William Baxter, ''Situating the Language of Lao-tzu: The
Probable
Date of the Tao-te-ching,'' in Kohn and LaFargue, Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching, 231-254.
Teaching-the-Daode-Jing
c.
e.
, the Lushiqunqiu, and it is in this text that we have the earliest clear statement that Lao Dan taught Confucius.
Despite the historical origins of the text, the legend of a sixth-century b. c. e. founder of the Daoist tradition has persisted into modern times and has been elaborated on in both the literati tradition and in the organized Daoist religion. Livia Kohn's essay ''The Lao Tzu Myth,'' gives a valuable overview of the various legends that have developed surrounding Laozi and draws on the insights of Anna Seidel's important and detailed study, La divinization de Lao-tseu dan le Taoisme du Han. 16
So, to wrap things up, what I find important to communicate to my students about the historical context of the Laozi are the following:
1. An understanding of the Daode jing must be grounded in its textual history.
Historical Hermeneutics
A decade ago Michael LaFargue published his monumental study of the hermeneutics of the Laozi, entitled Tao and Method: A Reasoned Approach to the Tao Te Ching, and in a single stroke reestablished the legitimacy of the
20 approaching the daode jing
attempt to reconstruct the original meaning of the text, or at least the series of ideas shared by its compilers and their audience (its ''competence''). 17 This work, seriously underappreciated by sinologists, at one and the same time drives a stake into the heart of postmodernist claims that the text is nothing more than the personal understandings of its readers and of modernist claims that the Laozi supports one or another of their own personal philosophical beliefs. Although I might not agree with all the ideas he identifies as signif- icantly constitutive of the philosophical milieu of the text (especially his Mencian emphasis) or with every single literary genre he identifies in its eighty-one verses, his insights, derived initially from methods he learned as a New Testament textual scholar, have advanced the historical hermeneutics of all early Chinese philosophical texts.
Agreeing with the importance of the attempt to establish the original meaning of the Laozi to its authors, compilers, and audience, I have looked instead to a group of early texts that I conclude constitute an early Daoist tradition that was centered on the cosmology of the Way and on methods of ''inner cultivation'' by which to directly access the Way in one's everyday existence. 18 By using a methodology based on identifying a constellation of key technical terms in each of these works and organizing them into three basic categories--cosmology, inner cultivation, and political thought--I have been able to build on the insights of Graham and Liu Xiaogan to argue that the early Daoist tradition consisted of a series of loosely connected master disciple lineages, all grounded in the meditative practice of inner cultivation. 19 The texts in these lineages all share a common cosmology and inner culti- vation vocabulary but differ in their political philosophy. Elaborating on Graham's divisions that he applied only to the Zhuangzi, I have argued that there are three aspects to early Daoist tradition: individualist, primitivist, and syncretist. 20 I do not think these are really three distinct and separate lineages but rather three aspects of a loosely organized tradition that coalesced into what we might call a philosophical school (rivaling the Confucians and the Mohists) only in the middle of the third century b. c. e. under the syncretist aspect, which might also, with some confidence, be identified by the terms used a century and a half later by the Han historians Sima Tan and Sima Qian as both Daojia (Daoist school) and Huang-Lao. It is quite possibly to this group that we owe the establishment of the myth of Confucius's ''teacher,'' Lao Dan, as the author of the Laozi and the founder of their tradition. Laozi is a text from the primitivist aspect, although its advocacy of wu-wei government and critiques of Confucian values are much less strident than the other sources in this category, chapters 8-10 and the first third of chapter 11 of the Zhuangzi.
third-person and first-person approaches 21
While the political philosophy of the Laozi is interesting, for me the challenge is to understand the role of inner cultivation in the text. Much of the insights about it seem couched in deliberately opaque or metaphoric lan- guage, designed to be understood within a small circle of practitioners yet, ironically, destined to be used for centuries by those who had no idea of its basis in breath cultivation. A good example of this is chapter 56, which begins with a sentence that is usually translated this way:
1. One who knows does not speak; one who speaks does not know.
I recall a former professor of mine (and he is certainly not alone in this) who used to love to point out the hypocrisy in Laozi saying this and then writing a text of five thousand characters. But this misses the entire point of the verse, which can only be understood by reading on:
2a. Block the openings; 2b. Shut the doors.
3a. Blunt the sharpness; 3b. Untangle the knots; 3c. Soften the glare;
4. Let your wheels move only along old ruts.
5. This is known as the Profound Merging (xuan tong).
Reading this passage in the context of the apophatic inner cultivation tech- niques of reducing sensory stimulation (2a? b), perceptual distinctions (3a), emotional bonds (3b), and intellectual activity (3c) that leads to relaxed breathing (4) and eventual union with the Dao, the first two lines take on a very different meaning. They indicate that what follows is an esoteric teaching that must be learned through personal instruction from an adept and can be truly understood only through the experience of inner cultivation. This, in turn, provides the justification to accept the textual variants of the Mawangdui recension of the first line, leading to a more precise translation: 21
1. Those who understand it [i. e. , the following saying] do not talk about it; those who talk about it do not understand it.
This is just one example of how an understanding that the intellectual milieu of the Laozi was conversant with inner cultivation practices can help us to get a sense of the hidden meaning in some of its more obscure passages. 22
Another compelling insight of LaFargue is that each of the eighty-one zhang (chapters) of the Daode jing is a unique individual composition whose elements are distinct literary genres he identifies. To a certain extent Lau had pointed the way to this insight decades earlier in the way he chose to format his
22 approaching the daode jing
translation, clearly indicating (p. xl) rhymed verse by indentation and single lines and subdividing each chapter into component sections that could stand on their own. 23 Interestingly enough, the Guodian Laozi parallels confirm this general insight: eleven of the thirty-two passages are complete syntactic and semantic units that are fragments of whole chapters in the major extant re- censions, and many of these correspond to subdivisions in the Lau and La- Fargue translations. Here are two examples related to inner cultivation practice:
Guodian A XII
The space between heaven and earth, is it not like a bellows? Empty it out and it is not exhausted;
Activate it and it continues to come forth. 24
This is one of three distinct units for Lau (four for LaFargue) in chapter 5 of the received text, famous for statements about ''straw dogs'' (which the di- rector Sam Peckinpah found compelling). Donald Harper has found a similar bellows analogy in early macrobiotic hygiene literature, where it refers to a type of breathing in which the qi is circulated in the body. I agree with him in asserting that it has this meaning in the Laozi as well. 25
Guodian A XIII
Attaining emptiness is the apogee (of our practice) Holding fast to the center is its governing mode. 26
The myriad things arise side by side
And residing here, I see them slowly return The forms of heaven are great in number But each returns to its root. 27
LaFargue sees these as two distinct units, the first a general comment about self-cultivation and the second a description of what one does in meditation. 28 Lau, however, sees the following lines as being part of the same semantic unit:
Returning to one's roots is known as stillness.
This is meant by returning to one's destiny. Returning to one's destiny is known as the constant. Knowledge of the constant is known as discernment.
There is further material in this chapter that is clearly from a different textual unit. In light of the Guodian parallels it appears as if this latter unit is a commentarial addition that was perhaps created in the composition of this chapter.
third-person and first-person approaches 23
The Guodian Laozi parallels clearly demonstrate that the chapters in all extant recensions of the text were built up from smaller independent units of verse, commentary, and framing. It is extremely important to keep this in mind when teaching the Laozi to even introductory audiences. For my advanced courses I include a reading of Robert Henricks's careful translation of these textual parallels, which may or may not constitute an independent text in their own right. 29 I sometimes have students read these Guodian parallels before they read the received text of Laozi and ask them to analyze it without ref- erence to the latter. They invariably see about as much coherence to them as they do to the received text.
Hence, historical hermeneutics is an extremely important tool in the pedagogy of Laozi. Establishing as much as we can about the intellectual milieu of its creators can help control the tendency among many of us who have embraced the text to interpret it as a support for a wide variety of quite modern intellectual positions.
Contemporary Relevance
To a great extent, much of what has been written throughout the ages about the philosophy of the Laozi falls under this heading. This includes all the major and minor commentaries, from Huainanzi's ''Daoying'' (Responses of the Way) essay in the second century b. c. e. to Yuan Emperor Taizu in the fourteenth century c. e. 30 Alan Chan's essay in the Kohn-LaFargue anthology gives a solid comparison of the two most influential commentaries, the Heshang gong and Wang Bi, while Isabelle Robinet's essay in the same volume provides an ex- cellent overview of the later and virtually unknown commentaries. 31 This ap- proach also includes the many modern philosophers who attempt to explain the ideas of the text in terms of ideas from the intellectual contexts in which they are working. There are too many thinkers in this group to inclusively list here, but a few of the most prominent are Fung Yu-lan, Chad Hansen, Liu Xiaogan, A. C. Graham, Benjamin Schwartz, Roger Ames, and numerous authors whose work has been published in Philosophy East and West over the past five decades. The Religious and Philosophical Aspects of the Laozi, edited by Mark Csikszent- mihalyi and P. J. Ivanhoe contains some interesting examples of such philo- sophical interpretations. And then there are the scores of modern Chinese thinkers who we could include and the myriad uses in popular Western culture such as the Tao of Pooh and George Lucas's ''Force. '' Julia Hardy's essay, ''In- fluential Western Interpretations of the Tao-te-ching in the Kohn-LaFargue volume provides a thorough overview of major Western interpreters of the Laozi. 32
24 approaching the daode jing
While some of these modern interpreters, such as Liu Xiaogan, clearly state that they are adapting the Daode jing for modern uses because of the deep insights it contains into the human condition, many interpreters and all traditional commentators assert that they are uncovering the true meaning of the text. Despite this, I would argue that many, in their use of philosophical perspectives from their own intellectual milieu, are in reality interested in the contemporary relevance of the text. That is, they wish to retrieve responsibly the ideas in the text they find most relevant today. I could not agree more with the following assertion by Robinet:
They [the commentaries] develop a sense of contemporality that
can be received by people of their own time and is relevant to their world, a world more likely than not dominated by a vastly differ- ent kind of thinking, such as Confucianism and Buddhism. To dis- solve the distance between the period and culture, in which the text evolved, the reader of another time must either make the text con- temporaneous to the reader or make the reader contemporaneous to the text. This is the task commentaries typically set for themselves, aiming at translating the text into a more current language while circling around its obscurities, lessening its paradoxes, and reducing its originality. They reshape the document for a newer taste, fre- quently using syncretistic forms of interpretation. 33
In teaching the Laozi, one of the absolutely essential things to keep in mind is to clearly distinguish between contemporary interpretations of the text and whatever we can establish of the text's original meanings through historical hermeneutics. There is absolutely nothing wrong with discovering something of value for our contemporary world in the ideas of the Laozi. Indeed, I think its teachings on inner cultivation contain valuable insights for us. But it is important to differentiate between what we can reasonably establish about the ''original meaning'' of the text through careful examination of its history and its larger intellectual context and the contemporary philosophical positions we use to interpret it.
A Critical First-Person Approach: Reconstructive Meditation
I would like to close with a section about a new approach I have taken in teaching the Laozi that adds the critical first-person element I advocated in my introduction. This is engaging students in what I call reconstructive medita- tion, the logic of which runs as follows:
third-person and first-person approaches 25
1. The creators of the Laozi practiced a form of breath meditation that led them to deeper and deeper states of tranquility and to what they asserted was an eventual merging with the Way. 34
2. They applied the clarity of mind developed through this meditation to the tasks of everyday life, hence developing, for example, the notion of ''effortless action'' (wu-wei). 35
3. Despite vast differences in cultural contexts, human beings in the third century b. c. e. in China had essentially the same physiology of body and mind as do modern humans. This assumption is widely accepted in evolutionary biology and neuroscience. 36
4. Thus, practicing breath meditation should have largely similar phys- iological effects on us as it did on them, although we, of course, conceive of the underlying mechanisms in entirely different fashions.
Based on these assumptions, I have developed a series of reconstructive meditations for students linked to passages in the Daode jing. Herewith two examples:
Bellows Breathing
The space between heaven and earth, is it not like a bellows? Empty it out and it is not exhausted;
Activate it and it continues to come forth
Laozi 5 speaks of the space between heaven and earth being like a bellows. Early Chinese physiological hygiene texts linked this bellows to the natural movements of the diaphragm as it inhales and exhales.
Instructions: Sitting upright in a comfortable position and with eyes closed (remember: ''The Five Colors blind men's eyes''; Laozi 12), imagine your diaphragm to be a bellows and simply follow its movements as you inhale and exhale. Do this for ten (or more, de- pending on prior experience of students) minutes, then stop.
Observing Consciousness While ''Holding Fast to the Center''
Attaining emptiness is the apogee (of our practice) Holding fast to the center is its governing mode.
The myriad things arise side by side
And residing here, I see them slowly return The forms of heaven are great in number But each returns to its root.
26
approaching the daode jing
Laozi 16 recommends gradually emptying out consciousness through a process of ''holding fast to the center. '' I interpret this to mean concentrating on the feeling of inhaling and exhaling as you expe- rience it in the center of your body, somewhere in your abdomen. For some of you it may be as high as the solar plexus; for others it may be as low as the spot later called the ''cinnabar field,'' three finger-widths below your abdomen.
Instructions: Sitting upright in a comfortable position, concentrate on your breathing and determine where it is centered in your abdomen. Carefully follow your breathing through its cycles of inhalation and exhalation. This is ''holding fast to the center. ''
When you are established in this breathing, open your focus to allow in the various thoughts and feelings that inevitably arise when attempting to sit quietly. Pay careful attention to where they come from. Notice how they arise and invariably pass away. Pay attention to where they go to. Do not follow them; do not react to them; always maintain an awareness of your center of breathing and simply con- tinue watching thoughts and feelings as they arise and pass away. This arising of something out of nothing is basic to your con- sciousness as microcosm and to the entire cosmos as macrocosm.
Conclusions
These reconstructive meditations help give students a sense of the experiential basis underlying not a few passages in the Laozi and start to provide some insight into the possible origins of the cosmology for which the text is re- nowned. I do not by any means wish to assert that these reconstructions are the exclusive original meaning of these passages; I only wish to assert that they may point to their possible experiential bases. In the end, reconstructive meditation is just another wrench in the toolbox of the scholar and teacher of the Laozi, another way to approach its meaning without reducing it to a series of ideas intended to deliberately confuse its audience and reinforce some very Western biases about the essentially rational and profane nature of human experience. It can provide new insights into the history of the text, the ''competence'' of its authors, composers, and audience, and can also con- tribute some insights into the nature of consciousness that some may find of contemporary relevance. It is in these ways that reconstructive meditation can augment the other three approaches.
third-person and first-person approaches 27
notes
I wish to thank Henry Rosemont Jr. , Erin Kline, and Michael Slater for their helpful criticisms of this manuscript but absolve them of all blame for whatever questionable assertions and contentious opinions I decided to retain.
1. R. C. Zaehner, Mysticism, Sacred and Profane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), argues that Christian mysticism is superior to all other forms. James Ware, Alchemy, Medicine and Religion in the China of a. d. 320: The Nei Pien of Ko Hung (New York: Dover, 1963), consistently translates Dao as ''God. ''
2. Propriety (li) prevents me from being any more specific about this except to say that most of the scholars I have in mind do not work on Daoism. And that is an interesting phenomenon in itself!
3. For a good example of this, see Wayne Proudfoot's assertion in Religious Ex- perience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 128-130, that the Daode jing uses paradoxical statements about the nature of the Dao to establish its ineffability, which is thus a feature of grammar and not of experience. By implication, the Dao is not a genuine power or force but a product of the linguistic manipulations of its inventors and the subsequent beliefs of its followers.
4. Of course, Herbert Fingarette got it right in his field-revising study of the Analects: Confucius--The Secular as Sacred, 2nd ed. (Prospect Heights, Ill. : Waveland, 1998).
5. The categories of ''historical hermeneutics'' and ''contemporary relevance'' are found in the writings of Michael LaFargue. The most accessible is ''Recovering the Tao-te-ching's Original Meaning,'' in Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching, ed. Livia Kohn and Michael LaFargue (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 231-254.
6. For a detailed discussion of the relationship between the Daode jing and Neiye and these other texts, see my book Original Tao: Inward Training (Nei-yeh) and the Foundations of Taoist Mysticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, in particular 144-153, 185-190.
7. Rudolph G. Wagner, A Chinese Reading of the Daode jing: Wang Bi's Com- mentary on the Laozi with Critical Text and Translation. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003). See also the following essays: Rudolph G. Wagner, ''Inter- locking Parallel Style: Laozi and Wang Bi,'' Journal Asiatiques 34, no. 1 (1980): 18-58; William Boltz, ''The Religious and Philosophical Significance of the 'Hsiang erh' Lao Tzu in the Light of the Ma-wang-tui Silk Manuscripts,'' Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 45 no. 1 (1982): 95-117; William Boltz, ''Textual Criticism and the Ma-Wang-Tui Silk Manuscripts,'' Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. 44, no. 1 (1984): 185-224; William Boltz, ''The Lao Tzu Text That Wang Pi and Ho-shang Kung Never Saw,'' Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 48, no. 5 (1985): 493-501. The best overview of the text and commentaries of the Laozi is Boltz's Lao tzu Tao te ching, in Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide, ed. Michael Loewe, Early China Special Monograph Series no. 2 (Berkeley: Institute for East Asian Studies, Univer- sity of California, 1993). For a succinct summary of the textual issues relevant to Laozi and other early philosophical texts, see Harold D. Roth, ''Text and Edition in
28 approaching the daode jing
Early Chinese Philosophical Literature,'' Journal of the American Oriental Society 113, no. 2 (1993): 214-227.
8. D. C. Lau, Chinese Classics: Tao Te Ching (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1982); Robert Henricks, Lao-Tzu: Te Tao Ching (New York: Ballantine, 1989) Victor Mair, Tao Te Ching: The Classic Book of Integrity and the Way (New York: Bantam, 1990); Robert Henricks, Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching (New York, Columbia University Press, 2000) (translation of Guodian Laozi parallels).
9. For an excellent and detailed study of the contrasting approaches of the Wang Bi and Heshang gong commentaries, see Allan Chan, Two Visions of the Way: A Study of the Wang Pi and Ho-shang-kung Commentaries on the Lao-tzu. Albany: State Uni- versity of New York Press, 1991.
10. For details, see my review in Philosophy East and West 35, no. 2 (1985): 213-215.
11. Sarah Allan and Crispin Williams, eds. , The Guodian Laozi: Proceedings of the International Conference, Dartmouth College, May, 1998, Early China Special Mono- graph Series no. 5 (Berkeley: Institute for East Asian Studies, University of California, , 2000).
12. Edmund Ryden, ''Edition of the Bamboo-Slip Laozi A, B, and C, and Tai Yi Sheng Shui from Guodian Tomb Number One,'' In Allan and Williams, The Guodian Laozi, 187-231.
13. Harold D. Roth, ''Some Methodological Issues in the Study of the Guodian Laozi Parallels. '' In Allan and Williams, The Guodian Laozi, 71-88.
14.
William Baxter, ''Situating the Language of Lao-tzu: The Probable Date of the Tao-te-ching,'' in Kohn and LaFargue, Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching, 231-254.
15. A. C. Graham, ''The Origins of the Legend of Lao Tan,'' 1981, in Studies in Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical Literature (Singapore: Institute for East Asian Philosophies, 1986), 111-124. An edited version appears in Kohn and LaFargue, Lao- tzu and the Tao-te-ching, 23-40.
16. Livia Kohn, ''The Lao-Tzu Myth,'' in Kohn and LaFargue, Lao-tzu and the Tao- te-ching, 41-62; Anna Seidel, La divinization de Lao-tseu dan le Taoisme du Han (1969; Paris: E ? cole Franc ? aise d'Extr^eme-Orient, 1992).
17. Michael LaFargue, Tao and Method: A Reasoned Approach to the Tao Te Ching (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). LaFargue earlier published a summary of his arguments from this volume together with a radically rearranged translation in Michael LaFargue, The Tao of the Tao Te Ching (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992).
18. For further details, see Roth, Original Tao, chap. 5.
19. A. C. Graham, ''How Much of Chuang Tzu Did Chuang Tzu Write? ,'' in Studies in Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 283-321; Liu Xiaogan, Classifying the Zhuangzi Chapters, trans. William Savage (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1994).
20. Graham initially proposed the latter two categories to represent two major authorial voices in the Zhuangzi. Liu Xiaogan preferred the categories ''anarchist''
third-person and first-person approaches 29
and ''huang-lao'' to Graham's ''primitivist and ''syncretist,'' but, unlike Graham, he related these voices in Zhuangzi to larger intellectual movements. In this aspect,
I follow Liu. For the references, see the previous note.
21. I accept the Mawangdui variants of fu yan and fu zhi instead of the received text's bu yan and bu zhi. The negative adverb fu implies a direct object, whereas the adverb bu does not and is therefore more vague. The received text contains many examples of this sort, where a relatively clear text has been made vaguer and thus more ''mystical. '' See Lau, Chinese Classics, 218, 80.
22. For examples of this kind, see my essay ''The Laozi in the Context of Early Daoist Mystical Praxis,'' in Mark Csikszentmihalyi and P. J. Ivanhoe, eds. , Religious and Philosophical Aspects of Laozi (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999, 59-96. This is an excellent collection and provides a philosophical complement to the Kohn and LaFargue collection.
23. Lau, Chinese Classics, p. xl.
24. Ryden, Edition of the Bamboo-Slip Laozi, 206.
25. Donald Harper, ''The Bellows Analogy in Laozi V and Warring States Mac-
robiotic Hygiene,'' Early China 20 (1995): 381-392.
26. Ryden, Edition of the Bamboo-Slip Laozi, 207.
27. I read the last character in the line, tu (sincere, serious, solid), as a loan
for tu (also sincere, but can mean supervisor, to inspect, to correct), which when combined with the character mai (meridian) in Chinese medicine refers to the central supervisory meridian that controls the flow of yang qi in the human body. This is the reading in the Mawangdui recension. I interpret this passage to mean that the dominant mode by which emptiness is attained is by concentrating on the center.
I think the center here refers to the center of the body where breathing is experi- enced, and thus the passage commends focusing on breathing in order to attain emptiness.
28. LaFargue, Tao of the Tao Te Ching, 62-63.
29. Henricks, Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching.
30. The twelfth essay of the Huainanzi, ''The Responses of the Way,'' consists of
a series of narratives presented to illustrate various statements from the Laozi. Each narrative ends with the formula, ''And so the Laozi, says . . . '' This ''reverse com- mentary'' genre is also found in the ''Commenting on Laozi'' and ''Explaining Laozi'' chapters of the Hanfeizi.
31. Allan Chan, ''A Tale of Two Commentaries: Ho-shang-kung and Wang Pi on the Lao-tzu,'' in Kohn and LaFargue, Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching, 89-118, is a sum- mary of his book on the same subject. Isabelle Robinet, ''Later Commentaries: Textual Polysemy and Syncretistic Interpretations,'' in Kohn and LaFargue, Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching, 119-142, is a masterful essay in which the late Professor Robinet provides insights from many Laozi commentaries that are virtually unknown to modern scholarship, both East Asian and Western.
32. Julia Hardy, ''Influential Western Interpretations of the Tao-te-ching,'' in Kohn and LaFargue, Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching, 165-185.
33. Robinet, ''Later Commentaries,'' 121.
30 approaching the daode jing
34. The justification for this is detailed in my essay ''The Laozi in the Context of Early Daoist Mystical Praxis. ''
35. This is one example of a more pervasive pattern of early Daoist meditation. For further details, see my essay ''Evidence for Stages of Meditation in Early Taoism,'' Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 60, no. 2 (June 1997): 295-314.
36. Evolutionary biology posits that all human beings (Homo sapiens) share a common genetic pool, whether they live in North America or in China, whether they live today or three thousand years ago. According to geneticist F. S. Collins, human beings are ''99. 9% genetically identical. '' ''Genome Research: The Next Generation,'' in The Genome of Homo Sapiens, ed. Bruce Stillman and David Stewart (Cold Spring Harbor, N. Y. : CSHL Press, 2003), 50. Geneticists Y. Sasaki et al. state, ''Homo sapiens is a unique organism characterized by its highly developed brain, use of complex languages, bipedal locomotion, and so on. These unique features have been acquired by a series of mutation and selection events during evolution in the human lineage and are mainly determined by genetic factors encoded in the human genome. ''Hu- man versus Chimpanzee Chromosome-wide Sequence Comparison and Its Evolu- tionary Implications,'' in Stillman and Stewart, The Genome of Homo Sapiens, 455. This common genetic heritage leads to the common physiology and neurophysiology that distinguishes human beings from the other higher hominids.
? The Dao and the Field: Exploring an Analogy
Robert G. Henricks
Several years ago while looking for a way to explain to a class the meaning of Laozi's Dao (the Way, literally a road or a path), I hit upon an analogy that has proved to be quite fruitful. It is an anal- ogy that provides us with a model for understanding the nature of the Dao and the nature of its operations. It also provides us with a way to understand Laozi's moral philosophy, and it may help us understand what Laozi believed with regard to life after death/ immortality.
The analogy is drawn between the Dao and a field--not a farmer's field which is groomed and cultivated for the purpose of raising a single, hybrid crop, but a ''natural'' field, one left un- tended, one that is barren and deserted in the winter but filled with a host of different wildflowers throughout the spring and summer.
The appropriateness of this analogy and its usefulness for understanding the thought of Laozi will become clear once we see what Laozi himself said about the Dao. And to begin this task there is probably no better place to start than with the beginning of the book itself, the opening lines of chapter 1:
The Dao that can be told of is not the eternal Dao:
The name that can be named is not the eternal name. 1
A cryptic start to a cryptic book. Laozi tells us that anything he says about a Dao, after all, will not be about a true, eternal, or
32 approaching the daode jing
constant Dao. But at the same time he seems to confirm, in this backward way, that there is some such reality. Whatever the Dao might be, it is eternal and abiding. Moreover, there might be a name that is appropriate to it, a name that is equal to its reality, an eternal name, but the names we use do not qualify for such status.
All in all, the opening lines seem to suggest what is often suggested in mystic literature: that there is a transcendent, eternal reality, with which we may come into contact but that lies beyond the realm of precise description. All attempts to talk about it somehow fall short of conveying a true sense of what it is. That this is Laozi's meaning seems to be confirmed, as a matter of fact, in the very next line of chapter 1, where he calls the Dao the ''Nameless. '' He adds, moreover, that in this aspect it is the origin of the phenomenal world, the beginning of all things: ''The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth. ''2
But the label ''Nameless'' can be understood in two different ways. It can mean, as we have suggested, something for which an appropriate name cannot be found. But it might also refer to a time or a condition of things--undiffer- entiated reality--when distinct phenomenal forms had not yet appeared, a state lacking nameable realities. The Chinese for ''Nameless'' (wu ming) allows both of these interpretations (i. e. , not having a name and not having names), and as it turns out the Dao for Laozi is ''nameless'' in both ways. The Dao is that elusive, difficult to describe, single reality that existed prior to, and gave rise to, all other existing things.
Thus in chapter 14, where problematically ''names'' are assigned to the Dao, we find the following:
We look at it and do not see it: Its name is The Invisible.
We listen to it and do not hear it; Its name is The Inaudible.
We touch it and do not find it:
Its name is The Subtle (formless).
These three cannot be further inquired into, And hence merge into one. 3
And in chapter 25 we have this:
There was something undifferentiated and yet complete,
Which existed before heaven and earth.
Soundless and formless, it depends on nothing and does not change. It operates everywhere and is free from danger.
It may be considered the mother of the universe.
I do not know its name; I call [or, I would style it] Dao. If forced to give it a name, I shall call it Great. 4
This is a telling statement on the nature of the Dao. It reports motifs that we already know: that the Dao is eternal, undifferentiated, the source of the phe- nomenal world, and something vague and elusive. But to this is now added the sense that the Dao is a reality that continues to be functional after creation, insofar as it is something that operates everywhere, and of course this also tells us that it is omnipresent. Moreover, the distinction that is made here between ''name'' (ming), which we do not know, and ''style'' (zi--Wing-tsit Chan ''calls it''), is informative. In China a person's name (personal name, that is, not surname) is given at birth; it is personal and rarely used in direct address. But the ''style'' is taken at capping age (around 20), and it is less personal, more publicly used, and less a part of that person's reality--who he or she really is. The word Dao has this ''style'' kind of relation to the reality at hand.
Laozi does venture here, when forced of course, to find some name to use for this reality, choosing the word da, the Great. But Kaltenmark has probably caught the import of this when he says, ''It is clear that he [Laozi] is using da in an absolute sense: the Immense, the Incommensurable. ''5
There is one more thing that Laozi tells us in chapter 25 which is important for our understanding of the nature of the Dao. He says, ''It may be considered the mother of the universe. '' When we move into the realm of image and metaphor, we find that Laozi depicts the Dao as a very feminine reality indeed. And to be more precise, as the line here makes clear, as something like a mother.
Three kinds of evidence can be called forth to support this and draw it out. To begin with, Laozi explicitly refers to the Dao as the ''Mother'' in no fewer than five different chapters. In addition to the reference already noted in chapter 25, in chapter 1, picking up the text where we left off, we find: ''The Named is the mother of all things [literally, the ten thousand things]. ''6 In chapter 20 Laozi laments that he alone values ''drawing sustenance from Mother (Dao). ''7 Chapter 52 begins, ''There was a beginning of the universe, Which may be called the Mother of the universe. ''8 And in chapter 59 the statement is made, ''He who possesses the Mother (Dao) of the state will last long. ''9
Second, the Dao is often pictured as womblike or vagina-like in its capacity as the source and originator of all forms. At the end of chapter 1, womb and vagina symbolism are both quite explicit. The Dao is said to be ''deeper and more profound, the door of all subtleties. ''10 An inexhaustible womb is the image portrayed at the opening of chapter 4: ''Dao is empty (like a bowl). It may
the dao and the field 33
34 approaching the daode jing
be used but its capacity is never exhausted. ''11 As a womb the Dao would contain all things in essence or seedlike form, and chapter 21 seems to me to support this:
The all-embracing quality of the great virtue follows alone from the Dao.
The thing that is called Dao is eluding and vague. Vague and eluding, there is in it the form [or forms]. Eluding and vague, in it are things.
Deep and obscure, in it is the essence.
The essence is very real; in it are evidences. 12
Chapter 6, without question, is the best chapter to cite in this regard. Called here the ''spirit of the valley,'' the valley itself being a symbol of constant fertility, the Dao is again described in terms of womb and vagina. But again in contrast to its mammalian counterpart, this is a source that can never be used up, one that will last forever:
The spirit of the valley never dies.
It is called the subtle and profound female.
The gate of the subtle and profound female.
Is the root of Heaven and Earth.
It is continuous, and seems to be always existing. Use it and you will never wear it out. 13
The third point to be made on behalf of the maternal nature of the Dao is that the Dao not only contains all things and brings them forth to life, but it also continues to function in a maternal way in the rearing of its children. That is to say, it nourishes them and protects them and brings them to maturity and completion. And in providing sustenance and care for all things, it has no favorites. Yet in contrast to its human counterpart, it does not seek to control and direct that growth, nor does it ever claim credit for the work it has done.
There are two chapters in the text that make this point, chapters 34 and 51. Chapter 34 reads:
The great Dao flows everywhere.
It may go left or right.
All things depend on it for life, and it does not turn away from them. It accomplishes its task, but does not claim credit for it.
It clothes and feeds all things, but does not claim to be master
over them.
Always without desires, it may be called the Small.
All things come to it and it does not master them; it may be called the Great.
Therefore (the sage) never strives himself for the great, and there by the great is achieved. 14
In chapter 51 two points of interest are added: the Dao and its virtue (really Power) are ''naturally'' honored and esteemed for what they do even though they promise no reward (in contrast, perhaps, to the honor and esteem ac- corded state rulers), and the involvement of the Dao in the complete life cycle of its children is neatly underscored:
The Dao brings them to life and virtue nourishes them.
Substance gives them form and ability completes them.
Therefore the 10,000 things honor the Way and esteem virtue.
No one rewards this honoring of the Way and esteeming of virtue. And yet they are constantly so of themselves.
The Way brings them to life, nourishes them, develops them, rears them, rests them, makes them secure, cares for them, and protects them.
It brings them to life, and yet it does not possess them.
It brings them to action, and yet it does not make them dependent. It brings them to completion, and yet it does not rule over them. This is called the Profound Virtue. 15
We may now turn with benefit to explore the analogy. My contention is that in the model of a field of wildflowers passing through the seasons we have an almost perfect model for grasping the nature of the Dao in its totality--we can see it, as it were, prior to, during, and after creation.
Let us approach it this way. Were we to go to an untended field in the midst of the winter, we might see no form of life whatsoever. There would be nothing but a still, silent void, with nothing for the senses to grasp. Did we not know better, we would presumably conclude that there was no relationship whatso- ever between this inert mass and the variety of forms, sounds, and smells that we know as summer life.
But were we to return to that field sometime in mid-June, we would find that the most marvelous of transformations had occurred. The very same field that had been barren and still is now the scene of bustling activity, covered with ten thousand (as it were) different forms of life. There are sunflowers and nightshade and butter-and-eggs and chicory, hundreds of kinds of wildflowers, all different shapes and colors and sizes, some tall and some short, some with one big flower, others in tiny clusters, to say nothing of the many nonflowering
the dao and the field 35
36 approaching the daode jing
grasses. And just as there seems to be an infinite number of kinds, there is as well an infinite number of each kind.
It would now seem clear to our minds that what had appeared to us in winter to be an inert, sterile void was in reality a fecund, perhaps inexhaustible womb, containing the seeds for all forms of life. Had we dug into the earth in winter, of course, we would never have detected these forms--there would have been only one, undifferentiated, homogeneous earth. And yet somehow, mysteriously, in the most minute, infinitesimal forms, the seeds of all these many plants, as yet indistinguishable, were there all the time.
The work of the field does not stop with springtime creation. Just as it made no distinctions in bringing forth a variety of forms, so too it remains impartial through the summer in providing support and nourishment for all, bringing all of the plants to completion of their natural life cycles.
Despite the historical origins of the text, the legend of a sixth-century b. c. e. founder of the Daoist tradition has persisted into modern times and has been elaborated on in both the literati tradition and in the organized Daoist religion. Livia Kohn's essay ''The Lao Tzu Myth,'' gives a valuable overview of the various legends that have developed surrounding Laozi and draws on the insights of Anna Seidel's important and detailed study, La divinization de Lao-tseu dan le Taoisme du Han. 16
So, to wrap things up, what I find important to communicate to my students about the historical context of the Laozi are the following:
1. An understanding of the Daode jing must be grounded in its textual history.
Historical Hermeneutics
A decade ago Michael LaFargue published his monumental study of the hermeneutics of the Laozi, entitled Tao and Method: A Reasoned Approach to the Tao Te Ching, and in a single stroke reestablished the legitimacy of the
20 approaching the daode jing
attempt to reconstruct the original meaning of the text, or at least the series of ideas shared by its compilers and their audience (its ''competence''). 17 This work, seriously underappreciated by sinologists, at one and the same time drives a stake into the heart of postmodernist claims that the text is nothing more than the personal understandings of its readers and of modernist claims that the Laozi supports one or another of their own personal philosophical beliefs. Although I might not agree with all the ideas he identifies as signif- icantly constitutive of the philosophical milieu of the text (especially his Mencian emphasis) or with every single literary genre he identifies in its eighty-one verses, his insights, derived initially from methods he learned as a New Testament textual scholar, have advanced the historical hermeneutics of all early Chinese philosophical texts.
Agreeing with the importance of the attempt to establish the original meaning of the Laozi to its authors, compilers, and audience, I have looked instead to a group of early texts that I conclude constitute an early Daoist tradition that was centered on the cosmology of the Way and on methods of ''inner cultivation'' by which to directly access the Way in one's everyday existence. 18 By using a methodology based on identifying a constellation of key technical terms in each of these works and organizing them into three basic categories--cosmology, inner cultivation, and political thought--I have been able to build on the insights of Graham and Liu Xiaogan to argue that the early Daoist tradition consisted of a series of loosely connected master disciple lineages, all grounded in the meditative practice of inner cultivation. 19 The texts in these lineages all share a common cosmology and inner culti- vation vocabulary but differ in their political philosophy. Elaborating on Graham's divisions that he applied only to the Zhuangzi, I have argued that there are three aspects to early Daoist tradition: individualist, primitivist, and syncretist. 20 I do not think these are really three distinct and separate lineages but rather three aspects of a loosely organized tradition that coalesced into what we might call a philosophical school (rivaling the Confucians and the Mohists) only in the middle of the third century b. c. e. under the syncretist aspect, which might also, with some confidence, be identified by the terms used a century and a half later by the Han historians Sima Tan and Sima Qian as both Daojia (Daoist school) and Huang-Lao. It is quite possibly to this group that we owe the establishment of the myth of Confucius's ''teacher,'' Lao Dan, as the author of the Laozi and the founder of their tradition. Laozi is a text from the primitivist aspect, although its advocacy of wu-wei government and critiques of Confucian values are much less strident than the other sources in this category, chapters 8-10 and the first third of chapter 11 of the Zhuangzi.
third-person and first-person approaches 21
While the political philosophy of the Laozi is interesting, for me the challenge is to understand the role of inner cultivation in the text. Much of the insights about it seem couched in deliberately opaque or metaphoric lan- guage, designed to be understood within a small circle of practitioners yet, ironically, destined to be used for centuries by those who had no idea of its basis in breath cultivation. A good example of this is chapter 56, which begins with a sentence that is usually translated this way:
1. One who knows does not speak; one who speaks does not know.
I recall a former professor of mine (and he is certainly not alone in this) who used to love to point out the hypocrisy in Laozi saying this and then writing a text of five thousand characters. But this misses the entire point of the verse, which can only be understood by reading on:
2a. Block the openings; 2b. Shut the doors.
3a. Blunt the sharpness; 3b. Untangle the knots; 3c. Soften the glare;
4. Let your wheels move only along old ruts.
5. This is known as the Profound Merging (xuan tong).
Reading this passage in the context of the apophatic inner cultivation tech- niques of reducing sensory stimulation (2a? b), perceptual distinctions (3a), emotional bonds (3b), and intellectual activity (3c) that leads to relaxed breathing (4) and eventual union with the Dao, the first two lines take on a very different meaning. They indicate that what follows is an esoteric teaching that must be learned through personal instruction from an adept and can be truly understood only through the experience of inner cultivation. This, in turn, provides the justification to accept the textual variants of the Mawangdui recension of the first line, leading to a more precise translation: 21
1. Those who understand it [i. e. , the following saying] do not talk about it; those who talk about it do not understand it.
This is just one example of how an understanding that the intellectual milieu of the Laozi was conversant with inner cultivation practices can help us to get a sense of the hidden meaning in some of its more obscure passages. 22
Another compelling insight of LaFargue is that each of the eighty-one zhang (chapters) of the Daode jing is a unique individual composition whose elements are distinct literary genres he identifies. To a certain extent Lau had pointed the way to this insight decades earlier in the way he chose to format his
22 approaching the daode jing
translation, clearly indicating (p. xl) rhymed verse by indentation and single lines and subdividing each chapter into component sections that could stand on their own. 23 Interestingly enough, the Guodian Laozi parallels confirm this general insight: eleven of the thirty-two passages are complete syntactic and semantic units that are fragments of whole chapters in the major extant re- censions, and many of these correspond to subdivisions in the Lau and La- Fargue translations. Here are two examples related to inner cultivation practice:
Guodian A XII
The space between heaven and earth, is it not like a bellows? Empty it out and it is not exhausted;
Activate it and it continues to come forth. 24
This is one of three distinct units for Lau (four for LaFargue) in chapter 5 of the received text, famous for statements about ''straw dogs'' (which the di- rector Sam Peckinpah found compelling). Donald Harper has found a similar bellows analogy in early macrobiotic hygiene literature, where it refers to a type of breathing in which the qi is circulated in the body. I agree with him in asserting that it has this meaning in the Laozi as well. 25
Guodian A XIII
Attaining emptiness is the apogee (of our practice) Holding fast to the center is its governing mode. 26
The myriad things arise side by side
And residing here, I see them slowly return The forms of heaven are great in number But each returns to its root. 27
LaFargue sees these as two distinct units, the first a general comment about self-cultivation and the second a description of what one does in meditation. 28 Lau, however, sees the following lines as being part of the same semantic unit:
Returning to one's roots is known as stillness.
This is meant by returning to one's destiny. Returning to one's destiny is known as the constant. Knowledge of the constant is known as discernment.
There is further material in this chapter that is clearly from a different textual unit. In light of the Guodian parallels it appears as if this latter unit is a commentarial addition that was perhaps created in the composition of this chapter.
third-person and first-person approaches 23
The Guodian Laozi parallels clearly demonstrate that the chapters in all extant recensions of the text were built up from smaller independent units of verse, commentary, and framing. It is extremely important to keep this in mind when teaching the Laozi to even introductory audiences. For my advanced courses I include a reading of Robert Henricks's careful translation of these textual parallels, which may or may not constitute an independent text in their own right. 29 I sometimes have students read these Guodian parallels before they read the received text of Laozi and ask them to analyze it without ref- erence to the latter. They invariably see about as much coherence to them as they do to the received text.
Hence, historical hermeneutics is an extremely important tool in the pedagogy of Laozi. Establishing as much as we can about the intellectual milieu of its creators can help control the tendency among many of us who have embraced the text to interpret it as a support for a wide variety of quite modern intellectual positions.
Contemporary Relevance
To a great extent, much of what has been written throughout the ages about the philosophy of the Laozi falls under this heading. This includes all the major and minor commentaries, from Huainanzi's ''Daoying'' (Responses of the Way) essay in the second century b. c. e. to Yuan Emperor Taizu in the fourteenth century c. e. 30 Alan Chan's essay in the Kohn-LaFargue anthology gives a solid comparison of the two most influential commentaries, the Heshang gong and Wang Bi, while Isabelle Robinet's essay in the same volume provides an ex- cellent overview of the later and virtually unknown commentaries. 31 This ap- proach also includes the many modern philosophers who attempt to explain the ideas of the text in terms of ideas from the intellectual contexts in which they are working. There are too many thinkers in this group to inclusively list here, but a few of the most prominent are Fung Yu-lan, Chad Hansen, Liu Xiaogan, A. C. Graham, Benjamin Schwartz, Roger Ames, and numerous authors whose work has been published in Philosophy East and West over the past five decades. The Religious and Philosophical Aspects of the Laozi, edited by Mark Csikszent- mihalyi and P. J. Ivanhoe contains some interesting examples of such philo- sophical interpretations. And then there are the scores of modern Chinese thinkers who we could include and the myriad uses in popular Western culture such as the Tao of Pooh and George Lucas's ''Force. '' Julia Hardy's essay, ''In- fluential Western Interpretations of the Tao-te-ching in the Kohn-LaFargue volume provides a thorough overview of major Western interpreters of the Laozi. 32
24 approaching the daode jing
While some of these modern interpreters, such as Liu Xiaogan, clearly state that they are adapting the Daode jing for modern uses because of the deep insights it contains into the human condition, many interpreters and all traditional commentators assert that they are uncovering the true meaning of the text. Despite this, I would argue that many, in their use of philosophical perspectives from their own intellectual milieu, are in reality interested in the contemporary relevance of the text. That is, they wish to retrieve responsibly the ideas in the text they find most relevant today. I could not agree more with the following assertion by Robinet:
They [the commentaries] develop a sense of contemporality that
can be received by people of their own time and is relevant to their world, a world more likely than not dominated by a vastly differ- ent kind of thinking, such as Confucianism and Buddhism. To dis- solve the distance between the period and culture, in which the text evolved, the reader of another time must either make the text con- temporaneous to the reader or make the reader contemporaneous to the text. This is the task commentaries typically set for themselves, aiming at translating the text into a more current language while circling around its obscurities, lessening its paradoxes, and reducing its originality. They reshape the document for a newer taste, fre- quently using syncretistic forms of interpretation. 33
In teaching the Laozi, one of the absolutely essential things to keep in mind is to clearly distinguish between contemporary interpretations of the text and whatever we can establish of the text's original meanings through historical hermeneutics. There is absolutely nothing wrong with discovering something of value for our contemporary world in the ideas of the Laozi. Indeed, I think its teachings on inner cultivation contain valuable insights for us. But it is important to differentiate between what we can reasonably establish about the ''original meaning'' of the text through careful examination of its history and its larger intellectual context and the contemporary philosophical positions we use to interpret it.
A Critical First-Person Approach: Reconstructive Meditation
I would like to close with a section about a new approach I have taken in teaching the Laozi that adds the critical first-person element I advocated in my introduction. This is engaging students in what I call reconstructive medita- tion, the logic of which runs as follows:
third-person and first-person approaches 25
1. The creators of the Laozi practiced a form of breath meditation that led them to deeper and deeper states of tranquility and to what they asserted was an eventual merging with the Way. 34
2. They applied the clarity of mind developed through this meditation to the tasks of everyday life, hence developing, for example, the notion of ''effortless action'' (wu-wei). 35
3. Despite vast differences in cultural contexts, human beings in the third century b. c. e. in China had essentially the same physiology of body and mind as do modern humans. This assumption is widely accepted in evolutionary biology and neuroscience. 36
4. Thus, practicing breath meditation should have largely similar phys- iological effects on us as it did on them, although we, of course, conceive of the underlying mechanisms in entirely different fashions.
Based on these assumptions, I have developed a series of reconstructive meditations for students linked to passages in the Daode jing. Herewith two examples:
Bellows Breathing
The space between heaven and earth, is it not like a bellows? Empty it out and it is not exhausted;
Activate it and it continues to come forth
Laozi 5 speaks of the space between heaven and earth being like a bellows. Early Chinese physiological hygiene texts linked this bellows to the natural movements of the diaphragm as it inhales and exhales.
Instructions: Sitting upright in a comfortable position and with eyes closed (remember: ''The Five Colors blind men's eyes''; Laozi 12), imagine your diaphragm to be a bellows and simply follow its movements as you inhale and exhale. Do this for ten (or more, de- pending on prior experience of students) minutes, then stop.
Observing Consciousness While ''Holding Fast to the Center''
Attaining emptiness is the apogee (of our practice) Holding fast to the center is its governing mode.
The myriad things arise side by side
And residing here, I see them slowly return The forms of heaven are great in number But each returns to its root.
26
approaching the daode jing
Laozi 16 recommends gradually emptying out consciousness through a process of ''holding fast to the center. '' I interpret this to mean concentrating on the feeling of inhaling and exhaling as you expe- rience it in the center of your body, somewhere in your abdomen. For some of you it may be as high as the solar plexus; for others it may be as low as the spot later called the ''cinnabar field,'' three finger-widths below your abdomen.
Instructions: Sitting upright in a comfortable position, concentrate on your breathing and determine where it is centered in your abdomen. Carefully follow your breathing through its cycles of inhalation and exhalation. This is ''holding fast to the center. ''
When you are established in this breathing, open your focus to allow in the various thoughts and feelings that inevitably arise when attempting to sit quietly. Pay careful attention to where they come from. Notice how they arise and invariably pass away. Pay attention to where they go to. Do not follow them; do not react to them; always maintain an awareness of your center of breathing and simply con- tinue watching thoughts and feelings as they arise and pass away. This arising of something out of nothing is basic to your con- sciousness as microcosm and to the entire cosmos as macrocosm.
Conclusions
These reconstructive meditations help give students a sense of the experiential basis underlying not a few passages in the Laozi and start to provide some insight into the possible origins of the cosmology for which the text is re- nowned. I do not by any means wish to assert that these reconstructions are the exclusive original meaning of these passages; I only wish to assert that they may point to their possible experiential bases. In the end, reconstructive meditation is just another wrench in the toolbox of the scholar and teacher of the Laozi, another way to approach its meaning without reducing it to a series of ideas intended to deliberately confuse its audience and reinforce some very Western biases about the essentially rational and profane nature of human experience. It can provide new insights into the history of the text, the ''competence'' of its authors, composers, and audience, and can also con- tribute some insights into the nature of consciousness that some may find of contemporary relevance. It is in these ways that reconstructive meditation can augment the other three approaches.
third-person and first-person approaches 27
notes
I wish to thank Henry Rosemont Jr. , Erin Kline, and Michael Slater for their helpful criticisms of this manuscript but absolve them of all blame for whatever questionable assertions and contentious opinions I decided to retain.
1. R. C. Zaehner, Mysticism, Sacred and Profane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), argues that Christian mysticism is superior to all other forms. James Ware, Alchemy, Medicine and Religion in the China of a. d. 320: The Nei Pien of Ko Hung (New York: Dover, 1963), consistently translates Dao as ''God. ''
2. Propriety (li) prevents me from being any more specific about this except to say that most of the scholars I have in mind do not work on Daoism. And that is an interesting phenomenon in itself!
3. For a good example of this, see Wayne Proudfoot's assertion in Religious Ex- perience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 128-130, that the Daode jing uses paradoxical statements about the nature of the Dao to establish its ineffability, which is thus a feature of grammar and not of experience. By implication, the Dao is not a genuine power or force but a product of the linguistic manipulations of its inventors and the subsequent beliefs of its followers.
4. Of course, Herbert Fingarette got it right in his field-revising study of the Analects: Confucius--The Secular as Sacred, 2nd ed. (Prospect Heights, Ill. : Waveland, 1998).
5. The categories of ''historical hermeneutics'' and ''contemporary relevance'' are found in the writings of Michael LaFargue. The most accessible is ''Recovering the Tao-te-ching's Original Meaning,'' in Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching, ed. Livia Kohn and Michael LaFargue (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 231-254.
6. For a detailed discussion of the relationship between the Daode jing and Neiye and these other texts, see my book Original Tao: Inward Training (Nei-yeh) and the Foundations of Taoist Mysticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, in particular 144-153, 185-190.
7. Rudolph G. Wagner, A Chinese Reading of the Daode jing: Wang Bi's Com- mentary on the Laozi with Critical Text and Translation. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003). See also the following essays: Rudolph G. Wagner, ''Inter- locking Parallel Style: Laozi and Wang Bi,'' Journal Asiatiques 34, no. 1 (1980): 18-58; William Boltz, ''The Religious and Philosophical Significance of the 'Hsiang erh' Lao Tzu in the Light of the Ma-wang-tui Silk Manuscripts,'' Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 45 no. 1 (1982): 95-117; William Boltz, ''Textual Criticism and the Ma-Wang-Tui Silk Manuscripts,'' Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. 44, no. 1 (1984): 185-224; William Boltz, ''The Lao Tzu Text That Wang Pi and Ho-shang Kung Never Saw,'' Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 48, no. 5 (1985): 493-501. The best overview of the text and commentaries of the Laozi is Boltz's Lao tzu Tao te ching, in Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide, ed. Michael Loewe, Early China Special Monograph Series no. 2 (Berkeley: Institute for East Asian Studies, Univer- sity of California, 1993). For a succinct summary of the textual issues relevant to Laozi and other early philosophical texts, see Harold D. Roth, ''Text and Edition in
28 approaching the daode jing
Early Chinese Philosophical Literature,'' Journal of the American Oriental Society 113, no. 2 (1993): 214-227.
8. D. C. Lau, Chinese Classics: Tao Te Ching (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1982); Robert Henricks, Lao-Tzu: Te Tao Ching (New York: Ballantine, 1989) Victor Mair, Tao Te Ching: The Classic Book of Integrity and the Way (New York: Bantam, 1990); Robert Henricks, Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching (New York, Columbia University Press, 2000) (translation of Guodian Laozi parallels).
9. For an excellent and detailed study of the contrasting approaches of the Wang Bi and Heshang gong commentaries, see Allan Chan, Two Visions of the Way: A Study of the Wang Pi and Ho-shang-kung Commentaries on the Lao-tzu. Albany: State Uni- versity of New York Press, 1991.
10. For details, see my review in Philosophy East and West 35, no. 2 (1985): 213-215.
11. Sarah Allan and Crispin Williams, eds. , The Guodian Laozi: Proceedings of the International Conference, Dartmouth College, May, 1998, Early China Special Mono- graph Series no. 5 (Berkeley: Institute for East Asian Studies, University of California, , 2000).
12. Edmund Ryden, ''Edition of the Bamboo-Slip Laozi A, B, and C, and Tai Yi Sheng Shui from Guodian Tomb Number One,'' In Allan and Williams, The Guodian Laozi, 187-231.
13. Harold D. Roth, ''Some Methodological Issues in the Study of the Guodian Laozi Parallels. '' In Allan and Williams, The Guodian Laozi, 71-88.
14.
William Baxter, ''Situating the Language of Lao-tzu: The Probable Date of the Tao-te-ching,'' in Kohn and LaFargue, Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching, 231-254.
15. A. C. Graham, ''The Origins of the Legend of Lao Tan,'' 1981, in Studies in Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical Literature (Singapore: Institute for East Asian Philosophies, 1986), 111-124. An edited version appears in Kohn and LaFargue, Lao- tzu and the Tao-te-ching, 23-40.
16. Livia Kohn, ''The Lao-Tzu Myth,'' in Kohn and LaFargue, Lao-tzu and the Tao- te-ching, 41-62; Anna Seidel, La divinization de Lao-tseu dan le Taoisme du Han (1969; Paris: E ? cole Franc ? aise d'Extr^eme-Orient, 1992).
17. Michael LaFargue, Tao and Method: A Reasoned Approach to the Tao Te Ching (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). LaFargue earlier published a summary of his arguments from this volume together with a radically rearranged translation in Michael LaFargue, The Tao of the Tao Te Ching (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992).
18. For further details, see Roth, Original Tao, chap. 5.
19. A. C. Graham, ''How Much of Chuang Tzu Did Chuang Tzu Write? ,'' in Studies in Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 283-321; Liu Xiaogan, Classifying the Zhuangzi Chapters, trans. William Savage (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1994).
20. Graham initially proposed the latter two categories to represent two major authorial voices in the Zhuangzi. Liu Xiaogan preferred the categories ''anarchist''
third-person and first-person approaches 29
and ''huang-lao'' to Graham's ''primitivist and ''syncretist,'' but, unlike Graham, he related these voices in Zhuangzi to larger intellectual movements. In this aspect,
I follow Liu. For the references, see the previous note.
21. I accept the Mawangdui variants of fu yan and fu zhi instead of the received text's bu yan and bu zhi. The negative adverb fu implies a direct object, whereas the adverb bu does not and is therefore more vague. The received text contains many examples of this sort, where a relatively clear text has been made vaguer and thus more ''mystical. '' See Lau, Chinese Classics, 218, 80.
22. For examples of this kind, see my essay ''The Laozi in the Context of Early Daoist Mystical Praxis,'' in Mark Csikszentmihalyi and P. J. Ivanhoe, eds. , Religious and Philosophical Aspects of Laozi (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999, 59-96. This is an excellent collection and provides a philosophical complement to the Kohn and LaFargue collection.
23. Lau, Chinese Classics, p. xl.
24. Ryden, Edition of the Bamboo-Slip Laozi, 206.
25. Donald Harper, ''The Bellows Analogy in Laozi V and Warring States Mac-
robiotic Hygiene,'' Early China 20 (1995): 381-392.
26. Ryden, Edition of the Bamboo-Slip Laozi, 207.
27. I read the last character in the line, tu (sincere, serious, solid), as a loan
for tu (also sincere, but can mean supervisor, to inspect, to correct), which when combined with the character mai (meridian) in Chinese medicine refers to the central supervisory meridian that controls the flow of yang qi in the human body. This is the reading in the Mawangdui recension. I interpret this passage to mean that the dominant mode by which emptiness is attained is by concentrating on the center.
I think the center here refers to the center of the body where breathing is experi- enced, and thus the passage commends focusing on breathing in order to attain emptiness.
28. LaFargue, Tao of the Tao Te Ching, 62-63.
29. Henricks, Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching.
30. The twelfth essay of the Huainanzi, ''The Responses of the Way,'' consists of
a series of narratives presented to illustrate various statements from the Laozi. Each narrative ends with the formula, ''And so the Laozi, says . . . '' This ''reverse com- mentary'' genre is also found in the ''Commenting on Laozi'' and ''Explaining Laozi'' chapters of the Hanfeizi.
31. Allan Chan, ''A Tale of Two Commentaries: Ho-shang-kung and Wang Pi on the Lao-tzu,'' in Kohn and LaFargue, Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching, 89-118, is a sum- mary of his book on the same subject. Isabelle Robinet, ''Later Commentaries: Textual Polysemy and Syncretistic Interpretations,'' in Kohn and LaFargue, Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching, 119-142, is a masterful essay in which the late Professor Robinet provides insights from many Laozi commentaries that are virtually unknown to modern scholarship, both East Asian and Western.
32. Julia Hardy, ''Influential Western Interpretations of the Tao-te-ching,'' in Kohn and LaFargue, Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching, 165-185.
33. Robinet, ''Later Commentaries,'' 121.
30 approaching the daode jing
34. The justification for this is detailed in my essay ''The Laozi in the Context of Early Daoist Mystical Praxis. ''
35. This is one example of a more pervasive pattern of early Daoist meditation. For further details, see my essay ''Evidence for Stages of Meditation in Early Taoism,'' Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 60, no. 2 (June 1997): 295-314.
36. Evolutionary biology posits that all human beings (Homo sapiens) share a common genetic pool, whether they live in North America or in China, whether they live today or three thousand years ago. According to geneticist F. S. Collins, human beings are ''99. 9% genetically identical. '' ''Genome Research: The Next Generation,'' in The Genome of Homo Sapiens, ed. Bruce Stillman and David Stewart (Cold Spring Harbor, N. Y. : CSHL Press, 2003), 50. Geneticists Y. Sasaki et al. state, ''Homo sapiens is a unique organism characterized by its highly developed brain, use of complex languages, bipedal locomotion, and so on. These unique features have been acquired by a series of mutation and selection events during evolution in the human lineage and are mainly determined by genetic factors encoded in the human genome. ''Hu- man versus Chimpanzee Chromosome-wide Sequence Comparison and Its Evolu- tionary Implications,'' in Stillman and Stewart, The Genome of Homo Sapiens, 455. This common genetic heritage leads to the common physiology and neurophysiology that distinguishes human beings from the other higher hominids.
? The Dao and the Field: Exploring an Analogy
Robert G. Henricks
Several years ago while looking for a way to explain to a class the meaning of Laozi's Dao (the Way, literally a road or a path), I hit upon an analogy that has proved to be quite fruitful. It is an anal- ogy that provides us with a model for understanding the nature of the Dao and the nature of its operations. It also provides us with a way to understand Laozi's moral philosophy, and it may help us understand what Laozi believed with regard to life after death/ immortality.
The analogy is drawn between the Dao and a field--not a farmer's field which is groomed and cultivated for the purpose of raising a single, hybrid crop, but a ''natural'' field, one left un- tended, one that is barren and deserted in the winter but filled with a host of different wildflowers throughout the spring and summer.
The appropriateness of this analogy and its usefulness for understanding the thought of Laozi will become clear once we see what Laozi himself said about the Dao. And to begin this task there is probably no better place to start than with the beginning of the book itself, the opening lines of chapter 1:
The Dao that can be told of is not the eternal Dao:
The name that can be named is not the eternal name. 1
A cryptic start to a cryptic book. Laozi tells us that anything he says about a Dao, after all, will not be about a true, eternal, or
32 approaching the daode jing
constant Dao. But at the same time he seems to confirm, in this backward way, that there is some such reality. Whatever the Dao might be, it is eternal and abiding. Moreover, there might be a name that is appropriate to it, a name that is equal to its reality, an eternal name, but the names we use do not qualify for such status.
All in all, the opening lines seem to suggest what is often suggested in mystic literature: that there is a transcendent, eternal reality, with which we may come into contact but that lies beyond the realm of precise description. All attempts to talk about it somehow fall short of conveying a true sense of what it is. That this is Laozi's meaning seems to be confirmed, as a matter of fact, in the very next line of chapter 1, where he calls the Dao the ''Nameless. '' He adds, moreover, that in this aspect it is the origin of the phenomenal world, the beginning of all things: ''The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth. ''2
But the label ''Nameless'' can be understood in two different ways. It can mean, as we have suggested, something for which an appropriate name cannot be found. But it might also refer to a time or a condition of things--undiffer- entiated reality--when distinct phenomenal forms had not yet appeared, a state lacking nameable realities. The Chinese for ''Nameless'' (wu ming) allows both of these interpretations (i. e. , not having a name and not having names), and as it turns out the Dao for Laozi is ''nameless'' in both ways. The Dao is that elusive, difficult to describe, single reality that existed prior to, and gave rise to, all other existing things.
Thus in chapter 14, where problematically ''names'' are assigned to the Dao, we find the following:
We look at it and do not see it: Its name is The Invisible.
We listen to it and do not hear it; Its name is The Inaudible.
We touch it and do not find it:
Its name is The Subtle (formless).
These three cannot be further inquired into, And hence merge into one. 3
And in chapter 25 we have this:
There was something undifferentiated and yet complete,
Which existed before heaven and earth.
Soundless and formless, it depends on nothing and does not change. It operates everywhere and is free from danger.
It may be considered the mother of the universe.
I do not know its name; I call [or, I would style it] Dao. If forced to give it a name, I shall call it Great. 4
This is a telling statement on the nature of the Dao. It reports motifs that we already know: that the Dao is eternal, undifferentiated, the source of the phe- nomenal world, and something vague and elusive. But to this is now added the sense that the Dao is a reality that continues to be functional after creation, insofar as it is something that operates everywhere, and of course this also tells us that it is omnipresent. Moreover, the distinction that is made here between ''name'' (ming), which we do not know, and ''style'' (zi--Wing-tsit Chan ''calls it''), is informative. In China a person's name (personal name, that is, not surname) is given at birth; it is personal and rarely used in direct address. But the ''style'' is taken at capping age (around 20), and it is less personal, more publicly used, and less a part of that person's reality--who he or she really is. The word Dao has this ''style'' kind of relation to the reality at hand.
Laozi does venture here, when forced of course, to find some name to use for this reality, choosing the word da, the Great. But Kaltenmark has probably caught the import of this when he says, ''It is clear that he [Laozi] is using da in an absolute sense: the Immense, the Incommensurable. ''5
There is one more thing that Laozi tells us in chapter 25 which is important for our understanding of the nature of the Dao. He says, ''It may be considered the mother of the universe. '' When we move into the realm of image and metaphor, we find that Laozi depicts the Dao as a very feminine reality indeed. And to be more precise, as the line here makes clear, as something like a mother.
Three kinds of evidence can be called forth to support this and draw it out. To begin with, Laozi explicitly refers to the Dao as the ''Mother'' in no fewer than five different chapters. In addition to the reference already noted in chapter 25, in chapter 1, picking up the text where we left off, we find: ''The Named is the mother of all things [literally, the ten thousand things]. ''6 In chapter 20 Laozi laments that he alone values ''drawing sustenance from Mother (Dao). ''7 Chapter 52 begins, ''There was a beginning of the universe, Which may be called the Mother of the universe. ''8 And in chapter 59 the statement is made, ''He who possesses the Mother (Dao) of the state will last long. ''9
Second, the Dao is often pictured as womblike or vagina-like in its capacity as the source and originator of all forms. At the end of chapter 1, womb and vagina symbolism are both quite explicit. The Dao is said to be ''deeper and more profound, the door of all subtleties. ''10 An inexhaustible womb is the image portrayed at the opening of chapter 4: ''Dao is empty (like a bowl). It may
the dao and the field 33
34 approaching the daode jing
be used but its capacity is never exhausted. ''11 As a womb the Dao would contain all things in essence or seedlike form, and chapter 21 seems to me to support this:
The all-embracing quality of the great virtue follows alone from the Dao.
The thing that is called Dao is eluding and vague. Vague and eluding, there is in it the form [or forms]. Eluding and vague, in it are things.
Deep and obscure, in it is the essence.
The essence is very real; in it are evidences. 12
Chapter 6, without question, is the best chapter to cite in this regard. Called here the ''spirit of the valley,'' the valley itself being a symbol of constant fertility, the Dao is again described in terms of womb and vagina. But again in contrast to its mammalian counterpart, this is a source that can never be used up, one that will last forever:
The spirit of the valley never dies.
It is called the subtle and profound female.
The gate of the subtle and profound female.
Is the root of Heaven and Earth.
It is continuous, and seems to be always existing. Use it and you will never wear it out. 13
The third point to be made on behalf of the maternal nature of the Dao is that the Dao not only contains all things and brings them forth to life, but it also continues to function in a maternal way in the rearing of its children. That is to say, it nourishes them and protects them and brings them to maturity and completion. And in providing sustenance and care for all things, it has no favorites. Yet in contrast to its human counterpart, it does not seek to control and direct that growth, nor does it ever claim credit for the work it has done.
There are two chapters in the text that make this point, chapters 34 and 51. Chapter 34 reads:
The great Dao flows everywhere.
It may go left or right.
All things depend on it for life, and it does not turn away from them. It accomplishes its task, but does not claim credit for it.
It clothes and feeds all things, but does not claim to be master
over them.
Always without desires, it may be called the Small.
All things come to it and it does not master them; it may be called the Great.
Therefore (the sage) never strives himself for the great, and there by the great is achieved. 14
In chapter 51 two points of interest are added: the Dao and its virtue (really Power) are ''naturally'' honored and esteemed for what they do even though they promise no reward (in contrast, perhaps, to the honor and esteem ac- corded state rulers), and the involvement of the Dao in the complete life cycle of its children is neatly underscored:
The Dao brings them to life and virtue nourishes them.
Substance gives them form and ability completes them.
Therefore the 10,000 things honor the Way and esteem virtue.
No one rewards this honoring of the Way and esteeming of virtue. And yet they are constantly so of themselves.
The Way brings them to life, nourishes them, develops them, rears them, rests them, makes them secure, cares for them, and protects them.
It brings them to life, and yet it does not possess them.
It brings them to action, and yet it does not make them dependent. It brings them to completion, and yet it does not rule over them. This is called the Profound Virtue. 15
We may now turn with benefit to explore the analogy. My contention is that in the model of a field of wildflowers passing through the seasons we have an almost perfect model for grasping the nature of the Dao in its totality--we can see it, as it were, prior to, during, and after creation.
Let us approach it this way. Were we to go to an untended field in the midst of the winter, we might see no form of life whatsoever. There would be nothing but a still, silent void, with nothing for the senses to grasp. Did we not know better, we would presumably conclude that there was no relationship whatso- ever between this inert mass and the variety of forms, sounds, and smells that we know as summer life.
But were we to return to that field sometime in mid-June, we would find that the most marvelous of transformations had occurred. The very same field that had been barren and still is now the scene of bustling activity, covered with ten thousand (as it were) different forms of life. There are sunflowers and nightshade and butter-and-eggs and chicory, hundreds of kinds of wildflowers, all different shapes and colors and sizes, some tall and some short, some with one big flower, others in tiny clusters, to say nothing of the many nonflowering
the dao and the field 35
36 approaching the daode jing
grasses. And just as there seems to be an infinite number of kinds, there is as well an infinite number of each kind.
It would now seem clear to our minds that what had appeared to us in winter to be an inert, sterile void was in reality a fecund, perhaps inexhaustible womb, containing the seeds for all forms of life. Had we dug into the earth in winter, of course, we would never have detected these forms--there would have been only one, undifferentiated, homogeneous earth. And yet somehow, mysteriously, in the most minute, infinitesimal forms, the seeds of all these many plants, as yet indistinguishable, were there all the time.
The work of the field does not stop with springtime creation. Just as it made no distinctions in bringing forth a variety of forms, so too it remains impartial through the summer in providing support and nourishment for all, bringing all of the plants to completion of their natural life cycles.
