No More Learning

? Hermeneutics and Pedagogy: Methodological Issues in Teaching the Daode Jing
Russell Kirkland
Naturally, there are many ways of teaching the Daode jing. My own approaches have shifted in several ways over the years, and will doubtless continue to do so. In addition, I continue to teach the text in different ways to different audiences, adjusting to the level and fo- cus of the participants of each course. So I recognize no definitive way to teach the text. Nonetheless, I maintain that there are better and worse approaches, and that it is necessary (1) to base one's approach soundly upon the facts, and (2) to adjust it in accordance with the evolution of the field. What follows, therefore, examines the herme- neutical and pedagogical implications of a variety of methodological issues. 1
I should note first of all that my approach is, in many regards, contrarian. That is, I never settle for teaching students to under- stand the Daode jing along traditional lines. For the most part, our textbooks do a credible job of explaining traditional concepts of the text's content (the sage, wuwei, etc. ). And at any course level, I ensure that my students are duly exposed to such inherited ''mainstream'' lenses. But those lenses are warped by Confucian bias and an abundance of Western misconceptions, mostly born of a desire to find in the Daode jing a utopian antidote to an array of perceived deficiencies in Western culture. 2
My primary thrust is generally to stimulate critical thought about such mainstream interpretations. My justifications for doing so re- side, in the first instance, in my assumption that a primary facet of
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liberal education is to stimulate critical examination of inherited models of understanding. But in this case, our culturally constructed model of the ed- ucator as Socratic gadfly is, at least in my own mind, supported by a compa- rable Zhuangzian thrust. Of course, using a Zhuangzian method to elucidate the Daode jing is, on a theoretical level, somewhat arbitrary, but doing so provides me with, at the very least, the pleasant illusion that my predilection for shocking my students with untraditional perspectives can be justified in ''Daoist'' terms. I should also acknowledge my former colleague Lee Yearley for convincing me that we are not entirely unjustified in reading Zhuangzi in terms that are, to some degree, postmodern. That is, I have come to the position, presumably Zhuangzian if not Socratic, that there is no position that can simply be assumed to be valid, and that it is proper to question every assumption, no matter how well-accepted it might be. For these reasons, my lenses for studying and teaching the Daode jing are constantly being removed and reexamined, and sometimes replaced by other lenses that for some in- telligible reason seem preferable, if not necessarily demonstrably correct. Such a reflexive deconstructionism (to appropriate a term from part of my own culture) is often appreciated by advanced students, and, if presented in terms of delicious Zhuangzian parables rather than postmodernist jargon, is tolerated even by students at the most introductory level.
In essence, my approach to teaching the Daode jing is, in various ways, to challenge students to grapple with an array of hermeneutical issues. I challenge them to question whatever they read or hear about the Daode jing, even from their knowledgeable and conscientious instructor. Many college students, particularly at the introductory level, have rarely been exposed to critical thought, much less expected to perform it themselves: they have been taught to assume that ''truth'' is known, and that their job is simply to accept what they are given (by their textbooks and by their instructors) and to commit it to memory. Naturally, the conscientious educator must (whether by Socratic or Zhuangzian imperatives) challenge students to consider truth as not neces- sarily known and to stimulate them to reconsider all that they learn from others. In other words, in teaching students the Daode jing, I teach them to ponder the viability of the ''radical'' new perspectives that I present to them while, in the final analysis, thinking for themselves. This model is quite alien to the mind-set of Qing dynasty Confucianism and its parallels in Christian cat- echism and its various secular analogues. To the shock and consternation of many students, I, like Zhuangzi, challenge my students to imagine that what they read in their books about the Daode jing might be unreliable, and that it is not just permissible, but actually necessary, for them to reflect on their own response to the material.
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For these reasons, I frustrate some students by requiring them to read the Daode jing in translations that are stark and minimalist, translations like those of D. C. Lau or Robert Henricks. 3 Students are sometimes frustrated by such translations because these translations tell them only what the text says, not what it means. Most students would be happier with one of the many trans- lations (or pseudo-translations) that presume to explain the meaning of each passage. What I challenge students to understand is that such explanations are really a window not into the text itself, but merely into the mind of the translator. Such windows provide false comfort indeed, for whether any of us like it or not, the text of the Daode jing--in the original Chinese--is stark, murky, and remarkably polyvocal. My goal, therefore, is to give students an experience of the text that is, to the greatest extent possible, comparable to the frustrating experience of reading the original text.
Before my students read the text for the first time, I often urge them to think about their experience of reading it and to ask themselves the following questions:
? What kind of text is this?
? How is this text affecting me?
? How is this text supposed to affect the reader?
? Who is ''the reader'' supposed to be?
? Why is the text in the form that it is in?
? How is the form of the text related to the message(s) that it intends
to convey?
In sum, I challenge students to set aside all that the text has generally been read to mean and to do something radical and original: to read it for themselves and to allow their own experience of the text to help inform their interpretive efforts. My assumption is not that students can find its ''true meaning'' within themselves, or even by themselves. I assume, rather, that because they have a starting point somewhere in a knowable cultural setting, one in which many of us grew up ourselves, the educator can identify and work to dislodge identi- fiable cultural illusions and stimulate students to react creatively to the facts of the text and its proper historical context.
Interpretation through Exegesis
Once, in a 1988 course at Oberlin College, I gave my students a stark, ''literal'' new translation of several intriguing Daode jing chapters (5, 6, 26, 35, and 56, in the traditional numbering), along with a colleague's explanation of the
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exegetical process, as formulated and practiced in the field of biblical studies. I then tasked students to choose one of those passages and perform an exe- gesis of it, as follows:
1. Carefully think through the following questions:
What point is the writer trying to make in this passage? How is he
trying to make it? 4
What is the structure of the passage? How does the writer present
his point? What does the structure of the passage communicate? Is the passage a coherent unity? Does it have ''seams''? What conclusion can one draw from these facts?
What type of language is used in the passage? If symbolic language is used, how is it used? What are the symbols, images, meta- phors? Why are those symbols used as they are? If the writer uses devices such as imperatives or interrogatives, why?
Can one discern different levels of meaning in the passage? If so, how was the writer using those different levels of meaning to help communicate his point?
Are there specific key terms on which the writer relies to com- municate his point? If so, what do those terms mean here, in this context? Is there any evidence that the writer means for other associations to carry over from other passages?
Can one identify a particular audience for the passage? What does the writer assume from his audience? Does he assume certain common knowledge, certain viewpoints, certain experiences? What is the ''world of discourse''?
2. With these questions in mind, select one of the specified chapters of the Daode jing with which you feel that you can work most pro- ductively. Use all of the ''authorized translations. '' Analyze the chapter exegetically, and outline the results. It is not necessary to attempt to determine specific answers to all of the questions raised above: ''Let the text set the agenda'' (or, to employ idiomatic apho- risms: ''Hit the ball where it is pitched,'' and ''Take what the defense gives you. ''). Synthesize the results of your analysis, and present your synthesis in a brief paper of one to two double-spaced pages.
In the Oberlin course, this assignment worked well: students took one of the assigned passages and analyzed it as a text, interpreting it on its own terms. In so doing, they disregarded not only everything outside the text of the Daode jing--a radical move in itself--but everything outside of the specific passage
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in front of them. For instance, in performing exegesis, it is illicit to assume that a symbolic reference to ''the mysterious female'' in Daode jing 6 can necessarily be interpreted in terms of other passages in which images of ''the feminine'' or ''the Mother'' appear. And of course, it is illicit to assume that such a phrase can be interpreted in terms of maternal images found in other texts, other ages, or other cultures.
This assignment illustrates my rejection of certain ''traditional'' models for interpreting the Daode jing. For instance, I reject altogether the common assumption that the Daode jing represents the thought of an ancient Chinese school of philosophy, which is today widely, though incorrectly, called Dao- ism. Historically, there was, in fact, no such thing: the conflation of the thought-content of the Daode jing with the thought-content of the Zhuangzi, and subsequent reification of the overlap into a coherent school of thought, is a common but insidious fallacy. 5 Critical scholars have for decades generally agreed that there was actually no ''philosopher'' named Laozi. 6 And they have generally agreed that the text that we call the Daode jing was actually the result of a complex process of accretion and reinterpretation, which probably began in an oral tradition and took its final form sometime in the early third century b. c. e. Recent research furthermore suggests that the form of the Daode jing, as well as some of its ideas, were modeled on those of the germinal fourth- century b. c. e. text called the Nei ye, ''Inner Cultivation. ''7
In any event, if the Daode jing was not, as is generally agreed, the product of a single mind, it logically follows that passage A and passage B may share a given idea fully, incompletely, or not at all. I therefore teach my students that some passages of the Daode jing are likely more closely related than others, and that we will find in it a plethora of inexplicable ''inconsistencies'' unless we acknowledge the plurality of layers and voices that are embodied in it.
Elsewhere, I have argued that the multivocality of the Daode jing might best be explained by seeing the text as having been composed in layers. In my classes, I give students a ''Historical Outline of Taoism,'' which summarizes that explanation as follows:
The Daode jing [''Laozi''] (early third century b. c. e. )
Origins:
(1) Ideas from anonymous people (not intellectuals) of sixth through
fourth century b. c. e. , probably including local elders (''laozi''),
possibly including women; possible origins in the land of Chu. (2) Teachings about meditative practices and ambient spiritual real-
ities influenced by the tradition that produced the Nei ye.
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recent scholarship and teaching the daode jing
Transmitted orally for generations, shifting and expanding in content; committed to writing in the early third century b. c. e. by an unknown intellectual, who converted the content to a sociopolitical program in response to the concerns of the intellectual elite of the political centers of his day. Eventually attributed to a character called ''Laozi,'' who was actually a pious fiction.
Contents:
1. Early layers: Emphasis on natural simplicity, harmony, ''femi- nine'' behaviors.
Ideal: The Dao (''Way'')--the source and natural order of things. Thesis: One should act through Nonaction (wuwei).
Education is unnecessary, and can be destructive of natural sim- plicity.
2. Later layers: Emphasis on sagely government; rejection of Confucian moralism.
Human ideal: The ''Sage'' (sheng ren)--one who is like the Dao. Government: If the sage-ruler holds to the Dao, the world will be orderly. 8
Naturally, this analysis, though based on textual and historical research, is an expression of my own interpretive vision, a vision that is continually evolving as I, and the field, mature.
This exegetical approach to the text results from my early training in biblical criticism, as well as my later sinological training as a philologist and historian. It is a radically particularistic approach. But it is also, to a sub- stantial degree, an approach that grapples meaningfully with the hermeneu- tical issues that reveal themselves as our interpretive movements slowly work their way free from patterns inherited from earlier, less reflective eras.
Lofting ''The Torch of Doubt'' to Illumine a Colonialistic Cave
In earlier generations, interpreters (in this case, Western, Chinese, and Jap- anese interpreters) went about their task on the basis of assumptions rooted securely in their own traditions. When Westerners encountered the religious and intellectual traditions of Asia, they went about making sense of those traditions by comparing and contrasting what they saw in them with what they ''knew'' from their own tradition. For instance, throughout the colonial age, Europeans understood the concept of ''scripture,'' and, after the Renais- sance and Reformation, many of them rejected the assumption that the indi-
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vidual can interpret scripture only under the guidance of sacral authority. In the European tradition, such authority had been devoted to seeing that members of the human community conform their lives to a revealed truth that, by its nature, transcends all individuals' interpretive abilities. But by the time Westerners reached China and began attempting to make sense of it, the in- dividualistic humanism that surrounded Protestantism had awarded the in- terpreter with the real or imagined ability to make sense of the world for himself. 9 Chinese traditions, including the Daode jing, therefore came to be interpreted according to a variety of Western agendas, and any historical or textual facts that could not be made to fit into the interpreter's agenda were simply ignored or explained away. The extreme of that thrust continues today, as hundreds of Westerners continue to assume that they are entitled to decide for themselves what the Daode jing says, ignoring not only two thousand years of Chinese interpreters, but even the text itself, thereby reducing it to epiphe- nomenality.
I attempt to induce productive shock in my students by teaching them these facts and urging them not to colonize the Daode jing. This text, I teach them, was never written for us. The na ? ? ve assumption that any ancient author or composer considered his thoughts applicable to modern or postmodern lives is patently ludicrous, though saying so is contrary to modernist norms.
Lofting Zhuangzi's ''torch of doubt,'' I challenge students to question the assumption that we today, Asian or Western, can really understand the Daode jing at all. Adducing Zhuangzi as our hermeneutical sherpa, I challenge students, for instance, to ask themselves how we know that the Daode jing is really a work of ''philosophy. ''10 If the text be, as traditional interpretations have supposed, an exposition of a great mind's analysis of the nature of life, why did such a percipient person not expound his views in a more orderly and comprehensible manner? 11 The evidence of the text, unsystematic in any perceptible sense, demonstrates either that its composer had no philosophical positions or that, as some analysts today suggest, he was too stupid to un- derstand or explain his own philosophy. 12
Holding up my hermeneutical torch of doubt in other corners of our cave, I challenge students, more generally, to ponder the alienity of ancient China, a culture fairly devoid of modern or postmodern minds. In this corner, for instance, I challenge them to ask themselves how we know that the Daode jing represents, as many have claimed, a work of ''mysticism. ''13 In that corner, my torch of doubt reveals that the Daode jing may have provocative references to ''the female,'' but that an interpreter who reads it as a text of late twentieth- century feminism has to ignore a great many uncomfortable textual and historical realities. 14 The Daode jing, I teach, was not written to help us with
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our own lives: it is a text from an alien culture, in a distant age, and studying it means exploring an alien world--not ourselves.
The common assumption that the Daode jing ought to be interpreted as a text applicable to our own lives actually reflects our lingering Judeo-Christian faith in the eternal relevance of scripture. Having rejected Church as inter- preter of Scripture, then the validity of the Bible itself, many moderns have searched for a replacement--for a classic text that can be appropriated and reinterpreted as a Bible for the non-Christian modern believer. Following the lead of early sinologists, decades of Westerners have ripped the Daode jing from its moorings in Chinese culture and society, and re-created it in their own idealized image, resulting in a plethora of ''Daos'' perfectly suited to the tastes and prejudices of modern and postmodern minds. 15
I attempt to convince students to take seriously two radical and, for many, highly uncomfortable assertions:
1. That the Daode jing is, contrary to popular belief, actually Chinese, that is, a product of a specific social, historical, and cultural context of which we, student and teacher alike, are not--and logically cannot be--a part. 16
2. That both that context itself, and this textual product of it, deserve to be understood and respected in their own right, not for what they can do for us. 17
By this process, I encourage respect for other cultures, justify the necessity of sound textual and historical research, and challenge students to examine their own unexamined assumptions about how we are, and are not, entitled to relate to other cultures.
Accepted Truth: The Confucians Are Always Right
Holding aloft Zhuangzi's torch, I warn students to question other common models for interpreting the Daode jing. For instance, I challenge the widely accepted ''Great Books'' model for studying ''Great Civilizations. ''18 To date, the West's acceptance of the Daode jing as a Great Book has been based on the text's usefulness to Confucians in their wildly successful effort to pre- clude any form of respect for Daoism among Western observers. So successful were the Confucians of the nineteenth and twentieth century (including highly Westernized Confucians like Fung Yu-lan and Wing-tsit Chan) that to this very day there are only a handful of educators--in Asia or the West--who
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teach the Daode jing as it is, or has been, taught by people who operate in its living tradition: Daoists.
Like their Confucian informers, Western sinologists (with the singular exception of Henri Maspero, whose singularity earned him the contempt of the more mainstream H. G. Creel) have generally dismissed the Daoist tradi- tion as it has existed in Chinese society of premodern and modern times. 19 For instance, until thirty years ago, there was hardly a Western sinologist who could even name a Daoist religious thinker of the past fifteen hundred years. Yet, the Daozang--the immense corpus of Daoist literature that has been in Western libraries since the 1930s--is replete with writings by such thinkers. The Dao- zang represents, in fact, the Great Books of the Daoists. But because Western sinology trusted Confucians as its ''native informants,'' and because modern Confucians (unlike their medieval predecessors) rudely dismissed every product of the Daoist religious tradition, the Western Daoist canon was quickly limited to two texts--the Daode jing and Zhuangzi--which represent the range and complexity of Daoist thought to about the same extent as the Gospel of John represents the range and complexity of Christian thought. While it is true that it is difficult to imagine Christianity without that gospel, it is also true that Christian beliefs and practices can hardly be understood by reading that text alone: centuries of practitioners reinterpreted the Christian message to fit their own age and their own lives and developed different ways of un- derstanding and living the Christian life. Imagine a teacher from a non- Christian culture handing her or his students a translation of the Gospel of John (a ''translation,'' moreover, made by someone who had never bothered to learn Greek) and telling them that all the rest of what Christians call Chris- tianity is merely ''moribund superstition'': by doing so, that teacher would be dismissing not only the lives and faith of two thousand years of Christian men and women, but also the theological subtleties of hundreds of thought- ful people who had labored to explain Christian faith in ways that make sense to intelligent minds of every age and culture. Yet, today's courses--even in many of our most elite universities--entirely dismiss the lives and practices of two thousand years of Daoist men and women, as well as the dozens of extant texts by thoughtful men and women who labored to explain Daoist principles and practices.
In sum, the Western world continues to understand and explain the Daode jing in Confucian terms, Protestant terms, theosophical terms, feminist terms, ecological terms, and many other sets of terms--but never, under any cir- cumstances, in Daoist terms. The modern Confucians (from Fung and Chan to their numerous Western disciples) have successfully convinced even highly
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educated Western intellectuals that there was, for instance, no meaningful Daoist thought after the third century c. e. 20 Even leading explicators of ''Daoist thought'' commonly write as though they have never heard of Daoist minds like Sima Chengzhen or Li Daochun. The writings of such Daoists--people who successfully refined Daoist beliefs and practices to enable them to survive century after century--have never been included in our sourcebooks. 21 Only in the 1990s have sourcebooks begun to include the Great Books of Daoism as they were identified by the Daoists of China themselves. 22 Yet, for the most part, our courses continue to teach Daoism in such a way that students learn that it is necessary and appropriate to ignore such texts. The Confucians co- opted the Western academy so effectively that our classrooms still echo with the Confucian lie that ''China had two 'Daoisms'--the noble and intriguing thoughts of the philosophers Laozi and Zhuangzi--and the contemptible su- perstitions of later 'magicians' and 'necromancers. ''' To the extent that we allow our students to believe such untruths, we are doing the equivalent of teaching our students that Judaism ceased to exist when Jesus was born. That is, we are promulgating the self-serving lies of the antagonists of our subject and presenting those lies as though they were unquestionable fact.
Thinking the Unthinkable: Teaching the Daode Jing as Daoism
So, if we were to do the unthinkable--to teach the Daode jing in a manner consistent with its actual place in Daoist tradition--how would we do it? Specialists in the study of Daoism are only now beginning to learn enough about the tradition to enable us to answer such a question. Only a handful of scholars, from Anna Seidel to Livia Kohn, have even begun to pay any at- tention to what Daoist tradition has to say about ''Laozi,'' or about the nature of the Daode jing.
Yet one thing that we have known all along is that, in Daoist tradition, the Daode jing is a scripture. From one Daoist perspective, the Daode jing is ''the final intellectual result of practical efforts to achieve longevity, . . . a theoretical treatise referring to these practices and alluding to them in a coded form. ''23 From other Daoist perspectives, the text is a potently sacred scripture, revealed by a divinity who has existed from the beginning of the cosmos. 24 In this perspective,
Laozi is . . . the one who comes down from heaven to earth regularly, like rain, at first to serve as ''counselor to the Emperor'' . . . and later, after he has transferred this power to the first of the Heavenly
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Masters . . . in the 2nd century a. d. , to serve as divine ''lord of the religion. ''25
In other Daoist formulations, Laozi ''is the image and the model of the entire universe,'' and by proper meditation and/or ritual, the practitioner is (re-) united with the universal Dao, assimilating his or her personal reality to the universal reality, according to the model of Laozi himself.
26 In certain con- texts, the Daode jing is a cosmic reality in itself, a manifestation of realities beyond the ken of ordinary minds, and as such it gives its possessor immense power and corresponding responsibilities. 27
In sum, from the richly varied perspectives of centuries of Daoists, the Daode jing is not just a record of some old man's wise suggestions for living life. Its contents are understood by Daoists not just as musings about the Dao: in some sense, they are the Dao. The scripture is sacred not for what it says, but for what it is.
But one must also beware overestimating this scripture's importance in Daoist life: the Daode jing was generally an honored scripture, but it was seldom regarded as the final or ultimate revelation of the Dao. It would therefore be misleading to teach students to think of it as scripture in the sense of the Christians' Bible or the Muslims' Qur'an--that is, as an authoritative revelation of a single great message. In Daoism, there has seldom, if ever, been any belief in a single great message. 28 In Daoism, there is no trace or either orthodoxy or orthopraxy, and Daoists felt little need to conceptualize or justify the absence of either. 29 Our students should be keenly aware of these facts.
Respect for Traditional Religion in Secular Education: Lessons from Laozi
Skeptics might ask: Should educators today really teach the Daode jing from a Daoist perspective? After all, biblical scholars in academia do not assume that they ought to teach Matthew from a Christian perspective; they teach their students to stand, at least temporarily, outside of Christian tradition, to ana- lyze the text without the interpretive lenses of later ''traditional teachings. '' The goal of such analysis is not to teach students how to be Christian, but merely how to understand Christian texts. Such studies assume the necessity of maintaining a critical perspective.
Yet I believe that we must remain self-critically aware of the secularizing tendencies of academia, wherein the beliefs of religious practitioners are often casually disregarded or explained away as superstition or Freudian illusion. 30
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It is true that we must teach our students to distinguish history from myth: the Jesus who walked in Capernaum and the Christ of Pauline theology or Chartres Cathedral are quite distinguishable. But both are worthy subjects of academic inquiry, and Christian belief that they are ultimately identical may not be gratuitously dismissed. That is to say, while our students should be led to be able to think outside of the terms of the tradition under study, they should not be taught hostility to that tradition; in all my courses, my syllabus explains that our goal is to evaluate religions in a manner that is both properly critical and properly sympathetic. While we are unlikely to wish our students to accept a Daoist understanding of the nature of the Daode jing, I can see little objection to the position that we ought to expose our students to such interpretations, and to explain those interpretations sympathetically in terms of the realities of Chi- nese history and society. Simply to exclude such interpretations as inherently irrelevant--as has almost always been done in our classrooms--seems to leave the educator open to the charge of cultural imperialism, that is, that we arrogate unto ourselves the authority to tell Daoists what parts of their tradition are meaningful and valid and what parts are unworthy of serious attention. Post- modern educators have been as guilty of this secularistic arrogance as their predecessors.
Second, it seems quite possible that at least some later Daoist interpre- tations of the Daode jing might actually shed significant, even vital light upon important elements of its contents. For instance, Westerners have generally been fascinated with passages that encourage the practice of wuwei, ''nonac- tion. '' Indeed, such a practice has widely been assumed to have been the most fundamental and essential element of the Daoist life. But if we can break out of our inherited Orientalist mind-set, we quickly learn that in the actualities of Daoist life, wuwei has generally not been a central value to most Daoists of the past or the present: in many segments of Daoism one finds little trace of it. 31
If we can look past the fetishized idea of wuwei, we find that the Daode jing recommendations for living ''a Daoist life'' are actually quite manifold. But at least a few passages clearly suggest the importance of self-cultivation through some biospiritual process, a meditative process that involves manipulating or refining life forces like jing (vital essence) and qi (life energy). The research of Harold Roth is beginning to suggest possible communities of practitioners of such processes. 32 And clearly, the Nei ye, a text with many similarities to the Daode jing, is devoted primarily to urging the reader to engage in such practices. But our inherited interpretive models do little to help us understand, or teach, the nature or purpose of such practices, even in the context of the Daode jing. However, if we remove our Confucian/Victorian blinders, and look at Daoism
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honestly, we find an enormous literature on such practices throughout Chi- nese history, from the Taiping jing, an important text of Celestial Master Dao- ism, through the Tang heyday of the consolidated Daojiao, into the ''Inner Alchemy'' traditions of late imperial times. 33
Although our students--secularistic like most of their professors--may have trouble dealing with the fact that Daoists often revered the Daode jing as a revealed scripture or that Daoists used it in ritual and sacerdotal settings, they should certainly be able to understand it as an early expression of the abiding Daoist principle of self-perfection through the cultivation of our vital life en- ergies. If we fail to include Later Daoism as a meaningful context for under- standing the Daode jing, we rob our students of the chance to understand (1) that important element of classical Daoism, and therefore (2) the deep-rooted continuities that run through Daoism, from the Nei ye and Daode jing to the present. 34
A Zhuangzian Hermeneutic: Liberation by Means of the Facts
From the foregoing it should be clear that I teach my students to study the Daode jing by means of a protean hermeneutical process, the structure and contents of which are dictated by the text before us and by the facts of Chinese and Western cultural history. My guiding principles are that interpreting the Daode jing requires (1) sound philological and historical training, (2) a will- ingness to test interpretive models against the realities of the text and its cultural context, and (3) a willingness to modify or discard models that cannot be shown to accord with those realities.
In that sense, my assumption is that the conscientious educator is comparable to a scientist, who honors empirical facts and works cautiously to develop and test hypotheses until a coherent theory seems to be justified by the evidence. In such an endeavor, the scientist is not guided by the emotional needs of his or her students: he or she does not analyze or present the data on the basis of students' desire to find their life's meaning in it, or to compensate them for the fact that other types of data do not satisfy such desires. It does not matter to the astronomer whether her or his students are able to understand mass and gravitation in terms of their own lives (though the inverse might seem desirable). Nor should students be led to imagine that performing spectroscopic analysis can be regarded as optional if they feel that it might interfere with their urge to ''find themselves'' in the stars. I am willing to be indulgent enough to inform students that they are free to run their private lives
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as they see fit; if one becomes a happier, more well-adjusted person by fol- lowing astrological beliefs, perhaps that is all well and good. But any serious astronomer is going to teach her or his students that what we do in this classroom is not astrology, it is science, and that in science we set aside our personal needs and desires, no matter how valid they might be, when we are assessing empirical facts. Our assumption is going to be that we will take the facts seriously, even if they give us no satisfaction, or even make us deeply uncomfortable. And if need be, we allow our understanding of ourselves to be altered, even revolutionized, by the true implications of the facts.
Is it reasonable to follow such principles in teaching a text from ancient China? One may answer that Zhuangzi seems to demand it. Zhuangzi chal- lenged readers to question what they have always assumed to be truth, to question our means of determining truth, and to allow our living to be guided by the true realities of life: unrelenting change, complexity that may well exceed human comprehension, and inevitable death. Following Zhuangzi's path may be baffling and uncomfortable, but he seems to say that doing so is ultimately more fulfilling than attempting to struggle against such realities. His charge to learn to see and respond to life as it is, rather than as we wish it to be, is deeply challenging, and it may be for that reason that he couched his teachings in humorous stories of doves and cicadas and whimsical eccentrics who live life fully, despite the fact that their lives might violate cultural norms--including the assumption that rational analysis leads to truth.
In teaching the Daode jing, I challenge students to question cherished beliefs--Confucian, modernist, and postmodernist alike. I challenge them to regard interpretive models as things to be examined critically, not simply ap- plied to the data unreflectively. I challenge them to ask uncomfortable ques- tions about the text, such as whether there is any way we can ultimately know for sure what it might mean. I challenge them to ask whether any interpretive method can reliably reveal the text's meaning, or whether all such methods might merely be cultural constructs, which in the final analysis explain only the interpreters themselves.
Because he leads us to ask such questions, Zhuangzi has often been called a relativist. But as some recent analysts have observed, Zhuangzi does not ex- plicitly deny the validity of particular views: he merely draws them all into question. 35 If we cannot be entirely sure that we are justified in accepting any particular view, we also cannot be entirely sure that we would be justified in rejecting it. Indeed, Zhuangzi seems to maintain that there must be some sound and valid approach to living. The famous parable of the butterfly dream shows a mind doubting the validity of two contrary models of self-identification. Yet the writer does not conclude that all models are necessarily invalid: ''Between
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Zhou and the butterfly there must be a difference'' (bi you fen yi). But the writer urges us to look for proper perspective not in any coherent interpretive model, but rather in the indeterminate ''transformation of things'' (wuhua).
To return to my starting point, I repeat that there seems to be no de- finitively right or wrong way to teach the Daode jing. But that fact does not logically lead to the conclusion that all approaches are equally valid. There are clearly better and worse approaches, and some can legitimately be condemned as invalid. After all, Zhuang Zhou might not have been able to be entirely sure whether he was Zhou or a butterfly, but there was no question that his reality lay somewhere within that bipolarity: he did not conclude that he might really be a gourd or a millipede! So our task as educators is to weed out invalid approaches to the Daode jing and to work within the remaining possibilities.
For some, this task will mean teaching the text as a product of its time, as a response to a particular set of historical and intellectual realities. In that sense, the Daode jing is, in its final form, someone's attempt to provide an alternative to certain patterns of thought and behavior in parts of ancient China. For other educators, it may mean teaching the Daode jing as an early expression of key aspects of Daoist practice, pointing out the significance of the text's passages on self-cultivation. To me, it seems necessary to teach our students both of those perspectives, because the text's composer (or at least, its final redactor) gave us a text that includes both. I try to help students cope with the resulting ambiguities by offering them a new hermeneutic model: unraveling a text that is composed in various layers, each the work of different minds, minds that proceeded from different assumptions, values, and concerns. This model, which reflects the textual and historical conclusions of many scholars, helps students understand the importance of historical realities, the importance of textual realities, and the fruitfulness of scholarly analysis as a hermeneutical tool.
This approach also gives students an intelligible reason to reject all the truly silly interpretations of the Daode jing that float around today. Just as Zhuang Zhou may or may not have been a butterfly but was certainly not a gourd, so the Daode jing is an expression of ancient Chinese sociopoliti- cal thought, an expression of interest in meditational and behavioral self- cultivation, possibly even an expression of popular values of ancient Chu, but it is certainly not the product of a modern or postmodern mind and was certainly not intended to correct the evils of our own age. So, although some educators may not yet feel ready to smash those interpretive gourds, we should help our students see what they are good for--studying the unreflective cultural impe- rialism that lingers in the postmodern West--and what they are not good for: understanding the Daode jing.
160 recent scholarship and teaching the daode jing
notes
1. Some of the thoughts presented here were stimulated by a 1993 Minneapolis workshop entitled ''Text and Context: Critical Thinking Strategies for Texts in Translation. '' In that workshop, sponsored by the University of Minnesota, M. J. Abhishaker of Normandale College examined the problems of critical thinking in a culturally diverse interpretive context, and I focused discussion on hermeneutical issues involving the Daode jing I am indebted to Dr. Abhishaker and the other participants.
2. For decades, the Daode jing has been widely interpreted as offering solutions to problems that modern Westerners see as afflicting their own world. As Steve Bradbury has said, ''Because the vast majority of its translators, Western and Chinese, were attracted to it in the first place because of their humanist faith in . . . the Daode jing as proto-humanist doctrine compatible with liberal Protestantism, they have usually produced . . . readings of the work that . . . endorse a Western agenda. '' That agenda generally relates to a modern metanarrative that subordinates textual, his- torical, and cultural facts to a yearning for a utopian society freed of the evils that supposedly afflict the world under the oppressive yoke of ''organized religion,'' ''in- dustrial development,'' ''technology,'' ''patriarchal hegemony,'' or the linear rational- ism of ''the Western mind. '' Educators should acquaint themselves with Bradbury's essay, ''The American Conquest of Philosophical Taoism,'' in Translation East and West: A Cross-Cultural Approach, ed. Cornelia N. Moore and Lucy Lower (Honolulu: University of Hawaii College of Languages, Linguistics and Literature, and East-West Center, 1992), 29-41. More generally, see J. J. Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter between Asian and Western Thought (London: Routledge, 1997); J. J. Clarke, The Tao of the West (London: Routledge, 2000); and Russell Kirkland, ''On Coveting Thy Neighbor's Tao: Reflections on J. J. Clarke's The Tao of the West,'' Religious Studies Review 28, no. 4 (2002): 309-312.
3. The 1963 Penguin edition of Lau's translation is still useful, though it trans- lates the received text, that is, the traditional version edited by the third-century phi- losopher Wang Pi. Students today should know that version, but should also be given a reliable translation of the Ma-wang-tui manuscripts, such as that by Robert G. Henricks, Lao-tzu Te-Tao Ching (New York: Ballantine Books, 1989). Henricks's version is readable and sinologically sound. In the same year, Lau translated the Ma- wang-tui edition, though the translation was published in Hong Kong, rendering it inaccessible to most students and educators. Fortunately, it has now been published in North America: D. C. Lau, Lao-tzu: Tao Te Ching (New York: Knopf, 1994), with a sound introduction by a good scholar, Sarah Allen. There is also a lovely translation of the Ma-wang-tui texts by Victor Mair: Tao Te Ching (New York: Bantam Books, 1990). Mair's translation is the most elegant of the reliable minimalist translations, but his explanatory efforts (in his preface, afterword, and appendix) contain so many prob- lems that I recommend it only to advanced students, who may be capable of sorting through them.
4. In the original assignment, I exhibited my personal values by referring to ''the writer'' as ''he/she. '' Since that time, I have learned not to project my wishes on
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history. My colleague Vivian-Lee Nyitray (University of California, Riverside) teaches students to ''avoid imposing a modern sensibility on the past,'' to remember that ''people in the past were not, for the most part, democratic, tolerant of religious or racial difference, concerned for individual rights . . . , fascinated by the personality . . . , particularly squeamish, or believers in 'Progress. ''' I pass these observations along to my students, adding, among other things, that we should beware of logical problems in applying gender-inclusive language to data from ages or cultures that were reso- lutely gender-exclusive. For instance, the category of ''Confucian scholar'' ( ju) has always been closed to women, whether or not we believe that it should have been. So I urge students to consider such facts when they write; today, for instance, readers of the Daode jing come in both genders, but such was not the case in ancient China. See notes 11 and 14 below.
5. Scholars like A. C. Graham and Harold Roth have made clear that, historically, the term ''Taoism'' was only a bibliographic classification until about the third century c. e. As Roth has put it, ''The 'Lao-Zhuang' tradition to which [modern 'tradition'] refers is actually a Wei-Jin literati reconstruction, albeit a powerful and enduring one. '' Harold Roth, ''Some Issues in the Study of Chinese Mysticism: A Review Essay,'' China Review International 2, no. 1 (1995): 157. I address these issues much more fully in Taoism: The Enduring Tradition (London: Routledge, 2004), and ''Self-Fulfillment through Selflessness: The Moral Teachings of the Daode jing,'' in Varieties of Ethical Reflection: New Directions for Ethics in a Global Context, ed. Michael Barnhart (New York: Lexington Books, 2002).
6. On the figure of ''Lao-tzu,'' a rich and constantly evolving cultural construct, see A. C. Graham, ''The Origins of the Legend of Lao Tan,'' in his Studies in Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 111-124; Judith Magee Boltz, ''Lao-tzu,'' in The Encyclopedia of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 8:454-459; Livia Kohn, God of the Dao: Laozi in History and Myth (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, 1998), and ''The Lao-tzu Myth,'' in Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching, ed. Livia Kohn and Michael LaFargue (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 41-62. The Western cultural construct of ''Lao-tzu'' remains wholly unstudied.
7. See Kirkland, Taoism: The Enduring Tradition, 39-52, and ''Varieties of 'Tao- ism' in Ancient China: A Preliminary Comparison of Themes in the Nei yeh and Other 'Taoist Classics,' '' Taoist Resources 7, no. 2 (1997): 73-86.
8. My complete ''Historical Outline of Taoism,'' with explanations of certain interpretive positions, appears in ''The Historical Contours of Taoism in China: Thoughts on Issues of Classification and Terminology,'' Journal of Chinese Religions 25 (1997): 57-82; more recent thoughts, and a revised outline, appear in ''The History of Taoism: A New Outline,'' Journal of Chinese Religions 30 (2002): 177-193. An exposi- tion of my analysis of the ''layers'' of the Daode jing appears in Kirkland, ''The Book of the Way,'' in Great Literature of the Eastern World, ed. Ian P. McGreal (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 24-29; a new analysis appears in Taoism: The Enduring Tra- dition, 52-67.
9. Again,Iemploythemasculinepronounhereasamatterofhistoricalaccuracy.
162 recent scholarship and teaching the daode jing
10. I am unaware of any study that properly examines the facile modern as- sumption that the Daode jing, or Zhuangzi, can or ought to be read in terms of what Westerners understand to be ''philosophy. '' In my ''Self-Fulfillment through Self- lessness,'' I suggest some critical perspectives on the interpretive assumptions of Arthur C. Danto and Chad Hansen.
11. Again, I use masculine-gendered language here for a reason. I see evidence in the Daode jing that some of its thoughts could have originated in the minds of women, for example, members of local communities of Chu, whose ''elders'' (laozi) may not all have been male. (This analysis originates in ideas of Kimura Eiichi; see my ''Book of the Way. '') But I also assume that, given the general absence of literacy among women in pre-Han China, the composer or redactor of the Daode jing must have been male (albeit possibly with input from female associates).
12. Such is apparently the view of Chad Hansen: ''Laozi's position . . . remains a way station in Daoist development . . . We still have no final answer to the question, 'What should we do? '. . . If there is some advice, some point, Laozi could not state it. And so neither can I. But Zhuangzi can! Daoism must still mature more. '' Hansen, A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought: A Philosophical Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 202, 230.
13. The happiness of some interpreters to read the Daode jing's teachings as a watery ''mysticism''--a category utterly alien to China--can generally be explained in terms of the Western cultural experience. While some traditional cultures did have occasional ''mystics'' who communed directly with some higher reality, the modern interest in finding new forms of mysticism in old traditions has been propelled by the desperate search for a modern (i. e. , nonreligious) religion. No longer willing to take God, Church, or moral absolutes seriously, many moderns yearn for a ''Truth'' that ''liberated'' persons can accept and practice without having to yield to any authority outside themselves. To such seekers, the very concept of mysticism involves a de- deified Truth, purged of the premodern cultural baggage that moderns blithely dis- miss as ''superstition''--that is, all beliefs that deny the autonomy of the individual to dictate what is or is not real, true, or important. In this sense, mysticism is a nar- cissistic cultural construct, cherished by moderns as a means of escaping God (who, in Western tradition, embarrassingly demands obedience) and sacral community (which embarrassingly suggests that reality exists outside the individual's own ''au- tonomous'' consciousness). Though there has still been no critical assessment of the Western cultural notion that the Daode jing contains mysticism, a few preliminary reflections in that direction appear in Hansen, A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought. Other reflections on the applicability of concepts of mysticism to Daoist data appear in Lee Yearley, ''The Perfected Person in the Radical Chuang-tzu,'' in Experimental Essays on Chuang-tzu, ed. Victor Mair (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983), 125-139.
14. Elsewhere I have commented on Tu Wei-ming's effort to facilitate post- modern appropriation of Confucius's teachings by retranslating Confucius's term for the human ideal--zhun zi, which originally meant ''the sons of the rulers'' and was transformed by Confucius to mean ''the noble man'' rather than ''the nobleman''--as ''the profound person. '' Such a translation is intended to render Confucian ideals
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accessible and attractive to everyone, male and female alike. However, historical facts clearly reveal that prior to the age of Tu himself, the Confucian tradition was reso- lutely ''sexist. '' To sanitize for modern consumption a conservative tradition that al- ways rejected, on principle, individual efforts to ''improve'' tradition seems to be a move well justified in postmodern terms, but illegitimate in Confucian terms. Daoism is a different case, since premodern Daoism welcomed women as practitioners, though it could not fully escape the gender constraints of the surrounding society. See my entry, ''Taoism,'' in Encyclopedia of Women and World Religion (New York: Mac- millan, 1999), 2: 959-964.
15. See the chapter in this volume by Norman J. Girardot, and his book The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge's Oriental Pilgrimage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
16. As Tu Wei-ming has noted, the Enlightenment mentality is the common heritage of all modern minds, Chinese and Western alike.