From the jacket flap: "The Dao De Jing is one of the richest, most suggestive, and most popular works of philosophy and literature...This edition is distinguished by the literary quality of the translation, its new renderings for a number of the stanzas, and by Roberts' knowledgeable contextualizations." Show ___DESCRIPTION: Bound in quarter red cloth with ivory paper over boards, gilt lettering stamped onto the spine; octavo size (8 5/8" by 5 5/8"), pagination: [i-vi] vii-xii, 1-226 [1, colophon]. In the publisher's dust jacket, unclipped yet unpriced, summary of the book on both flaps, short bio of translator on the back flap. ___CONDITION: Volume fine, with clean boards, straight corners without rubbing, a strong, square text block with solid hinges, the interior is clean and bright, and the text entirely free of prior owner markings; a short pencilled notation on the rear pastedown (perhaps the date the prior owner read the book?), else fine. The dust jacket is near fine, clean, without noticeable edgewear, the spine not sunned (the red lettering as bright as on the front panel); light creases at the head and tail of the spine and a bit along the top edge. ___POSTAGE: International customers, please note that additional postage may apply as the standard does not always cover costs; please inquire for details. ___Swan's Fine Books is pleased to be a member of the ABAA, ILAB, and IOBA and we stand behind every book we sell. Please contact us with any questions you may have, we are here to help. Homemade furniture and worship of state power; nutburgers and anti-Americanism: why this persistent connection? I think we all have a sketchy idea of how it hangs together. For deeper understanding, though, you could do worse than pick up the Tao Te Ching. A new annotated translation of this classic text of ancient Chinese quietism has just been produced by Moss Roberts, professor of Chinese at New York University. Roberts’s version of the Tao Te Ching raises the political issue with unusual clarity. Why this is so, and where, if anywhere, the trail leads, are matters I shall return to presently. First, some background on the Tao Te Ching. I imagine the one thing that everyone knows about the Tao Te Ching is that it was written by a sage named Lao Tzu. This is, in point of fact, the thing least worth knowing. Lao Tzu may or may not have existed; and, supposing he existed, he may or may not have written the Tao Te Ching. We simply have no idea, nor any way to pursue the matter. We have no accounts of Lao Tzu by people who knew him, nor any knowledge of his relationships with other writers of his time (most likely the later fifth or early fourth century B.C., if he existed). There are some stories about him, but they all have an apocryphal quality to them. There is even a thumbnail biography by the historian Sima Qian, “the Chinese Herodotus,” but it was written at least two centuries, and a huge national convulsion, after the latest date at which Lao Tzu could have lived, if he lived, and is not supported by any other evidence. Lao Tzu is a blank, a mystery. Which is entirely fitting, because the Tao Te Ching is fundamentally a work of mysticism. Organized as eighty-one stanzas of mixed verse and prose, it includes material on several different topics: self-cultivation, statecraft, military science, health. All this, however, is set in a metaphysical framework, and the metaphysics is of the mystical type, with principal elements that accord with the mystical truths revealed in other times and places, and that will be familiar to anyone who has looked into mysticism of any school. We are given to understand that there is an all-embracing law or spirit called the Tao (that is, the Way), which is supreme in the universe and governs the workings of nature. There is a corresponding spirit moving human beings, named Te (that is, Virtue—this word is pronounced “duh”). Tao and Te work together in one of those dualities the ancient Chinese thinkers were so fond of, like Heaven and Earth, yin and yang, gods and demons, ren (benevolence) and yi (righteousness), or the prince and the minister—those last two dualities much worked over by Confucius. The interaction of these dualities generates all the phenomena of the so-called “real world.” Both Tao and Te are essentially ineffable, but by certain spiritual exercises we can attain enough acquaintance with them to improve our lives, our government, our military prowess, and even apparently our health. These exercises center on the cultivation of something called wu-wei, which translators have variously rendered as “non-action,” “unattached action,” “Non-Ado,” “not-doing,” and so on. Here are the first lines of Stanza 48 in Moss Roberts’s translation: To pursue learning, learn more day by day; To pursue the Way, unlearn it day by day: Unlearn and then unlearn again Until there is nothing to pursue; No end pursued, no end ungained. These precepts are explicitly enjoined upon the rulers of states, who are assured that if they practice wu-wei on their subjects’ behalf, then tranquility, harmony, and sufficiency will result. Dr. Johnson said that George the First “knew nothing, and desired to know nothing; did nothing, and desired to do nothing.” This, apparently, would be the ideal Taoist ruler. Guide them back to early times, When knotted chords served for signs. [Stanza 80] The people are, in fact, to be kept as ignorant as possible: Thus under a wise man’s rule Blank are their minds But full their bellies. [Stanza 3] Talk about the simple life! These lines are uncharacteristically explicit, though. Most of the Tao Te Ching is written in an enigmatic style that occasionally defies translation altogether, even by experts. “There is no consensus on the first two lines of this stanza,” Roberts admits in his annotation of Stanza 10. For another instance, consider the famous couplet that opens Stanza 38. In Chinese: Shang de bu de, Shi-yi you de—literally “Upper virtue not virtue, Therefore has virtue.” Say what? (Roberts: “High virtue by obliging not/ Acquires moral force.”) Part of the problem is in the nature of the classical Chinese language. In its earliest form—the form employed in the Tao Te Ching, and by all the other great philosophers—written Chinese was extremely abbreviated in its syntax. Even modern Chinese people cannot read the language of the classics easily without special training. The purpose of early written Chinese was really mnemonic—to help one recall matter acquired by oral transmission, not to tell you something you didn’t know before. Even modern Chinese people cannot read the language of the classics easily without special training. This makes for an extremely short-winded form of presentation. In book one, chapter nine of the Analects of Confucius, for example, we read the four-character injunction: Shen zhong zhui yuan. Legge translates this as: “Let there be a careful attention to perform the funeral rites to parents, and let them be followed when long gone with the ceremonies of sacrifice”—a syllable-to-syllable ratio of very nearly one to ten. (It would be about one to six in modern colloquial Chinese.) Burton Watson, in the introduction to his invaluable handbook Early Chinese Literature, emits the following sigh of exasperation: “Is it too much to ask that the writer indicate at least the subject of the sentence? . . . In the case of classical Chinese the answer is usually, yes.” One consequence of all this minimalism is that translators can “color” their work in many different ways. Dr. Ching-Hsiung Wu, for example, who was a Catholic (he served as Minister Plenipotentiary to the Holy See under Chiang Kai-shek’s government on Taiwan), produced a version of the Tao Te Ching in 1961 that has been very popular with Christians: . . . only he who is willing to give his body for the sake of the world is fit to be entrusted with the world. Only he who can do it with love is worthy of being the steward of the world. [Stanza 13] Similarly, Witter Bynner’s The Way of Life According to Laotzu (1944) reflects his own pacifism, the more strongly felt because his country was at war: “the way for a vital man to go is not the way of a soldier” (Stanza 31). Moss Roberts’s view is that the book should be taken mainly as a treatise on statecraft. Thus where, in the first line of Stanza 41, other translators render shang shi as “scholars of the highest class” (Legge), “men of stamina” (Bynner), “a wise scholar” (Wu) or “superior students” (Muller), Roberts says: “men of service.” Similarly with the passage “Block all exchanges, shut all doors” in Stanza 52. Other translators take this as a command to withdraw from social intercourse, the better to cultivate oneself, but Roberts sees it as in line with other instructions to the ruler to keep his people ignorant. This business of keeping the people ignorant has now turned up twice in this piece, and is critical to an understanding of Taoism’s political consequences. At first sight it is difficult to fathom how a doctrine so mystical, quietist, and extremely reactionary could have any political consequences at all. In ancient China, though, wellnigh the only available employment for men of letters was as advisors to the princes who ruled the petty kingdoms of that time, and who were engaged in a constant and unblinking struggle for mastery over each other. A philosopher who had nothing to say about statecraft could get no hearing, and so all the schools had political consequences. Those that flowed from the Tao Te Ching were of particular importance, and the most important of them all was the development of Legalism. And yet, if you read the Book of Lord Shang, you see showing clearly through its harsh precepts the quietism and restraint of the Tao Te Ching. “Weakening the People,” for example, sounds dreadful to modern man—to “we, the people”—but is a fair extension of the meaning of rou, one of the key terms in the Tao Te Ching, which can mean “meek,” “gentle,” or “restrained” as well as “weak.” It is as if, starting from the proposition that “the meek shall inherit the earth,” one were to argue that a state under a strong central leader, whose people were kept meek and submissive, could conquer a mighty empire. Which, in fact, is what the book does argue, and what in fact happened! And how are the people to be kept in that meek, submissive state? By an inflexible system of rewards and punishments, explicitly endorsed in Stanza 74 of the Tao Te Ching: If they are in constant fear of death And we seize and put to death Committers of crimes, then who would dare? The horrid doctrines of Legalism attained their finished form in the teaching of Han Fei Tzu (280–233 B.C.). In opposition to Confucius’s yearning for traditional hierarchies and to the more meritocratic schemes of post-Confucian thinkers like Mo Tzu, Han Fei Tzu proposed a state organized around a system of laws so all-embracing and correct that it required no elites at all to administer, nor even a very active monarch—wu-wei enthroned, or, to recast it in terms of a somewhat later thinker, the state withered away. Henri Maspero, in his survey of the period titled China in Antiquity (1978), discusses Legalism in a chapter headed “Schools Derived from Taoism,” and concludes his account of Han Fei Tzu as follows: The doctrine of Han Fei, and that of the Legalists in general, tended to lower still further the position of the individual life, so little developed in ancient China and so constantly sacrificed to the life of society. . . . The theories of the Legalists, applied by the [Qin] dynasty to the government of the empire, had a great influence . . . upon the formation of the modern Chinese mind. The Tao Te Ching has been a great favorite with translators. The reason for this probably lies in the obscurity of the language, which allows the Tao Te Ching to serve its readers as a “mirror” text—one into which they can project their own hopes and fears, rather like a newspaper horoscope. The psychological processes involved here were drawn very well by Tom Wolfe in his 1998 novel A Man in Full. One of Wolfe’s characters is Conrad Hensley, a thoughtfull but ill-educated and unformed young man who by chance encounters the works of Epictetus and soon becomes a proselytizing Stoic. In an age like ours, when many people—probably most people— reach adulthood without ever having passed through any strict moral education deeper than the vapidities of “political correctness,” there is bound to be a demand for such products. Given that demand, it is not very surprising that few of those who have been visited by the temptation to make a translation of the Tao Te Ching seem to have been able to restrain themselves, to practice wu-wei. The nature of the book itself strengthens the temptation. For one thing, it is not very long—only five-thousand characters. Suppose you didn’t know any Chinese, but knew how to use a Chinese dictionary (an impossible state of affairs, as it happens, but let’s suppose); if you spent five minutes looking up and figuring out the syntactical significance of every single character, you could get the whole job done in three months of forty-hour weeks. Bynner, who could not read Chinese at all, in fact took an even more audacious approach, simply “distilling” the essence of as many other translations as he could find. If you do actually know Chinese, translating the Tao Te Ching is a fairly minor undertaking. Moss Roberts has previously published a translation of the fourteenth-century novel Three Kingdoms, at 650,000 characters a task 130 times more daunting. Boundless virtue all-accepting Attends the Way, the Way alone. Assuming form, the Way reveals Shapes half-seen and then half-hid. In dark half-hid, a likening; In light half-dark, forms visible . . . It is melancholy, and slightly disturbing, to realize that these passive, mystical doctrines, expressed with such beauty and vigor, helped set in motion a system of despotism that lasted almost unchanged for two-thousand years, and of which the Chinese people have not been able to rid themselves to this day. Yet after all, is it not in the Great Harmony, the universal City of the Sun, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, where all are uniform and all submissive, where all votes are unanimous and all controversy stilled, that “non-action” finds its truest fulfillment? Strange are the uses of quietism. Notes
John Derbyshire's most recent book is We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism (Crown Forum). What does the Dao de Jing literally mean?The title of the Dao De Jing can be translated in many ways, but it is usually given as something like "The Book of the Way and Its Virtue." Chinese written words are referred to as "characters." The first character in the Dao De Jing, dao, means "the way ahead" or "the way." De means "righteousness" or "virtue." ... How long is the Daodejing?The Dao De Jing, also called the Tao Te Ching, was originally written in the 6th century BCE by the Chinese sage Laozi. Only 5,000 Chinese characters long, its concise and beautiful wording and its profound insights into the nature of the universe make it one of the most influential books ever written. What is the way according to the Daodejing?The Way symbolizes a powerful, living process that cannot be held or fixed by intellectual or spiritual fences. “The dao that can be spoken is not the eternal Dao,” states the opening passage of the Daodejing. How many pages is the Dao de Jing?Product information. |
