospered. This is a result that I would like to attribute to my wuwei- ish style as chief executive, but probably had more to do with the trickle-down effect of Reaganomics in higher education during the go-go 1980s. Despite these successes, my ten-year tenure as a low-level academic functionary only served to drive home the Daode jing's central admonition that one should, at all cost, avoid the temptations of administrative rank and power, no matter how trivial one's pond of operations. I had no difficulty therefore in returning to the ragged ranks of the teaching faculty at the end of the decade. I also welcomed the opportunity to reactivate my yearly schedule of teaching a
my way: teaching the daode jing 119
course focused on Daoism, an offering that had become irregular during my bureaucratic years.
Some of the interconnected changes in the cultural and academic envi- ronment as they relate to the Dao during the decade of the 1980s are sug- gested by the odd fact that Ronald Reagan seemed to have discovered the Dao at this time. Thus Reagan, as the president of the United States and as the wizened Hollywood avatar of the brave new entrepreneurial age of conser- vative politics and corporate ''Death Star'' triumphalism, once actually quoted the Daode jing's hoary laissez-faire proverb (chapter 60) ''Ruling a big coun- try is like cooking a small fish. ''20 One rather doubts that Reagan himself spent much time perusing the ancient Daoist classics, but it is interesting to see that the presidential handlers and speech writers had appropriated Laozi's little antinomian text for their own ideological ends. It might be said that such an apparently foreign and erudite reference in the body of a popular political speech by America's Bedtime for Bonzo president demon- strates the increased sophistication of the general public. It could also be said that inasmuch as Reagan was our first Chauncy Gardener or Forrest Gump president, it was inevitable that he would discover, with or without a Teleprompter, the simplistic recommendations of this most simple of scriptures.
It is most likely that Reagan's scripted use of this Chinese text shows the developing concern in the 1980s for manipulating, massaging, and spinning a political message in relation to the lowest common denominators of popular culture. This episode consequently appears to be a sad commentary on the increasingly popular but impoverished and tabloidized status of the Daode jing in American cultural discourse. This ancient Chinese and Daoist ''mystical'' work had now become a Poor Ronald's Neo-Con Almanac of vaguely ''univer- sal'' political and practical maxims. Most of all, these hauntingly enigmatic verses seemed to hint at a fundamental ''practicality'' of purpose, something along the lines suggested by the American tradition of transcendentalist pragmatism and the continuing popularity of Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (first published in 1974). Laozi's little text was basically viewed as a specimen of the ''gems of world wisdom'' tradition of literature handy for lending some unusual yet homespun gravitas to after-dinner spee- ches or presidential addresses. So also was Benjamin Hoff, the exact political opposite of Reagan, writing in this same sappy vein of pop appropriation when he produced his winsome Poohification of Laozi, a work first published in 1982, but not achieving an amazing long-term best-seller status until the late 1980s and early 1990s. 21 It seems, in other words, that it does not make much dif- ference what the Daode jing or Daoism actually says. Rather, we are dealing with
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a text and a tradition that have become impressively exotic and infinitely flexible templates for totally different, and often contradictory, points of view.
I present here only a composite picture of my teaching of Daoism and the Daode jing during the 1980s. This was an evolving enterprise that was affected by various factors, not the least of which were the changing cultural and po- litical situation alluded to above, my own small participation in the promul- gation and proliferation of the new revolutionary Daoist scholarship, some wrenching involvement with Holmes Welch at the time of his suicide, and the final preparation of my own early interpretive contribution to the study of the Laozi and Zhuangzi (along with some analysis of the Liezi and Huainanzi), my Myth and Meaning in Early Taoism. 22 One of the most important elements in this mixture was that my Lehigh students of the 1980s were a different breed from the ones I had been teaching at Notre Dame and Oberlin in the 1970s. Although in my 1960s' soul I was at first prepared to bemoan the increased vocationalism and commodified careerism of students in the 1980s, as well as the heightened conservative political climate (and Lehigh University was a conspicuously conservative institution), I have subsequently come to appreciate the fact that it forced instructors of such intrinsically artsy and noncommercial topics as religion and Daoism to work harder at making a case for the hu- manistic, cultural, and practical significance of such subjects. This was actually not as difficult as it might at first seem because the 1980s were also the years of the Japanese economic ascendancy, a situation that, in tandem with the decline of American heavy industry and manufacturing, allowed for much anxious discussion about the secrets of the Japanese success. Pedagogically, it made good strategic sense to promote a discussion that asked basic questions about the continuing role of religion in contemporary Asian culture--especially to consider the sometimes silly and pandering questions about the role of some kind of Corporate Confucianism or Samurai Zen in the Asian economic mir- acle. Thus various books appeared during this period that championed the idea of a ''Zen of Management'' or, by extrapolation, the mysteries of the ''Dao Jones Averages'' (e. g. , Bennett Goodspeed's The Tao Jones Averages, 1983) and the appearance of Daoists on Wall Street (e. g. , David Payne's Confessions of a Taoist on Wall Street, 1984). In the Reaganomics sense, the Daode jing was now dis- covered to be a guide for cooking a small fish and for ''whole-brained invest- ing. ''23 As ridiculous as many of these works were, it can be said that the progressive commodification and co-optation of such improbable materials as the ancient Daoist texts dialectically tended to provoke a return to some of the more anarchistic implications of the early Daoist vision. Amid the creeping corporate sameness, there was an increasing tendency to go back to some of the recalcitrant foreignness of Daoism. In this way, there was a continuing
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discovery of the uncolonized islands of the Daoist imagination, Zhuangzi's villages ''of not even anything,'' and, even more exotically, the internalized cosmic kingdoms of the Highest Purity tradition.
A significant sign of my more experimental and experiential approach to these matters is indicated by the fact that during the 1980s I had started to grow my own Daoist calabash gourds in my backyard in Bethlehem, Penn- sylvania. Although my neighbors became increasingly nervous as my back- yard was overwhelmed by dozens of large, creeping, and oddly shaped Little Shop of Horrors gourds, I felt that I had finally been brave enough to go my own way in the cultivation of my academic and teaching career. From these fecund cucurbitic years in the 1980s down to the present, it has been my habit to start my courses on Daoism by bringing one of my large, lacquered, bi- partite, and hollow calabashes into the classroom on the first day. As the spirit so moves me, this will either lead to some meditation on the symbolically ''embodied'' Dao in front of the class or to a minilecture on the strange cosmogonic ontology of gourds, hun-tun, Won-ton soup, and chaos in Daoist tradition.
Finding My Way in the 1990s
During the 1990s, I felt a growing appreciation for the nature and role of performative ritual in teaching and knowing. It may seem strange to say that this awareness has been a latter-day development for me, particularly because the history of world civilization knows no tradition so replete with ritual practice as that of the Chinese. But this obtuseness is not necessarily a matter of my own special failings since the neglect of the study of ritual has been a quite general problem in sinological and comparative studies of Chinese religious tradition. The fact that so little descriptive and interpretive scholarship has been devoted to the role of ritual throughout all aspects of Chinese tradition is truly an incredible state of affairs. Far more attention has been devoted to attempts to reconstitute the shards of Chinese mythology as the crucial key for under- standing the tradition (and I have, admittedly and unapologetically, contributed to this genre of scholarship). There are all sorts of interesting and peculiar reasons for the prestige of mythology over ritual in the emergence of Western academic discourse concerning religion.
As revealing as it would be, this is not, however, the time or place to go into this legacy. It is better simply to observe along with Schipper and La- gerwey that even a work like the Daode jing, which seems at first glance to give support to the notion of Daoism's, if not Confucianism's, special mystical
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antipathy to ritual, actually suggests something much more interestingly pragmatic and corporally behavioral about practicing the Dao. Again, it is premature here to do more than say that it may be fruitful to approach the Daode jing with a more balanced appreciation of the imaginative and ritually practical aspects of ''returning to the Dao'' in the text--thinking also of this text's relation to the later, more manifestly liturgical sectarian traditions. This newfound awareness of the broad ritual implications of the ''Daoist body'' has special relevance for dealing with the apparently unbridgeable chasm between the mythic and ritual dimensions of Daoism, between the individual and communal aspects of the tradition, between the spirit and body, between the universal and regional, urban and rural geographic bodies, and between the early, apparently individualistic and mystical texts and the later, more mani- festly social and liturgical Daoist sectarian traditions. 24
One magnificently silly manifestation of these ideas linking Daoism, ritual, teaching, and performance--as well as my increasing fascination with the interestingly strange relation between satirical humor and religion in the raw--was my experimentation with a new, more participatory and liturgical way of teaching about the spirit of the Daoist tradition. Earlier explorations of these issues as related to teaching resulted in a quasi-shamanistic classroom project that involved the infamous levitation of the Lehigh business school building using the special spiritual ''mojo'' of Australian bullroarers and the Tao of Elvis, but my first attempt to design an entire course devoted to Daoism along these lines came in the spring of 1995 (after a long retreat in the wilderness to finish the writing of a long book manuscript) when I taught a course called ''The Daoist Phantasmagoria. '' In some ways, I suppose this sounds like I had sold my soul to the seductively foolish forces of Pooh Bear Daoism. But it was really my intention to use the ''Dao of Pooh''--along with a whole host of popular assumptions about the mystical, individualistic Daode jing--as a counterfoil to the ritualistic and performative point of the course.
For much of the first part of the course, my students and I engaged in many traditional academic exercises: books to read, classroom discussions, papers to be written, and multiple quizzes and exams. During the last month and a half of the course, the students and I collectively designed and executed a cam- puswide ritual event known as Dao Day. This involved an eclectic assortment of carnivalesque activities, culminating in a ritual procession through the cam- pus, a communal meal, and an actual Daoist spring ceremony performed by Master Hsuan Yuan, a Lungmen Daoist priest from the North Pole Gold temple in New York City--ably assisted, I should note, by a student dressed resplendently in a Disney Pooh Bear costume. The climax of these joyfully peculiar events came at the conclusion of Master Hsuan Yuan's ritual perfor-
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mance, when a gigantic papier-ma^che ? Cosmic Egg/Gourd/Lump started to quake and, amid sound, smoke, and light, split open. Gloriously emerging from the embryonic shards came the Old Boy himself--Laozi in this case being played by a diminutive but athletic Korean American student dressed in sagely drag and wearing the enigmatic ''Dao Socks of Mystery. '' After several cart- wheels and back flips, the Old Boy proceeded to lecture the assembled multi- tude with the five thousand characters of the Daode jing--an oration delivered entirely in Korean! So at the end of the day, it was clear that the Dao that can be spoken is certainly not the Dao. But as Laozi once said: ''Small people can only laugh when encountering the Dao for the first time. '' Ritually and communally speaking, we had all on that day surely released the spirit of the Dao at Lehigh University.
Even more important for me personally and for my teaching than the ''Daoist Phantasmagoria'' was the dawning realization over the years that I had found my own disciplined rite of ''one pointedness. '' There were times, in other words, when I had entered into the empty abyss of the gourd and experienced, to borrow from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a flowing state when I was no longer thinking or acting. I am alluding here to my own regular practice of the disciplined rituals of embodied language. I mean, of course, the path of writing which in the early 1990s, after a two-year period of intense full-time devotion to the writing of an impossibly long manuscript coming at the culmination of many years of painful preparation (that is, The Victorian Translation of China, which finally appeared in 2002 after more than fifteen years of work), led to my own small transformative epiphany of bodily, in- tellectual, and spiritual alchemy. Solve et coagula.
It was the ritual discipline, the struggle, the pain, the difficulty of working with the ''flesh of language,'' the deep ''fetal breathing'' of periodic inspiration, and the gradual development of a habitual, and always imperfect, art of writing (no matter what the subject) that led me to a further conviction about teaching Daoism and the Daode jing. 25 The Dao that can be Dao'ed is not the Dao, but at the same time, the ''invariant'' or Great Dao will only be reached through the assiduous work of grappling with the Dao's embodied forms. It was my reali- zation, therefore, that out of a spirit of Dao'ed timeliness and situational, or ying-ing, responsiveness to my own immediate pedagogical circumstances, the better way to teach the ritually pragmatic art of the Dao to students was to build on our shared academic and personal struggles with the practice and experi- ence of writing. It is in this sense that my commitment to teaching the Daode jing and Daoism as part of a writing-intensive seminar became obsessional.
This newfound passion for the revelatory linkages of writing-ritual- meditational experience-alchemical transformation has led to the incorporation
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of various supplementary course materials on these themes (such as a reading Lu Ji's ''The Art of Writing''/Wen Fu, Csikszentmihalyi's Flow, and selections from Steven Nachmanovitch's Free Play). 26 But most of all, I stress the dis- cipline of regular short free-form reflective writing assignments and the central role of the ongoing rituals of revision in dealing with the mysteries of the interactions of style and content, form and thought, in the Dao-ing of a more formal essay. Along with this commitment to the disciplined rites of writing as a way to creep up on the Invariant Way, I also had the good fortune at this time of discovering a work that, as a necessary complement to my emphasis on the Dao of Writing, masterfully taught a kind of Dao of Reading as associated with the Daode jing. I refer here to my use of, and enthusiasm for, Michael LaFargue's new (1992) translation and commentary on the Laozi entitled The Dao of the Daode jing. There are several aspects to this work that make it, in my estimation, one of the best ways to read, understand, and teach the Daode jing. It is curiously revealing that part of the success of LaFargue's approach to the text seems to derive from the fact that he was working as an outsider to the conventional sinological tradition of translation and analysis. LaFargue therefore shows us that an application of biblical methods of her- meneutics gives serious students a practical method for working through the literary forms of the text to some informed interpretive judgments, while keeping in balance the text's historical ''meanings for them'' and its con- temporary ''meanings for us. ''27
My Way after the Turn of the Century
The ''Daoist Phantasmagoria'' and Dao Day are behind me now, never to be done again. Such unconventional exercises in the ''deep play'' of ritual are too personally exhausting and too publicly frightening to sustain. But life goes on and my quasi-ritualized teaching of Daoism and the Daode jing continues, although in a somewhat less frantic way. What gives me heart to go forward is the feeling that I am finally learning, after some thirty years of effort, how to teach this text and the Daoist tradition. Not that these feelings themselves will not, in time, change, since that is the nature of the Dao and its power. Along with experimental courses on American visionary folk art and something deeply disturbing called ''Jesus, Buddha, Mao, and Elvis,'' I want very much to teach a semester-long course devoted to Daoism and that other important American New Age religion of salvational environmentalism, interests that have been sparked by my involvement in a recent conference at Harvard University and the publication of a book entitled Daoism and Ecology, Ways
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within a Cosmic Landscape. Related to these concerns is my desire to also de- velop a new course exclusively devoted to the emergence of a full-fledged ''American Daoism'': embryonic developments that draw upon the Poohish Daoism discussed here but also more significantly refer to various Daoist groups in North America and the beguiling neo-Daoist writings of the novelist Ursula Le Guin. In this respect it is worth noting that there is an important new resource for reflecting on, and teaching about, the Western appropriation of Daoism: J. J. Clarke's engaging overview of the Western romance with Daoism entitled The Tao of the West: Western Transformations of Taoist Thought. 28
In the meantime, I am encouraged that my regular writing-intensive Daoist seminar still displays some strong qi. The last time I taught the course, I had one of the most invigorating and rewarding seminars of my teaching career. Not only was I blessed with a diverse lot of bright and energetic students, but (for whatever subtle alchemical reasons) the discussions and student pa- pers were also unusually interesting and stimulating. Even better was that the course seemed to engender some healthy appreciation for the Dao of Reading and Writing, as well as some recognition of the importance of the kind of foolish ritual behavior elicited during the events of Dao Day. The culminating oral presentations and papers that grew out of this seminar were wonderfully eclectic and creative, covering such topics as the political philosophy in the Daode jing, the Tao of the Matrix films, a hip-hop rap composition based on chapter 2 of the Zhuangzi, the relation between mathematical chaos theory and some themes in the early Daoist texts, and finally (and always a crowd pleaser) Daoist sexual alchemy. Moreover, I did not receive any seminar papers that attempted the strategy of unadulterated emptiness or transparent defecation. Shit didn't happen! For that I am thankful. So goes the Dao.
notes
1. Along with Elvis Presley, spam, and pornography, one of the more ubiquitous subjects on the Internet (and on T-shirts) is the comparative listing of different world religions that begins with the taken-for-granted association of Daoism and the slogan ''Shit happens. '' This cow pat of popular American urban legend most dramatically surfaced in the hugely successful film Forrest Gump. We may only speculate that this quasi-proverbial saying probably stems from some half-remembered appreciation of the famous ''piss and shit'' passage in the Zhuangzi. The passage is found in chapter 22, which in Burton Watson's translation is as follows:
Master Tung-kuo asked Chuang Tzu, ''This thing called the Way--where does it exist? '' Chuang Tzu said, ''There's no place it doesn't exist. '' ''Come,'' said Master Tung-kuo, ''you must be more specific! '' ''It is in the ant. '' ''As low a thing as that? '' ''It is in the panic grass. '' ''But that's lower still! '' ''It is in the
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tiles and shards. '' ''How can it be so low? '' ''It is in the piss and shit! '' Master Tung-kuo made no reply.
Burton Watson, trans. , The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 240-241.
2. See the Zhuangzi, chapter 2.
3. On some of the contemporary Daoist practitioners in North America, see Solala Towler, A Gathering of Cranes: Bring the Dao to the West (Eugene, Oreg. : Abode of the Eternal Dao, 1996). On Saso, see his The Teachings of Master Chuang (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978); and on Schipper, see N. J. Girardot, ''Kristopher Schipper and the Resurrection of the Daoist Body,'' in The Taoist Body, by Kristofer Schipper (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
4. On the recent history of Daoism, see, among other works, K. Schipper, ''The History of Daoist Studies in Europe,'' in Europe Studies China: Papers from an Inter- national Conference on the History of European Sinology, ed. Ming Wilson and John Cayley (London: Han-Shan Tang Books, 1995), 467- 491; Anna Seidel, ''Chronicle of Daoist Studies in the West,'' Cahiers d'Extreme-Asie 5(1990): 223-347; and N. J. Gir- ardot, ''Chinese Religion: History of Study,'' in Encyclopedia of Religions 3 (1987): 312- 323 and ''Finding the Way: James Legge and the Victorian Invention of Taoism,'' Religion 29 (1999): 107-121.
5. See, for example, Philip Zaleski's review of the reprinted work by Alan Watts, Zen and the Beat Way (Boston: Charles E. Tuttle, 1997) in the New York Times Book Review, September 9, 1997, 46. As Zaleski correctly notes:
Our knowledge of Asian religions has come a long way since the 60's, and it's obvious now that in many ways Watts got his facts about as wrong as is humanly possible. His gaffes make one gasp: that Eastern religions ''do not involve belief,'' that they offer no ethical codes, that ''what they are concerned with is not ideas,'' that they contain little worship, that their rites are not ''very essential. '' In lieu of the dazzling reality of these faiths, with their elaborate rituals, complex devotions and strenuous discipline, Watts creates a fantastic theme park, where wise old sages down bottles of sake, spin out haiku and whack one another with sticks in displays of crazy wisdom.
See also the defense of Watts's ''fundamental Buddhism'' in the letter by Sergei Heurlin, New York Times Book Review, October 12, 1997, 4. For scholarly discussions of these issues, see the works by Donald Lopez, especially Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism under Colonialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) and Prisoners of Shangri-la: Tibetan Buddhism and the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).