Livia Kohn and Michael LaFargue eds. Lao

Review
Author(s): James A. Benn
Review by: James A. Benn
Source: Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 62,
No. 2 (1999), pp. 388-389
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of School of Oriental and African Studies
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3107542
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388

REVIEWS

translation (in any case, space does not allow
such an exercise). One saniple must suffice,
concerning the famous and highly controversial eight characters whLichopen Book IX
of the Lunyu (Zi han yan li yu ming
'
yu ren f J iz r gfif -. ' Whereas
Ryckmans's French translaltion Le Maitre
parlait rarement de profit. II c:elebraitla volonte
as
cileste etl'humanite', chose to treat yu
'
a verb, Leys reverts to a more traditional
interpretation in the English version, 'The
Master seldom spoke of profit, or fate or

humanity'. (The accompanyiing note, the contents of which have been nnodified from the
French, ends with a ratheer non-committal
conclusion: 'Both readings seem equally awkward'.) But as usual, Leys( loes not so much
as acknowledge the existenc:e of Ryckmans's
previous translation.
Still on the subject of interpretation, one is
hichunliteral
left to wonder what Huang (
translation' might be suppo,sed to mean. The
b the
reader is first exhorted to beimprestsed
impressed by
thinese
rom
a chese
display of erudition coming
scholar born in a family of Confucian teachers
and schooled in one of the last village
Confucian schools in Southi China' (quoted
from the blurb). One finds, however, that the

said erudition is not altogetller as careful and
supported by solid evidence as it should be.
Similarly, the translation is accompanied by
running notes which are not always very
illuminating. Take, for instarice, the celebrated
opening passage of the Lunyuwhich, in Huang's
rendition, calls for four nc)tes, but not the
indispensable one on the various possible
interpretations of shi W, which he chooses to
translate as 'regularly'. The note to XVII, 18
is astonishingly abrupt: 'Thi s chapter strongly
suggests the influence of Laozi (and) the
Daodejing' (it is not clear whether Huang
means that this passage of tthe Lunyu is later
than the Daodejing). Finally, the pinyin transcription is unorthodox (in the first place, one
wonders why Huang Chichung's name itself is
not transcribed in pinyin; F)roper names are
unnecessarily hyphenated; Y(ou is transcribed
as Iou, see e.g. XI, 15 and XVII, 7), etc.
On the whole, this rendition of the Lunyu

seems to be a superfluous follower of D.C.
Lau's 1979 Penguin version (iit has more or less
the same appendices on Confucius's life and
disciples), with a few odd borrowings from
Raymond Dawson whose Alnalects were also
published by Oxford Univer sity Press in 1993.
A 'comparative chronology', of dubious utility,
rather naively draws parallels between such
irrelevant events as the Gre-eks' victory over
the Persians at Marathon, amd Master Kong
besieged between Chen and Cai and running
out of food for seven dayrs Although this
translation may be at best used as a dependable
textbook for undergraduates it offers nothing
radically new either in the approach to the
translation, or indeed on the text itself by
comparison with the efforts imade by E. Bruce
Brooks and A. Taeko Brook:s to delve deeper
into textual analysis in their recent work, The
original Analects (New York, 1998).

ANNE CHENG

LIVIA KOHN and MICHAEL LAFARGUE

(ed.): Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching.
xii, 330pp. Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press,
1998. $20.95.
The seemingly never-ending stream of well
intentioned but ultimately misleading translations and reinterpretations of Lao-tzu's classic
make it increasingly difficult to bridge the gap
between his public image and the way that
Lao-tzu is actually dealt with nowadays by
scholars of Chinese thought and religion. This
new compendium of recent scholarship may
provide some way to bridge that gap. The
book's four parts cover the person of Lao-tzu
himself, ritual and commentarial understandings of the text, modern Western and Chinese
interpretations of its message and finally, the
problems of language, meaning and translation.

Part 1, 'Ancient myths', opens with a classic
essay by the late A. C. Graham on 'The origins
of the legend of Lao Tan', which first appeared
in 1986. Besides being a stimulating investigation of the supposed founder of Taoism and
the putative author of the Tao te ching, this
essay is a poignant reminder of a scholar whose
absence is still sorely felt. Of course Lao-tzu's
identity, or perhaps personality, was by no
^meansfixed at the end of the Han, indeed in
many ways the very essence of Lao-tzu was his
constant transformation. In her essay, 'The
Lao-tzu myth', Livia Kohn traces in fairly
broad terms the transformations of Lao-tzu in
early medieval China (roughly A.D. 200 to 600).
Whether as a paradigm for those who strove
to gain immortality, as the personification of
the Tao and the epitome of cosmic balance, as
a messianic god, or converter of the barbarians,
Lao-tzu was able to answer the needs of diverse
social, political and religious groups over

the centuries.
The editors of this volume are to be
commended for having included an essay by
an art historian-Yoshiko Kamitsuka's 'Laotzu in Six Dynasties sculpture', an abbreviated
version of a longer study which first appeared
in Japanese (p. 81). Images of Lao-tzu, and in
particular the inscriptions associated with them,
prove to be very revealing of Taoist practice in
medieval China, especially as to the expectations Taoists had of their 'Venerable Lord'.
As in Kohn's essay, the influence of Buddhist
ideas and images is impossible to miss, and is
intelligently brought out by both authors.
Part 2, 'Chinese interpretations', deals
mostly with the commentarial interpretations
of the Tao te ching. Alan K. L. Chan's 'A tale
of two commentaries: Ho-shang-kung and
Wang Pi on the Lao-tzu', essentially rehearses
the arguments which he made at greater length
in his Tivo visions of the Way. a study of the
Wang Pi and Ho-shang-kung commentaries on

the Lao-tzu (Albany, NY: State University of
New York Press, 1991), but this is a most
useful introduction to the major themes of
what continue to be the two most important
and influential interpretations of the text. Of
course, just as the figure of Lao-tzu changed
over time, so the Tao te ching continued to be
reinterpreted in the Chinese tradition. Isabelle

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389

REVIEWS
Robinet's 'Later commentaries: textual polysemy and syncretistic interpretations' (again a
slightly revised translation of an earlier article
first published in French, p. 140) usefully and
elegantly surveys some 30 commentaries which
appeared up to the Ming. These interpretations

were written from extremely diverse perspectives-those
of inner alchemy, Buddhism,
Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism to name
but a few-but Robinet finds that they share
similar concerns with linking the present to the
past, and with syncretic attempts to join the
thought of the text with that of other teachings.
Livia Kohn's second contribution to the
volume is 'The Tao te ching in ritual', a most
useful corrective to those who would prefer us
to understand the text as a mystical or purely
philosophical work. Not only was recitation of
the text understood as magically efficacious by
the second century A.D. but it was also
employed for the purposes of ordination and
as a precepts text. The importance of the
precepts in East Asian Buddhism is only just
beginning to be fully appreciated, and it is to
be hoped that Taoist precepts will eventually
achieve the same recognition. In the meantime,

this is a most useful introduction to some of
the ways in which the text was actually
employed in medieval China.
Part 3, 'Modern readings', contains three
essays, 'Influential Western interpretations of
the Tao-te-ching', by Julia M. Hardy; a reprint
of 'Lao-tzu and the ineffable Tao', from
Benjamin Schwartz's The world of thought in
ancient China (Cambridge, MA, 1985), which
appears here under the title 'The thought of the
Tao-te-ching', and Liu Xiaogan's 'Naturalness
(Tzu-jan), the core value in Taoism: its ancient
meaning and its significancetoday'. Of the three,
Hardy's careful survey of interpretations and
misinterpretationsof the text in Western scholarly and popular writings will probably be of
especial relevance to those of us who encounter
these essentialist and often sentimental interpretationsin the classroom. A patient unravelling
of received ideas about the Tao may serve us
better than the impatient dismissals to which we
may often be tempted to resort.

In part 4, 'Critical methods', we turn from
interpretations of the text to the ever-present
problems of language and translation. William
H. Baxter's 'Situating the language of the Laotzu: the probable date of the Tao-te-ching', is
a linguistic analysis of the rhyme and rhetoric
of the text, which gives a likely date of around
350 B.C., a date which is consistent with
traditional scholarship, but not, it seems with
more recent Chinese scholarship. Liu Xiaogan,
for one, has argued elsewhere for a much
earlier date, as the editors point out in the
introduction. Michael LaFargue's 'Recovering
the Tao-te-ching's original meaning: some
remarks on historical hermeneutics', is a bold
attempt to reconstruct what its author(s) originally intended. This of course assumes that the
Tao te ching formed a coherent whole to begin
with and many scholars will remain to be
convinced of this. The final article,' On translating the Tao-te-ching chapters', by LaFargue
and Julian Pas compares sample passages from
17 popular and influential English translations
of the text in order to illustrate the kinds
of problems that translators face, and the

consequences that these problems have for
understanding the text.
It is unfortunate that SUNY Press has
become a byword for poor editing and proofreading. What is even more unfortunate is that
the Press seems to have made no attempt to
salvage its reputation, and once again we find
misspellings on the back cover of a SUNY
book-in this case Ho-shang-kung becomes
'He-shang-kung'. Another particularly egregious error is the misspelling of the name of
one of the contributors-' Schartz' instead of
'Schwartz', (p. iv).
JAMES A. BENN

MARCWINTER:'... und Gang Jie erfand

die Schrift': ein Handbuchfar den
Gebrauch des Shuo Wen Jie Zie.
(Schweizerische Asiengesellschaft,
Monographie Bd. 18.) 629 pp.
Bern, etc.: Peter Lang Verlag,
1998. ?37.

The Shuowen jiezi [SWJZ: Explanations of
simple and complex graphs] is one of the most
celebrated reference works of Chinese philology. Chinese and Western sinologists base
their understanding of graphs primarily on the
explanations given by Xu Shen (A.D. 30-124,
58-148, or c. 55-150). Celebrated in Chinese
tradition and for centuries enshrined in its most
central corpus of reference works, this source
was also used by earlier sinologists to explain
the origin, mechanism and development of the
Chinese writing system. Whereas Chinese
scholars provide enormous quantities of not
only orthodox but also critical studies of this
'chief guide through mazes of Chinese epigraphy', to quote P.A. Boodberg, others still
refer to this early dictionary in the oldfashioned positivist manner. Even after the
archaeological finds from the end of the last
century, some traditionalists still refer to the
SWJZ uncritically and hold it up as the highest
authority on etymological issues, though others
tend to describe it as 'an almanac of forged
characters' (Qian Xuantong).
Marc D. Winter's ... und Gang Jie erfand die
Schrift is a fine compendium and a wellgrounded investigation into the SWJZ. It is
divided into two main parts: in the 'Analysis'
(pp. 13-234), the author discusses important
and controversial topics such as the value of
the SWJZ for sinological research. He outlines
the terminology used in his study, and
describes the SWJZ in terms of authorship,
structure, and the relevant traditional and
recent research. A short overview of the
scholarship on the SWJZ is given; references
to the SWJZ in the Yupian,the Guangyun,the
Jingdianshiwen, etc. are mentioned; the editions
of Xu Xuan, Xu Kai, Duan Yucai, Gui Fu,
Wang Yun, Zhu Junsheng and Ding Fubao are
cursorily described. The research of Roy
Andrew Miller, Paul Serruys, the out-dated
explanations of Leon Wieger, the impact of
this dictionary on Karlgren's GrammataSerica
Recensa, the opinions of Herrlee Glessner Creel
(nowadays only interesting from a historical

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