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Excerpt from Tao Te Ching
Foreword A new English translation of the Tao Teh Ching is welcome, if it is faithful to the original, and lays hold of yet more of its great insights. These objectives Dr. John C. H. Wu has done his best to attain. He has carefully revised an earlier rendering which was published in the T'ien Hsia Monthly twenty years ago. In addition to competence in the Chinese language, Dr. Wu possesses two endowments necessary to a translator of this text: a practical understanding of men and institutions, and an appreciation of mysticism in its highest and best sense. In the 1920s he carried on an illuminating correspondence with the late Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes— letters that were published in the aforementioned journal. It was natural that owing to his knowledge of comparative law he was chosen to write, in 1933, the First Draft of the Permanent Constitution of China. In 1946 there appeared, quite to the surprise of his friends, a translation of the Book of Psalms into the Chinese language. It is vain to hope for a definitive English rendering of the Tao Teh Ching; and this expectation Dr. Wu would be among the first to disclaim. Any translation is an interpretation, particularly if the work is one of great imaginative insight; for the language of one tradition does not provide exact verbal equivalents for all the creative ideas of another tradition. The Tao Teh Ching is a series of insights into life and nature; it is suggestion rather than statement. Obliged as a translator to choose a particular word, he is bound to leave other possibilities unexpressed; he cannot, as Chuang Tzu would say, play all the tunes at once. It does not follow, however, that one rendering cannot evoke more of the original music than another. An allied difficulty besetting a translator of this classic is worth mentioning: the obscurity of certain words and phrases, attributable it is believed to misplacement or loss of some of the wooden slips on which, before the invention of printing, the text was transmitted. Fortunately these instances are few, and may be ignored. The Tao Teh Ching was written in the morning of the human race, and still bears the freshness of the morning upon it. It exhibits a rush of language, a boldness and exuberance of expression for which paradox is the only adequate form. Hence one who expects to find in it a reasoned, chain-like sequence of thought will be disappointed. Let him not, however, turn away from it on this account. For the Taoists, Reality was beyond measurement, but not beyond apprehension by a mind that is still. The book's greatest gift, in my view is its mind-stretching quality; it challenges us at every turn to expand our view of life's possibilities. Both Confucianism and Taoism complement each other, however incompatible they seem at first sight to be. 'The former places a man in his proper relation to his fellow-men, the latter in proper relation to nature. A third philosophy, Buddhism, though introduced from India, deals with the problem of human suffering and with man's ultimate destiny. These three inheritances—the first adjusting man to his fellow-men, the second to nature, and the third to the Absolute—have molded the thinking not only of the Chinese people but of all Eastern Asia. There is truth, then, in the common saying that every Chinese wears a Confucian cap, a Taoist robe, and Buddhist sandals. Whereas Confucius counseled his people to labor untiringly for the welfare and dignity of man in society, Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu on the other hand cautioned them against excessive interference. In their view, the urge to change what by nature is already good only increases the sum-total of human unhappiness. These two urges: on the one hand, to do something, and on the other hand, not to do too much, are forever contending in our natures. The man who can maintain a just balance between them is on the road to social and intellectual maturity. Though Taoism by its nature is not a philosophy that could well be carried out in government, it nonetheless became the inspiration of much of Chinese literature and nearly all of Chinese art. It provided those "Waldens of the mind" that Dialectical Man needs to restore his sense of wonder and repose. Only the free, unfettered Taoist mind, bent on enjoying nature as well as conquering her, was able to engender in China a pure landscape art one thousand years before landscape art, for its own sake, made its appearance in Europe. Thanks to both Taoist and Zen influence, Japanese landscape art antedated that of Europe by six hundred years. Skill in the apportionment of space, economy of line and color, freedom and spontaneity in choice of subject and treatment, are all marks of Taoist thinking. He who views with distrust excessive organization and mechanization, will find in the Tao Teh Ching man's first articulate protest against them. If he has misgivings about the notion of "inevitable progress," he is reminded by Lao Tzu that "all things come back to their roots," that "to go far is to return." The heavy blow, says Taoism, often fails where the light touch succeeds. The world has a place for humility, yielding, gentleness, and serenity. But to enjoy these benefits one must "Learn to unlearn one's learning." Arthur W. Hummel |
