Subject: Re: Buddha's Birthday
From: [email-masked]
Newsgroups: soc.religion.eastern

In article <[email-masked]>, [email-masked] writes:
>930520
>
>I attended a lecture by a local Pure Land Buddhist on the basics of
>Buddhism at a local Catholic Church (neat widening of minds ;>).
>
>During it he mentioned, quite off-handedly, that they celebrate
>Gautama's B-day on April 8th.  I just saw a post in this newsgroup
>which placed it at May 23rd.  How many other different dates are
>there for this auspicious occasion?  Are they all during spring?
>
>Thyagi

	_Llewellyn's_Magical_Almanac_ for 1993 placed it as April 3.  I would
like to point out the problem here though.  The standered calander is based on
many things and wasn't even universally "in sink" until a few centuries ago. 
It is even debatable when Jesus's birthday really was, and this event is the
supposed basis of the calander.  If I can, I will download the information
later.  The point is that Buddha was born about half a millenia earlier, and
there isn't any certainty on Jesus.  There are arguements ranging from 7 "b.c."
to 2 "a.d." and probibly others.  In addition, whole weeks were sometimes added
or deleted from the calander to fix it.  My guess is that all the dates for
Buddha's birthday will be in the spring (maybe +/- a few weeks) based on the
stories about him.  The "exact" date varries depending on the evidence on hand. 
Furthermore, why should his birthday matter?  Excuse me for being Taoist, but
I am.  Is it relivant to you personally?  To Buddhism?  I thought that you
weren't supposed to do more than follow his example, yet he seems to be treated
like a demi-god.  Just wondering.  If you respond, please don't re-post this
entire post.  It annoys me to read more than 2 screens... its sorta bad form.
						Sweet water and light laughter,
						Weird 

From: [email-masked]
Newsgroups: soc.religion.eastern
Subject: Re: Buddha's Birthday

930523 [YaD sAOK !!1!!!  - Buddha's B-Day!!?1]

"Weird" quotes my request about Buddha's B-Day and writes:

|>...Gautama's B-day on April 8th.  I just saw a post in this newsgroup
|>which placed it at May 23rd.  How many other different dates are
|>there for this auspicious occasion?  Are they all during spring?

[Weird, prepare to either bypass this post or be annoyed, cuz it is
  more than two screens long. :>]

|_Llewellyn's_Magical_Almanac_ for 1993 placed it as April 3.  

This is interesting, but not of relevance to me because of the source,
as I'll make more clear below.  That is, unless they had more information
in their Almanac regarding from where (what sect) this date was drawn.

|[Explanation of the 'calendar problem' deleted.]
|
|If I can, I will download the information deleted.

Please don't do so on my account.  I don't trust 'history' very much anyway.

|My guess is that all the dates for
|Buddha's birthday will be in the spring (maybe +/- a few weeks) based on the
|stories about him.  

This makes sense to me too, though I don't remember off-hand, what part
of 'the stories about him' indicates his spring birth.

|The "exact" date varries depending on the evidence on hand.

Such 'evidence' would hardly prove convincing to me about anything
historical.  I was asking in order to discover more about how Buddhist
people see the Buddha, what esoteric teachings may be concealed within
the times and dates which are given, and generally to see how much
variation there is within a tradition that has an esoteric basis 
in a philosophy which transcends time and space.

|Furthermore, why should his birthday matter?  

Well, the response to this depends upon who you are asking.  It matters
to me because the date of birth of a pseudo-historical figure tells me
much about the tradition from which it comes.  An example here is the
case of the Christ, who is said (popularly) to have been born on 'Christ 
Mass', December 25th.  This is very interesting.  Not only was this date
apparently used as the birthday of Mithras among Mystery-traditions,
but it is very close to the Winter solstice (indicating the beginning
of solar light, the return of the Sun/Son within a very light-based
cosmology) and occurs 7 days prior to the beginning of the European
New Year.  Lots to think about there.

In the Pure Land lecture I heard the man mention many of his holidays
and all/most of them fell on the 8th (two major ones 6 months apart).
The Buddha's B-day was 4-8.  Ring any bells?  4 Noble Truths,
8-fold Path to Nirvana.  And there are 12 months in the year.
12-Link Chain of Causation.  Lots to think about there too.

May 23rd still has me wondering, though.  As this is a 'Sunday',
perhaps it is simply a convenient day for the celebration and the
day of Buddha's birth is considered to have occurred on a less
convenient party time.  I hadn't considered this before.

|Excuse me for being Taoist, but I am.

I'm sorry, but I don't know what you mean.  I've a number of books which
claim to be translations of something called _Tao Teh Ching_ (various
versions) and I've read bits and pieces of this lovely book.
I've read quite a few books about philosophical taoism and its
quite complex subtleties.  I've even pieced through a bunch of
books on 'Chinese philosophy' which delineated the differences
between 'philosophical taoism' and 'religious taoism' and even,
sometimes, 'mystical taoism'.

But I don't know what you mean when you imply that 'being Taoist'
might not allow you to comprehend Buddhism.  Have you ever heard
of Ch'an Buddhism?  It was inspired by Dhyana Buddhism from India
and by Chinese taoism, though these are quite philosophical as I 
read them.

Could you begin another thread, here or forwarded to any newsgroup
with reference, in response to this, and tell us, since you have
exclaimed twice now regarding your knowledge, the answers to these
questions:

When you say 'Taoism' what do you mean?

What is a 'Tao' and how can it be turned into an 'ism'?

Thanks.  Perhaps we'll be able to find someone who knows something
about Taoism and you shall be satisfied.  For myself, I am content
to know very little, if anything at all.

|Is it relivant to you personally?  To Buddhism?  I thought that you
|weren't supposed to do more than follow his example, yet he seems to be 
|treated like a demi-god.  Just wondering.  

Buddha's birthday is relevant to all people, yes, though they may not
find value in it.  To some forms of Buddhism it is quite relevant, since
they enjoy a more devotional path (Pure Land, I presume, is one of these -
perhaps Cris could tell us more).

Following the Buddha's example is not the teaching of Buddhism.
Siddhartha Gautama was a samana, a Hindu, before he is said to have
sat under the Bo Tree and experienced effulgent awakening.  If we were
to follow the Buddha's example we would perhaps find ourselves in much
more pain and dissatisfaction than we do currently, for his was the life
of an ascetic, and he ventured to both extremes as first Warrior Clan 
Prince and then Samana Beggar Monk (hmmmmmmm, warrior-monk, neato).

As I said above, the Buddha prescribed a practice which would, it seems,
clear up our attachments, our cravings, and allow us to reach a very
beautific experience called 'Nirvana'.  Hir evaluation of our condition,
called the '4 Noble Truths', contains the prescription called the 8-fold
Path.  I'm sure many would be happy to explain to you of what each of
these consist.  There seem to be very many different interpretations of
the Buddha's words. 

|...It annoys me to read more than 2 screens... its sorta bad form.

Yes, and I am a very long-winded writer, so I'll understand if you
do not respond to my extensive missives.  When you ask such complex
questions it is sometimes difficult to answer accurately without
taking up more than two screens.

Thyagi
----------------------
"The Path is like a slow-moving river.
It winds, lazily, through the forest of knowledge.
It does not care what course is proper.
It does not concern itself with restriction.
The river simply follows the path of least resistance.
It knows that its place is pure and perfect.
Know this and the 8-Fold Path is before you."

Thyagi Tzu

From: [email-masked]
Newsgroups: soc.religion.eastern
Subject: Re: Buddha's Birthday

[Weird write me a letter so I can get a working e-mail address
 --Toshi, co-moderator [email-masked]]

In article <[email-masked]>, [email-masked] writes:
>930523 [YaD sAOK !!1!!!  - Buddha's B-Day!!?1]

>"Weird" quotes my request about Buddha's B-Day and writes:
[Buddha's birthday info and calander stuff deleted]

>|Furthermore, why should his birthday matter?  
	In reference to a question that is asked below, this is what I ment by
"excuse me for being Taoist".  Birthdays do not matter to me enless a friend's
birthday matters to that friend.
[snip]
>                               
>May 23rd still has me wondering, though.  As this is a 'Sunday',
>perhaps it is simply a convenient day for the celebration and the
>day of Buddha's birth is considered to have occurred on a less
>convenient party time.  I hadn't considered this before.

	Yes, I beleive that that is part of it.  I also suspect that the
christian who told you the date may have been marginally informed.

>|Excuse me for being Taoist, but I am.
>
>I'm sorry, but I don't know what you mean.  I've a number of books which
>claim to be translations of something called _Tao Teh Ching_ (various
>versions) and I've read bits and pieces of this lovely book.
>I've read quite a few books about philosophical taoism and its
>quite complex subtleties.  I've even pieced through a bunch of
>books on 'Chinese philosophy' which delineated the differences
>between 'philosophical taoism' and 'religious taoism' and even,
>sometimes, 'mystical taoism'.
>
>But I don't know what you mean when you imply that 'being Taoist'
>might not allow you to comprehend Buddhism.  Have you ever heard
>of Ch'an Buddhism?  It was inspired by Dhyana Buddhism from India
>and by Chinese taoism, though these are quite philosophical as I 
>read them.

	See above.  Yes, I do know of Chan, or Zen as the Japanese version is
called.  Also, I would suggest that you ignore most of what you "learned" about
Taoism.  Its not really an organized group of individuals with a group thought
or idea.  Taoism could be called the Chinese hippy.  All who are different in
our society tand to get a certain nickname group.  I was once told that I was
kind of "granolla" and that it is a wonder that I'm not a Deadhead.  That's the
kind of 'group-and-forget-about' mentality that makes ppl and movements not be
concidered.  Taoism was a Chinese term for such.  For instance, the Schollar
Warriors are concidered Taoists, but are nearly paranoid in their persute of
safety and longevity.  Compare that to Chung-tsu who didn't care what ate his
body.  (Burry me?  Why are you partial to the worms and not the birds?)  To
compinsate for this, Europeans have begun terming Taoism as philisophical,
religious, and mystic.  Ignore these.  They will only get you to be a biggot. 
They were intended to be helpful and end up misinforming ppl of what Taoism is. 
For these reasons, you need to ask what I'd do PERSONALLY and why and if any of
my training (as I refere to my experiences in things that I make part of me)
influenced this decition.  For example, I find earrings disgusting.  That's
probibly mostly due to my exposure to Schollar Warriors.  A Lao-tsu style
Taoist wouldn't care.

>Could you begin another thread, here or forwarded to any newsgroup
>with reference, in response to this, and tell us, since you have
>exclaimed twice now regarding your knowledge, the answers to these
>questions:
>
>When you say 'Taoism' what do you mean?
	See above.
>
>What is a 'Tao' and how can it be turned into an 'ism'?

	"The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao."  That's the best
that I've ever heard it put.  I once tried to answer that question for a
friend.  He called back every night for 3 days.  Every call had me laughing
because he was trying and by trying would be unable to know the Tao.  I could
go more into this if you want, but be forwarned, it would be an entire post to
start giving you the idea.  Also, Tao means little to most Taoists.  Its a
concept, but is as important to their experiences and life as is the Big Bang
theory to most ppl in the U.S.  Incedently, once I start giving you the idea,
well.... "An experience is worth a thoughsand books." ...i.e. you're on your
own...I've done all that I can without becoming your Shifu.  I'm not yet ready
for that job.
>Thanks.  Perhaps we'll be able to find someone who knows something
>about Taoism and you shall be satisfied.  For myself, I am content
>to know very little, if anything at all.
>
	That is the best way to live.  Know enough about all religions to deal
with those religions' followers as if they are friends....and to let them
become your friends.
>
>|Is it relivant to you personally?  To Buddhism?  I thought that you
>|weren't supposed to do more than follow his example, yet he seems to be 
>|treated like a demi-god.  Just wondering.  
>                   
	This deals with what I ment about being Taoist.
>|...It annoys me to read more than 2 screens... its sorta bad form.
>
	Its also that I have a reading disorder and I put great effort into
reading more than about 5 screens or a post that's been re-posted more than 3
times.  So, please, if you respond to this, don't extract it too.
>Yes, and I am a very long-winded writer, so I'll understand if you
>do not respond to my extensive missives.  When you ask such complex
>questions it is sometimes difficult to answer accurately without
>taking up more than two screens.
	I understand.  That is the same for me and for ?s about Taoism.
>
>
>Thyagi
>----------------------
>"The Path is like a slow-moving river.
>It winds, lazily, through the forest of knowledge.
>It does not care what course is proper.
>It does not concern itself with restriction.
>The river simply follows the path of least resistance.
>It knows that its place is pure and perfect.
>Know this and the 8-Fold Path is before you."
>
>Thyagi Tzu
>
	Are you saying that you wrote this?  If so, why are you
given/have-taken the title tzu?  That's a hefty claim!
						Weird
p.s. I may have overlooked something here.  This much written stuff (reading it
and thinking and writing a responce) takes a lot of shen from me and I'm hungry
(for food) to begin with.

From: [email-masked]
Newsgroups: soc.religion.eastern
Subject: Not the eternal tao

930525

[Oh dear, I'm afraid I've written another very long post.  Please forgive.]

Weird asks a question:

|>|...why should [the Buddha's] birthday matter?  

And gives his answer:

|Birthdays do not matter to me enless a friend's
|birthday matters to that friend.

Well, then to you, the Buddha's b-day would matter if you could determine if
it mattered to hir.  Your question, however, was general, and regarded WHY
such an event should be important.  You did not state here why you have
the attitude you do.  You linked this to your Taoism, so I'd like to know
what 'being a Taoist' has to do with whether someone's birthday matters to
them.

Weird goes on to give suggestions:

|...I would suggest that you ignore most of what you "learned" about
|Taoism.  

I don't think I claimed to have learned anything.  Is there some reason
that you put the word 'learned' in quotes?  Is this an emphasis which
implies sarcasm?

|Its not really an organized group of individuals with a group thought
|or idea.  Taoism could be called the Chinese hippy.  All who are different in
|our society tand to get a certain nickname group.  

Could you be more specific?  If 'it' isn't an organized group, then what
IS 'it'?  You say Taoism could be called 'the Chinese hippy'.  This is
quite unclear.  Are you saying that Taoism is a stereotype?  Are you
saying that a particular lifestyle is encompassed by the term?  Please
share with us what you mean by 'the Chinese hippy' and how you arrived
at this conclusion.

|I was once told that I was
|kind of "granolla" and that it is a wonder that I'm not a Deadhead. That's the
|kind of 'group-and-forget-about' mentality that makes ppl and movements not be
|concidered.  Taoism was a Chinese term for such.  

What I understand you to be saying here is that you feel alienated and
categorized by the society around you (or have felt this way in the past),
and furthermore, that the label 'Taoism' was a catch-all for those
like yourself.  Is this why you call yourself by this name yet do not
associate it with any ideology or practice?

|For instance, the Schollar
|Warriors are concidered Taoists, but are nearly paranoid in their persute of
|safety and longevity.  

I'm sorry, but I don't know anything about any 'scholar warriors' who are
considered Taoists.  Is this something which I haven't read about yet, or
something which you have experienced directly?  Please tell us more about
these 'scholar warriors'.  Are they really Taoists?  Did they pretend to
be?  Who considers them to be?  Are these people wrong in their
categorization?

|Compare that to Chung-tsu who didn't care what ate his
|body.  (Burry me?  Why are you partial to the worms and not the birds?)  

I never met Chuang tzu.  Is this someone of whom you've read?  How is
your knowledge about Chuang tzu not 'learning' and how do one's feelings
regarding one's living body and what happens with it compare with how
one feels about the carcass and its means of disintegration?  Is this
a Taoist parable to which you refer?  Could you elaborate on its meaning
for us?

|To compinsate for this, Europeans have begun terming Taoism as philisophical,
|religious, and mystic.  Ignore these.  They will only get you to be a biggot. 
|They were intended to be helpful and end up misinforming ppl of what 
|Taoism is.

I shall remember your distaste for these categories, though sometimes find
them useful myself.  I don't know why they might make me into a bigot,
however.

I'm glad that you are contributing to this newsgroup.  It is unfortunate
that so much misinformation about Taoism exists, and I'm glad that such
people as you are here to tell us more of your experience with it.

|For these reasons, you need to ask what I'd do PERSONALLY and why and if 
|any of
|my training (as I refere to my experiences in things that I make part of me)
|influenced this decition.  

I'm sorry but I don't understand what you are speaking of here.  Are you
saying that Taoism is an individual thing and that you can only answer a
question about what it means to you?  If so, I can certainly understand,
and I think I asked that below.  I have a feeling that to you it has
something to do with your attitude rather than your beliefs, your way
of life rather than your specific activities.  Am I far wrong?

|For example, I find earrings disgusting.  That's
|probibly mostly due to my exposure to Schollar Warriors.  A Lao-tsu style
|Taoist wouldn't care.

Oh, I did not know there were different 'styles' of Taoism.  Can you provide
us with a list?  Perhaps there is a 'Lao tzu-style' and 'Chuang tzu-style'
and 'scholar warrior-style'?  Could you describe each of these so that
we can come to more clearly understand what Taoism means to you?  Thanks.

I'll attempt a beginning:  

scholar-warriors find personal ornamentation disgusting
Lao tzus detach themselves from worldly things
Additions?  Corrections?

|>When you say 'Taoism' what do you mean?
|	See above.

I'm afraid I still don't understand you completely.  Perhaps you will find
it worth your while to address another voluminous post of mine.  I cannot
be sure.

|>What is a 'Tao' and how can it be turned into an 'ism'?
|
|	"The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao."  That's the best
|that I've ever heard it put.  

Oh yes, I love the many ways which that line from _Tao Teh Ching_ has been
translated.  Each has its own personality and charm.  I hope that you don't
think this answers the question very well, however.  To use a word within
its definition often only confuses the issue.

|I once tried to answer that question for a
|friend.  He called back every night for 3 days.  Every call had me laughing
|because he was trying and by trying would be unable to know the Tao.  

Ha!  That is quite funny.  I see you saying here that continuously trying
to understand may lead to our being unable to 'know the Tao', which I still
am not sure I understand.  Thank you for this example.

|I could
|go more into this if you want, but be forwarned, it would be an entire post to
|start giving you the idea.  

Oh please do, if it would not inconvenience you overly.  You may have noticed
that I write very long posts, myself, and am not daunted by extended dialogues
or monologues about certain subjects as important as Taoism and Taoists.

|Also, Tao means little to most Taoists.  Its a
|concept, but is as important to their experiences and life as is the Big Bang
|theory to most ppl in the U.S.  

Ok, now you are being quite helpful.  You say that it is a concept, comparable
to the 'Big Bang theory' in its psychological import.  Above you say that
'trying and trying' to understand it prohibits our knowing it.  How would
you suggest, then, that we come to understand or know this concept?  How
did you come to understand and know it?  Does the concept relate to
anything besides itself?  Or is it simply a concept?  Is it, like the
Big Bang theory, founded upon empirical observation and peer review 
consensus?

|Incedently, once I start giving you the idea,
|well.... "An experience is worth a thoughsand books." ...i.e. you're on your
|own...I've done all that I can without becoming your Shifu.  I'm not yet ready
|for that job.

I don't know what a 'Shifu' is, and I have my own ideas about what the word
'tao' means to me.  I'm only here attempting to glean YOUR perspective, not
to learn any universal truths.  I suspect you imply here that you cannot
give me an experience of your experience.  I see this to be true, and 
can only hope that we have similar enough experience to come to some
common understandings. :>

|>Thanks.  Perhaps we'll be able to find someone who knows something
|>about Taoism and you shall be satisfied.  For myself, I am content
|>to know very little, if anything at all.
|>
|	That is the best way to live.  Know enough about all religions to deal
|with those religions' followers as if they are friends....and to let them
|become your friends.

Now here is something which seems very peculiar.  You seem to imply that
'Taoism' refers to some sort of 'religion'.  What is a 'religion' which
'Taoism' could be one?  Is 'Tao', the concept, the central feature of
'Taoism', the religion?  And didn't you say something about not using the
categories of 'philosophy', 'mysticism' and 'religion'?  How is what you
say here not in direct contradiction to this?

|Its also that I have a reading disorder and I put great effort into
|reading more than about 5 screens or a post that's been re-posted more than 3
|times.  So, please, if you respond to this, don't extract it too.

I'm sorry, but in order to be understood completely, then I must do such a
thing.  If others wish to follow the conversation, then this will allow them
to do so.  Otherwise, why have newsgroups?  I'm sorry that your reading
disorder is so difficult.  I'll do my best to keep this in mind.  I've
already told you that I am used to long posts, especially where Taoism and
other seemingly complex issues arise, yet I'll attempt to keep the quotes
down to 2 or 3 times at most.

[self-quotation omitted to save your eyes :> ]

|>Thyagi Tzu
|>
|	Are you saying that you wrote this?  If so, why are you
|given/have-taken the title tzu?  That's a hefty claim!

Thyagi Tzu wrote that.  Was that me?  What is so hefty about using the
title of 'tzu'?  What do you think that 'tzu' means?

  _ _
Tyagi Nagasiva

From: [email-masked] (Carol Wang)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.eastern
Subject: taoism books

i know about the taoism bibiography that's available on the net
(where, i couldn't tell you, but i'm sure i can find it again with
gopher . . .  8), but it is strictly a bibliography and is
unannotated.  i am interested in the comparative opinion and/or
recommendations of those on the net on some of the books that i have
and am thinking of getting . . .

slight wording changes can be important.  it's amazing how different
some translations can be, even when both claim to be word for word
translations.  most of the books below are "lao-tzu tao-te ching", so
mostly i just list authors.

gia-fu feng and jane english.  i've read this one front to back and i
like it the best so far.  i also have the annotated version by
needleman, but don't think much of his contribution, altho he has a
annotated bibliography which is extremely welcome.

j. wu.  i've read part of this (one of the ones that claims to be a
word for word translation) but he does some irritating things like
putting "the mother" in quotes in the text and such for no apparent
reason.

the tao of power.  it is an ok translation, but it does bizzare and
vaguely annoying things such as replacing "virtue" with "power" and
"sage" with "evolved individual"

robert hendricks (lao-tzu te-tao ching).  a translation of the
ma-wang-tui texts.  a very precise translation/amalgam of the 2 te-tao
ching texts found at ma-wang-tui.  which text was being used, where
words were missing or blotted out by decay or whatever are precisely
noted down.  the translation "owes a lot to chan wing-tsit and dc
lau".  i have not yet read those translations, but this one, while
interesting in it's precision seems to be uninspired.

the wisdom of laotse.  i borrowed this from a friend and it seems to
be a very complete translation, including commentary from chuangtse in
each chapter, but i have not actually read it.

chan wing-tsit.  i have his translation that is in his sourcebook of
chinese philosophy and it seems reasonable.  i know of the existence
of "the way of lao tzu", but don't know how much more info is in it
than in the sourcebook.

some translations that i'm looking to pick up, but don't know much
about, are:
lin, paul j. (had wang pi's commentary)

waley, arthur.  it is supposed to diverge significantly from a word
for word translation.

cleary.  i have his "taoist sisters" translation and it seems good,
but his "secret of the golden flower" seems odd in the introduction
where he talks about taoism as getting closer to God . . .  ?

cleary it seems has translated just about everything every written in
chinese (and in japanese, and . . . 8), a few other books that look
interesting (but i don't know how much repetition there is between
them) are "vitality, energy and spirit", "wen-tzu", "awakening the tao
(liu i-ming)", "the inner teachings of taoism (chang po-tuan with
commentary by liu i-ming)".  i also have "the taoist i ching" which is
supposed to have commentary by liu i-ming, but i have no idea how much
overlap there is between all of these.

other books:
"taoism: the road to immortality" by john blofeld looks interesting,
but all i have is a 5 line advertisement to judge by . . .

richard wilhelm "the i ching" seems reasonable so far, but cleary
slams his translation of "the secret of the golden flower" repeatedly
in his intro to his version . . .  it seems like a better translation
than that by legge (which is based on wilhelm's version?  why are
there almost no direct to english translations of the i ching?) but
i tried to read that version when i was about 13 and was offended by
something in it which i no longer recall, but have had no desire to
read it since.

"the portable dragon" by r.g.h. siu is a translation of the i ching
with illustrative quotes from western literature.

"the encyclopedia of eastern philosophy and religion"  it looks
interesting, but again i only have a 4 line advertisement to judge by. 

carol

From: [email-masked]
Newsgroups: soc.religion.eastern
Subject: Taoisminfo

	Well, at request, here is a quote from _Scholar_Warrior_ which I think
is fairly good at introducing Taoism as a beginning to learning what it
really is with a broad comprehention.

Begin quote:
	There are many styles of Taoism, for there have been hundreds of
masters in each century.  They have found varying but equally valid ways of
gaining their insight, and Taoism has evolved into an elaborate and sprawling
school.  It is a religion to some, a body of philosophy to others, or to many
people in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and much of the rest of Asia, simply a
conglomeration of superstitions.  But there are common elements.  When one
searches to the very core of Taoism, it is possible to see that Taoism is
eccentric, uninterested in dogma, and seldom concerned with deriving
authority from higher powers.  It is based on direct observation and relies
on pragmatic appeal when addressing its constituets.

End quote.

Begin quote (found later in book):
	Though some people think of Lao Tzu (6th century B.C.) [note:  That
date could be debated.  It is unknown whether the person even existed and if
he/she did, when that was.  Common lore tells of Lao Tzu as a man who lived
when Conficious was alive.  Of cource, it also tells us that his mother was
pregnant for eighty something years so that when he was born he was already
a wise old man.  I prefere to think of him as a contemperary of Conficious
'just because'.  Don't hold it against me :)] as the "founder" of Taoism,
this is not true.  His _Tao_Te_Ching_ is considered by many masters to be a
compilation of previous writings, and many of the concepts refer to already
well established ideas.  Lao Tzu did not write in a vacuum.  He clearly made
references to other writings and ideas and addressed himself to the social
problems of an already advanced civilization.  Taoism began much earlier than
Lao Tzu, and has an unbroken history through his time and into ours.
	Taoists are empirical.  They test their beleifs in the world, and
everything they beleive is up for questioning and reexamination at any time.
Such a lack of absolute assertion delights its adherents and confuses those
who require spirituality to be authoritive and based on beleifs in
reincarnation, an afterlife, and powerful gods.  A quick examination will
reveal that Taoism cares little for these elements and does not need them to
justify its point of view.

End quote.

Begin another quote that is even later:
	Some Taoists even turned this fierce skepticism toward the gods them-
selves.  You may find this strange, because there are many Taoist temples
that shelter a bewildering pantheon of gilded and brightly clothed figures.
But though there are gods in temples, and although religious activities
are one of the obligations of Taoists, the development of elaborate temples
was an almost political movement meant to help Taoism survive against
the attractiveness of Buddhism and Islam.  In their own private thoughts,
Taoists relized that there was much more to cosmology than a bureaucratic
pantheon in the sky:  the Tao preceded all things, and it was Tao that gave
birth to even the gods, not vice versa.
End quote.

	Sorry if this stop and go is annoying, but I can't do too much typing
at a time.  As a result, a quote/post on Tao will be delayed until later
because whenever someone asks about Taoism it always ends up as a attempt
to explain the Tao even though its not real critical.  *shrug*
						Gotta clean some dishes,
						Wierd

From: [email-masked]
Newsgroups: soc.religion.eastern
Subject: Re: Taoisminfo

930529

Oh, quoting books on taoism!  How fun!  Ok.  My turn:

-------- quote begins-----

The value of *Tao* lies in its power to reconcile opposites on a higher
level of consciousness.  It is symbolically expressed as light in Taoism.
To reconcile the polarities in order to achieve a balanced way of living
and a higher integration is the endeavor of psychotherapy.  Jung found
out that the method he had applied for years in his practice coincided
with the wise teaching of the ancient Taoists.  He says:

'My experience in my practice has been such as to reveal
to me a quite new and unexpected approach to Eastern
wisdom.  But it must be well understood that I did not
have a starting point, a more or less adequate knowledge
of Chinese philosophy.... It is only later that my
professional experiences have shown me that in my technique
I had been unconsciously led along the secret way which for
centuries has been the preoccupation of the best minds of
the East.' 
[_The Secret of the Golden Flower_, Wilhelm/Baynes, 95-6]

What is this preoccupation of the Eastern mind?  Jung puts it thus:

'Because the things of the inner world influence us all the
more powerfully for being unconscious it is essential for
anyone who intends to make progress in self-culture to
objectivate the effects of the anima and then try to understand
what contents underlie those effects.  In this way he
adapts to, and is protected against, the invisible.  No
adaptation can result without concessions to both worlds.

'From a consideration of the claims of the inner and
out worlds, or rather, from the conflicts between them,
the possible and the necessary follows.  Unfortunately
our Western mind, lacking all culture in this respect,
has never yet devised a concept, not even a name, for the
*union of opposites through the middle path*, that most
fundamental item of inward experience, which could
respectably be set against the Chinese concept of Tao.'
[_Collected Works_, C.G. Jung, Vol. III,...p. 203]

Never before has Chinese Taoism been so well explained in the light of
modern psychology and sincerely pursued as a way to elevate man's
mental activities and alleviate his sufferings.  Thus the mystery of
the age-old Eastern wisdom, which brings out the best in man, is no
longer a mystery but simply a way to wholesome and harmonious living.

------------------ quote ends

>From _Creativity and Taoism; A Study of Chinese Philosophy, Art, and
      Poetry_, by Chang Chung-yuan, Harper and Row, 1963; pages 5-6.

I think that 'defining tao' should be the first part of an attempt
to explain taoism.  Why?  Because then the person will contemplate the
most central Mystery of mysteries.  What is written is not important.
For me, the central element of my life and my taoism is to ask 'what
is tao?'

Tyagi tzu

From: [email-masked]
Newsgroups: soc.religion.eastern
Subject: Re: Taoisminfo

In article <[email-masked]>, [email-masked] writes:
>930529
>Oh, quoting books on taoism!  How fun!  Ok.  My turn:
>
	Gee, I started something  :)
[snip]
>the possible and the necessary follows.  Unfortunately
>our Western mind, lacking all culture in this respect,
>has never yet devised a concept, not even a name, for the
>*union of opposites through the middle path*, that most
>fundamental item of inward experience, which could
>respectably be set against the Chinese concept of Tao.'
>[_Collected Works_, C.G. Jung, Vol. III,...p. 203]
>

	Actually, you're getting into yin/yang here.  Tao is more and less than
this, but Yin/Yang is much closer.  Yin and Yang are the primal forces both
equal and powerful.  In a symbol, they appear similiar to 2 fish who twist
themselves into a circle head to tail.  One is white with a black eye and the
other is black with a white eye.  When you look at it, you may also realize
that it is olny after one side defeets the other and takes full control that it
losses.  The other side will recover. Essencially, that is to say that without
the opposite, not only could something not be defined as well, but it would
loose it power.  Imagin the 1960s in the USA.  Flower children and anit-war
protests and the like, but as soon as the Vietnom war ended, the movement died
out.  In destroying what a movement or group is opposed to, they destroy their
own 'fuel'.

>I think that 'defining tao' should be the first part of an attempt
>to explain taoism.  Why?  Because then the person will contemplate the
>most central Mystery of mysteries.  What is written is not important.
>For me, the central element of my life and my taoism is to ask 'what
>is tao?'

	What about Pu?

>Tyagi tzu
	Why do you use "tzu"?

						Weird

From: [email-masked]
Newsgroups: soc.religion.eastern
Subject: more on Taoism by Weird

	Well, TYPED by me anyway...  :-I  Here is more quoting from _Scholar_
_Warrior_ by Deng Ming-Dao.

TAO, THE DARK MYSTERY

The early sages postulate Tao as the ultimate nature of all things, and
this is still the best starting point for understanding Taoist philosophy.
Tao is of a scope more vast than our imaginations can conceive.  It is in the
space between heaven and earth, is heavan and earth itself.  It preceded all
things and will last far beyond the disintegration of our world.  It is as
close to absolute and eternal as we can imagine.

	We may speculate about the Tao, give it elaborate descriptions, but
the images we employ are merely metaphors.  The ultimate nature of Tao
itself is not possible for us to grasp because our minds are inherently
dualistic.  We are children of beauty and ugliness;  we dwell in the midst of
contrasts and extremes.  When given the choice between the nameless and
the nameable, we gravitate toward what we can identify.  The Tao, how-
ever, is both nameless (nonbeing) and named (being).  Within the depths of
Tao, existance and nonexistance come together;  no distinctions exist.
Time becomes circular and even irrelivant.  Our minds cannot function in
such a realm.  We cannot see where there is no contrast.  We cannot know
white without black, upper without lower, left without right.  In Tao, both
white and black stand in the same place.  This is why Tao is so elusive,
indescribable, nameless-strangely colorless and flavorless.

	It is precisely this confounding area where duality is neutralized that
Taoism most enjoys.  Taoists call this paradoxical mystery the nameless.
They say it is the nameless that gives birth to the named (meaning all
things conceivable, hence all things dualistic).  All things come from Tao
the nondualistic.  Tao gave birth to us, surrounds us, nutures us, supports
us.  It is the mother of all life, not in the sence of some mythical goddes,
but as the summstion of all the life-giving processes in the universe.
The entire universe, with its explosions, its deaths and births of stars, its
evolution, its expansion and contraction-all things from the most distant
points in infinity to the very point of our own hearts share Tao as mother.

	Tao is not a substance.  It is all substances.  Tao is not space, but 
it encompasses all spaces.  Nothing changes or moves without Tao.  Tao is
something active, moving.  Tao is process, a tremendous expansion and
contraction, a constant tide between existance and nonexistance.  Yet,
though it moves, its movement is not something tangible like the wind.
With the wind, we can say that there is something there.  We can feel the
breeze; we can examine the dust particles in the stream of air; we can
measure changes in temperature.  Nor is the movement of Tao exactly like
water.  We can touch the cool liquid, see the glimmering stream, measure the
volume of its flow.  But Tao is much more than that.

	Sorry, but any more may be more than my account on this mainframe can
handle.  Part two to come in a few days (if I'm not out of time
allotment by then).  This will in fact probibly be 4 or 5 parts.  I will TRY
to include the whole section from the book that way.  ;)

							Weird

From: [email-masked]
Newsgroups: soc.religion.eastern
Subject: Re: Tao [was Re: more on Taoism by Weird]

Weird writes:
> ... our minds are inherently dualistic.

	If that is so [one is not saying that it is not so
	or it is so], then even saying Tao is the same as saying not-Tao.
	What then can be said about it?
	
	Having said this, one can then talk about Tao 
	                  [in the dualistic realm.]
	
	[which is, clearly, the same as: "Not-having not-said not-this,
	 not-one not-can not-then not-talk not-about not-Tao
		          [not-in not-the non-dualistic not-realm.]"

	 One doesn't understand what this means, of course, which
	 (in the dualistic world) is exactly the same as saying that
	 one understands it.]
	
	This illustrates, one hopes, the difficulty with understanding.
	
	This does not illustrate, the simplicity of not-understanding,
	however.
	
	Nothing can!
	Or everything can!
	
	So one "understands" statements such as:
	
> The Tao, however, is both nameless (nonbeing) and named (being).
> Tao is not a substance.  It is all substances.
> Tao is not space, [I]t encompasses all spaces.

	But, one does not "understand" statements such as:
	
> TAO, THE DARK MYSTERY

	TAO [which here is the same as not-Tao], The Obvious Light

> it is the space between heaven and earth, is heavan and earth itself.

	Heaven === not-heaven
	Earth  === not-earth
	Space  === not-space.
	
> It preceded all things and will last far beyond the disintegration of
> our world.

	Who [of this dualistic world -
	     is there a who outside this dualistic world?],
	can say anything about what "preceded all things" and
        what "lasts beyond the disintegration of our world?"

> It is as close to absolute and eternal as we can imagine.

	Can the Absolute be known outside of Absolute?
	How can it be said (then) and by whom that:
	What is close to Absolute and what is far?
	What is eternal and what is not?
	What is imagination and what is not?

> We may speculate about the Tao, give it elaborate descriptions, but
> the images we employ are merely metaphors.

	How can the dual system "speculate" about something that is not
	available to the system?
	How can the eye see itself?
	
> ... Within the depths of Tao, existance and nonexistance come together;

	Can Tao be known?
	How to know its depths?
	Who can say anything about the depths of Tao?
	About existence or nonexistence?
	About there coming together?
	Are they separate?
	Is anything separate from Tao?
	Could it be that Tao is All That Is?

> Time becomes circular and even irrelivant.

	Where is time relevant?
	
> Our minds cannot function in such a realm.

	What realm?
	Who will tell us about that realm?
	Is there a mind in that realm?

	
	All That Is is!
	
	[Without our saying so. Isn't it?]

	Who knows:
	if it is
	or it is not?
	if it is one
	or it is many?
	if it has name
	or it has no name?

	Therefore,
	call it by Tao
	or any other name,
	or no name,
	it would be
	equally	right
	or
	equally wrong!

	
---raj

From: [email-masked]
Newsgroups: soc.religion.eastern
Subject: More taoism

930601

Weird quotes me and writes (in alt.magick, which I followup here):

|>the possible and the necessary follows.  Unfortunately
|>our Western mind, lacking all culture in this respect,
|>has never yet devised a concept, not even a name, for the
|>*union of opposites through the middle path*, that most
|>fundamental item of inward experience, which could
|>respectably be set against the Chinese concept of Tao.'
|>[_Collected Works_, C.G. Jung, Vol. III,...p. 203]
|
|
|	
|Actually, you're getting into yin/yang here.  Tao is more and less than
|this, but Yin/Yang is much closer.  Yin and Yang are the primal forces both
|equal and powerful.  

I've heard that yin is not powerful at all, that she is passive, receptive
and quite weak.  Is this not true?

|In a symbol, they appear similiar to 2 fish who twist
|themselves into a circle head to tail.  One is white with a black eye and the
|other is black with a white eye.  When you look at it, you may also realize
|that it is olny after one side defeets the other and takes full control that i
|it
|losses.  The other side will recover. Essencially, that is to say that without
|the opposite, not only could something not be defined as well, but it would
|loose it power.  

Can one 'side' ever really 'defeat' another?  Ought we choose now and be sure
that yin will never be defeated by the powerful yang?

|Imagin the 1960s in the USA.  Flower children and anit-war
|protests and the like, but as soon as the Vietnom war ended, the movement died
|out.  In destroying what a movement or group is opposed to, they destroy their
|own 'fuel'.

Interesting.  I've seen flower-children, anti-war activists and hippies
ever since I was born (in 1961).  No let up, though the VISIBILITY has
died down since that conflict ended (the war continues by the way).

|>I think that 'defining tao' should be the first part of an attempt
|>to explain taoism.  Why?  Because then the person will contemplate the
|>most central Mystery of mysteries.  What is written is not important.
|>For me, the central element of my life and my taoism is to ask 'what
|>is tao?'
|
|What about Pu?

Don't remember this if I've ever come across is.  What about it?  Please
explain.

|>Tyagi tzu
|	
|Why do you use "tzu"?

Why is there air?

Tyagi tzu

From: [email-masked] (Carol Wang)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.eastern
Subject: Re: More taoism

[reformated -a]

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] writes:
+Weird quotes me and writes (in alt.magick, which I followup here):
+|>the possible and the necessary follows.  Unfortunately
+|>our Western mind, lacking all culture in this respect,
+|>has never yet devised a concept, not even a name, for the
+|>*union of opposites through the middle path*, that most
+|>fundamental item of inward experience, which could
+|>respectably be set against the Chinese concept of Tao.'
+|>[_Collected Works_, C.G. Jung, Vol. III,...p. 203]
+|Actually, you're getting into yin/yang here.  Tao is more and less than
+|this, but Yin/Yang is much closer.  Yin and Yang are the primal forces both
+|equal and powerful.  
+
+I've heard that yin is not powerful at all, that she is passive, receptive
+and quite weak.  Is this not true?

no, yes, and no.  8)  a while back i posted a query to this group
about a better description of the female principle, yin, which i will
collate and post to the group someday after i finish my thesis.  yin
is no more passive than a river as it flows over and around rocks, no
more silent than a quiet night.  yin is not active, direct, or
confrontational like yang, but it is not stagnant, it is not entirely
passive. [45] "movement overcomes cold.  stillness overcomes heat.
stillness and tranquility set things in order in the universe."

+|In a symbol, they appear similiar to 2 fish who twist
+|themselves into a circle head to tail.  One is white with a black eye and the
+|other is black with a white eye.  When you look at it, you may also realize
+|that it is olny after one side defeets the other and takes full control that it
+|losses.  The other side will recover. Essencially, that is to say that without
+|the opposite, not only could something not be defined as well, but it would
+|loose it power.  
+
+Can one 'side' ever really 'defeat' another?  Ought we choose now and be sure
+that yin will never be defeated by the powerful yang?

?  i don't understand this stuff about "defeat".  yin and yang cannot
exist without each other.  there is no defeating about it and even
less point in choosing sides.  don't worry about the yin since [36]
"that which shrinks must first expand.  that which fails must first be
strong.  that which is cast down must first be raised.  before
receiving there must be giving.  this is called perception of the
nature of things.  soft and weak overcome hard and strong."

+|>I think that 'defining tao' should be the first part of an attempt
+|>to explain taoism.  Why?  Because then the person will contemplate the
+|>you cannot _define_ Tao.  this is one of the main points of taoist ideas.
+|>most central Mystery of mysteries.  What is written is not important.
+|>For me, the central element of my life and my taoism is to ask 'what
+|>is tao?'

i think the appropriate answer to this is "everything and nothing".  8)

carol

From: [email-masked]
Newsgroups: soc.religion.eastern
Subject: Re: More taoism

In article <[email-masked]>, [email-masked] writes:
>I've heard that yin is not powerful at all, that she is passive, receptive
>and quite weak.  Is this not true?

	Is there not strength in yelding?
Daotejing chapter 43:

The softest, most pliable thing in the world runs roughshod over the firmest
thing in the world.
That which has no substance gets into that which has no spaces or cracks.
I therefor know that there is benefit in taking no action.
The wordless teaching, the benefit of taking no action-
Few in the world can realize these!

	If you have trouble understanding what I've quoted, read it with water
and rocks in mind.

>|In a symbol, they appear similiar to 2 fish who twist
>|themselves into a circle head to tail.  One is white with a black eye and the
>|other is black with a white eye.  When you look at it, you may also realize
>|that it is olny after one side defeets the other and takes full control that i
>|it
>|losses.  The other side will recover. Essencially, that is to say that without
>|the opposite, not only could something not be defined as well, but it would
>|loose it power.  
>
>Can one 'side' ever really 'defeat' another?  Ought we choose now and be sure
>that yin will never be defeated by the powerful yang?

	Were Yang to accomplish such an imposibility, it would 'go the way of
the dinosaurs' too.  If it 'defeats' Yin, what then would its purpose be?  If
it had none, would it 'fall' thus allowing Yin to return?

>|Imagin the 1960s in the USA.  Flower children and anit-war
>|protests and the like, but as soon as the Vietnom war ended, the movement died
>|out.  In destroying what a movement or group is opposed to, they destroy their
>|own 'fuel'.
>
>Interesting.  I've seen flower-children, anti-war activists and hippies
>ever since I was born (in 1961).  No let up, though the VISIBILITY has
>died down since that conflict ended (the war continues by the way).

	Yes, an establishment (even an anti-establishment establishment) will
continue in some form after its "fall".  However, didn't you just back up my
statement?  The flower-childern and such are still around (I don't mean to
sound as if I'm talking down at such a life) mostly because some people grew up
like that, and some even raised kids like that.  What I ment is the movement
behind it (originally).  There is no Vietnam War (according to the media, or as
I like to think of it, the what-you-care-about-today club) to fuel the movement
into large groups and even miniscul acceptance.  The rebeliousness against
propriety is expected but not allowed out side of certain bounds and is not
looked at kindly (try to get a job as a long haired man).  This way of dealing
with those who are still, or grew up as, 'hippies' et al is an excelent example
of the power of yeilding too.  The big thrust, or original group, was greatly
deminished when there wasn't a counterpoint to oppose (Yang dies without Yin). 
The rest are delt some allowences, but are not given a foothold (yeild and the
group has nothing to fight... a punch that finds nothing but a body that falls
away behind its push in order to absorb the energy... "look, I don't care what 
you say, I'm just not hiring you because I don't think that you'd work out. 
Where's the reason to call the Better Buisness Buro?" [the long hair thing])

>|>I think that 'defining tao' should be the first part of an attempt
>|>to explain taoism.  Why?  Because then the person will contemplate the
>|>most central Mystery of mysteries.  What is written is not important.
>|>For me, the central element of my life and my taoism is to ask 'what
>|>is tao?'
>|
>|What about Pu?
>
>Don't remember this if I've ever come across is.  What about it?  Please
>explain.

	Have you heard of the uncarved block?  Its sort of a unspoilled/natural
nature of an item/person/place.  Ironicly, Winny the *Pooh* is a good example
of *Pu*.   [pun]

>|>Tyagi tzu
>|	
>|Why do you use "tzu"?
>
>Why is there air?

	Just wondering if you had a reason...  Oh, and there's air because of
gravity and the tempurature at sea level and the density of varrious
chemicals.....

							Weird

From: [email-masked]
Newsgroups: soc.religion.eastern
Subject: Re: Tao [was Re: more on Taoism by Weird]

In article <[email-masked]>, [email-masked] writes:
>Weird writes:
> 
>> ... our minds are inherently dualistic.
>
>	If that is so [one is not saying that it is not so
>	or it is so], then even saying Tao is the same as saying not-Tao.
>	What then can be said about it?

>> The Tao, however, is both nameless (nonbeing) and named (being).
>> Tao is not a substance.  It is all substances.
>> Tao is not space, [I]t encompasses all spaces.
>
>	But, one does not "understand" statements such as:
>	
>> TAO, THE DARK MYSTERY
>
>	TAO [which here is the same as not-Tao], The Obvious Light
                         
	Interesting idea....  True too.  In this instance, I think that the
author was using this phrasing because of how humans tend to consider Tao.  Tao
cannot be concidered within the dualistic realm.  It is everything and its
opposite (ruffly speaking)
>> it is the space between heaven and earth, is heavan and earth itself.
>
>	Heaven === not-heaven
>	Earth  === not-earth
>	Space  === not-space.
>	

	This set of conclusions is an excellent example of why Tao can;t be
considered within the realm of logic.  Of course, to many it would seem the
same 'chickening-out' as statements like "God just always was... I know that
may be hard for you to grasp [said condenceningly] but that's how it is. 
Nothing made him because nothing is his better."  *chuckle*  gee, my own
thoughts seem as senceless as those that I criticize.  *shrug*  Ah, the
interesting wonders of being Taoist.  We're a paradoxal bunch, aren't we?

>> It is as close to absolute and eternal as we can imagine.
>
>	Can the Absolute be known outside of Absolute?
>	How can it be said (then) and by whom that:
>	What is close to Absolute and what is far?
>	What is eternal and what is not?
>	What is imagination and what is not?
>

	Good and valid questions.  I can't answer them all right now
unfortunatly.  Until this coming September [mid sept, really] I will be on this
group of very limited amounts of time.  However, consider this example in the
contemplation of absolute.
Set of all natural numbers {1, 2, 3, 4, 5...}
Set of all natural square numbers {1, 4, 9, 16, 25...}
	Both sets have an infinite number of elements, yet one has infinitly
fewer elements!  Sorry, but being a Taoist AND a math major.... *shrug*  let's
just say that this is a big deal to me.  Its like saying that infinity minus
infinity equals infinity!  Wow!  Crazy hu?  Actually, they're different
infinities, one of which is infinitly smaller than the other.  *Scratching my
head*  Who needs chemicals to get mind-bogglingly confused out of reality!
	;)

	So, maybe you should ask if you know enough about absoluteness to make
any statments on it...  But thank you for something to concider in exchange.

>> We may speculate about the Tao, give it elaborate descriptions, but
>> the images we employ are merely metaphors.
>
>	How can the dual system "speculate" about something that is not
>	available to the system?
>	How can the eye see itself?

	With a mirror...?

>> ... Within the depths of Tao, existance and nonexistance come together;
>
>	Can Tao be known?
	"The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao."  You could 'know'
_a_ Tao (yes, we each have a personal Tao), but you couldn't know the eternal
Tao in your current state (I'm assuming that you're human and certain other
things of course...).

[a few ?s deleted]
>	Could it be that Tao is All That Is?
	
	Yes, it could be.  As Valentine Micheal Smith might say, "Thou art god."

>
>> Time becomes circular and even irrelivant.
>
>	Where is time relevant?
>	
>> Our minds cannot function in such a realm.
>
>	What realm?
>	Who will tell us about that realm?
>	Is there a mind in that realm?

	Excelently Taoist ?s!!	

>	Who knows:
>	if it is
>	or it is not?
>	if it is one
>	or it is many?
>	if it has name
>	or it has no name?
>
>	Therefore,
>	call it by Tao
>	or any other name,
>	or no name,
>	it would be
>	equally	right
>	or
>	equally wrong!

	Excellent!!!  You seem to be Taoist yourself.  Is this a 'poem' [for
lack of a better word] that you wrote or a quote?

>---raj
							Weird

From: [email-masked] (Ava Rosenblum)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.eastern
Subject: Re: More taoism

In article <[email-masked]>, [email-masked] writes...
>930601
>I've heard that yin is not powerful at all, that she is passive, receptive
>and quite weak.  Is this not true?

This depends upon how you define your terms such as 'strong' and 'weak' i.e.
from a masculinist or feminist perspective. My reading of Buddhism is that it
is quite consistent with feminist reformulations of such terms. That is,
'receptive' is not weak unless there is a copresent force that would define it
as such. And the meaning of 'passive'? It is difficult to define such terms in
isolation from a social context. 

> Essencially, that is to say that without
>|the opposite, not only could something not be defined as well, but it would
>|loose it power.  

Here you are perfectly capturing the essence of western reasoning. But I have
doubts as to any universal truth this mode of reasoning posits.

>Can one 'side' ever really 'defeat' another?  Ought we choose now and be sure
>that yin will never be defeated by the powerful yang?

Indeed I think we should, we have to, choose.

Ava

From: [email-masked] (Lorenzo Farris)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.eastern
Subject: Re: More taoism

[email-masked] (Ava Rosenblum) writes:

>In article <[email-masked]>, [email-masked] writes...
>>930601

>>Can one 'side' ever really 'defeat' another?  Ought we choose now and be sure
>>that yin will never be defeated by the powerful yang?

>Indeed I think we should, we have to, choose.

>Ava

Choose what? Between yin and yang? How can that be possible? They
cannot be one without the other.

However, if you refer to 'choosing sides' in a human dispute it is
no longer a simple polarity. To describe any human dispute in 
terms of two 'sides' is always an over simplification. We live
in at least four dimensions, not one. Issues are always in color,
never black and white.

		-Layman Lorenzo
-- 
As if it really mattered!               /  Lorenzo Farris                   
                                        /  [email-masked] 

From: [email-masked] (Lorenzo Farris)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.eastern
Subject: Re: More taoism

[email-masked] writes:
(sorry, I deleted the reference to the person to whom Tyagi
responds ;-(

>I've heard that yin is not powerful at all, that she is passive, receptive
>and quite weak.  Is this not true?

This seems an unusual characterization. Receptive perhaps. However,
any one who has seen aikido practiced knows that yin is by no means
weak. Yang can be stiff and brittle, and this is certainly weak.
Weak and strong are given by a balance of various elements. Any
extreme will tend to display *some* form of weakness.

>|In a symbol, they appear similiar to 2 fish who twist
>|themselves into a circle head to tail.  One is white with a black eye and the
>|other is black with a white eye.  When you look at it, you may also realize
>|that it is olny after one side defeets the other and takes full control that i
>|it
>|losses.  The other side will recover. Essencially, that is to say that without
>|the opposite, not only could something not be defined as well, but it would
>|loose it power.  

>Can one 'side' ever really 'defeat' another?  Ought we choose now and be sure
>that yin will never be defeated by the powerful yang?

I think perhaps that defeat is not the right word here. Becomes more 
manifest might be a better phrase. Yin and yang are inseparable. It
is meaningless to talk of yang without yin. They can only exist as
a dualism, a polarity.

>|>I think that 'defining tao' should be the first part of an attempt
>|>to explain taoism.  Why?  Because then the person will contemplate the
>|>most central Mystery of mysteries.  What is written is not important.
>|>For me, the central element of my life and my taoism is to ask 'what
>|>is tao?'
>|
>|What about Pu?

'Defining Tao?'! Explain taoism?! Good luck. Certainly I agree that
what is written, what can be written, what can be said about it, is
not only unimportant, but can easily deceive.

>|>Tyagi tzu
>|	
>|Why do you use "tzu"?

>Why is there air?
Because nature abhors a vacuum. ;-)

>Tyagi tzu

		-Layman Lorenzo-- 
As if it really mattered!               /  Lorenzo Farris                   
                                        /  [email-masked] 

From: [email-masked] (Ava Rosenblum)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.eastern
Subject: Re: More taoism

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] writes:
>930601
>
>Weird quotes me and writes (in alt.magick, which I followup here):
>
>|>Unfortunately
>|>our Western mind, lacking all culture in this respect,
>|>has never yet devised a concept, not even a name, for the
>|>*union of opposites through the middle path*, that most
>|>fundamental item of inward experience, which could
>|>respectably be set against the Chinese concept of Tao.'
>|>[_Collected Works_, C.G. Jung, Vol. III,...p. 203]

Actually, Hegel's notion of dialectics is similar to this: the idea that
thesis and anti-thesis lead to synthesis. Marx got his 'capitalism->socialism->
communism' formulation based upon this Hegelian notion that synthesis
occurs from the negation of opposites. Any hegel experts out there want
to comment on this? 

Ava

From: [email-masked] (Ava Rosenblum)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.eastern
Subject: Re: More taoism

In article <[email-masked]>, [email-masked] (Lorenzo Farris) writes...
>[email-masked] (Ava Rosenblum) writes:
> 
>>In article <[email-masked]>, [email-masked] writes...
>>>930601
> 
>>>Can one 'side' ever really 'defeat' another?  Ought we choose now and be sure
>>>that yin will never be defeated by the powerful yang?
> 
>>Indeed I think we should, we have to, choose.
> 
>
> 
>Choose what? Between yin and yang? How can that be possible? They
>cannot be one without the other.

This discussion is contexted within a binary oppositional conceptual framework:
yin and yang. Within this context, we are discussing two 'principles.' These
principles cannot be isolated from praxis -- human action. In this vein, there
is always choice regarding which principle we defer to as we act. And this
relationality you speak of (not being able to know one without the other) is
quite correct, but not just for 'yin' and 'yang.' This is the way we 'know' 
in western culture. The Tibbetan Buddhist dialectic also embraces this
dualistic reasoning, however, in an attempt to transcend it.

>However, if you refer to 'choosing sides' in a human dispute it is
>no longer a simple polarity. To describe any human dispute in 
>terms of two 'sides' is always an over simplification. We live
>in at least four dimensions, not one. Issues are always in color,
>never black and white.

Ofcourse this is the case. Again, we are discussing a conceptual schema that is
based in binary oppositional thinking.

Ava

From: [email-masked]
Newsgroups: soc.religion.eastern
Subject: Re: More taoism

[The "rule" about included lines is coded into inews, my
 newsposter because each internet post costs a significant
 amount of taxpayer money, and reducing the quoted material
 is a reasonable way to decrease costs.  However, you should
 try to attribute any quoted material to the correct person :)
 --Toshi]

In article <[email-masked]>, [email-masked] (Ava Rosenblum) writes:
>>Weird quotes me and writes (in alt.magick, which I followup here):   

>>|>Unfortunately

[snip]

>>|>[_Collected Works_, C.G. Jung, Vol. III,...p. 203]      

[snip]                                      

>Ava

	I don't know if this will make it to posting because of the rule about
more written lines than quoted lines, but I'd like to point out that all this
posting/reposting is really getting to me.  If you re-post something, please
remove lines such as:

"Weird quotes me...."

when they no longer apply.  I never wrote a quote of Mr. Jung.  That (I think)
was Tygi or something to that effect (sorry if I butchered the name).

							Weird

From: [email-masked] (Ava Rosenblum)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.eastern
Subject: "Lovers Find What Sages Seek"

I wanted to share a passage from _The Tao of Relationships_ by Grigg
(p.203). It rings very true and is really beautiful, to me.

	        _Lovers Find What Sages Seek_

	Together in passion, man and woman go beyond each other to the
	moving stillness beyond self. Opposites resolve. Man and woman
	are no more. In the thoughtless primal that is the Tao, one and
	two are none at all.

	Lovers find what sages seek. Body and mind disappear. Division
	and separation end. And the beginning that is all, overcomes the
	thinking that is some.

	Those who touch all do not return to some the same.

Ava

From: [email-masked]
Newsgroups: soc.religion.eastern
Subject: Re: "Lovers Find What Sages Seek"

Ava writes [the beautiful passage from "The Tao of Relationships"]:
> 	        _Lovers Find What Sages Seek_

		Lovers seek
		love.
		Sages seek not:
		neither love
		nor its expressions
		nor its fulfillment.
		
		Lovers seek passion
		Sages are beyond
		passion or
		its opposite: dispassion.
		
		What is a man?
		or a woman?
		Do they exist
		outside of thoughts?
		
		Isn't the self
		only the "moving"
		part of Tao?
		What then is beyond?
		Who is there to say?
		To whom? and how?
		
		Body and mind?
		Beginning and end?
	        Division and Separation?
		All or none?
		
		All is That
		The thoughtless primal
		that is the Tao,
		one and	two are not at all.

---raj

From: [email-masked]
To: [email-masked] (Alan Fleming)
Subject: Re: translations

[email-masked] (Alan Fleming) writes:
> I guess this is a catch-22, but my understanding of Taoism is a bit 
> anti-intellectual anyway.  (Obviously, the way I've gotten this impression
> is through books, talks and excercises so all this could have suffered
> some flaw in translation from the earlier originals.)

	I agree that Taoism isn't an intellectual exercise. But that's
not the same as anti-intellectual.
	An anti-intellectual attitude fails to appreciate the value
and use of the intellect, which is very un-Taoist. The intellect is a
useful and vital tool in following the Tao.

>  However, given that
> this is my view of Taoism, then your statement seems the exact opposite of
> how Taoism should be studied.  Intellectual excercises do nothing but
> hamper the free flow of yourself and the Tao.

	Look at it this way - unless we think about what we're doing,
we just end up doing what previous experience has conditioned us to
do. We aren't really free, because we are constrained by social
programming, biological compulsions, and whatever other baggage we've
picked up over the course of life.
	We carry around our little prejudices, and measure everything
by those standards. Folks who study Taoism can agree on this. But why
are intellectual prejudices different personality prejudices?

>  I personally find Tai Chi,
> meditation

	Is the meditative state of mind different from everyday state
of mind? If you did not meditate, would you know what mental calmness
was?
	When you practice Taijiquan, there are principles which must
be followed. If you did not have a teacher, then you would doing Taiji
incorrectly. Without some sort of feedback, you wouldn't see where you
have tension, where your posture is incorrect and where alignments are
incorrect.
	Freedom is something which takes rigor and hardwork to
achieve. I think that the closing section of Wolfe Leowenthal's
_There_Are_No_Secrets_ makes the point very eloquently.

> the very act of interpreting them is flawed.  Based on the wide variation
> of translations available, I feel the text is intentionally vague enough
> that its importance is through the reader's interpretation and understanding
> rather than some proper scientific formula.

	This will probably sound pretentious, but you are creating a
dualism between scholarship and personal exploration, and you've
parked me on the scholarship side of the line. This is the kind of
non-Taoist intellect which so many Taoists exhibit.
	I asserted that scholarship was necessary, I never said that
it was sufficient.
	I spend quite a bit of time practicing Taijiquan and
meditating. I also spend time on "intellectual" things like reading
books on Taoism and trying understand the mindset of the folks who
wrote this stuff.

Stephen Chan		[email-masked]	|Transarc Corporation
Facilities Weeny	(412)338-6996		|707 Grant St
Usenet Wannabee				       	|Pittsburgh, PA 15219

From: [email-masked] (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Subject: Re: Lao-tse, and Pooh too

[email-masked] (William R. Williams) writes:
>     Well, it's my understanding that the traditional debate
>between the two philosophies is along individual/society lines.
>Specifically, Taoism is directed more at an individual's 
>freedom, while confucianism stresses the importance of subjugating
>one's own needs to those of the state and society.  As a fierce
>believer in individual liberties, I fall in with Taoism.
 
But the Taoists weren't fierce believers, and the opposition of the free
individual and his needs to society and the state was characteristic of
neither philosophy.  The Taoists didn't believe in opposing anything,
and certainly didn't believe in giving primacy to the needs of the
individual:
 
"The reason the universe is everlasting is that it does not live for
Self.  Therefore it can long endure.  Therefore the Sage puts himself
last [ . . . ]" (_Tao Te Ching_ i, 7, trans. Lin Yutang).
 
It's true that there are stories in which Chuangtse suggests an
opposition between individual and social interests (like the story in
"Autumn Floods" in which he says he would rather be like the tortoise
wagging its tail in the mud than be burdened with high public office). 
I don't think that shows he accepts such an opposition, though, any more
than he accepts the other oppositions that he turns into paradoxes.  As
is said in "A Happy Excursion", "The perfect man ignores self; the
divine man ignores achievement, the true sage ignores reputation."
 
Confucius viewed man as essentially a social being and society as part
of the universal order of things.  So a man realizes what he really is
by being a good man.  That view of human nature was mostly implicit in
Confucius, but became more explicit in his follower Mencius:
 
"A gentleman differs from other men in that he retains his heart.  A
gentleman retains his heart by means of benevolence and the rites."
(_Mencius_ iv.b.28, trans. D.C. Lau)  Elsewhere, Mencius refers to the
heart a gentleman retains but bad men lose as the "original heart" or
"true heart".   (See vi.a.8, 10 and 11)
 
>    In addition, Confucious was one of the driving forces behind
>the establishment of beaurocracies (no time to look it up) in 
>China [ . . . ]
 
I don't think so.  Confucius thought government was mostly a matter of
ethics and culture:
 
"Govern the people by regulations, keep order among them by
chastisements, and they will flee from you, and lose all self-respect. 
Govern them by moral force ("_te_"), keep order among them by ritual
("_li_") and they will keep their self-respect and come to you of their
own accord."  (_Analects ii, 3, trans. Arthur Waley)
 
His ideal member of the governing class was far from a bureaucrat or
careerist:
 
"A gentleman is not an implement." (ii, 12)
 
"He who seeks only coarse food to eat, water to drink and bent arm for
pillow, will without looking for it find happiness to boot." (vii, 15)
 
>    Basically, my challenge to Confucians and Devil's Advocates
>out there is to show that respect for the government and society
>is more important than defense of personal liberties.
 
Confucius certainly didn't think that all actual governments were worthy
of respect.  He did think that respect for social order, which includes
government, is part of what makes us human, and I suppose he would have
thought that a conception of personal liberties that is inconsistent
with such respect is a conception that doesn't make any sense.  A more
practical point is that personal liberties and many other social goods
can't exist without a social order that is generally respected.  Since
respect for social order is a precondition for personal liberties and
other goods as well, it makes sense to say that it is more important
than personal liberties.
-- 
Jim Kalb ([email-masked])		"Who lives without folly is not so wise 
				 as he thinks."  (La Rochefoucauld)

From: [email-masked]
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Stephen Mitchell's _Tao Te Ching_ (Was Re: Taoist Churches? )
Date: Sun, 15 Aug 93 17:08:52 -0400

>I am learning what a few of my colleagues from Buddha-L know 
>about Taoism and immensely enjoying another round of that 
>ever-popular scholarly sport "What is Taoism?"

There are two things one sees very frequently mentioned on the net 
by people who have absolutely no idea what they are talking about:
the first is Zen, and the second is the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
I'm going to blame LW for the following opinion of mine, though, and
leave it to posterity to see if it's legitimate: The question "What
is Taoism", or indeed any question of that form -- "what *is* (historical
phenomenon)" is pointless. It's a question over word-usage, not history.
When we ask it we think we are asking "what really happened" but instead 
all we are doing is arguing about what we are going to mean by the term 
which stands for our historical phenomenon.

Consequently I suggest to eveyone that they consider abandoning fruitless
lines of inquiry such as "what is Taoism", which at best are devilled by
a grammatical misunderstanding and at worst represent a repressed desire
to establish some outside authority for one's actions or thoughts. (Not
that I've seen any of that here, let me hasten to add.) More fruitful
questions are more specific, and place themselves within some sort of
context, for instance: "Was Lao Tzu a historical personage?" "What 
prior influences are to be found within the Tao Te Ching?" "What is the
relationship between Tai Chi Chuan and the literary tradition of Taoism?
The alchemical?" etc.

I hope that these thoughts will serve as an introduction to a followup
on my comments on Stephen Mitchell's _Tao Te Ching_. Alan Fox kindly
sent me a photocopy of a very negative review of it, and I pulled out
my (autographed :)) copy and examined it more closely than I had before.

Here is what is wrong with Stephen Mitchell: Aldous Huxley, to give an 
example of a learned and influential man, believed that all esoteric 
religions are essentially the same. Stephen Mitchell believes that all 
esoteric religions are essentially California Zen. Consequently he has 
rewritten the _Tao Te Ching_ as a California Zen text. This means: a
disappearance of the tension between Tao and Te, a blithe deletion or
rewriting of most of the practical comments upon statecraft, and an
annoying lot of familiar spiritual cliches.

It's still a very readable and enjoyable book, and if one accepts the
possible legitimacy of a California Zen text it's certainly a wonderful
example of such a thing. But I have to agree with the reviewer from
_the Nation_ that the packaging and notes are disingenuous in distracting 
one from the fact that this translation has its own particular axe to 
grind, no matter how mellow, and in not providing the reader with
a sense of how else one might read the text.

        Tom Price  | heaven and earth regard the 10,000    | [email-masked]
****************** | things as straw dogs and I feel fine  | ******************
		      ^
		       ------------ this line for instance
				    is mangled. Too cruel
				    for him, one supposes

From: [email-masked] (DanLusthaus)
Date: Tue, 17 Aug 93 13:52:54 -0400
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: Tao Tsang's western whereabouts are sought

>" [...]  I am seeking a very ancient work published by the Cheng-t'ung
>Emperor in 1436 titled "Tao Tsang" or the "Taoist Canon". I know there are
>two originals of this work, one in Peking and the other in Tokyo however I
>was hoping there might be a copy available in the western world somewhere !

The Tao-tsang ("Tao Treasury") is not "ancient", but was an attempt during
the Ming Dynasty to put together a Taoist canon (corpus of fundamental
texts) in imitation of the Buddhist canon, called in Chinese San-tsang
("three Treasures," from the sanskrit Tripitaka, "Three baskets").  The Tao
tsang does contain some ancient materials, and lots of other stuff as well,
including talismans and amulet designs, commentaries on all sorts of texts,
several versions of Lao Tzu, etc. etc.  It is about 100 volumes of compact
Chinese texts, much of it uncatalogued until this century (e.g., various
versions of the same text, under different titles, appeared in different
volumes, and so on). The French and Japanese have indexed it now, some
concordences to a few important texts have been published (mostly in
French).  Copies of Tao tsang can be found in most University libraries
that have good East Asian language collections. Both versions mentioned in
the note can be found at the University of Iowa, for example; U Penn has a
copy; etc.

Dan Lusthaus
[email-masked]
Bates College

Date:         Tue, 17 Aug 93 19:15:26 EDT
From: hal roth <[email-masked]>
Subject:      Tao-chia
To: [email-masked]

Dan Lusthaus' learned comments on Tao-chia reflect the accepted scholarly
wisdom on the topic that is gradually being challenged by several scholars
who are working through the implications of the textual discoveries at Ma-wang-
tui. They include Wu Kuang and Yu Ming-kuang, Randy Peerenboom, Carine Defoort,
 Sarah Queen, and myself.
 I do not have the time to give a detailed reply to Dan because we are leav-
ing town for five days in exactly ten minutes. But let me begin with his first
paragraph.
 Despite the traditional views on this subject, it is precisely my point that t
he textual sources I mentioned in my previous mailing can be taken to represent
 not a homogeneous school, but rather a developing lineage of thought that by t
he early Han had gained prominence at the Han court and had begun to develop
its own mythology and a clear sense of self-identity. See Angus Graham's "Origi
ns of the legend of Lao Tzu" in the collection *Studies in CHinese Philosophy a
nd Philosophical Literature* for background material on this. This lineage very
definitely thought of itself as descending from Lao Tzu, which is, for example,
the most frequently quoted canonical authority in the *Huai-nan Tzu.* It is my
argument in several published articles and two others curently being finished
that a close examination of these textual sources reveals a consistency of tech
nical terminology and intellectual concerns that were *not* shared by any of th
e other late WS and early Han schools. For more detailed arguments please see
two articles of mine, "Psychology and Self-cultivation in Early Taoistic
Thought" in HJAS 12/91, and "Who Compiled the CHuang Tzu?" in Henry Rosemont's
festschrift for Angus Graham, *Chinese Texts and Philosophical COntexts*.
FUrther Dan seems to question the appellation "Taoism" for this tradition, but
has no trouble classifying Han Fei as a "Legalist", even though it could also
be argued that this category is retrospective and obscures the many differences
 between thinkers like Han Fei, Shen Tao, Shen Pu-hai, Shang Yang. Why question
one and not the other?? Also, many scholars question authenticity of HFT 20,21.
    Time's up. More next week. I'd be happy to send offprints to anyone who
supplies me with their address.

Cheers,
Hal Roth

Date: Tue, 17 Aug 93 22:00:52 EST
From: [email-masked]
Subject: Philosophical Taoism vs. Religious Taoism: Round 81
To: [email-masked]

Taoist philosophy vs. Taoist religion, round 81.
 
We're well and properly into it now.  I tried to warn you :-). 
The philosophy/religion distinction is by now such a wide and
well-placed chasm that it is nearly impossible not to fall into
it.  
 
Lineages are very important, Tony.  In traditional China, people
did not merely declare their allegiance to "isms."  Instead, they
would find a master who would instruct them in specific texts and
in the right understandings of those texts.  The right
understandings, interpretations, and glosses, as well as the
practices that went along with the texts, were orally transmitted
along a master-disciple lineage that itself became part of the
tradition.  These lineages were structured along family lines
with the master as father presiding over the fates of older
brother-younger brother (less commonly sister) disciples and were
thus called "chia" (families).  This organizational structure was
applied to the dissemination of all sorts of written knowledge--
political doctrine, methods of warfare, medicine, astronomy,
philosophy, etc.  Modern Taoism preserves the practice, even
insists upon it.
 
When we speak of "Tao-chia," one of the Chinese terms regularly
translated "Taoism," the _chia_ refers to this same family
lineage sort of organization.  So, Dan, when Hal cites the Ma-
wang-tui finds as evidence for the "Huang-Lao tradition," we can
be certain that there was at least one such lineage, the one that
included the tomb occupant.  We seldom find such evidence,
though, so it remains a question whether Ssu-ma T'an meant to
point to one lineage which included all of the texts he cites or
a group of text-specific lineages that he believed held certain
points in common.  (I favor the latter, but have no solid proof.)
 
Whatever the case for Ssu-ma T'an, many early Taoists claimed
membership in what they called "Tao-chia."  Even Buddhists
sometimes fall under the rubric.  These same people have no
trouble speaking of "Tao-chiao" (the teachings of the Tao).  The
confusion arises not only when we want to translate both terms
"Taoism," but when we want to distinguish between the two.  When
we distinguish, we are likely to draw a distinction between
"philosophical Taoism" (Tao-chia) and "religious Taoism" (Tao-
chiao), privileging the former over the latter.  There is a
history behind this view.  It is not a long one, but it is ugly. 
 
The chasm opened in this discussion when Tony suggested that
"Taoist church" was a contradiction in terms and yawned yet wider
when Stephen Thomas wrote:
 
>I must add that I find nothing in Lao Tzu or Chuang Tzu which
>suggests they were advocating a religion.
>
>BTW, one would also be drawing a pretty long bow to find
>anything in those texts supporting the esoteric and magical
>practices for which Taoism (in a wider sense) is renowned.
 
The real division between Taoism, the philosophy, and Taoism, the
religion, does not really begin, logically enough, until the
concept "religion" was imported into China, say two hundred years
ago.  Up until that time, the two terms are used rather
indiscriminately.  As lineages and ideologies clash, the terms
may be employed pejoratively, but there is no philosophy/religion
distinction.  However it might have come to China, the term
"religion" (tsung-chiao "teachings of the lineage heads") arrived
loaded with western prejudices against non-Christian ideologies. 
The Manchus were at this time engaged in suppression of
potentially subversive native Chinese organizations and were all
too ready to accept the chia/chiao distinction.  Tao-chia is
quietist and non-threatening; Tao-chiao is activist and chaotic. 
This worked well enough.  Most literati abandoned Tao-chiao in
favor of Tao-chia.  I emphasize again, this was NOT the situation
in previous centuries.
 
Later, as Chinese accepted western technological superiority as
spiritual superiority, the Taoist religion became, for
intellectuals, unseemly, retrograde "superstition."  Lao-Chuang,
as a philosophy, could (partially at least) be saved and even
became a source of pride.  One can find this view easily by
reading Republican-era gazetteers, for example.  Strangely
enough, Taoists in China now find themselves arguing not only
against the "feudal superstition" label, but for the notion that
they are a religion and thus entitled to constitutional
protections.  
 
Where it gets really ugly, though, is when modern scholars
continue to read this division back into history.  Maxime
Kaltenmark, in his _Lao-tzu and Taoism_ even called "religious"
Taoism a "hodge-podge of coarse-grained superstitions."  This is
not history, it's ideological imperialism!  One has to ask what
right we have to decide which was the "correct" and which the
"perverted" interpretation of the _Lao-tzu_?  Taoist texts are
full of similar prejudices, but it is a case of one tradition
arguing against another, not "philosophy vs. religion." 
 
I know that the above is a bit of an over-simplification, but I
really do think that it is worth the attempt to see Taoism as it
saw itself at each stage in its complex history.  There seems to
me to be no problem in calling certain late Warring States/ early
Han traditions "Taoist" so long as one immediately qualifies the
appellation by reference to the specific beliefs and practices
of the textual lineage in question.  Can we agree that we will
apply the term Taoist to those schools and lineages that 1) focus
their attention on the nature of the Tao and 2) tend to regard
the _Lao-tzu_ as a foundational text, however they might interpret
it?  

Then again, people have been flaming one another over who possesses
the Tao for over 2,000 years. t's great sport.
	-Steve Bokenkamp

From [email-masked] Wed Aug 18 07:45:23 1993
Date: Wed, 18 Aug 93 02:47:28 EST
From: [email-masked]
Subject: Tai-chi
To: [email-masked]
Sender: [email-masked]
Status: OR

Pierre,

A good place to start on the development of ch'i practice in Taoism
is with the articles by Engelhardt, Despeux, and Miura in the 
volume _Taoist Meditation and Longevity Techniques_, edited by
Livia Kohn.  Since you read French, you might also want to 
go directly to Catherine Despeux's _Taiki k'iuan: technique de
combat, technique de longue vie_ (Paris: Institut des Hautes
Etudes Chinoises, 1976).  If you read German, Ute Engelhardt has
a book as well...

		-- Bokenkamp

From [email-masked] Wed Aug 18 17:44:14 1993
Date: Wed, 18 Aug 93 17:23:12 -0400
To: [email-masked]
From: [email-masked] (DanLusthaus)
Subject: Re: Tao-chia
Sender: [email-masked]
Status: OR

I thank Hal Roth for his comments, and hope in the near future he might
expand on what new developments he and his list of colleagues are up to.  I
was amused to discover that my "learned comments on Tao-chia reflect the
accepted scholarly
wisdom on the topic that is gradually being challenged by several
scholars," since some of Hal's other colleagues have tended to see me as
critical of the status quo (particularly Graham's historical claims re: Lao
Tzu and Chuang Tzu). But that's another story.
        In support of his use of the term "Taoism" for pre-Han materials,
Hal presents what I call the "trajectory theory" of early Chinese thought,
which, without getting too theoretical, is intrinsically retrospective
since it is defined teleologically (the end-product "defines" selective
precedents as its "means").  Since history (at least by some criteria) is
progressional, such a view is attractive.  It would be impossible, e.g., to
conceive Confucianism in any other way. There are some significant
differences between The Analects and Mencius, but "Confucianism" (which,
too, coelesces in the Han, but with a more discernible and distinct lineage
- primarily because it was invariably and repeatedly targeted by the other
leading groups for criticisms of various sorts - and negative definitions
establish definable limits), and outright incommensurabilities between
Mencius and Hs"un Tzu (the latter is arguably *not* Confucian in the final
analysis - especially if one tends to treat Mencian Confucianism as
canonical).  Confucian thought gets thoroughly reshuffled in the later Han,
and then again in multiple ways with the onset of so-called
Neo-Confucianism.  So it makes sense to speak of a trajectory re:
Confucianism, and yet, if each of the individual "confucian" authors is to
be appreciated on their own for their actual positions, it is necessary to
suspend reading them diachronically from time to time.
        Likewise, the so-called Legalists are not a homogenous group, as
Hal rightly notes.  But it is Han Fei Tzu whom, I would think, is the least
problematic person to label a "legalist", given his actual involvements
(ultimately tragic) in the Legalist rise to power.  One might add, that the
relation between Mo Tzu (and the portion of the _Mo Tzu_ usually attributed
to him) and the neo-Mohists (and the canons attributed to them, so
admirably tackled by Angus Graham) is frequently tenuous at best, but, they
are not only labeled/grouped together by recourse to a constructed
trajectory, since their "lineage" is historically unambiguous in terms of
succession.
        But the issue is different in the case of Taoism. First,
Confucianism is rightly viewed as a trajectory because the tradition has
survived, and most of its claims to historical continuity are
nonproblematic. Mohism can be seen as a trajectory for exactly the opposite
reason: it did not survive the Han period (though it is mentioned
atavistically in later sources, as a negative example), and so its diffuse
trajectory is quite finite and determinate.  When we come to Taoism, the
trajectories (and the native claims) are all over place. First, in pre-Han
times virtually everyone and their grandmother (with Confucians and Mohists
being the exceptions that make the rule) claimed some sort of affinity if
not direct ideological descent from Lao Tzu. One can even find certain
passages in Hs"un Tzu that seem to give Lao Tzu a nod. But Lao Tzu was
being appropriated and utilized quite differently by different
people/groups.
        Despite Graham's claim that Chuang Tzu was ignorant of Lao Tzu, I
argue that his final positions are markedly different from Lao Tzu's on
occasion, but he reached them by working out, to his satisfaction, the
problems that he saw in the Tao Te Ching (that's a long story, for another
occasion).  So Chuang Tzu is one "appropriation." If you believe there is a
"school of Chuang Tzu" (the only actual evidence for which is Graham's bald
claim that there was), then they too appropriated Lao Tzu in various ways
(often ironically and satirically, not with unquestioned approval).  The
Huang-Lao grouping, for which the ma-wang-tui scrolls have become our best
evidence, is itself very hard to determinatively delineate.  The Legalists
also appropriated Lao Tzu. And just to keep things complicated,
differentiating the "Legalists" from the "Huang-Lao"s is no simple matter
either.  Then there are the other "groups" (alchemists, yin-yangists, etc.)
whose rhetoric clearly strongly overlaps with these others. Moreover, for
many centuries it was the Confucians, not the "retrospective" Taoists who
took the I-Ching (and its yin-yang models) most seriously.  By Hal's
criteria, Kao Tzu (Mencius' gadfly and the one Mencius identifies as a
prior expert in "the coursing of Ch'i," an expertise that Mencius also
claimed as his own primary expertise) would be a Taoist, I suppose. As I
mentioned in an earlier posting, the Lao-Chuang "tradition" came much
later, and was the invention of *non-taoists* supplementing their regular
Confucian and Buddhist speculations.  Jim Sellmann, who's been quietly
observing these exchanges, has worked on the Lu-shih ch'un-ch'iu: perhaps
he has a few cents to throw in on that.
        My point (for those who like simpler responses) is that lots of
people are claiming allegiance to Lao Tzu, for a variety of reasons. There
are multiple, indistinct (to current eyes) trajectories, none of which
survive the Han intact; but, as if through a prism, come out the other end
reconfigured, with all sorts of fantastic "lineages" (=claimed
trajectories).  I am not even comfortable with the notion that we can speak
of three main pre-Han Taoist trajectories: 1. Chuang Tzu, 2. Legalist, 3.
Huang-Lao.  There's a lot more going on, and it might be prudent to resist
teleologically grouping the early materials if we want to discern what
actually was the case early on, rather than building a "prefigura" basis
for a later "tradition."
        One last point. I propose that a hermeneutic clue to whether a
reading of Lao Tzu follows the text accurately or whether it is imposing a
"legalistic" reading is determinable by how the text treats "Tao." For Lao
Tzu it is observable, even effable (in certain respects), but
indeterminate; for Legalists it signifies the "pattern," "principle" or
"Cosmic Law" (e.g., li) that regulates everything, that is determinate, and
which, by unpacking its determinations, can be used to generate "rules" for
ethico-political conduct.  Much of the material Hal cites as "taoistic"
falls closer to the latter view than the former (interestingly, the closest
to the Lao Tzu view on this in Chuang Tzu).

Dan Lusthaus
[email-masked]
Bates College

Date: Sat, 21 Aug 93 02:51:17 -0400
To: [email-masked]
From: [email-masked] (DanLusthaus)
Subject: Re: Translations and Interpolations

> Lin Yutang:

When it takes 20+ English words to render four or eight in Chinese,
something's wrong.  He has an agenda, and takes liberties (there is no
translation out there that doesn't).

> Ch'u Ta-Kao: a very literal translation of the standard text, chopped up and
> rearranged perversely.

Not always so literal, but the rearrangement (a mania lots of Chinese and
Western scholars indulged in prior to the recovery of the ma-wang-tui
texts) is annoying.

> Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English:

The pre-Needleman edition is not bad, frequently outsmarting the more
credentialed scholars. Needleman not only added insipid intro and notes,
but tampered fatally with the translation itself.  Probably the best
translation to get "the feel" of ttc for nonspecialists.

> Richard Wilhelm:

Ponderous, opinionated; some insights, but drowned in his preconceptions.

> Aleister Crowley: the tao teh ching couched in Golden Dawn terms. Actually
> less orthodox than my interpolation, it is at least honest in its preface:
> "This may not mean what Lao Tse meant. It is however what _I_ mean."

Whatever...

>
> Robert G. Hendricks: an excellent and scholarly translation of the
> Ma-wang-tui find. Strangely, there seems to me to be less of substance
> in Ma-wang-tui than in the later editions - I can almost imagine that
> the original ttc was nothing more than an elaborate floral tone-poem,
> refined and revised through endless misinterpretation and reinterpretation 
> until it has acquired the deeper meanings we read in it. While this edition 
> is impeccably researched and quite authoritative, I find it unsatisfying.

I'm not sure why you react to it as you do. Henricks is not translating for
flair but for accuracy (which involves making hermeneutic choices that
surpress some of the mwt's ambiguities).  There is really not that much
difference between the standard versions (the two Wang-pi versions, the
Ho-shang-kung version, Han-shan Te-ch'ing version, etc. - which themeselves
are darn close to each other) and the mwt versions (allowing for their
lacunae).  In mwt ttc there are a few grammatical particles sprinkled here
and there that limit some of the later hermeneutic ambiguitites, several
intriguing phrases with suggestive differences from the standard fare, but
nothing radically different.
        I'm wondering if the floral-embellishments might not lie with the
more recent translations trying to make the text sound like an outgrowth of
19th century Romanticism (with a bit of exotic Quietism thrown in), rather
than the "early" version.  There's not much in the standard versions you
don't also find in the mwt version (the lacunae aside).

Dan Lusthaus
[email-masked]
Bates College

From: Peter Alexander Merel <[email-masked]>
Subject: Translations and Interpolations
To: [email-masked] ([email-masked])
Date: Sat, 21 Aug 93 11:29:34 EST

Taoist folks,

I've just been perusing the portion of the last month's postings I'm able
to get at with gopher, and I must say I'm very impressed with the quality
of the material. I was wondering if anyone has bothered themselves with the
Tao Teh Ching interpolation I made available on coombs.anu.edu.au?

The reason I ask is I'm just about to release a new version of it
incorporating what I draw from the Robert G. Henricks translation of
the Ma-wang-tui texts, and I'd be very happy to receive your views on
the old version before I finish the new one.

For those who haven't looked at the interpolation yet, I should warn
that it is highly unorthodox and does not pretend to be a translation
at all. My feeling is that the ttc we have received is an entirely
syncretic document, and that early texts, such as Ma-wang-tui, bear no
greater authority than later editions. My intent with the interpolation
is simply to draw out the subtext that I read from the various
editions, and to try to make that as pretty as I can.

I'll quickly review the translations I've mixed in - I'd be interested in 
hearing how people feel about them as well:

 Lin Yutang: an excellent translation, quite western in tone and
 unambiguous in its context. Lin Yutang was chiefly interested in
 making the ttc and related works accessible to westerners, and had no
 obvious barrow to push. Perhaps a little too determinate for some tastes.

 Ch'u Ta-Kao: a very literal translation of the standard text, chopped up and
 rearranged perversely.

 Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English: the standard new-age treatment. Sections that 
 pertain to violence or subterfuge are prettified, and reverance for nature
 is accentuated. A very attractive volume, but shallow.

 Richard Wilhelm: this work is translated twice, from chinese to german and 
 then from the german to english. It seems to have suffered in the second
 translation, but still contains some interesting interpretations.

 Aleister Crowley: the tao teh ching couched in Golden Dawn terms. Actually
 less orthodox than my interpolation, it is at least honest in its preface:
 "This may not mean what Lao Tse meant. It is however what _I_ mean."

 Robert G. Hendricks: an excellent and scholarly translation of the
 Ma-wang-tui find. Strangely, there seems to me to be less of substance
 in Ma-wang-tui than in the later editions - I can almost imagine that
 the original ttc was nothing more than an elaborate floral tone-poem,
 refined and revised through endless misinterpretation and reinterpretation 
 until it has acquired the deeper meanings we read in it. While this edition 
 is impeccably researched and quite authoritative, I find it unsatisfying.

--
Internet: [email-masked]          |         Accept Everything.            |
UUCP: {uunet,mcvax}!munnari!extro!pete |         Reject Nothing.               |

From: Peter Alexander Merel <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Translations and Interpolations
To: [email-masked] ([email-masked])
Date: Sat, 21 Aug 93 19:29:58 EST

Dan Lusthaus writes:
>> Lin Yutang:
>
>When it takes 20+ English words to render four or eight in Chinese,
>something's wrong.  He has an agenda, and takes liberties (there is no
>translation out there that doesn't).

Granted. What I mean by 'no barrow to push' is he seems quite evenhanded
in his language, and doesn't bend the text towards deism or buddhism as 
others do.

>> Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English:
>
>The pre-Needleman edition is not bad, frequently outsmarting the more
>credentialed scholars. Needleman not only added insipid intro and notes,
>but tampered fatally with the translation itself.  Probably the best
>translation to get "the feel" of ttc for nonspecialists.

Ah, I'll have to dig mine out and see what I have. 

>> Robert G. Hendricks: an excellent and scholarly translation of the
>> Ma-wang-tui find. Strangely, there seems to me to be less of substance
>> [...]
>
>I'm not sure why you react to it as you do. Henricks is not translating for
>flair but for accuracy (which involves making hermeneutic choices that
>surpress some of the mwt's ambiguities).  

That's just what lets me down. Henricks often looks for simple interpretations
of ambiguous paragraphs - for me, his translation doesn't present the mystery
or depth that I prefer to read into the work. I'm not trying to take anything
away from him though - this is a fine translation indeed. It is the poetry, or
lack of it, that disappoints me, the lack of symmetry and grace. Henricks 
gives me the feeling of a simpler, less fascinating ttc, one that is easier
to impart and less effective. 

>There is really not that much
>difference between the standard versions (the two Wang-pi versions, the
>Ho-shang-kung version, Han-shan Te-ch'ing version, etc. - which themeselves
>are darn close to each other) and the mwt versions (allowing for their
>lacunae).  In mwt ttc there are a few grammatical particles sprinkled here
>and there that limit some of the later hermeneutic ambiguitites, several
>intriguing phrases with suggestive differences from the standard fare, but
>nothing radically different.

Agreed.

>        I'm wondering if the floral-embellishments might not lie with the
>more recent translations trying to make the text sound like an outgrowth of
>19th century Romanticism (with a bit of exotic Quietism thrown in), rather
>than the "early" version.  

I don't speak Chinese, so I have to rely on the translations. If they are
more romantic than the originals, I am not offended; I am more interested
in the usefulness of the message than in its source - this is why I regard
the work as essentially syncretic. Your mileage may vary.

But 'exotic quietism' I am less sure about. My reading of the ttc
emphasises the identification of world and self - non-action for me has
less to do with passivity and more to do with living in the moment and
holding fast to the evidence of senses and heart. I am troubled by some
of the advice in the ttc - I am not certain I like the idea of
encouraging ignorance and passivity, so I stretch to find some of my
interpretations. Chapter 65, for instance, is a real bugbear for me.
Biasing my reading towards principals of love, acceptance and restraint
I think I end up with a more useful and symmetrical text, and that's
what I am aiming at. 

--
Internet: [email-masked]          |         Accept Everything.            |
UUCP: {uunet,mcvax}!munnari!extro!pete |         Reject Nothing.               |

Date: Mon, 23 Aug 93 02:18:22 -0400
To: [email-masked]
From: [email-masked] (DanLusthaus)
Subject: Re: Translations and Interpolations

Steven Thomas writes (and I'm keeping the tinder moistened)
>fit, at least in terms of our modern western understanding of Taoism.
>There are paragraphs linked with 'Therefore' or 'Hence' which are at
>best irrelevent and at worst complete non-sequitur. Holding this view of
>the text, I cannot but be amused at the contortions of translators who
>desperately try to render every paragraph so as to fit their own
>philosophy. It is much easier to simply accept that some bits of junk
>have crept in, and throw out what you can't handle. (No flames, please,
>DanLusthaus, I'm not speaking of scholarship here :-)

Steven is repeating a claim that pervades the literature. LOts of folks
(including the publishing scholars and translators) seem to have trouble
making the "logical" connections announced by ttc's "therefores." I would
contend that ALL the "therefores" and "thus"es in ttc are deliberate and
make sense. One of the criteria I use for evaluating the coherency of ttc
translations is whether what precedes and follows a "therefore" has been
transmuted into a non sequitor or not. When I use ttc in my classes, we
work at discovering how the "therefores" work. After a little practice, and
with a few clues as to how the thing works, most of the students can figure
out the connections themselves.  To make their task easier I usually
provide them with word-for-word linear translations of several chapters so
that they won't be handcuffed by misleading translations (though we survey
close to ten of the major translations for each of those chapters too).
Since few if any translations preserve a literal enough sense of the
multivocal dimensions of Lao Tzu's text (it is amazing poetry - there is
hardly a line that cannot be read in ten or more ways, one of the reasons
for proliferation of incommensurate "translations"), trying to intuit the
connections without recourse to the Chinese original may be impossible.

>
>A further interesting thought here is that the text is usually divided
>into chapters, sometimes with headings. There is, however, good reason
>to believe that such division is artificial - the Ma-wand-tui texts have
>no headings, for example, and the division into chapters may simply be a
>result of transcription.

Chapter divisions and titles for the chapters were added in the Ho-shang
kung commentary (and maybe earlier, but that's our earliest clear source).
The ma-wang-tui has a few "chapter" markers, but only a few; nothing close
to 81.
        On the other hand there are two ways you can come up with your own
chapter titles directly from the text (one only requires translations for
the first way, but must be able to read Chinese for the second):
1. This won;t work for every chapter, but works for many; at the end of
many chapters there is a line that sums up what the chapter's been about,
sometimes in the form "this is called X".  Those chapters can be titled X.
2. Read carefully in Chinese virtually every chapter does one or both of
the following. (i) it repeats a word multiple times, and that word usually
indicates the chapter's theme. or (ii) many words in Chinese (as in most
languages) have several meanings. When "translating," one usually tries to
select the most appropriate of the alternate meanings for that context.
But, if one pays attention to and collates the rejected meanings, one often
finds there are several (most commonly three) words which get "explicitly"
translated differently, but all become synonymous in virtue of having a
common shared meaning (usually rejected for at least two of them while
"translating.") That "synonym" is invariably the theme of the chapter, and
can serve as its title. Before you start to think this sounds insane, after
I told my 2nd year Classical Chinese students at UCLA about this, and
demonstrated with a couple of chapters how it worked, they invariably
zeroed in on the "synonym" for every chapter thereafter.
        Is this some major secret that no one else has ever seen or
noticed? If you read the translators' comments you'd think so. If you read
Hanshan TeChing's commentary (which he spent 15 years writing, meditating
carefully on ttc's language usage), you'll discover he does the same thing.
Since he doesn't explicitly announce it either, I guess it's been a sort of
secret game that some ttc commentators have played. By the way, some of
Ho's "titles" were derived by these two methods.

>>  Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English: the standard new-age treatment. Sections that 
>>  pertain to violence or subterfuge are prettified, and reverance for nature
>>  is accentuated. A very attractive volume, but shallow.

One more thing on Feng. He is a t'ai-chi (in pinyin: taiji) teacher who, I
think, takes the martial side of things seriously; He doesn;t so much
"prettify" the violence, as offer it in traditional style.

>>  Robert G. Hendricks: maybe too scholarly for a
>lover of the Tao, and prone to one or two howlers, e.g Ch.46, line 2:
>"When the world lacks the Way, war horses are reared in the suburbs."

Why is that a howler? It very literally translates the passage.  Chiao can
mean open frontier, or the areas outside the city (i.e., the suburbs). As I
said above, most line in ttc have multiple *intended* meanings. This may be
read as (1) the war horses of the opponent (across the frontier border of
your state) are being bred to attack, AND (2) to be defensive, your state
is breeding war horses to protect the city (the ruler's abode).  The line
also implies conscription of the horses' owners into the army, from their
rural farms into "city" training grounds.
Dan Lusthaus
[email-masked]
Bates College

To: Taoism List <[email-masked]>
Subject: On "therefore" and non sequiturs in Chinese texts
Date: Mon, 23 Aug 93 11:58:15 -0400
From: John McRae <[email-masked]>

Recently, Dan Lusthaus suggested that all (or, I suppose, virtually all)
of the "therefores" (_ku_ [_gu_ in Pinyin]) in the ttc were meaningful.  

In some of the Ch'an literature I've worked on, I've gained the impression
that very often "therefore," rather than indicating a logical connection,
actually masks a non sequitur.  And, come to think of it, I believe the
same is also true of Buddhist texts translated from Indic languages. 
Excuse me from having to come up with examples from Kumaarajiiva's
translations, if you will -- today is the first day of student advising,
and my little-bitty office is like Shinjuku Station.  

So, the question:  Does the use of "therefore" in pre- or non-Buddhist
Chinese literature sometimes obscure rather than reveal logical structure.

-- John 

From: Steve Thomas <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Translations and Interpolations
To: [email-masked] (Peter Alexander Merel)
Date: Mon, 23 Aug 93 12:41:50 CDT

Peter Alexander Merel writes:
> 
>              ... I was wondering if anyone has bothered themselves with the
> Tao Teh Ching interpolation I made available on coombs.anu.edu.au?

Yes, I found it last week. It was, um, interesting.
> 
> The reason I ask is I'm just about to release a new version of it
> incorporating what I draw from the Robert G. Henricks translation of
> the Ma-wang-tui texts, and I'd be very happy to receive your views on
> the old version before I finish the new one.

Well, um, I'd say you had produced something that was highly
personalised - some passages I'd have no argument about, others I would
say you'd gone off the rails completely - no, strike that - you've gone
off on a different tack from me.
> 
> For those who haven't looked at the interpolation yet, I should warn
> that it is highly unorthodox and does not pretend to be a translation
> at all.

I can dig that.

> My feeling is that the ttc we have received is an entirely
> syncretic document, and that early texts, such as Ma-wang-tui, bear no
> greater authority than later editions.

Well, earlier texts must have some chance of being closer to the
original (although it is not certain that they are). But if you ar going
to produce your own interpretation of your perception of the subtext,
then I guess you need not be concerned with authority. ;-)

> My intent with the interpolation
> is simply to draw out the subtext that I read from the various
> editions, and to try to make that as pretty as I can.

My criticism would be that you have tried to hard to render all passages
according to your subtext. My personal view of the TTC is that it is
highly corrupted from the original text (always assuming there was an
original text - I'll leave you to figure that out :-)  There are
passages which are obvious later interpolations, which may have been
commentary in an early edition, and there are some which simply don't
fit, at least in terms of our modern western understanding of Taoism.
There are paragraphs linked with 'Therefore' or 'Hence' which are at
best irrelevent and at worst complete non-sequitur. Holding this view of
the text, I cannot but be amused at the contortions of translators who
desperately try to render every paragraph so as to fit their own
philosophy. It is much easier to simply accept that some bits of junk
have crept in, and throw out what you can't handle. (No flames, please,
DanLusthaus, I'm not speaking of scholarship here :-)

A further interesting thought here is that the text is usually divided
into chapters, sometimes with headings. There is, however, good reason
to believe that such division is artificial - the Ma-wand-tui texts have
no headings, for example, and the division into chapters may simply be a
result of transcription. I have a 'translation' from which I removed all
chapter headings and divisions, and low and behold, I found a completely
different result: the text reads much more like a collection of
aphorisms, sayings, proverbs, what have you; some 'chapters' dissolve
into a series of loosely related sayings, sometimes adjacent chapters
merge into a single unit.

The picture I have of how the present text came to us is this: someone
originally wrote a brief work, consisting of a collection of musings about
the Tao, some ideas about how people should behave, how rulers should
rule, etc. Someone(else) then extended the work by the addition of
commentary and explanation, and probably also sayings from other sources
(much as I might add today "We only possess what we renounce", which is
written at the bottom of my calendar - a quote from Simone Weil). Others
then have copied this interpolated edition, adding further
embellishments as well as dividing the work into chapters (people love
to organise things), thus giving us the texts we have available today.
If you don't read chinese, then you are also restricted to reading the
translations of those texts by others who cannot fail to inject their
own beliefs and opinions.

What does this mean for us today? I guess it means that (a) you should
be happy with whatever resonance you get from passages of the TTC, and
(b) you should not feel bad or surprised when you stumble over bits you
can't accept - you can happily discard them as interpolations, and who can
argue with you?

> I'll quickly review the translations I've mixed in - I'd be interested in 
> hearing how people feel about them as well:

The first five are all heavily influenced by the ideas of the
translator. But if one or more strikes a chord in you, then that should
not be a problem.
> 
>  Lin Yutang: 
> 
>  Ch'u Ta-Kao: 
> 
>  Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English: the standard new-age treatment. Sections that 
>  pertain to violence or subterfuge are prettified, and reverance for nature
>  is accentuated. A very attractive volume, but shallow.

Gag. You make it sound like one to avoid.
> 
>  Richard Wilhelm: 
> 
>  Aleister Crowley: the tao teh ching couched in Golden Dawn terms. Actually
>  less orthodox than my interpolation, it is at least honest in its preface:
>  "This may not mean what Lao Tse meant. It is however what _I_ mean."

To be fully honest, he could have called it something other than the Tao
te ching. At what point does something cease to be translation and
become a new work inspired by the original?

> 
>  Robert G. Hendricks: an excellent and scholarly translation of the
>  Ma-wang-tui find.

Agreed. The most useful translation I have found in terms of
understanding the underlying structure. But maybe too scholarly for a
lover of the Tao, and prone to one or two howlers, e.g Ch.46, line 2:
"When the world lacks the Way, war horses are reared in the suburbs."

You should also look up D.C. Lau (available in Penguin, with a more
detailed work available from Chinese University Press). I have found his
translation to be quite worthwhile, and the notes very useful.

	Steve

Date: Mon, 23 Aug 93 16:19:59 -0400
To: [email-masked]
From: [email-masked] (DanLusthaus)
Subject: Re: On "therefore" and non sequiturs in Chinese texts

John McRae observes:
>In some of the Ch'an literature I've worked on, I've gained the impression
>that very often "therefore," rather than indicating a logical connection,
>actually masks a non sequitur.  And, come to think of it, I believe the
>same is also true of Buddhist texts translated from Indic languages. 
>So, the question:  Does the use of "therefore" in pre- or non-Buddhist
>Chinese literature sometimes obscure rather than reveal logical structure.

That's a great question, and John is right that sometimes it does (obscure
rather than reveal). The Buddhist case, of course, gets the added incentive
to make these sorts of non sequitors due to the rhetorical power of the
Diamond Sutra, which repeatedly uses the formula: X is not X, therefore it
is X. In the case of ttc, though (and I would argue for Chuang TZu,
Mencius, and a host of early literature) the "therefores" are not intended
as obscurantist devices. Ttc does use a certain amount of paradoxical
juxtaposition (not usually in relation to "therefore" but more often marked
by the connective "erh" "and yet"), but he usually explicates somewhere how
the juxtaposition is not Really PAradoxical (e.g., wu-wei erh wu pu wei,
non-deliberative-actions and-yet without not acting, usually translated
prettified as "does nothing, yet nothing remains undone"). Seng-chao (one
of Kumarajiva's assistants, who himself wrote some important early Buddhist
texts filled with taoistic nuances and rhetoric) apparently loved ttc's
"erh" structures, since his writings are filled with them, especially when
he's trying to make a serious point, and he partially set the tone and
style for later Buddhist writers. Kumarajiva repotedly said of Seng Chao
that while his (Kumarajiva's) understanding is deeper, Seng Chao's literary
style is better.
        As for therefores, one clue is to look for a shift in registers.
E.g., the famous Ch'an question: What is the meaning of Bodhidharma's
coming from the West? is answered in numerous ways in various texts. One
famous answer is: "the pine tree in the courtyard." which seems on the
surface to be a non sequitor until one thinks about the significance of the
tree on the courtyard, i.e., what it is, what function it serves, etc.
Then, it becomes a rather rich (and accurate) response.  Another famous
reply: "pass me the armrest."  Again, unpack what that request and a
response to it would entail, and it is a "direct" answer that has shifted
registers.  If these examples don't make any sense to some readers, they
can always be used as Koans (kung-an).
Dan Lusthaus
[email-masked]
Bates College

To: [email-masked]
From: [email-masked]
Subject: Taoist violence
Date: Tue, 24 Aug 93 23:18:11 PDT

First a big THANK YOU to Alan for having the imagination to see what i
was saying--violence is a part of nature.
Second to S. Y. Chan who suggests that asking "what ifs" leads one away
from the tao.  What if it is my "character" to ask what if and i do it
naturally, spontaneously, they drip like water from my lips and finger tips
like what if it is my tao to ask what if? although I'm certainly away from
your tao, are you sure i'm away from mine?

to Steve Thomas and RJB; I'm terrible sorry tht i aroused such "violent"
"intellectual" responses from you about violence.  
Discussing things philosophically has always been a dangerous task sometimes
leading one to jail and execution. I'm sorry to hear that "you" (sorry steve
that he missquoted you) are pro censorship, that you trust your fellow
persons so little that you think those "common" folk will use "good" things
to do wrong (violate the social contract). But it seems that the one who 
wants to justify her/his acts will use whatever they can get their hands
on to justify it.
"... no room for violence in Taoism ... a person ... could not by definition
act in such ways." like Alan said that's just your definition and its not
the only one. Lots of self-claimed "Taoists" (of the "religious" bent) led
or fought in rebellions under the banner of "Taoism"; in the Lao Tzu and
Chuang Tzu mode as Alan rightly pointed out violence is part of nature.
To eat is an act of violence; to breath air kills all kinds of life forms!
"... the stuf of Zen koans, ..." historically you don't get Ch'an/Zen
without Taoism.
See Chuang Tzu ch. 6 "Because he regards punishments (a form of violence)
as the body, he was benign in his killing." (watson, p. 79)  maybe that's
one of the passages that aint Chuang Tzu's but it is in the text.
"Do you want to encourage them?" in part i like to encourage free and 
creative thought; in part i don't want to encourage anything,especially
not a discourse on taoism!
"Taoist sage" the Taoist sage ruler that the Lao Tzu is directed toward
and especially the ma-wang-tui Huang ti ssu ching 4 classics of the the
Yellow Emperor require the sage ruler to call out the troops make war
kill to establish and maintain sociopolitical order, he can be the perpetrato

RJB is this yours "... its nice to know that no one in the whole history of
Taoism has ever promulgated anything like the Thought Which Must Not
Be Uttered Before Laypeople, or ever done anything violent." ? 
Not! see above, the Taoist rebels, the Huang-Lao texts, "religious taoist
" "black magic" used to harm others. I guess you want to stipulate them
out of the label of "Taoist". You "like" Taoism and want to keep it
"sacred ground" sorry to pop your bubble but that often happens in "Taoism".

Now that i'm in the thick of this crap: 
Dan asked HOw to rape taoistically. what kind of rape were you thinking of;
the intellectually rape of censorship? see above? There is a "Taoist"
sexual meditation were one has sex with 300 virgins on the night of the
full moon without ejaculation , of course, to get their yin.  I'd think
that's a form of statutory rape. I susspect you're looking for violent
rape. your imagination can't run with this hey? something happens naturally
spontaneously, without fore thought or puropseful action or desire but it
happens nonetheless?  There is a passage in i believe a D.H. Lawrence story
(sorry can't recall a title) were a character gets attacked, but he overcomes
the attacker and disables him, but naturally spontaneously the "victim" now
becomes killer.  May be this is the problem of the date raper, he's just
doing what he does it seems natural to his nature.  
I think you're right there is a moral view in Buddhism and even Zen, but
is there in Taoism which is often proclaimed to be amoral??????
too much said already.
jim

Date: Wed, 25 Aug 93 03:49:00 -0400
To: [email-masked]
From: [email-masked] (DanLusthaus)
Subject: Re: Taoist violence

 >Dan asked HOw to rape taoistically. what kind of rape were you thinking of;
>the intellectually rape of censorship?

Are Lao or Chuang intellectual censors? Do they condone that?

> There is a "Taoist"
>sexual meditation were one has sex with 300 virgins on the night of the
>full moon without ejaculation , of course, to get their yin.  I'd think
>that's a form of statutory rape.

Since rape, by definition, requires that the rapee be unwilling, this
doesn't qualify. The babes hungered for these guys and their lengendary
"moves." And the older women also had their turn at other festivals. SInce
when are fertility rituals with all-willing participants (however
repackaged in terms of hygiene or cosmology) "rape"?

> I susspect you're looking for violent
>rape.

yup.

> your imagination can't run with this hey?

I didn't challenge your hyperbole of "murder" ("killing" would have been a
more accurate term) for the reasons you and Alan offered (so I must have at
least a little imagination), but rape is a different thing.  Hyperbole is
ChuangTzu-ish for sure (relatively absent in Lao Tzu), but he chooses his
outrages carefully.

> something happens naturally
>spontaneously, without fore thought or puropseful action or desire but it
>happens nonetheless?

A desireless rape???! Hmmm. You're right. My imagination can't get a handle
on that. Freedom is not license. In one of the very rare occasions where
Lao Tzu uses the term hsin (mind) he says: 

"The sage has no fixed mind, in order to be open to the minds of others."

To get lost in your own urges is not Taoism. The term hsing, conventionally
mistranslated in CT translations as "feelings", means "basic desire of a
thing" for CT. Against his verbal sparring buddy, Hui-shih, he argues that
one can be human and be without hsing.  Is mind-fasting, etc., about giving
in to urges, being driven by pleasure/pain sensations? Maybe you want to
cling to that strata of the Chuang Tzu text that AG labels Yangist (after
Yang Chu, the guy who wouldn't lift a finger for anybody).  But, we know
that Taoism is about BALANCE, so CT also reminds us (at least twice in the
text) the sage has no self.
        To get sinitic for a moment - Chinese uses several words that end
up in English as "self."  The most positive of them is tzu, as in tzu-jan
(spontaneous).  There are tzu compunds that are also treated negatively
(self-aggrandizement is lambasted repeatedly by kuo-hsiang, for instance).
Then there is wo ("I"), which can be positive or negative, depending on
context. Then there is szu (personal, private, selfish) which almost
invariably carries the negative implications of selfishness.  Then there is
chi (which is what the sage doesn't have), which, too, carries the
implication of selfishness.
        You're maybe getting your selves mixed up?

>  There is a passage in i believe a D.H. Lawrence story
>(sorry can't recall a title) were a character gets attacked, but he overcomes
>the attacker and disables him, but naturally spontaneously the "victim" now
>becomes killer.

Chuang Tzu would find that ironic, not laudable.

> May be this is the problem of the date raper, he's just
>doing what he does it seems natural to his nature.

And by not listening to the mind of the other, he becomes a shmuck or worse.
  
>I think you're right there is a moral view in Buddhism and even Zen, but
>is there in Taoism which is often proclaimed to be amoral??????

Proclaimed by whom? Of course you and Angus can conveniently ignore all the
ethical (as opposed to "moralist") passages in the Chuang Tzu by arguing CT
never wrote them (that's part of the underlying agenda behind the whole
fiasco of dissociating parts of the text from the "real" Chuang Tzu; the AG
translation takes whole passages and chapters and sends them to Siberia
under that pretext), but they're there nonetheless.
        And while Lao Tzu points out that Heaven and the sage are not jen
(kindly), he also holds compassion as one of his three treasures. So go
figure!

>too much said already.

Always.

Dan Lusthaus
[email-masked]
Bates College

To: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: Taoist violence 
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 93 11:34:08 -0400
From: [email-masked]

not me
>>... its nice to know that no one in the whole history of
>>Taoism has ever promulgated anything like the Thought Which Must Not
>>Be Uttered Before Laypeople, or ever done anything violent." ? 

not me either
>Not! see above, the Taoist rebels, the Huang-Lao texts, "religious taoist
>" "black magic" used to harm others. I guess you want to stipulate them
>out of the label of "Taoist". You "like" Taoism and want to keep it
>"sacred ground" sorry to pop your bubble but that often happens in "Taoism".

I think the follow-up misunderstands the original here. As Hliao-Feh 
observed, "The True Sage picks up on Sarcasm."

not me either again
>Dan asked How to rape taoistically. what kind of rape were you thinking of;
>the intellectual rape of censorship? 

Nor, I might add, does the True Sage abuse metaphors like this!

>May be this is the problem of the date raper, he's just
>doing what he does it seems natural to his nature.  

The Sage might be "allowed" to date rape, but it's hard to imagine why
he would want to. Similarly, while murder is not directly outlawed by, say,
the TTC, murder by the State in the form of warfare is sanctioned and its
skilful execution applauded. Asking such questions as "can a Taoist rape
or murder" seems to me to be approaching the issues from the wrong angle
entirely: the Sage doesn't live by ethical heuristics but instead cultivates
a particular attitude such that ethical heuristics become irrelevant.
We might ask "can we imagine a Sage raping or murdering?" To which the
best answer, to my mind, would be: "In Taoism we learn to not be surprised
by anything." But I also think we learn that every case is unique and that
generalizations have a very limited usefulness, so such questions are not
really worth asking.

        Tom Price  | heaven and earth regard the 10,000    | [email-masked]
****************** | things as straw dogs and I feel fine  | ******************

Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1993 10:32:40 -0400 (EDT)
From: [email-masked]
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: Taoist violence

[email-masked] writes:
> Second to S. Y. Chan who suggests that asking "what ifs" leads one away
> from the tao.  What if it is my "character" to ask what if and i do it
> naturally, spontaneously, they drip like water from my lips and finger tips
> like what if it is my tao to ask what if? although I'm certainly away from
> your tao, are you sure i'm away from mine?

	I'll ignore the whole issue of "your Tao" versus "my Tao".

	If it really the case that your nature is to ask lots of
questions about hypothetical situations, then I think you'd be right -
questions would be your manifestation of the Tao.
	But if you are asking lots of questions about hypothetical
situations, because you're trying to get a series of yes/no answers
which will categorically define the Tao, then I think you're off-base.
	If you are an anxious person who needs to be consoled by
non-ambiguous yes/no answers (which you get by asking questions) then
you are far from the Tao.
	If you are planning for something, and you need to ask
"what-if" situations to in order to plan something concrete, then that
doesn't seem far from the Tao.
        And, the final point is that people talk too easily about
their "nature". We are all creatures of habit, physical habits,
emotional habits, intellectual habits. We are "carved blocks" - having
internalized all kinds of conventional behaviors. You don't become
"uncarved" merely by spontaneous doing whatever comes up.

Stephen Chan		[email-masked]	|Transarc Corporation
Facilities Weeny	(412)338-6996		|707 Grant St
Usenet Wannabee				       	|Pittsburgh, PA 15219

Date: Thu, 26 Aug 93 05:37:36 -0400
To: [email-masked]
From: [email-masked] (DanLusthaus)
Subject: Re: Taoism and I Ching

>How does the I Ching fit into all of this?  Is it the philosophical
>foundation of Taoism?
>Anthony Lynn

Short answer. According to Chinese tradition, it was Confucius who first
took the I-ching seriously (it's older that Confucius or Lao Tzu), and a
set of commentaries usually attached to the text are attributed to him
(though modern scholars reject that attribution).  The basic yin-yang ideas
permeate early Chinese thinking in one way or another, and perhaps the
question whould be how many varieties of it are there, i.e., are the sort
of oppositional contrasts in Lao Tzu similar or different to the one's
found in Chuang Tzu, are those similar of different to the ones in Mencius,
etc., and so on, including the I-ching.  For instance, the I-ching (as
usually interpreted) seems to think that the full complement of
possibilities in any course of action or event can be reduced to six binary
variable factors (yin-yang lines). Lao Tzu's oppositions don't quite work
that way. On the other hand, both would see oppositions (in their
disinctive ways) as foundational.
        "Taoists" become interested in I-ching much later. It remained
nonetheless a key text for Confucians.

Dan Lusthaus
[email-masked]
Bates College

Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1993 06:17:43 -0400 (EDT)
From: Alan David Fox <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Virtue == Love?
To: Peter Alexander Merel <[email-masked]>

Peter Alexander's posting indicates the kind of problems which arise from
reading the text only in translation.  The word virtue has connotations in
English which the word De does not have in Chinese, and vice versa.  To
insist that because the word "virtue" is used, it must mean what English
speaking people mean by the word virtue, is not much different than
insisting that God wrote the Bible in King James English.  You're
fabricating your own Taoism here.  That's fine, of course, but your
resistance to analysis of the text leads to the kind of fuzzy headed
idiosyncratic thinking that we have been seeing here.  What you are
describing is not Daoism, but your own projection.  Sorry.

Alan Fox       (+
302-831-2350   -)
[email-masked]
U of Delaware Philosophy Dept.

Date: Fri, 27 Aug 93 07:24:08 -0400
To: [email-masked]
From: [email-masked] (DanLusthaus)
Subject: Re: Taoist violence

Seems I'm not the only one who thinks the discussion has been getting kind
of silly lately. Since I've been asked, I'll throw in a few more cents.

>The nature of the sage's feelings is difficult to define, but we do know that
>he has great Te, Te being commonly translated as virtue or strength. Perhaps
>Dan Lusthaus can shed some scholarly light on the nature of Te, but my reading
>of ttc Chapter 38, Chapter 10 para 2, and Chapter 60 makes me feel that what
>is being discussed is love.

        Since love and hate are two sides of the same dualist coin, you may
want to reconsider. Translators a century ago thought they were very clever
when they latched onto "virtue" as an equivalent for te since literate
readers a century ago knew that in Latin, virtus meant a potential or power
that one perfects. The more that innate talent is developed and perfected,
the better one becomes. To be virtuous meant to perfect one's innate
powers, one's talents, not necessarily act like a Victorian Lady. They
thought it was clever because virtus seemed to straddle both Taoist and
Confucian connotations; the Taoists (particularly Chuang Tzu) treated it as
innate abilities and talents, and the Confucians as the moral perfecting of
a person.
        While neither Lao nor Chuang recommend coldhearted nastiness (on
the contrary, they both frequently describe the sage and his synonyms in
lofty ethical terms), neither is sentimental about it. To paraphrase ttc
ch. 2: When all in the world deem loving to be loving, that itself is
extremely hateful.
        I recently wrote a piece on Lao Tzu (on its way to publication). I
enclose an excerpt here to maybe put the maudelin moralism back in its
place.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
        Confucianism promotes specific moral values and insists that
learning and cultivating those values is the only way to make individuals
and society truly human and harmonious.  Chief among those values are ren
(humankind-ness), yi (appropriateness, or the balancing of the individual
with the group), and li (social rules, rituals, and etiquette).  A
Confucian goal is to become a "person of ren." For Laozi such moral values
and exhorations always prove self-defeating.
        Laozi's critique of Confucianism occurs in various places in the
Dao de jing, but perhaps in its most devastating form in chapter 38. "The
best De doesn't De," says Laozi, "therefore it has De."  What Laozi means
is that the best sort of De is not something that one deliberately and
calculatingly does. It happens spontaneously, naturally. "Lower De doesn't
lose De,  therefore it has no De." If one always pursues a moral ideal
rather than relinquishing it, one will never be moral, or at best, one
might be called "lower De."  As he says in chapter 3, "Holding ideals in
high esteem makes the people contentious." Ideals require striving,
ascending a valuative ladder; and the ladder only has value if some people
are higher than others on it.  Among the group that deems the ideal
worthwhile there will inevitably be rivalry and competition for the higher
berth, those above "looking down" on their fellow strivers, etc.  When
people are contentious harmony becomes endangered.
        Chapter 38 says that  "The best De is wu-wei and without deliberate
actions." Wu-wei is impossible to translate accurately, and the common
Quietist term "non-action" by which it is frequently rendered does the
notion of wu-wei great violence. Laozi's full phrase, occurring several
times in the Dao de jing, is wu-wei er wu bu wei, which means "no action,
yet nothing isn't done."  Wei means not only 'to act,' but also 'to
consider or deem,' 'to do something deliberately with effort.' Wu is used
in this phrase as a negational prefix. The point is not to desist from
acting, but to do things effortlessly, without friction or contention,
without the ulterior motives of gain or loss, praise or blame, reward or
punishment. Putting such considerations aside, there is nothing one can't
do.

"Lower De considers others, and takes deliberate action.
Higher ren considers others, but takes no deliberate action.
Higher yi considers others, and takes deliberate action.
Higher li considers others, but when they don't respond or reciprocate, he
rolls up his sleeves to force them (to comply)."

Ren (humankind-ness) is innocuous because it is impotent, it does nothing
despite its own intent that something ought to be done. Yi, according to
Laozi, is equivalent to the "lower De" since it deliberately imposes itself
on others.  For Confucians, ren is a feeling of mutual, common
humankind-ness between individuals. Yi delineates the type of roles
incumbent on individuals in particular situations, such that those roles
become conducive to the enactment of ren. Li encodes and fixates the rules
that individuals must follow in order for yi to transpire appropriately.
But Laozi argues that once ineffectual ren has degenerated into rules, the
conditions for conflict, rebellion and repression have emerged. By
definition a rule is something that prescribes something while proscribing
its converse. Moreover, a rule prescribes something that would not be
natural otherwise-to prescribe what's natural is redundant (e.g., it would
be ludicrous to make a rule that 'humans must breath,' since they cannot
voluntary do otherwise). Since rules advise doing something unnatural,
there will always be someone who will refuse to comply. For a rule to
remain meaningful and not become an empty rule, compliance must be
enforced. While the Confucians justify their moral system by claiming that
it provides the means for producing social harmony, Laozi undermines their
justification by showing that it actually produces just the opposite
result: rebellion and repression.

"Hence lose Dao, and De follows.
Lose De, and ren follows.
Lose ren, and yi follows.
Lose yi, and li follows."

Li is a flimsy version of loyalty and trust, and the beginning of rebellion.
Trying to figure things out ahead of time is only Dao's festoon and the
start of foolishness.
Chapter 18 charges that moral values don't cure social problems, they are
merely symptoms that the problems are getting worse.

"When the great Dao is abandoned, then there is ren and yi.
When smartness and erudition emerge, then there is great Dissimulation.
When family relations are not harmonious, then there is [insistence on]
filial piety and kindness.
When a country becomes troubled and rebellious, then there is [talk about]
the loyalty of ministers."

Rather than teach ideals that will be counterproductive in the end, Laozi
proposes we give up ren and yi, erudition and moral inculcation. 
Confucianism considers "learning" moral values its top objective. Laozi
responds, "Pursuing learning, everyday more is acquired. Pursuing Dao,
everyday more is dropped."
++++++++++++++++++++

Since Lao Tzu never read Paul, Augustine or the German Romantics, he
wouldn't feel the need to lionize "love." As he says in ch. 3, "esteeming
worthy ideals makes the people contentious."

Dan Lusthaus
[email-masked]
Bates College

To: Peter Alexander Merel <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Disinterest (was Virtue==Love) 
Date: Fri, 27 Aug 93 14:16:11 -0400
From: [email-masked]

>>I am sorry. I normally would not quibble about the meaning of
>>a word, but in this case you are using "disinterested" to mean
>>nearly the opposite of what it means. I think you must mean
>>"uninterested" or "indifferent". While the word is often used
>>this way in modern journalism, this devaluation of its meaning
>>has only happened in the last ten years or so. 
>>
>>Disinterested means free of all bias and self interest.
>
>Well, we may be hitting one of the differences between English english and
>American english, but my concise oxford gives two meanings for disinterest -
>1. impartiality. 2. unconcern. 

This is not a Taoist response, but actually a Confucian one. We're all
familiar with Confucius' doctrine that one of the first tasks is "the 
rectification of names"; i.e., eliminating sloppy language.

"Disinterested" carries the connotation of impartiality and "uninterested"
carries the connotation of unconcern. It is very valuable to be able to
make this distinction so clearly and simply. The fact that some people have
gotten away with using "disinterested" to mean unconcerned, and that these
people have done so in influential enough circumstances to have that additional
meaning get into a dictionary, does not mean that it's a good thing.

My other example of this kind of loss of useful distinction is "revolve" vs.
"rotate". To revolve is to travel in a circular or elliptical path around
a point outside of one's body; to rotate is to spin on an internal axis.
The earth rotates once a day and revolves around the sun once a year.
Furthermore, there are revolving doors, if we count the assembly as a group of
four doors, but if we count it as one object it's a rotating door.

Dictionaries will tell you that the usage is not so clear-cut, but if we
accept that as so, what's the point of having two words? It is to our benefit
to keep them distinct so that we may express ourselves clearly and compactly.

Thanks for letting me evangelize.

        Tom Price  | heaven and earth regard the 10,000    | [email-masked]
****************** | things as straw dogs, baby  -- TTC    | ******************

To: "[email-masked]" <[email-masked]>
Subject: Poisoned Courtesy Between Peter and Alan (Was Re: Virtue == Love?)
Date: Fri, 27 Aug 93 14:53:50 -0400
From: [email-masked]

One advantage of not naming the way that has no name (but that Lao-Tzu 
called the Tao) is that if this is seriously done, discussions won't 
fall apart in the manner that they have currently between Peter and Alan.
It's impossible to argue over who is correctly interpreting the way
if one can't talk directly about it. One ends up saying "I think this,
I think this"; authority has no place to stand and the question becomes one
of subjective functionality. 

Interlude: It's unfortunate that "subjective" has become a perjorative 
term and come to mean "stupid and unsubstantiated." If anyone is interested, 
Soren Kierkegaard's _Concluding Unscientific Postscript_ is devoted to the 
thesis that Truth is Subjectivity -- since in the end you believe or you 
don't, and making that leap is a qualitative change in your thought that 
can't be affected by quantitative changes in the amount of plausible evidence. 
Of course, this being the case, one should be a little uneasy (here's where 
"angst", the Danish word for "dread", entered into the modern vocabulary) and 
consequently will not stand for the sloppy thinking that most people think 
of today as "subjectivity" -- such as the New Age smorgasbord of immature 
spiritual-style playtime. So subjectivity should, anyway, lead to rigor.

But I didn't mean to talk about subjectivity, I wanted to make a comment
on what Lao-Tzu called the Tao and how not to have arguments. Subjectivity
should lead to rigor but will also obviate discussions about authority.
If there's not authority to name you're thrown back on yourself and questions 
of functionality. If others don't find what you have to say to be useful they
can't tell you you're doing it wrong, they'll just leave you alone.

If one is in academia, of course, one is forced to develop other sorts of 
habits. I'd rather be a fuzzy-minded, idiosyncratic turtle in the mud than 
a tortoise-shell ritual object fighting for tenure ...

Which is not to accuse anyone of either fuzzy-mindedness or not having tenure.

        Tom Price  | heaven and earth regard the 10,000    | [email-masked]
****************** | things as straw dogs, baby  -- TTC    | ******************

From: Peter Alexander Merel <[email-masked]>
Subject: Translating Teh
To: [email-masked] ([email-masked])

Dan Lusthaus writes:
>        Since love and hate are two sides of the same dualist coin, you may
>want to reconsider. Translators a century ago thought they were very clever
>when they latched onto "virtue" as an equivalent for te since literate
>readers a century ago knew that in Latin, virtus meant a potential or power
>that one perfects. The more that innate talent is developed and perfected,
>the better one becomes. To be virtuous meant to perfect one's innate
>powers, one's talents, not necessarily act like a Victorian Lady. They
>thought it was clever because virtus seemed to straddle both Taoist and
>Confucian connotations; the Taoists (particularly Chuang Tzu) treated it as
>innate abilities and talents, and the Confucians as the moral perfecting of
>a person.

I spent some time debating with myself about using the word love for Teh. 
Originally I used the word 'strength', but that just did not seem to ring
true. One day I sat down to see where Teh was best defined - and was struck
by the last paragraph of Chapter 10:

Give birth to them and nourish them.
Give birth to them but don't try to own them;
Help them to grow but don't rule them.
This is called Profound Virtue.
                                      (Henricks)

I'm unsatisfied by the word virtue, and 'Profound Virtue' I find 'Profoundly
Unsatisfying'. Virtue is such an ambiguous and devalued word today that this
use is quite opaque, and I could only find the meaning in the context.

So I looked at the context - bearing, nourishing, helping, giving, sheltering
and not demanding or owning - in the various translations - and I could think 
of no better term for such things than 'love'. Can you?

>        While neither Lao nor Chuang recommend coldhearted nastiness (on
>the contrary, they both frequently describe the sage and his synonyms in
>lofty ethical terms), neither is sentimental about it. To paraphrase ttc
>ch. 2: When all in the world deem loving to be loving, that itself is
>extremely hateful.

We could equally paraphrase, when all in the world deem virtue to be
virtue, that itself is without virtue. It seems to me that Chapter 2 is
on point - that it has to do with the essential subjectivity of human
values, that what are commonly thought of as hard and fast descriptions
of the world are no more than consensual value judgements.

But you are quite right, there is a component of 'power', in the sense
of 'free-flowing-ness', even in my reading of Teh. I hope that using
the word love in the abstract, without supplying it an object, will
include this sense; but I admit the word is not a perfect match in
common parlance. Too often love is meant as desire, or lust, or
romance, where I prefer it to mean something more along the lines of
'Profound Agape'. But almost all words rely on their context to 
disambiguate their sense, so I am content that the use I make of 
the word remains consistent and accessible.

>        Confucianism promotes specific moral values and insists that
>learning and cultivating those values is the only way to make individuals
>and society truly human and harmonious.  Chief among those values are ren
>(humankind-ness), yi (appropriateness, or the balancing of the individual
>with the group), and li (social rules, rituals, and etiquette).  A
>Confucian goal is to become a "person of ren." For Laozi such moral values
>and exhorations always prove self-defeating.
>        Laozi's critique of Confucianism occurs in various places in the
>Dao de jing, but perhaps in its most devastating form in chapter 38. "The
>best De doesn't De," says Laozi, "therefore it has De."  What Laozi means
>is that the best sort of De is not something that one deliberately and
>calculatingly does. It happens spontaneously, naturally. "Lower De doesn't
>lose De,  therefore it has no De." If one always pursues a moral ideal
>rather than relinquishing it, one will never be moral, or at best, one
>might be called "lower De."  

This strikes me as a limited interpretation of this chapter - I should say
that it is not the adherence to morality that is being admonished, but the
adherence to deliberation. I understand that Dan's interpretation is drawn
naturally from the context of Taoism as a reaction to Confucianism, but I
am drawn here towards the less informed reading. I feel that the author of the
ttc intends the work to stand by itself, without reference to Confucianism.

In this I may be quite mistaken, quite certainly if the terms Dan refers
to were specifically Confucian words, rather than general usage. But even
if the original does explicitly concern Confucianism, if the work is to be 
made accessible to non-specialists, that dependance is unhelpful, imho.

>As he says in chapter 3, "Holding ideals in
>high esteem makes the people contentious." Ideals require striving,
>ascending a valuative ladder; and the ladder only has value if some people
>are higher than others on it.  Among the group that deems the ideal
>worthwhile there will inevitably be rivalry and competition for the higher
>berth, those above "looking down" on their fellow strivers, etc.  When
>people are contentious harmony becomes endangered.

I like this interpretation quite a lot - it gives direction to the abstractions
in Chapter 2. I shall adopt it, if you don't mind.

>        Chapter 38 says that  "The best De is wu-wei and without deliberate
>actions." Wu-wei is impossible to translate accurately, and the common
>Quietist term "non-action" by which it is frequently rendered does the
>notion of wu-wei great violence. Laozi's full phrase, occurring several
>times in the Dao de jing, is wu-wei er wu bu wei, which means "no action,
>yet nothing isn't done."  Wei means not only 'to act,' but also 'to
>consider or deem,' 'to do something deliberately with effort.' Wu is used
>in this phrase as a negational prefix. 

I like this very much too - the 'non-action' business has always given me
a problem, and this gives me something much tastier to chew on.

>[...]
>But Laozi argues that once ineffectual ren has degenerated into rules, the
>conditions for conflict, rebellion and repression have emerged. By
>definition a rule is something that prescribes something while proscribing
>its converse. Moreover, a rule prescribes something that would not be
>natural otherwise-to prescribe what's natural is redundant (e.g., it would
>be ludicrous to make a rule that 'humans must breath,' since they cannot
>voluntary do otherwise). Since rules advise doing something unnatural,
>there will always be someone who will refuse to comply. For a rule to
>remain meaningful and not become an empty rule, compliance must be
>enforced. While the Confucians justify their moral system by claiming that
>it provides the means for producing social harmony, Laozi undermines their
>justification by showing that it actually produces just the opposite
>result: rebellion and repression.
>
>"Hence lose Dao, and De follows.
>Lose De, and ren follows.
>Lose ren, and yi follows.
>Lose yi, and li follows."
>
>Li is a flimsy version of loyalty and trust, and the beginning of rebellion.
>Trying to figure things out ahead of time is only Dao's festoon and the
>start of foolishness.

Ah, Dan's interpretation of chapter 38 is quite close to my own. I saw
fit to call li "religion" in the last version of my interpolation, but
I now feel that this is quite incorrect and melodramatic, and will think 
about what more generic words would capture his reading.

>Chapter 18 charges that moral values don't cure social problems, they are
>merely symptoms that the problems are getting worse.

But does love imply morality? I don't see that it does.

>"When the great Dao is abandoned, then there is ren and yi.
>When smartness and erudition emerge, then there is great Dissimulation.
>When family relations are not harmonious, then there is [insistence on]
>filial piety and kindness.
>When a country becomes troubled and rebellious, then there is [talk about]
>the loyalty of ministers."
>
>Rather than teach ideals that will be counterproductive in the end, Laozi
>proposes we give up ren and yi, erudition and moral inculcation. 
>Confucianism considers "learning" moral values its top objective. Laozi
>responds, "Pursuing learning, everyday more is acquired. Pursuing Dao,
>everyday more is dropped."

I think Dan's translation here is very clear and neat, and in accord with my 
understanding of the other translations.

>Since Lao Tzu never read Paul, Augustine or the German Romantics, he
>wouldn't feel the need to lionize "love." As he says in ch. 3, "esteeming
>worthy ideals makes the people contentious."

We may be taking different meanings for the word love. By love I don't
mean something romantic or passionate, though I am happy for such
senses to be drawn. I mean by it complete acceptance and compassion -
cherishing, if you will.  I admit that the word remains ambiguous, but
I still feel that it works better with Teh's context in the ttc than
phrases including the word virtue.

--
Internet: [email-masked]          |         Accept Everything.            |
UUCP: {uunet,mcvax}!munnari!extro!pete |         Reject Nothing.               |

Date: Mon, 30 Aug 93 00:30:42 -0400
To: [email-masked]
From: [email-masked] (DanLusthaus)
Subject: Re: Interpreting Lao Tzu

>I mean to say that what I'm aiming at with an interpolation is accessibility 
>to non-specialists, and textual dependance on the historical context of the 
>work is unhelpful in this - that's exactly what I am attempting to remove.

Peter, Lao Tzu's audience was no less sensitive and determined to respond
to his vocabulary and technical terms than is your audience for you
interpolation. You may want to ignore or discard the confucian connotations
of ch. 38 (though the entire chapter is an attack on confucianism, which is
equivalent to "interpolating" speeches from the last Republican convention
and pretending there is no such thing as Democrats or Liberals), but that
can only be done at the risk of completely misconstruing the text. Case in
point: "love" as a modernization for te. The Confucian term "jen" (or ren
in pinyin, and my piece) is a much closer equivalent to "love" than te will
ever be (Julia Ching and others have in fact used "love" to translate ren).
Part of the reason I cited that chapter in response to the recent
conversation was that it was a case of Lao Tzu explicity rejecting the love
(qua ren) = te equation. I'm sorry if I didn't make that more explicit.

>This means that there is little hope of my text corresponding precisely with 
>the originals; though I intend that it faithfully present their meanings and 
>flavour, I will sacrifice contextual nuance for the sake of clarity.

These two clauses are an oxymoron. Meaning *is* the recovery of context. If
you are not recovering Lao Tzu's context, then you are inventing and/or
"recovering" your own. The fact is that a modern Chinese reader, even if
s/he would find Lao Tzu's (lack of) grammar baffling, would **instantly**
recognize the Confucian implications of the terms ren, yi, li, and know
this chapter is saying something negative about Confucianism.
        Mencius, later than Lao Tzu, formalized a list called the four
beginnings in the following order: ren, yi, li and zhi (knowledge of right
and wrong). Sometime later (anyone know exactly when? where?) a fifth item
was added, xin (honesty, trust), and these five have forever since been
called "The Five Constants." Every Chinese knows the five constants. 
Knowing and explaining such details will go a lot further toward
"faithfully presenting... meanings and flavour" than arguing for the
questionable use of love (or agape) for te.
        As for Agape, that was Augustine's brainchild, not Lao Tzu's (see
my earlier message). Augustine "converted" Plato's preference for Eros to
Agape. Maybe Jim has something to say about that loss?
        Don't forget, as agape gets entrenched in Christian theology,
sexual repression escalates (they are not disjointed notions). Augustine's
_Confessions_ may shed some light on that. Christian "moral" codes ever
since have been almost exclusively concerned with bedroom ethics (to wit:
abortion, contraception, etc.). As Jim pointed out, Taoists have not been
prudes (though Western influence has had devastating effects on the sexual
openness of Chinese and Japanese!). In short - without intending to start
another brushfire, or start a silly argument for/against one religion or
another - agape is not an innocent or innocuous notion, but, historically
speaking, a very dangerous one, and one which (and this really is the
point) Lao Tzu did *not* advocate.

Dan Lusthaus
[email-masked]
Bates College

From: Peter Alexander Merel <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Interpreting Lao Tzu
To: [email-masked] ([email-masked])

Joseph Adler writes:
>[email-masked], in responding to Dan Lusthaus' remarks on
>chapter 10 of Lao Tzu, writes:

Pardon me, I don't think Dan mentioned chapter 10 in the article I
replied to - I did in reply, but he referred to several others, 
chapter 38 for the most part.

>How could the "author" have possibly intended the text to stand
>by itself, without reference to its context?  Are you suggesting
>that he imagined scholars such as us, looking back at the text
>not only through nearly impenetrable mists of time but also
>across a considerable "cosmological gulf"?  That seems hardly
>likely.

I agree, this does seem rather unlikely - and apologies for implying
one author. I am asking whether the ttc is intended to present an
alternative to Confucianism, a self-consistent philosophy with its own
axioms and symmetries, or whether it presents a reply to Confucianism,
incomplete or inaccessible without knowledge of Confucianism.  My
inclination is towards the former, but I'll cheerfully accept the
latter given the obvious utility of such a context.

>And yes, words such as ren, yi, and li were unmistakably
>Confucian buzz-words by the third century BCE, even though they
>all had prior usages.  If this means that only "specialists" can
>understand it, then so be it -- although one doesn't need to read
>the text in Chinese to understand at least some of its context. 
>Your last sentence quoted above seems to imply that accessibility
>to non-specialists has a higher value than truth (as slippery as
>that may be).  I don't mean to posit a simplistic hermeneutic
>here -- substitute another word for "truth" if you prefer.  But
>certainly consistency with the discourse current at the time of
>the text's composition should be a high priority, and not so
>easily jettisoned.  (Assuming, of course, we would like our
>interpretation to me something more than the "blowing of wind.")

I mean to say that what I'm aiming at with an interpolation is accessibility 
to non-specialists, and textual dependance on the historical context of the 
work is unhelpful in this - that's exactly what I am attempting to remove.
This means that there is little hope of my text corresponding precisely with 
the originals; though I intend that it faithfully present their meanings and 
flavour, I will sacrifice contextual nuance for the sake of clarity.

I feel that this approach is useful so long as precise and scholarly
english translations of the work do exist, and I explicitly refer to my
rendition as an interpolation, rather than a translation. I come to praise 
Lao Tse, not to bury him :-)

--
Internet: [email-masked]          |         Accept Everything.            |
UUCP: {uunet,mcvax}!munnari!extro!pete |         Reject Nothing.               |

From: Peter Alexander Merel <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Interpreting Lao Tzu
To: [email-masked] ([email-masked])

Dan LustHaus writes:
>Peter, Lao Tzu's audience was no less sensitive and determined to respond
>to his vocabulary and technical terms than is your audience for you
>interpolation. You may want to ignore or discard the confucian connotations
>of ch. 38 (though the entire chapter is an attack on confucianism, which is
>equivalent to "interpolating" speeches from the last Republican convention
>and pretending there is no such thing as Democrats or Liberals), but that
>can only be done at the risk of completely misconstruing the text. 

I don't seek to downplay the anti-confucian connotation of Chapter 38, but to
genericize it, to make it more useful to the majority of my audience who have
no experience of Confucianism. To do this I will have to abstract from the
understanding of that chapter that I have recently drawn from you, Dan - to 
ignore that understanding would be foolish.

>Case in point: "love" as a modernization for te. The Confucian term "jen" 
>(or ren in pinyin, and my piece) is a much closer equivalent to "love" than 
>te will ever be (Julia Ching and others have in fact used "love" to translate
>ren). Part of the reason I cited that chapter in response to the recent
>conversation was that it was a case of Lao Tzu explicity rejecting the love
>(qua ren) = te equation. I'm sorry if I didn't make that more explicit.

That's quite all right - thank you for completing your argument.

Dan's philological reasoning is sound, and further reflection on my
contextual argument shows me its flaw. The sage is both compassionate and
impartial, but impartiality is not an attribute of love or kindness -
Dan's ren. Love is indefatigably partial.

This means that I must choose another word for Teh. I have considered not
translating it at all - after all, I do not attempt to translate Tao - but
to do that, imho, detracts greatly from the accessibility of the text. I 
briefly considered 'beauty', but that doesn't sit well with Chapter 10, and
I still cannot content myself with some flavour of 'virtue'. 

However, after some puzzling, I believe I do have a word that may fit. I
was admiring Dan's letter, the one that I reply to here, and it seemed to me
to be the very model of the word it was discussing - it is compassionate, yet
unloving, restrained, yet open, generous, yet not contentious ... I don't mean
to embarrass Dan, but I think it demonstrates grace. I wonder then whether the
word 'grace' might be closer to the mark for Teh?

>>This means that there is little hope of my text corresponding precisely with 
>>the originals; though I intend that it faithfully present their meanings and 
>>flavour, I will sacrifice contextual nuance for the sake of clarity.
>
>These two clauses are an oxymoron. Meaning *is* the recovery of context. If
>you are not recovering Lao Tzu's context, then you are inventing and/or
>"recovering" your own. 

I'm afraid I can't agree here - I think that meaning is the recovery of
use. If I know what something means, then I become able to employ it in some
fashion. I feel that use and context, especially when it comes to hermeneutics,
are different things, that use can be conveyed by metaphor where context can
not. I guess I'm suggesting that context is a specialisation of meaning. 

>The fact is that a modern Chinese reader, even if
>s/he would find Lao Tzu's (lack of) grammar baffling, would **instantly**
>recognize the Confucian implications of the terms ren, yi, li, and know
>this chapter is saying something negative about Confucianism.

Quite so - but it is the modern English reader that I am concerned
with. I feel that I can convey chapter 38 to him algorithmically, even
though I cannot convey its context. If the reader wishes to concern
himself with context, there are many fine translations that he will
easily discover for himself.

>        Mencius, later than Lao Tzu, formalized a list called the four
>beginnings in the following order: ren, yi, li and zhi (knowledge of right
>and wrong). Sometime later (anyone know exactly when? where?) a fifth item
>was added, xin (honesty, trust), and these five have forever since been
>called "The Five Constants." Every Chinese knows the five constants. 
>Knowing and explaining such details will go a lot further toward
>"faithfully presenting... meanings and flavour" than arguing for the
>questionable use of love (or agape) for te.

Agreed.

--
Internet: [email-masked]          |         Accept Everything.            |
UUCP: {uunet,mcvax}!munnari!extro!pete |         Reject Nothing.               |

From: [email-masked]
Cc: TAOISM-L <[email-masked]>
Subject: Forgetting Words

>When Zhuangzi laments "where can I find a
>man who has forgotten words that I might have a word with him" (Watson's
>translation), I suggest that he sheds a lot of light on several of the
>intermingled questions we've been asking, as well as on the manner in
>which we've been asking them.  
>
>In the first place, what would it mean to be able to forget words in this
>fashion, and why would such a person be the ideal conversational partner? 

I'll risk mentioning Ludwig Wittgenstein again, because the language theory
of his middle-late period is very interesting in this context. My understanding
of the argument of _the Blue and Brown Books_ is as follows: 

We commonly think of language as serving a pictorial function. We have
a symbol, which is connected with some object, and also connected with
an esoteric thing called the "meaning". I think the "meaning" in my head,
think of the appropriate symbol, communicate the symbol to you and then
it evokes the "meaning" in your head. According to LW, a great deal of 
linguistic philosophy is devoted to understanding how the "meaning" is
evoked by the symbol and how it is connected with it in the first place.
We can see it in Alan's post (which I hope he doesn't mind my taking as
representative of customary thought on language):

>someone who could avoid projecting their own meanings onto my
>words would be one who might truly understand what I am trying to say. 
>And perhaps true communication is only possible between two or more such
>individuals.

According to this view of language the problems of communication are to be
found as a result of evoking the wrong, or almost the wrong, "meaning" with 
our symbols. But what if, says Wittgenstein at this point in his argument, 
this is an inappropriate model of language? Then all this inquiry will 
turn out to have been misplaced.

He asks the question: What is meaning? Based on the way the word is used
it seems to be almost an esoteric fluid, an enigmatic entity that inhabits
the mind. He offers this suggestion: such seeming is merely a grammatical 
confusion; throw it out altogether. Use is meaning. If I use a symbol, and 
you respond in any way, the interaction is the meaning. Your response shows 
the meaning. There is no need to look for any enigmatic entity. Meaning 
isn't in my mind, or your mind, but in the interactive use of symbols.

When I read Watson's Zhuangzi and got to the part about forgetting words,
I thought at once of this. One who sees things in terms of Middle-Wittgenstein
language theory (which I hope I have not explained too abominably) is quite
close to leaving words behind, since to him they do not provide a picture
of the world and have no place in it except as tokens in a game played by
humans. If I hold the "picture theory" of language I will see discrete 
things in my world, and, by extension, will see the names of those things.
If however I see the world as essentially "orthogonal to language" -- and
if I think of language as a game that humans play -- then I won't attempt
to understand the world in terms of lang -- in terms. :-)  

>What does seem pretty clear is that according to the Zhuangzi and the Dao
>De Jing, at least, the sage models him or herself after nature, and nature
>can certainly not be realistically described as compassionate,
>non-violent, loving, or even remotely interested in anything that happens
>to us, or even to itself.  Nature doesn't play favorites - why should the
>sage?

Once one starts thinking that language is a human game that has
no ontological toehold, so to speak, out there in the world, it's
a small step to say that human *thinking*, which is an essentially 
linguistic activity, is a game taking place wholly in human minds and 
its structure has nothing to do with the structure (if there is such
a thing) of the world. One will then cease to think of nature in 
ethical terms, or personal terms, or any human terms. 

This is my understanding of "forgetting words" and the significance thereof.

        Tom Price  | heaven and earth regard the 10,000    | [email-masked]
****************** | things as straw dogs, baby  -- TTC    | ******************

From: [email-masked] (DanLusthaus)
Date: Tue, 31 Aug 93 18:46:38 -0400
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: sex, text, context

LeGrand Cinq-Mars' response to my response to his response was indeed very
thoughtful, rigorous, and well argued. In fact, I have no argument with his
demand for methodological rigor when making comparisons. I heartily endorse
most of what he says.
        We sometimes speak "quickly" on email, and briefly, without
footnotes, extensive documents, etc.; but the nature of the media, viz.
although somewhat mimetic of "print media," is actually more instantaneous,
generalized and haphazard. That's to be expected. So, everyone else, please
excuse if I take the time to respond a little more thoroughly to LeGrand's
recent posting (though still "quick" and undocumented for the most part).
If this discussion hasn't interested you so far, hit the delete button.
        One issue: he questioned my suggestion that "Western" influence, in
the form of missionaries and so on, has had a serious impact on East Asian
sex attitudes and practices, suggesting that (1) East Asian attitudes have
always been complex and variegated, different at different times and
places, and (2) that sexual "repression" is a Western construct in need of
supplementation by other sorts of sociological "power" relations, somatic
theories, etc. (3) He also cites non-Augustinian traditions (Indian
Buddhist monks, Rabbinics, contemporary Japanese Buddhists) as additional
examples of my problematic term "sexual repression," identifying "abortion"
as one of the issues they were "repressive" or at least concerned about.
        (1) Absolutely right. Ch'ing and T'ang are different. But are
either like today, where in mainland China any sign of public affection
(holding hands, e.g.) is (or until recently was) taboo? Now Nestorians and
other Christian missionaries were in Ch'ang-an (the capitol) during the
T'ang, bad mouthing each other and competing for converts, and having some
impact (yet to be measured or fully appreciated) on East Asian culture,
perhaps, ironically Japan more than China, since their contact with people
like Kuukai (and more indirectly, the formation of some basic Central Asian
Buddhist ideas) likely nuanced or altered the flavor of Indian Buddhism on
its way to Japan, producing what everyone recognizes is an intriguing and
curious anomaly: Japanese Buddhism is in its very fundamentals
diametrically opposed to the most fundamental Indian Buddhist ideas. That
is currently being articulated quite hyperbolically by several leading
Buddhist scholars at Komozawa University in Tokyo, under the title
"critical buddhism."
        Case in point: Indian Buddhism does not oppose abortion (nor does
Tibetan Buddhism). Japanese Buddhists on the other hand "sell" cemetary
plots and perform or oversee expiatory rituals for the abortants to expiate
their sins. This may be linked more directly to more recent contact with
Western theology than to Nestorian, etc. influences from over a thousand
years ago, but the West is not without some complicity in this turn of
events.
        Incidentally (to return to Taoist issues for a moment), the
Christians in Ch'ang-an were not only influencing Buddhists, but Taoists
and Confucians as well, who, by the late Sung, were themselves adopting
Buddhist ideas wholesale (Buddhists, to their credit or demerit, introduced
the idea of "hell" to China in the first place - and it is notable that the
Chinese resisted it for several centuries before adopting it with a
vengeance.)
        (2) Sex: somatic, socio-political, kinship, 'meditational',
business alliances, etc. Yes, it can be contextualized in many ways. As
Madison Ave. knows, and Merleau-Ponty recognized, sex is an "atmosphere."
It's susceptible to pollution, abuse, etc., but it's also the very air we
breath, the cause of our existence, and the Eros (thirst for life,
enjoyment, pleasure, comfort, aesthetic sensibilities, etc.). Sexual codes
are so potent precisely because if you control someone's genitals you
control that person (and in an extremely literal sense) his/her progeny.
You dictate the structure, function and interrelations of the family (which
confucians have long recognized is the basic human unit: politically,
socially, emotionally, spiritually, and every other which way). The rigor
LeGrand suggests for recognizing all the *different* spheres in which
sexual relations need to be examined is commendable, but not at the expense
of losing sight of its centrality and ubiquity. This is not an opposing
suggestion, but a complimentary one: to understand its ubiquity is
precisely to understand all the spheres it radiates into, and vice versa.
        Because of Adam and Eve hiding from God's voice in the Garden,
Western culture has in general been ashamed of its body. A great deal of
the power of Renaissance art was the splashing of naked nymphs and portly
women in open, brightly colored fields. The rediscovery of joy and the
body, after centuries of artistic depictions of torture and agony, came as
a revelation, which was soon subterfuged by the ingrained guilt that
reasserted (a horrible misreading that reversed) Platonic Love (Eros);
These nymphs were only allowed to inhabit the imagination, not the local
fields; true love was "platonic" - no touchee, no feelee. The immense and
paralyzing internal conflicts this produced was precisely what presented
itself to Freud from the hysterical, neurotic voices on his couch. Jung
wanted to stick everything back into the imagination (the collective
unconscious) while having affairs with his patients, and via Husserl,
Merleau-Ponty, Bytendyck (sp?), and the more trendy therapies of the 60s
and beyond, the lived-body has finally arrived as an authentic academic
topic. Only for us sinologists and indologists to remind our colleagues
that it always was one for the cultures we study (as we can demonstrate
with the materials that survived missionary expurgations).
        Now this "quick" sketch of the West has its importance for Taoist
studies as well, since, until quite recently, one of the byproducts of the
renaissance's reinvention of Plato was German Romanticism, which worshipped
Nature (with a capitol "N"). Aside from contributing to Marx and Engels and
their eventual influence on the Chinese mainland (Engels' _Dialectics of
Nature_ was probably much more widely read and studied in China than any of
Marx's writings), it has also been the main "context" from which Western
readers have approached Taoism, aided and abetted by translators who waxed
poetic and philosophical on Taoism as the world's true Nature religion.
'Nuff said.
        (3) As stated earlier, Indian Buddhism was not against abortion.
The Talmud (root text for Rabbinic Judaism) not only doesn't oppose
abortion, it offers instructions in how to prepare and perform abortive
procedures (some of which are also found in the Bible, though apparently in
sections rarely read by Fundamentalist Christians). Of course, abortion is
not the beginning and end of sexual discourse - which is exactly my point.
Why, with all the problems in the world, is this the one that is most
nasty, most organized, inflames the greatest passions, infiltrates most
sections of our political and social arena? What em-bodied theory accounts
for this intensity? How can US politicians seriously say to Chinese
diplomats, to their faces, outlaw abortion or we'll get tough? (Fortunately
such threats have never manifested more than minor inconveniences - US
withholding funding for UN programs, etc.). Can anyone imagine T'ang (or
Ch'ing) society putting an "abortion issue" at or near the top of their
social/cultural agenda? Nor, I suspect, without input of Western ideas
would the Communist Chinese have constructed their One-Child policy.

Next time, I'll stick to Taoism... promise!

Dan Lusthaus
[email-masked]
Bates College