No More Learning

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
118 recent scholarship and teaching the daode jing
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
122 recent scholarship and teaching the daode jing
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-
my way: teaching the daode jing 123
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
my way: teaching the daode jing 125
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
126 recent scholarship and teaching the daode jing
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).
6. Even a recent ''Gospel of Elvis'' alludes to Daoism. See Louie Ludwig, The Gospel of Elvis: The Testament and Apocrypha of the Greater Themes of ''The King'' (Ar- lington, Texas: Summit, 1994). Most egregiously, see David Rosen's The Tao of Elvis (New York: Harvest, 2002).
7. Most problematic is Mitchell's presumption that his experience with Zen meditation gave him some unique and seamless insight into the inner ''perennial
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philosophy'' embedded in the ancient Daoist text. It should also be noted that it is not always the philologically sophisticated sinological scholar that is able to produce a good translation. This is demonstrated by the infamous ''Philological Notes on Chapter One of the Lao Tzu'' by the formidable sinologist, Peter A. Boodberg,
in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 20 (1959): 598-618. For all of his erudition, Boodberg managed to produce a ''translation'' that amounted to almost total gibberish.
8. See N. Sivin, ''On the Word 'Taoist' as a Source of Perplexity: With Special Reference to the Relations of Science and Religion in Traditional China,'' History of Religions 17 (1978): 303-330. See also Russell Kirkland's acerbic ''The Taoism of the Western Imagination and the Daoism of China: De-Colonizing the Exotic Teachings of the East, unpublished lecture, University of Tennessee, 1997.
See also Steven Bradbury, ''The American Conquest of Philosophical Daoism,'' in Translation East and West: A Cross-Cultural Approach, ed. Cornelia N. Moore
and Lucy Lower (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, College of Languages, 1992), 29- 41.
9. See, for example, Livia Kohn's The Daoist Experience: An Anthology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993); Eva Wong's Shambhala Guide to Daoism (Boston: Shambhala, 1997); and Steven Bokenkamp's Early Daoist Scriptures (Berke- ley: University of California Press, 1997). On the scholarship surrounding the Daode jing, see Livia Kohn and Michael LaFargue, eds. , Lao Tzu and the Tao-te-ching (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998).
10. See James Miller's Daoism: A Short Introduction (Oxford: Oneworld, 2002); Livia Kohn's Daoism and Chinese Culture (Cambridge, Mass. : Three Pines Press, 2001); and the forthcoming work by Russell Kirkland, Taoism: The Enduring Tradition (New York: Routledge).
11. The first edition of Thompson's Chinese Religion: An Introduction appeared in 1969. For a discussion of the pedagogical and cultural significance of this book, see N. J. Girardot, '' 'Very Small Books about Very Large Subjects': A Prefatory Appreciation of the Enduring Legacy of Laurence G. Thompson's Chinese Religion. An Introduction,'' Journal of Chinese Religions 20 (fall 1992): 9-15.
12. Some of these issues as they relate to the nineteenth century are treated in my The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge's Oriental Pilgrimage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
13. Concerning my association with Eliade and my growing estrangement from him in the 1980s, see my ''Whispers and Smiles: Nostalgic Reflections on Mircea Eliade's Significance for the Study of Religion,'' in Changing Religious Worlds: The Meaning and End of Mircea Eliade, ed. Bryan Rennie (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 143-164.
14. See my discussion of these issues in ''Part of the Way: Four Studies on Taoism,'' History of Religions 11 (1972): 319-337.
15. On the multiple translations of the Daode jing, see Knut Walf, Westliche Taoismus-Bibliographie: Western Bibliography of Taoism (Essen, Germany: Verlag Die Blaue Eule, 1992).
128 recent scholarship and teaching the daode jing
16. On the Jungian cult, see Richard Noll, The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung (New York: Random House, 1997); and especially J. J. Clarke's Jung and Eastern Thought: A Dialogue with the Orient (London: Routledge, 1994).
17. On the liberal Protestant paradigm (and its accompanying anti-Catholicism) as applied to Daoism and other Chinese religions, see my Victorian Translation of China. See also Gregory Schopen, ''Archaeology and Protestant Presuppositions in the Study of Indian Buddhism,'' History of Religions 31 (1991): 1-23.
18. The daunting nature of this situation is suggested by Isabelle Robinet's evocative description of the amazingly heterogeneous Daozang:
The existing Daoist canon . . .
, which was first issued in 1442, contains more than a thousand works. It simultaneously gathers together works by philos- ophers like Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu; pharmacopoeial treatises; the oldest Chinese medical treatise; hagiographies; immense ritual texts laced with magic; imaginary geographies; dietetic and hygienic recipes; anthologies and hymns; speculations on the diagrams of the I ching; meditation techniques; alchemical texts; and moral tracts. One finds both the best and the worst within the canon. But it is exactly this state of affairs that constitutes its richness.
Isabelle Robinet, Daoist Meditation: The Mao-shan Tradition of Great Purity, trans. Julian Pas and N. J. Girardot (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993).
19. See Girardot, The Victorian Translation of China.
20. I no longer have the exact reference for Reagan's use of the Daode jing. I think it may have been mentioned in an article in the New York Times describing the amazing six-figure advance given to Stephen Mitchell for his rendition of the Daode jing.
21. See Patricia Leigh Brown's ''Peace Is a Bookshelf Away: Benjamin Hoff's Pooh-as-Daoist Joins a Genre That Combines Self-help with Spiritual Discovery,'' New York Times, November 19, 1992.
22. Myth and Meaning was first published by the University of California Press in 1983, with a corrected paperback printing in 1988 (the connection with chaos theory was discussed in my preface to the paperback edition).
23. Such is the subtitle of Goodspeed's Dao Jones Averages, a work that is replete with the secret stock market wisdom of the amazingly adaptable Daode jing.
24. See Schipper's suggestive discussion of some of these matters in The Taoist Body, 183-216; see also John Lagerwey, Daoist Ritual in Chinese Society and History (New York: Macmillan, 1987), ix-xvi, 241-290. For some of the problems associated with the use of the category of mysticism, see the general discussion in the Harper- Collins Dictionary of Religion (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995), 747-749.
25. I borrow the phrase ''the flesh of language'' from David Abram's meditation on the ecology of language, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 73.
26. For Lu Ji's essay, see Tony Barstone and Chou Ping, trans. , The Art of Writing: Teachings of the Chinese Masters (Boston: Shambhala, 1996). See also Stephen
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Nachmanovitch, Free Play: The Power of Improvisation in Life and the Arts (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1990) and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1990).
27. For LaFargue's hermeneutical method as applied to the Daode jing, see The Dao of the Daode jing: A Translation and Commentary (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 190-213 (''Hermeneutics: A Reasoned Approach to Interpreting the Daode jing''). The literary forms include what LaFargue calls ''polemic aphorisms'' and ''self-cultivation sayings. '' In his discussion of the ''origin sayings'' (a subset of the self-cultivation sayings), LaFargue suggests that some scholars (hinting at my Myth and Meaning) misconstrue these passages as instructions about cosmogonic and metaphysical theories which are then used by Daoists to ''build the rest of their thought and their approach to practical problems'' (207). Let me take this opportunity to say that my point of view about the cosmogonic implications of some of the passages and images in the Daode jing is not so far removed from LaFargue's idea that these passages are basically ''celebratory'' in nature--that is, that these passages cel- ebrate ''the existentially 'foundational' character of Dao as concretely experienced in the self-cultivation practice of the ideal Laoist'' (208). It is worth mentioning that another excellent recent translation is Stephen Addiss and Stanley Lombardo, Daode jing Lao-Tzu (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993). In the past few years, numerous other translations (good and otherwise) have appeared. Moreover, there is also the recent excitement of the discovery of the oldest extant version of the Daode jing, the so-called Guodian text. See, for example, The Guodian Laozi: Proceedings of the International Conference, Dartmouth College, May 1998, Early China Special Monograph Series, No. 5, edited by Sarah Allan and Crispin Williams. For a translation of the text, see Robert Henricks, Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
28. See also the critical appraisal of Clarke's work in the symposium ''The Tao of the West: Western Transformations of Taoist Thought,'' in Religious Studies Review 28 (2002): 303-338 (commentary by N. Girardot, Julia Hardy, Russell Kirkland, Elijah Siegler, James Miller, Jonathan Herman, Jeffrey Dippmann, Louis Komjathy, and J. J. Clarke).
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? The Reception of Laozi
Livia Kohn
In teaching Daoism, one of the key texts that is usually discussed early in the class is the Daode jing, also known as the Laozi after its alleged author. The text, which in its standard version consists of eighty-one chapters and is divided into two parts, is highly philo- sophical and inspiring and has been translated into English numer- ous times. As likely as not, students are already familiar with it and may even own one or the other translation. From reading it--and from popular citations and adaptations made of it, such as the famous Tao of Pooh--students in close imitation of mainstream America have gained the idea that Daoism is all about going along with the flow, living in harmony with nature, acting by not acting, cultivating qui- etude and spontaneity, and generally being a nonachieving, nature- loving kind of person. It typically comes as somewhat of a shock to them to learn that there are some serious historical realities in the background of the book, that not everyone reads it in the same, Americanized way, that translations differ considerably in wording and outlook, and that there is an entire two-thousand-year-long reli- gious tradition called Daoism, in which the text has played an im- portant and often devotional role, being used both in communal ritual and in personal cultivation.
The first reception of Laozi, therefore, that our students tend to be already familiar with is the reception of the text Laozi as scripture, that is, as something of eternal value that can and must be adapted to one's own particular circumstances and interpreted accordingly. As
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Michael LaFargue has described it, this reception focuses on the idea that the text has something important to say to the present-day reader. 1 The main problem to be overcome, then, is the apparent cultural distance between this reader and the ancient writing, the best way of bringing the text into the modern world and making it into a document addressing questions of most interest today. A given interpretation is most successful if it allows the reader to find in the text something stimulating, moving, or inspiring. While this ap- proach is perfectly valid and should be discussed in the classroom, we as ed- ucators also have the task to inform students about the historical realities surrounding the text. At this point three different topics emerge as central to the discussion: the concrete, textual unfolding of the work; the historical reality surrounding its conception; and the text's role in the later religious tradition.
First, the concrete, textual history of the work includes a discussion of the three major editions of the work. Among them is most prominently the so- called standard edition, also known as the transmitted edition. Handed down by Chinese copyists over the ages, it is at the root of almost all translations of the text. It goes back to the third century c. e. , to the erudite Wang Bi (226-249), who edited the text and wrote a commentary on it that Chinese since then have considered inspired. It has shaped the reception of the text's worldview until today.
A somewhat earlier edition is called the Mawangdui version, named after a place in southern China (Hunan) where a tomb was excavated in 1973 that dated from 168 b. c. e. It contained an undisturbed coffin surrounded by numerous artifacts and several manuscripts written on silk, mostly dealing with cosmology and longevity techniques, such as gymnastics and sexual practices. Among them were two copies of the Daode jing. The Mawangdui version differs little from the transmitted edition: there are some character variants that have helped clarify some interpretive points, and the two parts are in reversed order; that is, the text begins with the section on De, then adds the section on Dao. The manuscripts are important because they show that the Daode jing existed in its complete form in the early Han dynasty, and that it was considered essential enough to be placed in someone's grave. 2
Yet another important edition of the Daode jing was discovered in 1993 in a place called Guodian (Hubei). Written on bamboo slips and dated to about 300 b. c. e. , the find presents a collection of various philosophical works of the time, including fragments of Confucian and other texts. Among them are thirty-three passages that can be matched with thirty-one chapters of the Daode jing, but with lines in different places and considerable variation in characters. Generally, they are concerned with self-cultivation and its application to questions of rulership and the pacification of the state. Polemical attacks against Confucian
virtues, such as those describing them as useless or even harmful (chapters 18- 19), are not found; instead negative attitudes and emotions are criticized. The Guodian find of this so-called Bamboo Laozi tells us that in the late fourth century b. c. e. the text existed in rudimentary form and consisted of a collection of sayings not yet edited into a coherent presentation. Another text found at Guodian, the Taiyi sheng shui (Great Unity Creates Water), gives further in- sights into the growing and possibly even ''Daoist'' cosmology of the time, as does a contemporaneous work on self-cultivation, the ''Inward Training'' (Neiye) chapter of the Guanzi. It appears that, gradually, a set of ideas and practices was growing that would eventually develop into something specifi- cally and more religiously Daoist. 3
In describing and discussing the textual history, instructors must make it clear that the Daode jing was not naturally standardized, but that the standard version evolved over time, from a rudimentary form found at Guodian through the first fairly complete texts at Mawangdui to the standard edition of Wang Bi in the third century c. e. , which did not arise until six centuries after the text's first conception. This standardization, moreover, depended on what the Chi- nese of that age considered valuable and relevant. Prior to Wang Bi--and less so but still even after him4--the Daode jing was a text in flux, consisting of mis- cellaneous sayings in various stages of coherent collation that were changed, rearranged, and reinterpreted many times. Especially the new Guodian find is of importance here, because it shows the context of the work as part of the educational repertoire of a southern crown prince, used--at least as much as we can tell so far--together with philosophical works of other schools to give the next ruler the best possible education for his future responsibilities. 5
Another topic is the historical reality surrounding the text's creation, the environment of Warring States China, as well as the wider perspective of world history. In this context it is helpful to students to point out that both the person and the text Laozi arose around 500 b. c. e. in a period of great change not only in China but the world over. The German philosopher Karl Jaspers called this period the ''axial age'' in his seminal work The Origin and Goal of History. The term refers to the fact that at this time in many different cultures new thinkers and religious leaders arose who, for the first time, placed great emphasis on the individual as opposed to the community of the clan or tribe. Examples include the Buddha in India, Zoroaster in Persia, Socrates in an- cient Greece, and Confucius in China. The ideas proposed by these thinkers and religious leaders had a strong and pervasive impact on the thinking of humanity in general, contributing significantly to our thinking even today.
Students should understand that no document arises in a historical vac- uum. They need to see how China at this time was undergoing tremendous
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economic and political changes. The arrival of iron-age technology, and with it better ploughshares, wagon axles, and weapons, had caused an increase in food production and massive population growth, as well as greater mobility and wealth among the people. This in turn led to a heightened hunger for power among local lords, who began to wage wars in order to expand their lands and increase their influence, setting large infantry armies against each other. While the central king of the Zhou dynasty (1122-221 b. c. e. ) was still officially in charge of the entire country, there were in fact many independent states in a more or less constant state of conflict. The period is thus appro- priately named the Warring States (zhanguo). It was a time of unrest and transition which left many people yearning for the peace and stability of old, and ended only with the violent conquest of all other states and the estab- lishment of the Chinese empire by the Qin dynasty in 221 b. c. e.
Most Chinese philosophers of the Warring States, in accordance with the situation they faced, were concerned with the proper ''way'' or ''method'' (dao) leading to the recovery of the harmony and social manageability of an earlier, golden age. The word dao was accordingly not limited to one specific school but arose as a generic term used by all philosophers, so generic, in fact, that A. C. Graham entitled his work on early Chinese philosophy Disputers of the Dao. The works of the ancient Chinese philosophers can thus be described as characterized by a strong backward focus and feudalistic vision. Although Western scholars usually characterize them as ''philosophers,'' they always placed a strong emphasis on the practical dimensions of their teachings, both in regard to the individual's social behavior and to his or her personal self- cultivation. In fact, at the core of most ancient Chinese thought are practices of social discipline and the transformation of individuals and communities. Followers often congregated in small, almost sectarian groups rather than in what we think of as philosophical schools. 6
This phase of the discussion of the text also lends itself most opportunely to an introduction of the basic history and doctrines of Confucianism as a comparative backdrop. It can be emphasized here that, while the quest for harmony and political stability was equally at the root of philosophers' efforts, early Confucians focused predominantly on the idea of ritual formality or etiquette (li), the proper behavior in all social situations. This social formality was to be observed on all three levels of life: in family and society, in gov- ernment, and in religious ritual. It meant the guidance toward proper behavior among people of different rank and status, defined through the five rela- tionships of ruler-minister, father-son, husband-wife, elder-younger brother, and friend-friend. In each case, there was a senior and a junior, and each had obligations toward the other, expressed in the so-called Confucian virtues. 7
This social focus and emphasis on set behavior patterns, then, can be con- trasted effectively with the doctrines of ziran and wuwei in the Daode jing.
An aspect students should be made aware of is the role of the text in the later religious tradition, and especially its importance in Daoist ritual. As early as the first century b. c. e. , the Daode jing was considered a sacred text that should be recited to the greater benefit of self and state. By the second century c. e. , it was the central text of the Celestial Masters, who recited it regularly both as a devotional exercise and for its magical effect. To ensure the proper efficacy of this recitation, practitioners had to be morally pure. Accordingly, the Ce- lestial Masters also used it as the inspiration for certain behavioral rules. These rules are connected with the Xianger commentary to the Daode jing, a text that survives among the manuscripts found at Dunhuang. Attributed to Zhang Lu, third Celestial Master and grandson of the founder Zhang Daoling, who lived in the early third century, it describes the contemporaneous interpretation of the text. The precepts listed here are of two kinds: a group of nine precepts providing general rules of behavior based on the philosophy of the Daode jing, and a group of twenty-seven precepts, which present a mixture of general rules, behavioral regulations, and temporal taboos. 8
In the fifth century, recitation of the Daode jing was widely practiced among Daoist schools and linked closely with the attainment of immortality. As such, it appears in the Wenshi neizhuan (Inner Biography of the Master at the Beginning of the Scripture), a sixth-century hagiography of Laozi that tells of his transmission of the Daode jing to Yin Xi, the Guardian of the Pass--a tale symptomatic for the idealized relationship between master and disciple in the religion. At first Laozi rejects Yin Xi's demand to join him on his further travels, saying:
In order to follow me, you first have to attain the Dao. But your many impurities are not eradicated yet, so how can you follow me on my distant wanderings? For the present, recite the ''Text in Two Sec- tions'' [the Daode jing] ten thousand times. Then your Dao will be perfected and you can follow me on my distant wanderings. 9
Yin Xi did as he was ordered and recited the Daode jing ten thousand times over a period of three years. As a result, he ''gained eternal life and the state of no death. '' According to another source, he ''attained inner sincerity in his essence and pervasion in his meditation so that he could pervade the mystery,'' as the Xisheng jing (Scripture of Western Ascension, DZ 726) states (1. 11ab).
That this practice and its effect was not merely part of mythology is evidenced in the Zhen'gao (Declarations of the Perfected, DZ 1016), a record of Daoist teachings and practices dated to around the year 500. According to
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this, a certain Old Lord instructed three members of the Zhou family, the father and two sons, to recite the Daode jing. The father and elder brother succeeded in reciting the text ten thousand times and flew off as celestials. The younger brother, however, reached only 9,733 times and did not attain immortality (5. 6a).
In addition, the Daode jing also stood at the center of a ritualized medi- tation. According to a fifth-century text that survived in Duhuang and served as a preface to the text, the Daode zhenjing xujue (Introductory Explanations to the Daode jing), Laozi gave detailed instructions on how to properly venerate the scripture. Adepts should purify themselves thoroughly and enter a special meditation chamber, where they burn incense, straighten their robes, bow to the ten directions, and actively visualize Laozi and his major assistants.
Only in the venerable presence of these divine personages is the Daode jing to be opened. Its recitation must further be preceded by a formal prayer, by which the adept calls upon the Lord of the Niwan Palace, the central repre- sentative of the gods and resident in the central palace of the head, to descend. As the divinity approaches, the room undergoes mysterious changes: a radiance as of seven jewels spreads, doors and windows open spontaneously. A link of light to the higher spheres is thus established, through which the practitioner floats up and away into the purple empyrean. Finding himself among the stars, he has the sun and moon at his sides and approaches the divine immortals to gain immortality for himself--and not only for himself but also for his an- cestors of seven generations.
After this invocation, when the adept has placed himself firmly among the celestials, he proceeds with the ritual. The text says:
Finish the recitation, then clap your teeth and swallow your saliva thirty-six times. Visualize the green dragon to your left, the white tiger to your right, the red bird in front of you, and the dark warrior at your back.
Your feet stand between the eight trigrams, the divine turtle and the thirty-six masters bow to you. In front, you see the seventeen stars, while your five inner organs give forth the five energies and a network pattern streams across your body.
On three sides you are joined by an attendant, each having a retinue of a thousand carriages and ten thousand horsemen. Eight thousand jade maidens and jade lads of heaven and earth stand guard for you. (sect. 5)
Clapping one's teeth and swallowing saliva are part of the standard Daoist meditation ritual, symbolic forms of announcing one's communication with
the deities. The adept is instructed to place himself in the cosmic center by seeing himself surrounded by the four mythical animals of the four direc- tions, representing constellations in the sky, and placing his feet firmly on the eight trigrams of the Yijing (Book of Changes). Everyone bows to him, and he is fully established among the stars; his body has become a pure constellation of light and energy patterns. Then he sees himself supported by attendants, one on each side and behind him, who in turn, as in an imperial procession, are joined by thousands of followers and servants. Now that the celestial position of the meditator at the center of the cosmos is firmly established, he can recite the Daode jing in its truest environment and to its greatest effect. 10
Over the following centuries, the Daode jing continued to be actively used both in meditation and liturgy and played an important role in the formal ordination of priests, representing a level of advanced lay followers who were preparing to leave the householder's life but had not yet done so. Their progress was divided into two stages. First, he or she--women being treated as equals in the priestly system--learned basic meditation and recitation techniques, worshipped Laozi and Yin Xi as their major patriarchs, and ob- served ten precepts that included five basic rules against killing, stealing, lying, sexual misconduct, and intoxication, together with a set of guidelines to help practitioners to live in harmony with their families and their commu- nities, striving for the liberation and salvation of all beings.
Second, they took additional precepts and received more detailed instruc- tions on the Daode jing, undergoing an ordination ceremony that named them Gaoxuan fashi or Preceptors of Eminent Mystery and bestowed upon them a variety of exegetical, devotional, and technical materials linked with the text. These included early commentaries on the Daode jing, technical interpretations of the text, philosophical and mystical exegeses, practical manuals on Daode jing meditation and ritual, and formal hagiographies of Laozi and Yin Xi. 11 The importance of the Daode jing as a sacred scripture in priestly and monastic ordination continues to the present day. It is one of the texts chanted at reli- gious services in the Complete Perfection (Quanzhen) school, handed to or- dinands at the time of first initiation together with a set of ten precepts and certain guidelines for self-cultivation. The Daode jing as much as the figure of Laozi have inspired seekers of self-cultivation, and numerous meditation techniques through history as well as Qigong methods of recent years have appeared in their name. 12
Discussing these topics with students and placing the text in its larger historical and ritual context will inevitably lead into the reception of Laozi the person, a figure typically thought of as a contemporary of Confucius. Based on an account of his person in the Shiji, he is typically described as a learned and
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somewhat reclusive official at the Zhou court, where he served as an archivist. His first call to fame came when Confucius, eager to expand his knowledge of the ancient rites, went to the Zhou capital to consult him. Lao Dan, instead of imparting his wisdom, put Confucius down, advising him to forget all about things to cram into his head and instead to let go of everything and follow the natural way. Confucius, stunned for several days, finally emerged with the verdict that he had met many impressive people in his day but none like Lao Dan, who was ''truly like a dragon,'' free from all constraints and powerfully soaring in the sky. Laozi's second call to fame came when he decided to emigrate because nothing much good was going to come of the Zhou dynasty anymore. Stopped by the Guardian of the Pass, he was compelled to spell out his ideas and thus, under some duress, wrote the Daode jing.
As A. C. Graham has shown, this image is largely legendary, the figure Laozi being originally a Confucian creation, used to show the master's hu- mility and eagerness to learn. The hoary master was then taken over by the growing ''Daoist'' school when it needed a respectable founder in the fourth century b. c. e. Presented to the conquering Qin rulers as a powerful political thinker of unusual longevity in the third century b. c. e. , Laozi was then re- moved from the scene by the story of his western emigration, which conve- niently also accounted for the compilation of the Daode jing.