No More Learning

'' There seems to be a consensus among authors that popular Daoism cannot simply be dismissed as trash or snobbishly ignored altogether. It constitutes a reality, and to deny this would not be very productive. All authors, however, make it explicitly or implicitly clear that a university class on the Daode jing cannot just be a lecture on New Age Daoism. In an academic context it is therefore prudent, as many contributors point out, to introduce the Daode jing within a historical framework and to make it clear that there is a substantial difference between contemporary America and ancient China. A course on the Daode jing will hardly avoid dealing with this difference--or, as Judith Berling, Geoffrey Foy, and John Thompson say, ''Some contextualization is required to engage students fruitfully with the text. '' Teaching the Daode jing academically necessarily involves such a contextualization, including informa- tion on the cultural background and the philological peculiarities of this text.
The potentially productive tension between popular and academic ap- proaches to the Daode jing thus immediately relates to another, also potentially productive, tension that is perhaps most neatly captured by Michael LaFargue's hermeneutical distinction between the attempt to reconstruct what the text ''meant to its original authors and audience'' and what it can mean to a con- temporary reader. This distinction between ''them'' and ''us'' grants each ap- proach its own specific validity and legitimacy on the one hand, while, on the other hand, it also strongly cautions against a conflation of their different
reading strategies. Both reading strategies make sense, but because they are methodologically so far apart it is very unlikely that they will concur. Both approaches, the academic and the popular, the historical and the ''contempo- rary,'' can coexist--in the real world as well as in the classroom. This coexis- tence implies that neither approach should be forced on the other. Popular Daoism can certainly not claim a monopoly on reviving the true spirit of the Daode jing that is supposedly lost in, for instance, ''dry'' philological transla- tions, but neither can academic research claim the Daode jing as an exclusive object of scholarly investigation. To put it in the words of the famous butterfly dream allegory in the Zhuangzi: There is a man, and there is a butterfly, and ''so there is necessarily a distinction between them. '' To ignore this distinction, to try to blur it or even it out, or to claim that it is a hierarchical one, is neither very Daoist nor, so the authors of this volume seem to agree, didactically rewarding.
Which Text, Which Translation?
A second issue that is brought up--again, if not explicitly then at least implicitly--in virtually all contributions to this volume is the practical problem of having to use English translations when teaching the Daode jing (outside the field of Chinese studies). The majority of teachers who discuss the Daode jing in their classes will not be trained scholars in Ancient Chinese language--and the same will certainly be true for the students taking these classes. This situation leaves teachers and students dependent on the sources that are used in class. The very choice of the translation(s) of the Daode jing will substantially deter- mine the image of the text that the course will produce.
In the case of the Daode jing the problem of translation has a much deeper dimension than with many other great books. The Daode jing is a text without an identifiable author or authors, without a specific date or time of creation, and without a definite form. It is, moreover, a book that, most likely, was originally none; present-day sinological scholars mostly assume that the text had oral origins. Many essays in this volume talk about the extremely complex textual history of the Daode jing: it emerged over centuries, and the early manuscripts discovered in relatively recent excavations show different versions of the text at different times. The choice of one or more English translations of the Daode jing is thus not only a choice of one or more particular renderings, but it is also necessarily a choice of one or more editions or versions of the text on which the translation is based. There are translations of the ''standard edition'' of the text by Wang Bi that goes back to the third century c. e. (although recent scholarship has shown that, most likely, even the text that is transmitted as the Wang Bi
introduction 5
6 introduction
edition is different from the text that Wang Bi actually worked with), with or without Wang Bi's commentary in English. Then one finds, though much more rarely, translations based on other editions (such as the one ascribed to Heshang Gong, third century c. e. ? ). Then there are translations on the basis of the various manuscripts found, respectively, in Mawangdui (around 200 b. c. e. ) and Guodian (third or fourth century b. c. e. ). And there are also translations--often the most popular ones--that do not identify any specific Chinese edition as their source. Translations of the Daode jing presuppose a choice of one or more Chinese ''original'' text(s), which are, paradoxically en- ough, never truly originals because there simply exists no authentic Urtext to work with. Sinological translators will typically not only have subjectively de- cided on one or more Chinese editions as their source(s), but they will also rely on one or more specific Chinese commentaries of their choice. To translate the text, for instance, on the basis of the Wang Bi edition does not mean only to follow Wang Bi's wording of the Daode jing, but also to be at least influenced by Wang Bi's interpretation. Thus, to decide, for instance, between the Wang Bi and the Heshang Gong editions is not only a philological, but also a herme- neutical decision for the translator--and this decision is inevitably repeated by the teacher who then decides for one of these translations for his or her class.
The Daode jing is not only different from other great books by, philologi- cally and historically speaking, not precisely meeting the characteristics of many other books; it is also very unique in style. This adds to the difficulties involved in its translation. As many essays in this volume point out, it works more often than not on the basis of imagery (Henricks and others), proverbial sayings (LaFargue), and poetic devices (Hall and others). Such linguistic and rhetorical features are often hard to translate. Accordingly, translations vary greatly not only in regard to their textual source, but also in how they deal with the literary aspects of the text.
Generally speaking, the authors of this volume distinguish between two kinds of translations: academic and popular. The differences between these approaches have already been discussed in the preceding section, and teachers of the Daode jing will hardly avoid taking these differences into account. (Ty- pically, the academic translations are more literal and less appealing to a general reader, while the opposite tends to be the case with the popular ones. ) Several authors, however, address internal differences among the academic or expert translations. Some of these translations are so expert that they are hardly readable anymore--and are completely unusable in an undergraduate class outside Chinese studies (see, for instance, Norman Girardot, note 7). Others, however, even though certainly also expert and produced by eminent scholars, are highly interpretative in a way that often remains hidden to the non-
sinological instructor. I would like to explain this with the help of one example. The line from the Daode jing quoted most often in the present volume (and probably not only here) is the first line of the first chapter. Robert G. Henricks cites it in Wing-tsit Chan's translation: ''The Tao that can be told of is not the eternal Tao. '' David Hall translates: ''The Way that can be spoken of is not the constant Way. ''1 Semantically speaking, the most important difference between these two renderings is the difference between ''eternal'' and ''constant. '' Whereas ''constant'' is a rather colloquial word, the term ''eternal'' is resplen- dent with theological and philosophical connotations. Strictly speaking, these two words, although close in their meaning, belong to very different ''language games. '' Chan's translation of the Daode jing was a major, and highly suc- cessful, effort by this eminent scholar to present the text, as he states in the preface, ''from the perspective of the total history of Chinese philosophy'' and to integrate it into the discourse of Western academia. As a Chinese professor at an American university, he was among the most important proponents of Chinese thought and culture in his time and worked for its establishment within the curricula of the West. With his translations of Chinese classics he attempted to introduce Chinese texts as serious materials deserving the full attention of Western scholars and, particularly, philosophers. 2 So he used a highly metaphysical vocabulary to demonstrate the philosophical and religious status and significance of texts like the Daode jing. His translations thus con- tributed considerably to the academic respect that the Daode jing has gained in North America (as reflected, for instance, in the publication of this present volume), while they also cemented a sort of metaphysical interpretation of the Daode jing that more recent authors like David Hall tried to overcome or correct in their studies and translations. In this way, all translations reflect to a certain degree the agenda of their translators. This is, to use Norman Girardot's ex- pression once again, certainly not ''intrinsically evil,'' but it is something that those who teach the Daode jing in English translation will have to consider. Many translations and interpretations thus function, as Russell Kirkland says, not as a window ''into the text itself, but merely into the mind of the translator. ''
Is the Daode jing a Religious Text?
In regard to the two issues discussed above, I could not detect substantial disagreements among the contributors to this volume. But this is decidedly not so in regard to the third problem that is persistently addressed (again, if not explicitly then at least implicitly) in these essays: the question as to which academic discipline can rightfully claim for itself the Daode jing and, for that
introduction 7
8 introduction
matter, Daoism. This text is a volume in a series on teaching classic texts in religion, and accordingly, a majority of the contributors teach in departments of religion, and, again accordingly, most contributors either explicitly or implicitly take the Daode jing to be a religious text. But this opinion is not shared by all contributors, and it is more likely not to be shared by those who do not have a background in religious or theological (biblical) studies. Some contributors are practical teachers, others are philosophers. Particularly the latter tend to not understand the Daode jing as a (primarily) religious text. I find this an important controversy, particularly because it is likely to also reflect a diversity among the readership of this book: not every reader will teach the Daode jing as a ''classic text in religion''; some will teach it, I suppose, as a classic text in philosophy, others may teach it as a classic text in literature, and others may perhaps teach it as a classic text in breathing (see Roth). This situation may be summarized by rephrasing the statement by Russell Kirkland quoted above--in a less psy- chological and more sociological manner: Our way of reading and teaching the Daode jing may thus serve not so much as a window ''into the text itself, but merely into the education and institutional affiliation of the instructor. ''
The dispute over what the Daode jing is and, more broadly, what Daoism in general is has a long history. This dispute is, one might say, an episode within the history of modern Western academic politics, or even, to use Ed- ward Said's influential concept, an episode within the history of Orientalism. The background of this dispute is aptly depicted by Norman Girardot:
I spent considerable time tilting at windmills concerning the as- sumed 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 ritu- alistic, superstitious, popular, or religious tradition.
It is a fact that until recent decades modern Western and Eastern scholarship on Daoism largely applied such a schema, and that this schema was not only classificatory, but also evaluative: Daoist ''philosophical'' texts (i. e. , the Daode jing and the Zhuangzi) were normally viewed as quite respectable works of universal importance that deserved a certain recognition as great books; that is, they were seen as somewhat on par with what in the eyes of dominating Western values could be counted as theoretically or historically significant. On the other hand, the various forms of Daoist religion that have been so important
throughout Chinese history and the vast number of texts included in the Daoist canon (Daozang) tended to be viewed as objects of mere anthropological in- terest or as relevant only for research on popular culture; they were not granted high-culture status on the basis of the dominating Orientalist criteria. Due to the efforts of a number of scholars (particularly in France, North America, and Germany), however, this one-sided view is, fortunately, no longer generally held. Daoist religion has not only been emancipated as a major factor in Chi- nese society, both historically and culturally, but, in the course of this eman- cipation, the traditional distinction between Daoist religion and Daoist philosophy has largely been torn down. It is now widely accepted that the Daoist classics had, from the beginning, their religious or practical aspects and that Daoist religion was not merely a degeneration of an earlier blossoming but a development in its own right that not only incorporated the classic texts but continued to produce new texts and other significant cultural products and practices.
Even though the former Orientalist hierarchy and distinction between Daoist philosophy and religion is no longer in place, the wounds have not been completely healed, as is obvious in many contributions to this volume. Some of the essays seem to indicate an attempt to reverse the former hierarchy and to establish Daoism as a primarily religious tradition, to portray the Daode jing as a primarily religious text and, consequently, to teach Daoism exclusively so. Livia Kohn, for instance, states very explicitly, ''It is important, therefore, to make it clear from the beginning of the class that Daoism is first and foremost a religion and that, while philosophical ideas bandied about in its name have their place in this religion, they are far from dominant in it. '' Similarly skeptical or dis- missive of a philosophical reading of Daoism, and particularly the Daode jing, is Russell Kirkland: ''The evidence of the text [the Daode jing], unsystematic in any perceptible sense, demonstrates either that its composer had no philosophical positions or that, as some analysts today suggest, he was too stupid to under- stand or explain his own philosophy. '' Earlier scholars attempted to cleanse Daoist philosophy from religion, but this tide seems to have turned.
There are other contributions to this volume--although clearly the minority--that obviously do not take the Daode jing as a primarily religious text. David Hall, for instance, was a comparative philosopher and read the text accordingly in a philosophical way. But he concluded his essay by saying, ''In closing I should note that. . . I certainly do recognize that the philosophical import of this work by no means exhausts its significance. Its poetic value, for example, is clearly as significant as its philosophical worth. ''
How one conceives of the Daode jing and Daoism, and particularly how one teaches it, is influenced by the department one is employed by or was educated
introduction 9
10 introduction
in. I am unable to come up with a statistical survey, but it seems to me that the provenience of the contributors to this volume is, by and large, representative for where and how the Daode jing is taught in present-day North America. It is now pretty common to have experts on Eastern religions in departments of religious studies, or to even have positions for teaching Asian religions. It is very telling that we are now academically used to speaking of religions and literatures in the plural, inclusive of non-Western ones. This is not yet so common when it comes to philosophy: How many departments of philoso- phies, not to mention Asian philosophies, are there? Here, Daoism and the Daode jing are not yet as emancipated as in religious studies. Still, the Daode jing is taught in an increasing number of introductory and even advanced courses outside of Chinese and religious studies.
It is hard to definitely say what kind of text the Daode jing is. I suppose that the Daode jing in itself is not accessible, and none of the contributors to this volume seems to claim such an access. Even historically, however, the Daode jing was approached--in China and elsewhere--in very different ways, and the imposing of labels such as philosophy, religion, or literature is, in- evitably, an effect of the present academic discourse that issues, and cannot but issue, such labels. The Daode jing, historically speaking, did not come with any of them. Like the Dao, it does not speak. It is our lecturing and writing, for better or worse, that makes it speak.
notes
1. Both Henricks and Hall come up with very different versions of this line in their respective English translations of the whole text.
2. His well-known Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963) is still reprinted and widely used in North American univer- sities.
part i
Approaching the
Daode Jing
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? Third-Person and First-Person Approaches to the Study of the Laozi
Harold D. Roth
As a scholar, teacher, and sometime reconstructor of the religious thought of the early Daoist tradition whose academic position has been housed for two decades in a department of religious studies, I have done a considerable amount of thinking of late about how best to approach the study and teaching of the textual materials that are my primary sources. Because of the considerable exegetical litera- ture on the Daode jing that has accumulated over two millennia, it has been necessary to bring a degree of organization to this material and to develop some clarity about the perspectives that can be found in this hermeneutic corpus before presenting it to a modern audience. Moreover, given the context in which we teach in recent times, it is also important to deeply consider how we are to approach the thought found in ancient religious texts in a manner that both utilizes re- cent historical scholarship and respects the integrity of the ideas and the experiences that led to them that are found in these texts.
The academic study of Asian religious traditions in North America has, in the past several decades, taken a turn in the direction of the social sciences as a corrective to the tendency among some in ear- lier generations to idealize them (when they weren't excoriating them for being inferior to Christianity or seeing them as odd variants of it), and this is certainly a welcome development. 1 However, far too often extreme forms of historicism, the doctrine that knowledge of hu- man affairs has an irreducibly historical character, and of social constructionism, the claim that all human phenomena are socially
14 approaching the daode jing
constructed artifacts, have been applied in a far from unbiased fashion by scholars with their own personal axes to grind against specific Asian religious traditions or by scholars who want to lump these traditions together with the Christian and Jewish traditions that they have personally rejected. Deluding themselves into thinking they have an objective or scientific viewpoint, they have established their entire careers on ''debunking'' the religious thought, practices, and underlying experiences of Asian religious traditions without the slightest bit of awareness about the methodological or personal axes they are grinding or the extent to which they remain confined within an essentially Western religious Problematik that is far from scientific or objective. 2
One of the foundational assumptions of this body of reductionistic scholarship on Asian religious traditions is that practitioners, including the authors of the religious texts we study, are essentially deluding themselves and their followers when they assert that there is an ineffable transcendent or sacred dimension to human experience (viz. , ''The Way that can be spoken of is not the constant Way''). 3 Yet since most Asian religious traditions affirm the interpenetration of the sacred in the secular, to begin by denying it and then look for reductive explanations for why it cannot be possible is to approach the study of these Asian traditions from a perspective that is deeply partial and flawed. 4 It is a perspective, however, with which we are extremely comfortable because it is a foundational element of the worldview in which most Western scholars have been raised. Yet it is an element whose dogmatic origins remain largely unexamined. In the traditional ontologies of the Abrahamic religions, there is a fundamental division between Creator and Creation, sacred and secular. Thus there can be nothing sacred in the secular. Whether or not one believes in a transcendent sacred realm, there can be nothing sacred in the everyday world of mundane experience that we all inhabit. Thus both believers and nonbelievers make the same unexamined assumption. To have this as part of one's system of religious beliefs is one thing, but to have it guide one's ''objective'' scholarship is, to paraphrase Sartre, mauvaise foi of the highest order. Yet this assumption has come to dominate the study and teaching of Asian religious traditions in North America, greatly to our detriment.
From my own perspective, I am interested in the possibility that there is something more to the ''sacred'' than either believers think or reductionist scholars automatically deny. For me there is the distinct possibility that the ancient Daoist texts that have come down to us contain insights into the nature, activity, and context of human consciousness that just might be ap- plicable to modern human beings. Toward this end I myself have practiced meditation within several Asian traditions--Hindu, Buddhist, and Daoist-- with an eye toward identifying their techniques of training of the attention
third-person and first-person approaches 15
and imagination and personally examining their effects. Rather than biasing my research with unprovable religious doctrine, as some religious studies scholars would suggest, this has given me an additional methodological tool for conducting a fair and balanced analysis of the very insights into con- sciousness that others assume to be false and dogmatic.
The question I want to return to is this: How is it possible to be both historically accurate yet nonreductionistic? How is it possible to both respect the ideas and underlying experiences found in ancient religious texts, yet also be critical of their authors' understanding of themselves and their traditions? In recent years in my teaching I have begun to develop a philosophy of how to approach these texts. I frame the problem in terms of what might be called third- person and first-person methods of studying religious texts and traditions.
The modern North American academy is dominated by what we might call third-person learning. We observe, analyze, record, and discuss a whole variety of subjects at a distance, as something ''out there,'' as if they were solely objects and our own subjectivity that is viewing them doesn't exist. Certainly there are exceptions: in public speaking one both reads books about the subject and actually practices it; in studio art, a course wouldn't go very far if students didn't have the chance to practice on paper or canvas what they are being taught. The same is true for some courses in music: theory is appreciated so much more by actually playing the music that exemplifies it. The experimental sciences are all about applying third-person learning in controlled laboratory settings; at least in physics, the effect of the subjectivity of the observer who sets up the experiments is known to be an integral part of the results.
In many of the humanities we tend to value third-person learning at the expense of all other forms. Yet do we not find that when students are called on, for example, to reflect on what a famous poem means to them, they derive a deeper understanding of its meaning? Or when students are challenged to apply ethical theories to problems in their own lives, that they learn useful tools and see the relevance of these formerly abstract theories?
In my teaching I have done rather extensive experiments in what I would call critical first-person learning. I say ''critical'' because in many forms of first-person learning in the contexts of religion, one must suspend critical judgment and believe in the truth of the tradition one is embracing. There is an important place for this form of committed first-person learning, but we should be careful to not require that kind of commitment from any of our students in a secular university. But why not allow them to get some firsthand experience of, for example, such practices as Buddhist insight meditation or Confucian adherence to family rituals or Daoist energy circulation (daoyin) in a totally secular context, in which the need to believe in a creed is removed, in
16 approaching the daode jing
which students simply need to be willing to conduct simple observations in the only laboratory we always carry along with us wherever we go: our Beings? Why not attempt to use this experience as a basis for reconstructing the worldview of the people who created these texts, rather than assuming that it is totally impossible to do because human experience is totally determined by culture and hence incommensurable across cultures and times?
I would like to suggest that one way of approaching the study and teaching of Asian religious traditions that is both sympathetic and critical is to combine first- and third-person approaches to them. Toward this end I present some ideas on how to do this while studying the Daode jing.
Third-Person Approaches to Studying the Daode jing
I teach the Daode jing in a number of lecture courses and advanced seminars, from a ''Foundations of Chinese Religions'' course that includes everything from oracle bones to the Huainanzi, to a ''Laozi and the Daode jing'' advanced seminar in which the occasional student is able to read classical Chinese. I try to remain consistent in the overall approaches I use to study the text if I am not always able to follow each approach to the depth I would like. These three approaches are:
1. History: presenting the best understanding of the historical context of the text
2. Historical hermeneutics: uncovering the worldview--the practices, experiences, and beliefs--of those who created the text
3. Relevance: responsibly retrieving insights from the text into our modern context5
The methodological approaches I use to do this are primarily of the kind I have called third-person, but I also use a critical first-person approach that I call ''reconstructive meditation'' in helping to give my students some insights into both the historical hermeneutics and the contemporary relevance of the Laozi.
History
The foundation of any enlightened study of the ideas in the Daode jing is a thorough grounding in what we can establish about its actual history. The primary source for this is the text itself in its various redactions and other closely related texts that were rough contemporaries, such as Guanzi's Neiye
third-person and first-person approaches 17
(Inward Training) and related texts and certain parts of the Zhuangzi, Lush- iqunqiu, Huang-Lao po-shu, and Huainanzi. 6
The textual history of the Laozi is complex and, to my way of thinking, absolutely riveting. Until the publication of Rudolph Wagner's A Chinese Reading of the Daode jing in 2003, the best way for nonspecialists to read about the various recensions and redactions of the text and its major commentaries was in several scholarly essays written by Wagner and William Boltz. 7 Brief introductions to the excavated recension from Mawangdui (ca. 200 b. c. e. ) and to the ''proto-Laozi'' from Guodian (ca. 310 b. c. e. ) by Lau, Henricks, Mair, and Henricks, respectively, touch upon some of these major issues as well; that of Lau is the most detailed. 8 However, Wagner's book is by far the most thorough, especially his meticulous reconstruction of the most important commentary ever written on the Laozi, that of Wang Bi (226-249 c. e. ) and the redaction of the Laozi text on which it was based. In establishing a critical edition of this lost redaction, Wagner provides textual variants from the excavated recensions and from major redactions in the textus receptus (received text) that, although it was transmitted with the Wang Bi commentary, was actually primarily a text as- sociated with another early commentary more closely allied with Daoist reli- gious practice, that of Heshang Gong (n. d. ). 9
I often have the students in my Laozi seminar get a feel for these textual variants by having them compare translations of some of the major chapters between the Mawangdui and received recensions, but it is only those few who can read Chinese that really get a good sense of this. This is because trans- lations of the received text alone vary so much that it is difficult for a non- Chinese reader to know when the differences are caused by genuine textual variants or by the translators' varying understandings of the text. One trans- lation that can potentially overcome this difficulty is the bilingual Tao Te Ching of D. C. Lau, which contains his translation of the received text in part 1 and that of the Mawangdui recension in part 2. However, as the book's dust jacket notes state, on occasion ''the translator has taken the opportunity to give the translation an overdue revision. '' Unfortunately, he places those correc- tions in his translation in part 2, thus negating its use for comparative pur- poses. 10 In these cases I have to fall back on my own knowledge of Chinese to guide students past this problem.
While one must go to a variety of mainly Chinese sources to learn about the Mawangdui excavations and texts, there is a superb source for the details of the excavations from Guodian that yielded several texts with many parallels with the extant Laozi recensions. This is The Guodian Laozi: Proceedings of the International Conference, Dartmouth College, May, 1998, edited by Sarah Allan and Crispin Williams. 11 Consisting of essays based on papers presented at the
18 approaching the daode jing
conference and of a record of the discussions that ensued therein, it presents details of the tomb excavations and contents; details of the three bundles of bamboo slips that contain parallel material to the extant recensions of the Laozi and their textual significance; early discussions of a short, heretofore unknown text included in bundle 3, ''Vast Unity Generates Water'' (Taiyi shengshui); and it concludes with Edmund Ryden's critical edition of the texts contained in the three bundles. 12 This is essential reading for advanced stu- dents. Although some have argued that these Guodian parallels to all or part of thirty-three Laozi verses are an anthology taken from an already complete eighty-one-verse text, I have concluded that in light of the textual variations internal to the parallels, the total lack of alternative corroborating evidence to the existence of a complete Laozi until at least sixty years after the tomb was sealed, the eleven partial parallels, and the many variations in characters, order, and structure between the Guodian texts and their parallels in the extant recensions, this scenario is highly unlikely. 13 Instead, these Guodian Laozi parallels constitute an early attempt to assemble a coherent text from a more general body of ''Daoist'' philosophical verse, a corpus of probably originally oral material that was also drawn on to create ''Inward Training.
'' Whether these Guodian texts represent a kind of intermediate stage to the extant Laozi (a ''proto-Laozi,'' if you wish) or simply an early failed attempt to draw from this corpus out of which the complete eighty-one-verse Laozi was later assembled cannot be determined at this time.
The next task in studying the textual history of the Daode jing is to identify its literary genre and to derive the historical evidence it might yield. The early research of Bernard Karlgren pointed out the verse nature of much of the text, but it is the masterful essay by William Baxter for a collection entitled Lao-Tzu and the Tao-te-Ching, edited by Livia Kohn and Michael LaFargue, that spe- cifies with a great deal more precision the types of verse, its dating relative to other early Chinese poetic sources, and its larger literary and philosophical context that links it to ''Inward Training'' and the three other ''Techniques of the Mind'' texts in Guanzi. 14 Baxter's analysis of the rhetorical structures and the phonological characteristics of the Laozi in comparison to those of these Guanzi texts and to the Book of Odes and Elegies of Ch'u indicate a mid-fourth- century b. c. e. date for it and that ''the Lao-tzu and similar texts emerged from a distinctive tradition of philosophical verse with strong oral elements and little concept of individual authorship'' (249). The literary genre he identifies contrasts with the narrative genre found in the other major sources of early Daoist thought, Zhuangzi and Huainanzi, a point that should not be over- looked. Baxter's essay is very important for intermediate and advanced stu- dents, and even those without Chinese can get some valuable insights from it.
2. 3.
4. 5.
The legends surrounding the book are influential and must be un- derstood.
It is a collection of mostly rhymed verse that contains some framing, and it was built up in a number of stages that cannot now readily
be ascertained.
It is representative of a literary genre of ''Daoist'' didactic poetry that also includes Guanzi's four ''Techniques of the Mind'' texts.
A complete eighty-one-chapter recension seems to have been estab- lished by the middle of the third century b. c. e. , and not earlier.
third-person and first-person approaches 19
Further conclusions on the date and origins of the Daode jing and the myth of its reputed sixth-century b. c. e. author are found in A. C. Graham's ''The Origins of the Legend of Lao Tan. ''15 Therein he conclusively demon- strates how a Confucian story of Master Kong being given instruction in the Rites from a Zhou historiographer by the name of Lao Dan became the basis for the attribution of the text of the Laozi to this same figure at some point in the first half of the third century b. c. e. It was a masterful stroke to make the founder of their main rival's tradition a student of their own, and it bespeaks a conflict between Confucians and proponents of the Laozi, wherein they both were competing for political power and influence at a local state court (per- haps the Qin court of Lu Buwei). Writings from both traditions are certainly found in the philosophical work produced there in about 240 b. 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.