No More Learning

But that's really too much of a wimpishly relativistic and blithely Daoistic answer to give to serious seekers of the Way. More pointedly and neoconservatively, let me just say no. No, hardly anything that popularly parades as Daoism and the mesmerizing message or mental massage of the Daode jing has much relation to the historical Daoist tradition or, for that matter, to the amazingly malleable text attributed to the wizened and pointy-headed Chinese Yoda known as the Old Boy. It's not that I think Mitchell's Zennish pseudo-translation of the Laozi, Hoff 's New Age Pooh Bear Dao, or Kevin Smith's Silent Bob are intrinsically evil. 7 They assuredly are not, and I have used both Mitchell's and Hoff 's works in the classroom. When
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employed strategically and contextually, they constitute an effective way to begin and end a course on Daoism. First, before the long hard journey into the murky byways of the tradition, these works give temporary comfort and con- fidence to the wayfarers. Besides being appealingly well written and broadly accessible, they accomplish this by articulating prevailing sentimental expec- tations and desires about the tradition. But it is exactly this consciousness raising about our cultural preconceptions concerning the text and the tradition that helps to set up and significantly problematize the meaning of ''Daoism'' in both Chinese and Western cultural history. Contrary to Pooh Bear Daoism, the Laozi never announced that the Disney World secret of the cosmos is that ''life is fun. '' Nor was the actual Daoism of Chinese tradition intrinsically nontheistic, nonritualistic, or nonclerical. Indeed, the Daoism of Chinese his- tory, like Buddhism for that matter, was never a tradition that focused exclu- sively on the individualistic practice of meditation or the ''idiot savant'' purity of Pooh Bear intuition.
I regularly begin my current writing-intensive seminar on the Daoist tra- dition at Lehigh University with an initial short evaluative essay on the ''life is fun'' Daoism as presented by the Tao of Pooh and as contextualized by Nathan Sivin's brilliantly vexing article ''On the Word 'Taoist' as a Source of Per- plexity. ''8 I conclude the course with an assignment that requires my students to write a final brief reflective paper on the accuracy of the Hoffian vision of Daoism in light of the course's semester-long struggle with pooh-perplexing issues of comparative interpretation, Daoist history, and other, much more obscure and awkwardly off-putting Daoist texts. More than anything else, it is my hope that, by the end of the term, my students will continue to dance with the Dao as portrayed by Hoff and Mitchell (a disciplined tango rather than the formless abandon of a mosh pit), but that they will also have learned critically to appreciate the stubborn historical, cultural-social, and religious otherness of the tradition. The slippery truth is that it is extremely difficult to know how easy knowing the Dao really is. One must suffer to experience the transmutation of new knowledge. Shit happens, but only after ingestion, mastication, digestion, and colonic absorption. After all, both Chinese and Western alchemists agree that the secret formula of creative knowing is always solve et coagula. That is, all things must be dissolved down to a state of utter confusion so that real knowledge can congeal and emerge--so that there may be, as Coleridge once said about the alchemy of translation, a ''transparent defecation'' of meaning.
I do not want to sound smugly superior regarding Hoff's Tao of Pooh, Mitchell's Daode jing, the Dao of Steve, Silent Frigging Bob, the Idiot's Guide to Daoism, or other works of this ilk. Hoff and Mitchell, in particular, beautifully convey much that is in keeping with the early texts, if not some essentialized or
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purely mystical ''Daoism. '' We must always keep in mind that, even with the wealth of pioneering Daoist scholarship and new translations now becoming available, many well-intentioned, and more philologically and technically so- phisticated, studies by sinologists and scholars of comparative religions fail miserably at communicating either the letter or the spirit (thought and practice, myth and ritual, head and belly) of the Daoist tradition to a general audience. I must also say that, despite my various caveats, I truly appreciate the often marvelously foolish productions of American popular culture. A strong case can be made that an Americanized pop-Daoism, along with the more seriously acculturated Daoism of practicing resident masters, legitimately represents an aspect of the latter-day diasporic history of the tradition, as well as the progressive global unfolding of the Dao. I confess to sentimental attachments to some of these ideas, but I also believe in my owlish heart of hearts that we need to know where something came from and how it has discursively walked down its own cultural path. We need to take these first baby steps before, in a heroic act of interpretive license and mixing metaphors, we plunge head- long into the ambiguous waters of Daoism's contemporary cross-cultural transformations.
During my long teaching career, the study of Daoism has become one of the most exciting and revolutionary areas in sinology and in the overall com- parative history of world religions. In this sense, my real grievance is not so much with the inevitable sway of popular conceptions about Daoism on stu- dents and teachers, but rather with the realization that so few of these dramatic new findings have made much of an impact on the general academic or public awareness of the tradition. This is truly unfortunate because it is already abundantly clear that Daoism as the ''indigenous national religion'' of China had a textual and social history as richly complex and fascinating as anything seen in European Christian history. Hoff and Mitchell cannot be blamed for this oversight. Rather, we are the ones largely at fault. That is, we (the profes- sional teachers of Chinese tradition and the comparative history of religions) are the ones who have failed to imaginatively synthesize and effectively commu- nicate the findings of specialized scholarship.
To some degree this state of affairs is understandable since it has only been within the past two decades that significant new translations and research findings have become widely disseminated. We are also starting to get some helpful synthetic treatments and textual anthologies appropriate for use in an undergraduate classroom. 9 For the first time, also, several state-of-the-art classroom introductions to the overall Daoist tradition have appeared. 10 How- ever, it remains to be seen whether these introductory works will do for Daoism what Laurence Thompson's groundbreaking undergraduate textbook accom-
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plished for Chinese religions more than thirty years ago. 11 The field of Daoist studies is expanding so rapidly (and, most significantly and thankfully, the field is on the verge of passing back into the hands of native Chinese scholars versed in the latest Western research and methodological perspectives, especially the academic study of comparative religions) that it is becoming increasingly dif- ficult for any single scholar and/or teacher to keep up with all of the latest developments. In the meantime, we are too often left with only yesteryear's Beatnik Daode jing and miscellaneous mystical leftovers. In this respect, an earlier generation's Zennish approach to Daoism and the Old Boy's text has only been transposed today into Poohish terms. So shall the twain meet and merge in the blur of popular sentiment. In the end, and despite all evidence to the contrary, we (the people, both students and teachers) tend to prefer the familiarity of the Disney version to the alien peculiarities of the real thing. But that does seem to be the Way of the World.
So Daoism is as Daoism does. But such a saying only has meaning in the course of time and with a little help from its intertextual friends. Daoism, or rather the discursively constructed meaning of Daoism and important textual artifacts like the Daode jing, has a complex cultural history. But even more pertinent to our concerns here is that the teaching of elusive and intrinsically foreign Chinese productions like the Daode jing and Daoism also has a sig- nificant cultural history that should not be ignored. 12 Both text and tradition in the contemporary Western academy are embedded in a pedagogical phan- tasmagoria of shifting cultural shapes, mythologies of political correctness, shadows of academic careerism, changing student expectations, institutional transformations, and the ritual actions of the prevailing civic religion of cor- porate capitalism.
There is, then, no single, original, fundamental, or pure Daoism that is somehow ''defined'' by the Daode jing. And there is no single, original, funda- mental, or pure way to teach the Way to American students. A sinuously in- sinuating path has been staked out over the past quarter century, however, and it should be our mission, should we as teachers of the Dao decide to accept it, to walk resolutely down this discursive path while watching over both shoulders and protecting our hindquarters. This is a ritual perambulation that requires that we pay equal attention to where we have come from and to the sporadic markers and clearings that blaze the trail ahead. I will, therefore, proceed autobiographically in the pages that follow with an eye to sketching out some of my own struggle with the artless art of teaching such a mesmerizing text and such a little-known tradition. This will involve a descriptive appraisal of the three primary phases of my career that roughly correspond to the cultural history of the '70s, '80s, and '90s. The Dao that can be trodden is not the Dao,
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but it nevertheless may be revealing (if not amusing and embarrassing) for me to retrace some of the stumbling steps I have taken along the way.
On the Way in the 1970s
I am not exactly sure when I first taught a course on Daoism and the Daode jing. I think it was in the spring of 1972, during my second semester of teaching at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana. It was at about that time that I offered an undergraduate course devoted solely to the Daoist tradition--or, more accurately, a class that began with the Daode jing and went on to Burton Watson's Chuang Tzu, selections from A. C. Graham's Lieh Tzu, James Ware's quirky Pao P'u Tzu/Nei P'ien, and various messy purple mimeographed copies of Ch'en Kuo-fu and Tenny Davis's renditions of ''outer'' and ''inner'' al- chemical texts. Background readings for this course in the 1970s included Holmes Welch's Taoism, The Parting of the Way, which is a popularly written and still helpful guide to the Daode jing (the second half of the book on the ''Taoist Church'' is now hopelessly outdated), and Max Kaltenmark's Lao Tzu and Taoism, which covered both the Zhuangzi as well as the Daode jing and introduced students to the important French school of Daoist studies (it also dealt intelligently with the ''Daoist Religion,'' albeit in an extremely truncated way). In addition to these works, I often assigned various selections from Jo- seph Needham's monumental Science and Civilisation in China, the Bellagio conference on Daoist studies, and (after 1974) the new macropedia edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. I must also confess that, at times throughout the 1970s, I used such secondary materials as John Blofeld's The Secret and Sub- lime: Taoist Mysteries and Magic, Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics, and the Richard Wilhelm and C. G. Jung version of the Secret of the Golden Flower. These works were not only titillating crowd pleasers, but also played into my lingering graduate school fascination with alchemical ''mysteries. ''
With regard to the Daode jing during much of the 1970s, I primarily used the Wing-Tsit Chan (The Way of Lao Tzu, 1963) or the Gia-fu Feng and Jane English translation (Tao Te Ching, 1972), supplemented or replaced by Arthur Waley's ''mystical'' version (The Way and Its Power, 1958) and D. C. Lau's neo- Confucian rendition (Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 1963). This became a pattern in my teaching of the text that persists down to the present day--that is, an insistence that, since most of my undergraduate students had no command of the Chinese language (although over the years at Oberlin and Lehigh I have had a number of students who majored in Asian studies and knew modern, if not classical, Chinese), it was crucial to come to grips with the intertextual and
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cross-cultural multiplicity of translations, readings, and interpretations of such an ancient and ironically terse text. This was a text that was already in its received form a composite and redacted document. Furthermore, the allusive ''Laozi'' helped to raise several premodern and postmodern issues of authorship and the locus of intentional meaning. Given my own background and training as a historian of religions and a fresh-from-graduate-school assistant professor, I am sure that at this time in the 1970s I mainly focused on methodological issues concerning the philosophical and/or religious nature of the text and attempted to frame the discussion and reading of the text with interpretive quasi-Eliadian structures of myth, symbol, and shamanism. 13 Let me only say that over the years, while using multiple translations, I have moved away from such prescriptive tactics to a more open-ended interrogative approach that emphasizes the importance of multiple questions, multiple readings, and multiple meanings of the text--especially, to borrow from Michael LaFargue and reader response theory, the interplay of a latter-day scriptural ''meaning for us'' and the historical ''meaning for them'' interpretations.
From these beginnings down to the present, I have taught some kind of specialized course on Daoism almost every other year of my career (as well as a regular survey course on the religions of China, an offering that regularly assigns the Daode jing). These have mostly been small-enrollment, seminar- style undergraduate courses, but I have also taught Daoism as a graduate course in the history of religions at Notre Dame and at Lehigh have mounted one (never to be repeated) mega-enrollment and multimedia Daoist extrava- ganza (''The Daoist Phantasmagoria,'' given in the spring of 1995; on this course, see below). It is noteworthy that, in keeping with my methodological bent in the 1970s and as a way to combat various pious fictions about ''Daoism,'' I spent considerable time tilting at windmills concerning the assumed two, and utterly distinct, forms of Daoism (the so-called daojia ''philosophical'' and daojiao ''religious'' forms). Thus throughout most of the 1970s, the dominant scholarly and popular construct of Daoism was that it was an interesting, but relatively obscure and certainly minor, sinological subject which, according to both native Chinese and Western scholarly opinion, rather neatly divided itself into an early classical, elite, or philosophical phase and a later ritualistic, su- perstitious, popular, or religious tradition. 14
Not surprisingly, the philosophical power and scriptural authority of the early tradition were mostly defined by the gloriously evocative verses found in the Daode jing, one of the very few ''Daoist'' texts then readily available in multiple English translations. The foundational significance of the text seemed ratified by the simple fact that there were so many translations. It was often said that the Daode jing was second only to the Christian Bible in the ranking of the
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most frequently translated sacred books in world literature. Whether or not this judgment is truly accurate is largely beside the point. The more important fact is that there were at that time dozens of English translations of the Daode jing, a handful of which were decent scholarly versions in an affordable paperback format. 15 Almost nothing else of the vast Daoist literature was easily avail- able for classroom use. This situation reinforced the too easy assumption that Laozi's little work was certainly the crucial source for fathoming the ''original'' spiritual ''essence'' of East Asian culture. Moreover, given its five-thousand- Chinese-character brevity and poetic fluidity, it was a text that naturally lent itself to multiple translations and to quasi-plagiarized renditions of previous translations. So it was that ''Daoism'' at this time, and in keeping with a tra- dition canonized by the great Scottish missionary translator James Legge in the 1890s, was primarily a matter of what was alluded to in the Daode jing, along with some parabolic adumbration from the other early texts attributed to the shadowy sages known as Zhuangzi and Liezi. The incredible riches of the Daozang, or the so-called Daoist canon, were still known to only a very few scholars working primarily in Paris, Japan, and Taiwan.
Also directly relevant to the general understanding of Daoism in the early 1970s was--amid the ongoing Vietnam war, Richard Nixon's opening of Maoist China, and the beginning of the Watergate affair--the heightened fascination with direct religious experience and a flirtation with non-Western religions, especially forms of Hinduism and Buddhism that seemed to be fundamentally ''mystical'' in nature. Given the literary and cultural influence of the beatnik and hippie generations in the '50s and '60s, the one Asian religion (aside from the Beatles' temporary infatuation with the Maharishi Yogi and transcendental meditation) that epitomized these concerns for experiential ''highs,'' methods of spiritual self-cultivation, and immediate personal en- lightenment was the kind of Japanese Zen Buddhism promulgated in North America by charismatic cultural entrepreneurs like Jack Kerouac, Alan Watts, Gary Snyder, and D. T. Suzuki. Associated with these trends, and something that had semi-cult status among some faculty and students at Notre Dame in the 1970s (and in many other academic and intellectual circles at that time), was the romantic passion for the archetypal dream psychology of Carl Jung. Coming under the esoteric Jungian spell at this time were also the best-selling English translations of Richard Wilhelm's German versions of the ancient Chinese Book of Changes and the crypto-Daoist Secret of the Golden Flower. 16 Finally, it is worth noting that the works by comparative religion scholars like Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade were fashionable and were often identified with a pervasive counterculture-Jungian-Zennish-Shamanistic myth of individualistic spirituality. Whatever was popularly (or, for that matter,
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scholastically) known about Daoism at this time was largely subsumed under the more overarching categories and hip sensibility of Zennish mysticism. Thus it was often intimated that the unique Protestant ''genius'' of Zen had something to do with the Chinese transmogrification of a corrupt ritualistic Buddhism. Moreover, the crucial agent of this reformation was (in some in- choate fashion) the pure ''philosophical-mystical'' Daoism of the Daode jing and the bluntly scatological and humorous spirit of the Zhuangzi. 17
All of these factors led to a situation in the 1970s where the eclectic study of world religions (or, still in those innocent times, the ''religions of man'')-- as well as things like mysticism, tribal religions, new religions, altered states of consciousness, shamanism, and occult traditions like alchemy--were ex- tremely popular subjects for undergraduate course offerings. Furthermore, the cultural and academic climate was such that, in response to the growing demand, new nontheological departments of religion (or religious studies) were being created at many colleges and universities. As a personal exem- plification of these developments I should point out that my arrival at Notre Dame in the fall of 1971, after graduate studies at the University of Chicago and Chinese language study in Taiwan, depended entirely on the decision of the Theology Department to establish for the first time a regular position in the comparative history of non-Christian religions.
Even though Daoism was still largely understood in canonical, philo- sophical, Zennish, shamanistic, and mystical terms linked with the Daode jing, there were signs that there was something seriously wrong with this perspec- tive concerning the Daoist tradition in particular and Chinese religions in general. It was almost as if the sinological Orientalists woke up one day from several hundred years of dogmatic philological slumber and discovered that China actually had religious traditions that were critical to an understanding of the larger civilization (beyond the orthodox ''great tradition'' of the Ruist or Confucian scholar-bureaucrats). The trigger for this scholarly satori was in many respects the interdisciplinary revolution in the study of Daoism that started to manifest itself in the late 1960s. There were earlier indications of an impending reformation of the mostly unimaginative, nonmythological, and irreligious ''classical'' narration of Chinese tradition--for instance, the work of French masters like Henri Maspero, Marcel Granet, Rolf Stein, and Max Kal- tenmark; the maverick studies of the Chinese American scholar C. K. Yang in the sociology of religion; and the iconoclastic interpretations of the Cambridge polymath and historian of traditional Chinese science Joseph Needham--but it was not until the pioneering First International Daoist Conference in Bellagio Italy in 1967 and the work of Kristofer Schipper that the axis of sinological understanding really started to shift (Schipper's work being significantly fur-
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thered by a bevy of other sibilated scholarly s's: Edward Schafer, Michel Strickmann, Michael Saso, Anna Seidel, along with Isabelle Robinet). Equally significant in this regard was that the groundbreaking papers from the con- ference were published in Mircea Eliade's History of Religions journal, an event that, along with the creation of the interdisciplinary Society for the Study of Chinese Religions at an American Academy of Religions meeting in Wa- shington, DC, in 1974 (led by Laurence Thompson and Daniel Overmyer), signaled the collapse of the traditional sinological aversion to most interdisci- plinary interlopers and comparative approaches.
The revelatory nature of these new perspectives was that they immedi- ately and radically challenged the artificially dichotomized understanding of Daoism as comprised of a philosophical tradition largely defined by the Daode jing and a later, mostly degenerate and superstitious, Church religion of rit- uals, ''priests,'' and ''popes. '' After the Ma-wang-tui archaeological discoveries in 1973, it was also gradually becoming evident that the text we thought we knew so well had, in its earliest extant form, turned into a Han-period Huang- Lao political treatise known as the Te Dao Ching. Whatever the interesting implications of these developments, it was basically evident that very little could be taken for granted about this text or the tradition. This was exhila- rating but also bewildering, since the simple mystical purity of the Daode jing was in the process of being absorbed into the labyrinthine literary and reli- gious caverns of the Daozang. 18 And the recognition of the Daozang as the defining textual and intertextual body for Daoism, along with the newfound appreciation of the living sectarian tradition in Taiwan by scholarly partici- pant-observers like Kristofer Schipper and Michael Saso, meant that we were forced to contend with a vast universe of meaning in the past and present that was almost totally unexplored. Furthermore, the highly esoteric vocabulary of Daoist texts associated with the visionary Shangqing/Highest Purity and li- turgical Lingbao/Numinous Treasure traditions seemed hopelessly arcane and off-putting. But this condition of bafflement was understandable given the fact that the decipherment of the technicalities of Daoist literature was just beginning. The state of Daoist studies at this time was roughly the way Buddhist studies were some one hundred years earlier.
I do not want to rehearse any more of this scholarly history here, but it is terribly important for a younger generation of students, teachers, and schol- ars, whether sinologically or comparatively inclined, to remember what it was like just twenty or thirty years ago. If one was a sinologist at that time, there was really not very much worth studying with respect to Chinese religion or Daoism. If one was a comparative scholar, China also seemed singularly impoverished when contrasted with the lush religious riches of the Indian
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subcontinent and the Indo-European tradition. Both sinology and the com- parative history of religions were peculiarly insulated disciplines in relation to the emergence of the human sciences and the professionalization of academic life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--themes that I have written about in my recent book on sinological Orientalism and compar- ativism. 18 By the mid-1970s, however, there were portents in the air that the Kingdom of Dao, and the classical and scriptural centrality of the Daode jing, were not as they had been imagined for centuries by loyal Chinese scholar- bureaucrats, clever Catholic priests, righteous evangelical Protestant mis- sionaries, furtive sinological Orientalists, hesitant comparative scholars, and romantic popularizers of the ''mysteries of the East. '' The '60s and '70s were a significant turning point in the meager history of the Western understanding of Daoism and the tantalizing text attributed to Laozi. We are only now at the end of the century, and at the threshold of a new millennium, starting to assimilate and understand the implications of the revolution in Chinese studies and the comparative history of Chinese religions associated with these developments in Daoist studies.
Part of the Way in the 1980s
By 1979-80, I had left Notre Dame to move on to Oberlin College in Ohio and then to take up a more permanent residency at Lehigh University in Beth- lehem, Pennsylvania. The times had changed and I had changed. No doubt, my teaching had also changed. I was battle hardened in the petty political ways of academe by this time, yet strangely enough I found myself ensconced in the position of chair to the Lehigh Religion Studies Department, then the smallest departmental unit in a university known more for engineering and Lee Iacocca than Laozi. I will not bore you with a description of my activities as the tiny administrative poobah of the minuscule Religion Department, except to say that, contrary to almost everyone's expectation, the department grew and prospered. This is a result that I would like to attribute to my wuwei- ish style as chief executive, but probably had more to do with the trickle-down effect of Reaganomics in higher education during the go-go 1980s. Despite these successes, my ten-year tenure as a low-level academic functionary only served to drive home the Daode jing's central admonition that one should, at all cost, avoid the temptations of administrative rank and power, no matter how trivial one's pond of operations. I had no difficulty therefore in returning to the ragged ranks of the teaching faculty at the end of the decade. I also welcomed the opportunity to reactivate my yearly schedule of teaching a
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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
124 recent scholarship and teaching the daode jing
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
my way: teaching the daode jing 127
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
my way: teaching the daode jing 129
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
132 recent scholarship and teaching the daode jing
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.