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Reading the Daodejing Synthetically
Orientations
In this work, I offer a new hermeneutical reading of the Daodejing 道德經 with an eye to how it could be read for a tradition of early Daoism and how that might contribute to the long line of previous English-language readings and translations that began in earnest with James Legge in the nineteenth century. The present reading significantly differs from previous readings primarily in that I do not take a predetermined point of view that depends on the Analects 論語 or the Zhuangzi 莊子. I take this position despite the fact that the Analects, circulating contemporaneously with the Daodejing, remains my preferred talking partner, especially in my attempts to highlight the differences between the two works and not the derivation of one from the other. I take this position also despite the fact that the Zhuangzi, first circulating possibly more than two centuries after the first appearance of the Daodejing, has more to say about a specifically early Daoist reading of the Daodejing than any other writings until Ge Hong 葛洪 in the fourth century CE.
I also do not take a predetermined point of view that depends on the Wang Bi 王弼 commentary, the Xiang’er 想爾 commentary, or even the Heshang Gong 河上公 commentary, all of which were written some five hundred years after those first circulations of the Daodejing. That is a very long time, and there is very little by way of previous Western-language translations and readings of the Daodejing that can be said to approach it in this manner. Specifically, I take very seriously those aspects of the Daodejing not commonly recognized in previous readings, namely the early Daoist emphasis on yangsheng 養生 (“the nurture of life”), a term referring to a specific regimen of bodily techniques of cultivation. I have a lot more to say about yangsheng in the pages that follow.
If we take the arguments of Bruce Brooks and Taeko Brooks seriously (and I examine them more closely in chapter 5), then we need to stop talking about absolute dates in terms of a onetime composition for the Daodejing and the Analects. According to them, both of these writings absorbed textual accumulations, or at least underwent various redactions and editions, over time until 249 BC, the date of the Lü conquest, and I have no reason to argue with them on this point. This is important to note, because neither text is systematic in chronologically or thematically ordering their sections or chapters—there is little rhyme or reason in their continuities and progressions, as every reader of them quickly realizes.
These two texts did, however, provide the raw material that later writings would systematize, as the Mencius 孟子 did with the Analects by providing a fleshed-out theory of the historical cycle of Sage-Kings, and as the Zhuangzi did with the Daodejing by providing a fleshed-out theory of the historical breakdown of the world and the concomitant loss of the Dao. My project here, however, is not to provide this kind of textual history; although I affirm that the Daodejing is an accumulated text, I do not take early and separate accumulations, redactions, editions, or versions (as, for example, found in the Guodian 郭店, the Mawangdui 馬王堆, the Beida 北大, the Yan Zun 嚴遵, and the Heshang Gong versions) as being radically different in thought or spirit from each other.
What this means most importantly is that my reading radically differs from that of, for example, Michael La Fargue, who argues that the Daodejing is a collection of aphorisms culled from various and multiple voices (and I return to his ideas on the dating and content of the Daodejing soon enough), or, in the words of D. C. Lau, “the Daodejing is an anthology in which are to be found passages representing the views of various schools.” I take the text synthetically, not atomically, and I hold to the view that the ideas from one section or chapter are deeply involved with all other ideas in every other section or chapter. To read the text otherwise is to be handcuffed from the start: if the sections and chapters are not inherently inter-referential, then each section and chapter must be taken by itself on its own terms, and the way they are to be read in this approach is always already established beforehand by any philosophical Confucian or religious Daoist reading, either chronologically or thematically.
My approach to the Daodejing is somewhat similar to some parallel contemporary approaches to the Bible that attempt to steer between the Scylla of traditional interpretation (either philosophical or religious), with its false hope of continuity, and the Charybdis of historical-critical methods, with its destructive path of atomization. Even if there are redactors or editors of originally disparate accumulations, redactions, editions, or versions, the redactors or editors have brought the disparate components together in a way that sees a coherent unity in the whole. Although the synthetic reading I espouse will certainly do some degree of injustice to the “original” Daodejing, what I receive in return is the authority provided by the early Daoist tradition of yangsheng cultivation for a possible third reading, which I call the early Daoist reading. This authority is very hard to downplay in the modern quest for some elusive (and atomic) original text.
To treat the Daodejing synthetically (albeit with a bias toward yangsheng cultivation) also means that I strive to remain open to it as a poetic, mythic, philosophical, political, religious, and imaginative work. Even if the Daodejing at the time of its first circulation was not completed in anything like its present form as we have come to know it, it did at some point come to that completion, and certainly by the time of the Mawangdui editions, from which point onward it was more or less the full, received text that we have today. It is this synthetic reading of the Daodejing that I here espouse, a reading that is deeply informed by the experience of it as a specifically Daoist writing most immediately owned by the tradition of early Daoism with its strong emphasis on yangsheng practice.
Conventions
I give my translation of the Daodejing in the Appendix, and in this study it is to this translation that all of my references, discussions, and analyses of the text refer. I announce the specific passage or chapter under discussion as DDJ followed by the chapter number; for example, DDJ 7 refers to Daodejing, chapter 7. In the translation, I have relied on the format structure uncovered by Rudolf Wagner that he calls “the interlocking parallel style” (IPS). This structure provides for a non-linear way to read certain sections or chapters of the Daodejing, but by no means every section or chapter, that clearly were not meant to be read in the typical linear fashion. In the IPS structure, for example, two consecutive sentences, A and B, are not to be read A on top followed by B underneath, familiar as we are with this structure from most printed verse; instead, A is to be read on a left-hand column and B on a right-hand column directly next to it; thus, A and B are parallel with each other. The main thematic content of A is, typically but not always, contrastive, complementary, or connective with B; thus, the thematic content interlocks. Furthermore, there is often a middle column that progresses, contains, or links the AB parallel. I have not adopted each and every IPS structure designated by Wagner, and I have tended to simplify those I have adopted with the aim of ease of reading. A straightforward instance of the IPS is found in DDJ 7:
| Heaven is long. | | Earth is lasting. |
| The reason why |
| Heaven is long | and | Earth is lasting |
| is that they do not live for themselves. This is why they are able to be |
| long | and | lasting. |
| Because of this, the Sage |
| marginalizes his body but his body is first, | and | disregards his body yet his body lasts. |
| Is it not because he has no self-interest that he is able to realize his self-interest? |
I take the Laozi jiaoshi 老子校釋, based on the Longxing guan 龍興觀 stele, as my base text of the Daodejing. All of my amendments to it have textual support in the various other versions and editions that I have consulted as well as in the commentaries and notes to them. These other versions of the Daodejing include the Guodian Laozi 郭店老子, the Mawangdui Laozi 馬王堆老子, the Laozi Daodejing Heshang Gong zhangju 老子道德經河上公章句, Wagner’s critical text of the Laozi Daodejing Wang Bi zhu 老子道德經王弼注, the Laozi Zhushi ji pingjie 老子註釋及評介, and the Laozi duben 老子讀本. My amendments to the Laozi jiaoshi are for the most part relatively minor. The largest amendment is from DDJ 23; in this chapter, all versions other than the Laozi jiaoshi include an average of an additional twenty-seven characters, which I have kept in the translation. By far the greatest number of my amendments to the Laozi jiaoshi concerns particles, either adding them or subtracting them, again based on variations from these other Chinese versions that greatly assist in the clarification of discrete sentences.
Speaking of the various editions of the Daodejing, Wagner writes, “Most differences are in particles, where textual variations usually are largest but meaning is least likely to be influenced.” I have also amended many adverbs and transitions such as shigu 是故 (“therefore”) and shiyi 是以 (“for this reason”), again only so far as the separate versions I consulted assist in clarifying specific passages. It is not my intention to document each and every instance of this; on the other hand, I make no claim to provide yet another critical or “authentic” edition of the Daodejing. In the end, my most important hermeneutical claim is simply that I take the Daodejing as a synthetic, self-referential text.
I have put all Chinese transliterations from primary sources into pinyin, as well as all quotations from Western scho...
