Mark Saltveit

I just wrote an article at Taoish.org about a lost section of the Tao Te Ching found in the Guodian texts, at least according to Prof. Sarah Allan of Dartmouth, who is one of the leading experts on the subject. There were 14 extra slips mixed in with Bundle C of the Guodian Laozi. They were described as a separate document called “Da Yi sheng shui” (“The Great One produced water)" in the first Chinese version of the Guodian text. But she makes a compelling argument (which others have supported) that while the first 8 of the slips are a separate text, the last 6 are part of that version of the Tao Te Ching, or proto-Tao Te Ching as some call it. (These slips where not separate from the TTJ when found; notches from the binding rope show that they were bundles together.) It starts out:

No added value in the Concubine version?

Right, I was thinking more of the Heshan Gong in regards to taboo. I suppose another possibility is that the Heshan Gong version was written outside of the Han Empire. Fragments were found at Dunhuang, on the very Western edge of the Han Empire. Or it was written by a scribe far removed from the capital who did not respect the taboo. Or it could have been written during the brief Xin Dynasty (9-23 CE), which wasn't much of a dynasty. (I have 2 daughters that have lasted longer). Or, since taboos don't survive dynasties, maybe the taboo from the earlier Western Han didn't survive after Xin into the later Eastern Han.

I'm sorry, that must be the link for my local public library. You'll have to look up JSTOR independently and search for the title. I thought that was a universal link for JSTOR, with the publication number being 25066707.

I guess I'm not entirely clear on the rules of the name taboo. I had thought that the taboo only applied during the reign of that emperor. So if the Mawangui versions were written before this emperor's reign, and Heshan Gong was written after, couldn't they both have used that character? Or is that character banned going forward into the future? The easiest way for most people to access Liu Xiogan's articles (and most scholarly articles) is through the JSTOR database which many public libraries -- including mine --- give access to. The URL for this article is http://0-www.jstor.org.catalog.multcolib.org/stable/25066707

Just as true today -- the real tragedy of the (second) Iraq is that it upset a carefully wrought balance between Iran and Iraq, Shia and Sunni, and unleashed a bunch of fighting that continues in Syria and elsewhere.

One of the leading Chinese scholars, Liu Xiogan, says "From Bamboo Slips to Received Versions: Common Features in the Transformation of the 'Laozi'" Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 63, No. 2 (Dec., 2003), pp. 337-382

Could it also mean that it was written after he wasn't emperor any more?

ChiDragon: Prof. Stephen Bokenkamp, in "Early Daoist Scriptures", says "second century C.E.?" So somewhere between 100 C.E. and 200 C.E.

Why the focus on government? The tomb had a cup from the court of the Emperor of Chu (meaning the group right around him, not a court like a judge convicting people of crimes), indicating that this person was well-connected to the court. A leading theory is that it was the tutor of the prince of Chu at the time. So he would be most interested in chapters relating to government. At the same time, there are no chapters over 66. This implies that the last several may not have existed yet at that time. In general terms, either this was a government-focused selection, or the earliest editions of the DDJ were about government, and more of the water/feminine/mystical sections were added later.

I don't think anyone would dispute that Wang Bi is a giant of Daoist scholarship. We also don't know what his starting materials were. He may have had one text of the DDJ, or a dozen wildly varied ones, or a fragment of a longer work. Good point on age.... most likely there were rather different variants, some "died out" or were lost or supressed. Some books exist only in fragments that were quoted in other books. I've researched a Greek writer, Sotades who invented the palndrome. Everything he wrote was destroyed because of his notoriety (he was executed for criticizing Emperor Ptolemy II after Ptolemy married his own sister). Only 10-20 fragments exist, and all because they were quoted. It's easy to find fairly recent and very inaccurate versions of classic books such as the Tao Te Ching-- some 100 years, some 20.

ChiDragon: Uh... what? I can't tell if you're joking or not.

Thanks!

Tzu/Zi is an honorific that simply means Master -- Laozi, Zhuangzi, Sunzi (art of war), etc. Lao Tzu is the man (traditionally) considered to be Lao Dan, but but no one is sure there was such a person. Lao Tzu can also mean "the Old Master" or "the Old Masters", Classical Chinese was a very flexible language. When I was in China, it was very common to refer to old/wise/honored people as Lao Marblehead, or whatever. Similarly, young people were often called "Xiao Luigi" or whatever, where xiao means young or little. As the British might say "Young Master Downton." Tangentially, the word for timid/cowardly was literally "small heart," or "small gallbladder" 胆小

Actually the Mawangdui silks were 168 BCE, Guodian goes back to 300 BCE. An excellent source for the latest scholarly findings on these subjects is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is free and online: Zhuangzi: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zhuangzi/ Laozi http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/laozi/

It's like asking if Jesus was a Christian... All of this is so old that very little can be known for certain. This hopefully encourages a certain humility about pronouncing the truth about what happened -- which seems perfectly in sync with Taoism (the Tao that can be told is not the true Tao, and all that.) Some people (esp. professors of religion) consider "Taoism" to be the technical term for the religious form of Daoism that only arose in the second century C.E. By this definition, Zhuangzi can not have been a Taoist, nor could the author(s) of the Daodejing. But it's almost a circular argument. I use Taoist for anyone who believes in the ideas in the DDJ and LZ, or practices based on them in any form. There are references in both ZZ and the LZ that seem to be references to self-cultivation techniques, such as forms of breathing and meditation (Zhuangzi talks about "the feasting of the mind", which certainly sounds like meditation of some sort.) Whether these were common technqiues among Taoists of that era, or even elements of some long-forgotten ancient religion of the Warring States period, there is no way to know. The former seems likely and the latter unlikely to me, but really we don't have any evidence except the texts themselves.

ZZ and LZ lived so long ago that we can't be sure either was an actual person (though there's historical record of a person named Chang Chou who is widely considered to be ZZ). More to the point, there are a lot of reasons to believe that both books are collections of sayings accumulated over years, perhaps an oral tradition, later compiled into a book. The Guodian Laozi fits this theory pretty well, looking a lot like either an embryonic kernel of the book, or a loose collection of some of the raw pieces that were later put together. The Mawangdui silk texts and Beida version are a lot closer to the 250 CE received version, but also look like two examples of a variant that died out, like Neanderthal man, with the De section coming before the Dao, etc. There are quotes from Laozi in the Zhuangzi (but not vice versa). Nonetheless, many thing ZZ might be older, in its "original: kernel, the Inner Chapters, which are widely believed to have been written by Zhuangzi, with the rest added later by devotees. In part because they quote Zhuangzi.

Or perhaps it was an invasive species crowding out the better-suited native plant.

Very interesting, thanks. I wish I knew Classical Chinese. Marblehead: I was making a cheap joke actually, my house is bigger than I need, but since you asked: The outside, pretty much. If I spent more time in it.

Thanks, I would love any and all. ;-) I can offer you in return a copy of my book "The Tao of Chip Kelly" -- I'm pretty sure there is no better book on Daoism and American football. Do you find Wagner authoritative? It looks great, though there is a funny typo on Amazon. It gives Wang Bi's years as 126 CE - 249 CE. I'm pretty sure he died young but a Daoist adept living 123 years, why not? What and when are the Yan Zun and Concubine versions? I have not heard of those. I do have Bokenkamp's book and his (unpubicized) translation of the parts of the DDJ quoted in the Xiang'er. Part of my interest was spurred by the comment on Chapter 80 that Henricks may have mistranslated a character on the MWD silks that reads "funeral vessels" as "weapons" -- that changes the entire meaning of that chapter! Thanks, Mark

You must have a large house! I regard my house as a small house.

Thanks! I hadn't thought of the Cold War as a Daoist war, but that makes a lot of sense. May I quote you on that?

Thanks, Marbled One. it's a bit controversial to call Sun Tzu Daoist; I've seen highly respected people take both sides. Fair to say it comes out of the same cultural seedbed but isn't classically Daoist in the way that the DDJ and Zhuangzi are.Certainly the Daoist classics are yet more skeptical of battle than the Sun Tzu. I think the most Daoist part of it is a quote I vaguely remember that "the best way to win a war is to convince your opponent that you're not enemies in the first place."

I would love to hear more about what a Taoist sort of war is. in my opinion, World War 2 was the most Taoist war for the United States. Because we were relucant to fight, pacifist even or at least isolationist, until the situation made clear that we had to fight. Then, we focused the entire nation on the war and overwhelmed our enemies. The only problem is that afterwards, we did not return to our natural isolationist position, which you can see the American public is embracing today. The Soviet Union became the new enemy and the mobilization turned into the Military Industrial Complex, as war hero general and president Eisenhower said.

"without competing with the world" -- nicely put.