Flow: The
Psychology
of Optimal Experience.
Teaching-the-Daode-Jing
notes
1. I've outlined this theory in Language and Gnosis: Form and Meaning in the Acts of Thomas (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), chap. 1; ''Socio-historical Research and the Contextualization of Biblical Theology,'' in The Social World of Formative Chris- tianity and Judaism: Essays in Honor of Howard Clark Kee, ed. P. Borger, J. S. Frerichs, R. Horsley, and J. Neusner (Philadelphia: Fortress Press 1988), 3-16; ''Are Texts Determinate? Derrida, Barth, and the Role of the Biblical Scholar,'' Harvard Theolo- gical Review 81, no. 3 (1988): 341-357; Tao and Method: A Reasoned Approach to the Tao- te-ching (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 5-43) and Michael
hermeneutics and pedagogy: old-time historicism 191
Lafargue ''Recovering the Tao-te-Ching's Original Meaning: Some Remarks on His- torical Hermeneutics,'' in Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching, ed. Livia Kohn and Michael LaFargue (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 255-276. I owe a great deal both in hermeneutics and in pedagogy to the mentoring of Dieter Georgi,
and partly through him to his teacher Rudolf Bultmann.
2. My resulting interpretation of the first two chapters of the Acts of Thomas was
published as Language and Gnosis.
3. See Michael Ermarth, Wilhelm Dilthey: The Critique of Historical Reason (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). For my critique of Gadamer, see LaFargue, Tao and Method, 7-12; for Derrida, see LaFargue, ''Are Texts Determinate? ''
4. I've found most helpful Ted Kaptchuk's The Web That Has No Weaver (Chi- cago: Congdon & Weed, 1983) on Chinese medical theory, and B. Frantzis, Opening the Energy Gates of Your Body (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1993).
5. I've adopted A. C. Graham's term ''Laoism'' as a convenient designation of the specific teaching of the Daode jing, to distinguish this from other teachings associated with the term ''Daoism. '' See A. C. Graham, Studies in Chinese Philosophy and Philoso- phical Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 118, 124. This enables me to avoid engaging in struggles over what properly deserves the prestige name ''Daoism. '' For students concerned about this question, I recommend Nathan Sivin's very informative article, ''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, for the situation in China, and Julia Hardy's ''Influential Western Interpretations of the Tao-te-ching,'' and The Tao of Pooh, ed. Benjamin M. Hoff (New York: Penguin Books, 1983), for a history of ''Western Daoism. ''
6. See LaFargue, The Tao of the Tao Te Ching, A Translation and Commentary (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 219-253. I assign the essays under the following topics: Organic, Natural, Appearances, Self-Promotion, Con- tending, Confucianism, Empty, Nothing, Uncarved Block, Agitation, Desire, Still, Naming, Understanding, Impressive, Strict, Hurting, Forcing, Low, Softness, Im- provements, Working, Dao, and De. These give an overview of my attempts to re- construct the original historical meaning of the Daode jing. I sometimes also assign the longer and more systematic essay on ''Organic Harmony'' in LaFargue, Tao and Method, 160-172. I think organic harmony as there defined is the core value in Laoism.
7. More complete explanation of my theory about how proverbs mean is given in LaFargue, Tao and Method, chaps. 6-7. See also my ''Understanding the Aphorisms in the Tao-te-ching,'' Journal of Chinese Religions, no. 18 (fall 1990): 25-43.
8. LaFargue, Tao and Method.
9. Ibid. , 104-112, 181-195. My attention was first drawn to parallels between the Daode jing and the Nei Ye by the work of Hal Roth; see ''Psychology and Self-Culti- vation in Early Taoistic Thought,'' Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 51 (December 1991): 599-650.
10. A. C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China (LaSalle, Ill. : Open Court Press, 1989), 243.
192 recent scholarship and teaching the daode jing
11. Many of these ideas are implied in passages using the key recurrent term ''turn back. '' For example chapter 16 speaks of ''turning back to the root,'' which it says is equivalent to achieving a mental stillness (jing) that is the opposite of activity (zuo); this implies that stillness is a kind of primary or ''root'' state, compared to which activity is secondary and derivative. The common tendency is to flee this ''root'' and involve oneself in outward-directed activity. Laoist advice to ''turn back'' is advice to reverse this outward flow and turn back to this neglected root. Similarly, chapter 64 says one should ''desire [to be] desire-less, learn [to be] un-learned . . . turn back to the place all others have gone on from''; chapter 28 speaks of ''turning back to an infant [-like state], turning back to [being] uncarved''; chapter 52 speaks of ''turning back
to the [internal] Mother,'' in contrast to occupying oneself with phenomena in the world, the Mother's ''children''; chapter 32 says that the ''naming'' involved in legalistic rule making is a result of ''cutting up'' an initially ''uncarved'' Dao. I think the end of chapter 1 also pictures conceptual naming as something that arises out of a prior ''merged'' state of mind, that is, a state of mind prior to the emergence of well-defined concepts. If my understanding is correct, this aspect of Laoist thought is probably summed up in the rather cryptic passage in chapter 25: ''One can call it [Dao] 'Great. ' Great means going forth, going forth means going far away, going far away means turning back. '' ' The social world we see is the result of a ''going forth'' from Dao, a movement that initially alienates this world from Dao. Overcoming this alienation is the object of Laoist self-cultivation, which is a reversal (''turning back'') of this cosmic movement away from Dao.
12. LaFargue, Tao and Method, 172-174.
13. Some elements in this list are the result of my attempts to situate the Daode jing in its social setting in ancient China, spelled out in LaFargue, Tao and Method, chaps. 3-5. Many of these assumptions are not specifically Laoist, but were elements of a political culture that Laoists shared with other thinkers of the time, including their Confucian rivals. The tendency among Western scholars is to try to assimilate divisions between different Chinese schools to modern divisions we are familiar with (right vs. left, religious vs. secular, etc. ). I think n historical reading should focus instead on the way that the shared political culture of ancient Chinese thinkers differs from the shared political culture that shapes modern thought.
14. See the remarks by A. C. Graham on what he calls ''hierarchical anarchism'': the utopias of even the most ''primitivist,'' anticivilization thinkers in ancient China were presided over by a sage emperor. Disputers of the Tao, 299-311.
15. This attitude is well represented, I believe, in the Gospel of Mark, another of my favorites among religious classics, though its message is in many ways directly opposed to the Daode jing. See my ''The Authority of the Excluded: Mark's Challenge to a Rational Hermeneutics,'' in Religious Propaganda and Missionary Competition in the New Testament World: Essays Honoring Dieter Georgi, supplement to Novum Tes- tamentum, no. 74, ed. Lukas Borman, Kelly DelTredici, and Angela Standhartinger (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 229-255.
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