Indeed, various dates have been proposed for the encounter—for example, B. In any case, testifying to its appeal, different accounts of the meeting circulated among the educated elite during the Warring States period. Admittedly, this is conjecture. The story of Laozi occupies a cherished place in the Daoist tradition. It is important also because it raises certain hermeneutic expectations and affects the way in which the Laozi is read.
If the work was written by a single author, one might expect, for example, a high degree of consistency in style and content. If the Laozi was a work of the sixth or fifth century B.
There is little consensus among scholars, however, on the date or authorship of the Laozi , as we shall see below. In the eyes of the faithful, the Dao is a divine reality, and Laozi is seen as the personification of the Dao. Lao Dan is but one manifestation of the divine Laozi, albeit a pivotal one because of the writing of the Daodejing , which in religious Daoism commands devotion as a foundational scripture that promises not only wisdom but also immortality and salvation to those who submit to its power.
During the Tang dynasty — C. The influence of the Laozi on Chinese culture is both deep and far-reaching. One indication of its enduring appeal and hermeneutical openness is the large number of commentaries devoted to it throughout Chinese history—some seven hundred, according to one count W. Chan , The Laozi played a significant role in informing not only philosophic thought but also the development of literature, calligraphy, painting, music, martial arts, and other cultural traditions.
Imperial patronage enhanced the prestige of the Laozi and enlarged its scope of influence. In C. In religious Daoism, recitation of the Daodejing is a prescribed devotional practice and features centrally in ritual performance.
The Daodejing has been set to music from an early time. The influence of the Laozi extends beyond China, as Daoism reaches across Asia and in the modern period, the Western world. During the seventh century, the Laozi was translated into Sanskrit; in the eighteenth century a Latin translation was brought to England, after which there has been a steady supply of translations into Western languages, yielding a handsome harvest of some LaFargue and Pas , , with new ones still hitting bookstores and internet sites almost every year.
A forthcoming translation is Minford The influence of the Laozi on Western thinkers is the subject of Clarke From nature lovers to management gurus, a growing audience is discovering that the Laozi has something to offer to them. The reception of the Laozi in modern Asia and the West falls outside the scope of this article; nevertheless, it is important to note that the Laozi should be regarded not only as a work of early Chinese philosophy, but also in a larger context as a classic of world literature with keen contemporary relevance.
The next three sections are intended for readers who are interested in the textual history and commentarial tradition of the Laozi , including the major manuscripts recovered through archaeological excavations or from the antiquities market. They are important to understanding the Laozi , but one may go directly to section 5 on the main interpretive approaches to the text if one wishes to bypass them.
The date of composition refers to the time when the Laozi reached more or less its final form; it does not rule out later interpolations or corruptions.
The traditional view, of course, is that the Laozi was written by Lao Dan in the sixth or early fifth century B. This seems unlikely, however, if it is assumed that the Laozi was written by a single author. As the archaeological evidence to be presented below will indicate, bodies of sayings attributed to Laozi were committed to writing probably from the second half of the fifth century B.
These collections grew, competed for attention, and gradually came to be consolidated during the fourth century B. By the middle of the third century B. It is possible, as A. Graham suggests, that the Laozi was ascribed to Lao Dan around B. It seems reasonable to suppose that Laozi, whether or not his real name was Li Er, attracted a following and that some of his sayings entered the world of Chinese philosophical discourse during the fifth century B.
A process of oral transmission may have preceded the appearance of these sayings in written form. It is conceivable that a succession of editors or compilers brought together diverse bodies of Laozi sayings, resulting in the mature Laozi. According to Bruce Brooks and Taeko Brooks, the Laozi contains different layers of material spanning the period between and B.
Although in this sense the Laozi may be regarded as a composite work, the product of many hands over a long period of time, it should not be assumed that the sayings that now inhabit the Laozi were put together at random. The language of the Laozi does provide some clues to its date of composition. Much of the text is rhymed. Focusing on rhyme patterns, Liu Xiaogan and concludes that the poetic structure of the Laozi is closer to that of the Shijing Classic of Poetry than that of the later Chuci Songs of Chu.
The dating of the Shijing and the Chuci is by no means precise, although generally the poems collected in the former should not be later than the early fifth century B.
For this reason, Liu Xiaogan argues, the traditional view first articulated by Sima Qian should be upheld. Both Liu and Baxter provide a concise analysis of the different theories of the date of the Laozi. Why is all this important? It may be argued that date and authorship are immaterial to and may detract from interpretation.
Issues of provenance are important, however, if context has any role to play in the production of meaning. There are different ways to date the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, but they do not affect the discussion here. As the political conditions deteriorated, philosophers and strategists, who grew both in number and popularity as a social group or profession during this time, vied to convince the rulers of the various states of their program to bring order to the land.
At the same time, perhaps with the increased displacement and disillusionment of the privileged elite, a stronger eremitic tradition also emerged.
If the bulk of the Laozi had originated from the fourth century, it might reflect some of these concerns. From this perspective, the origin of the Laozi is as much a hermeneutical issue as it is a historical one.
The discovery of two Laozi silk manuscripts at Mawangdui, near Changsha, Hunan province in marks an important milestone in modern Laozi research.
The Hunan Provincial Museum website also provides useful information. Before this find, access to the Laozi was mainly through the received text of Wang Bi — C. There are other manuscript versions, but by and large they play a secondary role in the history of the classic. But first, a note on the title and structure of the Daodejing. According to the Shiji Later sources added that it was Emperor Jing who established the text officially as a classic. However, the title Daodejing appears not to have been widely used until later, toward the close of the Han era.
Most versions exceed five thousand characters by about five to ten percent, but it is interesting to note that numerological considerations later became an integral part of the history of the work.
This claim cannot be verified, but a number of Laozi manuscripts discovered at Dunhuang contain 4, characters. The current Daodejing is divided into two parts pian and 81 chapters or sections zhang. Part one, comprising chapters 1—37, has come to be known as the Daojing Classic of Dao , while chapters 38—81 make up the Dejing Classic of Virtue. In this context, it is easy to appreciate the tremendous interest occasioned by the discovery of the Mawangdui Laozi manuscripts.
The two manuscripts contain all the chapters that are found in the current Laozi , although the chapters follow a different order in a few places.
For example, in both manuscripts, the sections that appear as chapters 80 and 81 in the current Laozi come immediately after a section that corresponds to chapter 66 of the present text. One scholar, in fact, has adopted the title Dedaojing Te-Tao ching for his translation of the Mawangdui Laozi Henricks It seems unlikely that the Mawangdui arrangement stems simply from scribal idiosyncrasy or happenstance—e. This raises important questions for interpretation.
The division into 81 chapters reflects numerological interest and is associated particularly with the Heshanggong version, which also carries chapter titles. It was not universally accepted until much later, perhaps the Tang period, when the text was standardized under the patronage of Emperor Xuanzong r.
Traditional sources report that some versions were divided into 64, 68, or 72 chapters; and some did not have chapter divisions Henricks The earlier Guodian texts see below are not divided into two parts, but in many places they employ a black square mark to indicate the end of a section. The sections or chapters so marked generally agree with the division in the present Laozi. Thus, although the chapter formation may be relatively late, some attempt at chapter division seems evident from an early stage of the textual history of the Daodejing.
Until about two decades ago, the Mawangdui manuscripts held the pride of place as the oldest extant manuscripts of the Laozi. In late , the excavation of a tomb identified as M1 in Guodian, Jingmen city, Hubei province, yielded among other things some bamboo slips, of which are inscribed, containing over 13, Chinese characters.
Some of these, amounting to about 2, characters, match the Laozi see Allan and Williams , and Henricks The tomb is located near the old capital of the state of Chu and is dated around B. Robbers entered the tomb before it was excavated, although the extent of the damage is uncertain.
The bamboo texts, written in a Chu script, have been transcribed into standard Chinese and published under the title Guodian Chumu zhujian Beijing: Wenwu, , which on the basis of the size and shape of the slips, calligraphy, and other factors divides the Laozi material into three groups.
Group A contains thirty-nine bamboo slips, which correspond in whole or in part to the following chapters of the present text: 19, 66, 46, 30, 15, 64, 37, 63, 2, 32, 25, 5, 16, 64, 56, 57, 55, 44, 40 and 9.
Groups B and C are smaller, with eighteen chs. There is one important clue, however. Ding , 7—9. Taking into account all the available evidence, it seems likely that different collections of sayings attributed to Laozi expanded and gained currency during the fourth century B. They would have been derived from earlier, oral or written sources.
During the third century B. Even more recently, the growing family of Laozi texts welcomed another new arrival. In January , Peking University accepted a gift of a sizeable collection of inscribed bamboo slips, said to have been retrieved from overseas. Among them, we find a nearly complete version of the Laozi. Although the published material to date did not mention any carbon dating of the slips, the consensus among the scholars who have worked with them is that they date to the Western Han dynasty.
The Beida Laozi agrees with the Mawangdui manuscripts in another important respect; that is, Part 1 also corresponds to chapters 38—81 of the current chapter version, or the Dejing , and Part 2, chapters 1—37, or Daojing.
Like the Mawangdui manuscripts, the Beida Laozi also records the number of characters at the end of each part. In terms of wording, the Beida Laozi agrees with the Mawangdui manuscripts in many instances, although in some places it agrees rather with that of the received text. However, the Beida text agrees with the standard version at the beginning of Chapter 2, as opposed to the shorter formulation found in the Guodian and Mawangdui versions.
What is equally significant is that the sequence or order of the chapters is exactly the same as that in the received Laozi. The difference lies in the division of some of the chapters.
Chapters 17—19 of the received text form one chapter in the Beida Laozi. The same is true for chapters 6—7, 32—33 and 78— However, the current chapter 64 appears as two chapters in the Beida slips. Altogether there are 77 chapters. Each chapter is clearly marked, with a round dot at the start, and each chapter starts on a separate bamboo slip.
The Beida Laozi is almost intact in its entirety, missing only some 60 characters when compared with the received text. While it offers fresh glimpses into the development of the text, it does not provide any significant new insight into the meaning of the Laozi. A series of articles on the Peking University bamboo slips were published in the journal Wenwu , no. The Beida Laozi was published in December and launched in February Although the majority of scholars accept the authenticity of the find, a notable critic is Xing Wen, who argues strongly that it is a forgery Xing ; for a critical discussion in English, see Foster In summary, two approaches to the making of the Laozi warrant consideration, for they bear directly on interpretation.
Some of these sayings were preserved in the Guodian bamboo texts. On this view, the Laozi underwent substantial change and grew into a longer and more complex work during the third century B.
The Mawangdui manuscripts were based on this mature version of the Laozi ; the original emphasis on politics, however, can still be detected in the placement of the Dejing before the Daojing. Later versions reversed this order and in so doing subsumed politics under a broader philosophical vision of Dao as the beginning and end of all beings. As distinguished from a linear evolutionary model, what is suggested here is that there were different collections of sayings attributed to Laozi, overlapping to some extent but each with its own emphases and predilections, inhabiting a particular interpretive context.
Although some key chapters in the current Laozi that deal with the nature of Dao e. This seems to argue against the suggestion that the Laozi , and for that matter ancient Chinese philosophical works in general, were not interested or lacked the ability to engage in abstract philosophic thinking, an assumption that sometimes appears to underlie evolutionary approaches to the development of Chinese philosophy. The Guodian and Mawangdui finds are extremely valuable. They are syntactically clearer than the received text in some instances, thanks to the larger number of grammatical particles they employ.
Nevertheless, they cannot resolve all the controversies and uncertainties surrounding the Laozi. In my view, the nature of Dao and the application of Daoist insight to ethics and governance probably formed the twin foci in collections of Laozi sayings from the start.
They were then developed in several ways—e. The demand for textual uniformity rose when the Laozi gained recognition, and consequently the different textual traditions eventually gave way to the received text of the Laozi. As mentioned, the current Laozi on which most reprints, studies and translations are based is the version that comes down to us along with the commentaries by Wang Bi and Heshanggong.
Three points need to be made in this regard. First, technically there are multiple versions of the Wang Bi and Heshanggong Laozi —over thirty Heshanggong versions are extant—but the differences are on the whole minor. Second, the Wang Bi and Heshanggong versions are not the same, but they are sufficiently similar to be classified as belonging to the same line of textual transmission.
Third, the Wang Bi and Heshanggong versions that we see today have suffered change. Prior to the invention of printing, when each manuscript had to be copied by hand, editorial changes and scribal errors are to be expected.
Boltz and Wagner have examined this question in some detail. Verse 17 of the Tao Te Ching reflects on one of the text's consistent themes, how to lead others with integrity. Today we seem to actively select against leaders who demonstrate self-awareness. Instead, in political figures such as Tony Blair and Boris Johnson, the mass-media landscape favours survival of the biggest and most monstrously deformed egos. They're an unavoidable by-product of power, a scum of pure ego that forms on the surface of society and imitates the appearance of leadership.
The Tao Te Ching is a 2,year-old reminder that today, as then, every one of us has a choice to practise self-awareness and exercise our own power in and over the world. That might come as more of a nasty wakeup call than a comfort to some of us. As Wallace said: "It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. The Tao Te Ching by Laozi: ancient wisdom for modern times. The mysterious Laozi's ancient wisdom may be hard to translate, but the meaning is clear — learning to be self-aware could improve modern life.
A natural mirror of taoist thought … David Foster Wallace. Take this collection of more than versions of the famous opening verse: The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao.
Translated by Aleister Crowley The tao that can be told, is not the eternal Tao. Translated by Stephen Mitchell If you can talk about it, it ain't Tao. Consisting of eighty-one short sections in a poetic style, the text ranges widely in content, from practical advice to universal wisdom, embracing politics, society and the personal.
The emphasis is on the right view and understanding of existence, the Way of the cosmos, and the text sets out to transmit an informed awareness of being that leads to personal harmony.
The Taoist inclination to refer to the natural background to human existence when considering the human is widely in evidence. The literary style is terse and often cryptic, so that multiple interpretations of the individual sections are often possible, but the essence of the work is clear, in communicating an approach to life which is in accord with the natural, and so conducive to spiritual tranquillity and resilience.
This is, by far, my favorite translation of the Tao Te Ching. I own a few others and they're all well and good, but this one is the one I continually read from and refer to when people ask me about the Tao. The translation is well done, it captures the nature of the text well, and it flows fairly evenly. It's not overly flowery or ornate, it gives you the basics of what you need to understand the various entries and assist in understanding what Tao is i. It's a book that changed my life.
I learned of Taoism in a world history class in high school, and when my friends took their Philosophy course at the local university this was the text they worked with. My copy came second hand from the U's bookstore and I have had it ever since.
It has taught me to understand a lot of the things in the world that otherwise would baffle me and lends a lot to my own personal philosophies. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is lost on their path through life. It doesn't have all of the answers, but it does have a LOT of perspective.
Author 2 books 1, followers. Eddie Watkins. Author 6 books 5, followers. There are many translations of the Taoteching, nearly every one of which is probably worth reading, but this is my favorite version. But anyway The fullness is there in potential, unspent. I like this. The commentaries that follow each poem or entry are fascinating and just scratch the surface of what I understand is a vast accumulation of scholarship on this text.
The commentaries are often wildly contradictory and tangential, obsessive to an anal nth degree, but also at times wise in their own right. These commentaries have been written by official scholars, by mendicant monks, and even one or two extreme eccentrics living on the fringes of society unaffiliated with any institution. At the back of the book are short biographies of each commentator, which is fascinating reading in itself. It all adds up to evidence that this is a living book, with enough clear and direct meaning to be perpetually valid, and enough obscurity to be endlessly pondered.
The translator is an American who goes by the name Red Pine. Gerrie Williams. This is an amazing. I've read many books out there and this is the best one. Very enjoyable read! I highly recommend it. Concatenated thoughts. Because he does not claim merit, His merit does not go away. It consists of 81 short chapters written in poetic form which, using a pithy language brimming with evocative and, at times, repetitive contradictions, provide guidance on how humanity may have a harmonious relationship with nature, with the Tao.
After reading chapter 11 by the latter, the merits of each work became particularly noticeable. Chen's translation is an accurate marvel.
It's the kind of translation I like; literal as possible. I don't want only the translator's interpretation, I want to know the precise words that went through the author's mind.
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