I and Tao: Martin Buber's Encounter with Chuang Tzu (review)

132 China Review International: Vol. 6, No. ?, Spring 1999 Guldin's chapter 3, with its account ofvillagers' views ofurbanization, makes for an appropriate conclusion. As for the remaining substantive chapters, readers with a specialized interest will want to mine them for the nuggets they contain. Fritz Gaenslen Gettysburg College Fritz Gaenslen is an associateprofessor ofpolitical science, and teaches courses on China, Japan, developing areas, andpeasants aspoliticai actors. m Jonathan R. Herman. I and Tao: Martin Buber's Encounter with Chuang Tzu. Albany: State University ofNew York Press, 1996. 278 pp. Hardcover $65.00, isbn 0-7914-2924-5. Paperback $24.95, ISBN 0-7914-2924-5. As Jonathan Herman rightly hints in his "Preface" to I and Tao: Martin Buber's Encounter with Chuang Tzu, many "sinologists, Buber scholars, and comparative religionists" will be astonished to learn that the young Martin Buber (1878-1965), one ofthe premier religious thinkers of the twentieth century, studied classical Chinese and ancient Chinese philosophy and, moreover, authored a study tided Reden und Gleichnisse des Tschuang-tse (Talks and parables of Chuang Tzu). The latter is Buber's translation of, and commentary on, the ancient Chinese philosophical "text,"1 the Chuang Tzu (p. ix), that Buber published in 1910, at the start ofhis long career as a scholar ofreligious philosophy and Hasidic thought. Trying to correct the scant attention hitherto devoted to Reden und Gleichnisse by Buber scholars and sinologists alike, Herman offers an insightful hermeneutic ofthe interrelationship of Reden und Gleichnisse and Buber's "dialogical philosophy," especially as developed in the latter's highly important I and Thou (1923). Herman accomplishes this task via translation and analysis of Buber's little known Reden und Gleichnisse, which is comprised of German translations of fiftyfour passages from the Chuang Tzu. In Reden und Gleichnisse, these passages are followed by an interpretive "Afterword" (Nachwort), dealing with Chuang Tzu's contributions to the literary and philosophical development ofwhat Buber calls "The Tao-Teaching" (Die Tao-Lehre) especially insofar as they can be understood y nwersi y ^n relati0n to the alleged définition ofthe teaching by Lao Tzu. As Herman notes, while Reden und Gleichnisse has been an obscure text, it is hardly a "lost" work: Maurice Friedman, Buber's biographer, translated Buber's "Afterword" into English in 1957 as "The Teaching of the Tao." Herman's unique contribution is not ofHawai'i Press Reviews 133 in "discovering" a hitherto unknown text, but in insightfully evaluating Buber's "Taoist volume with respect to different models ofmeaning, where each model is justified through a combination ofestablished work in hermeneutic theory and the intentions suggested by Buber's work itself (p. 8). The three hermeneutic models ofmeaning framing Herman's analyses are "historical reconstruction," "interactive interpretation," and finally "aesthetic reception" (p. 187). Herman does not, in unfolding his multifaceted hermeneutic of Reden und Gleichnisse, gloss over the scholarly weaknesses of Buber's "Taoist volume." He admits, for example, that Buber's knowledge of Chinese, by contemporary standards, was rudimentary. Additionally, Herman admits tiiat Reden und Gleichnisse is "based almost entirely on the available English [translations] ... by Giles and Legge, with particularly liberal use ofthe former" (p. 4). Nevertheless, in his tripartite analysis of Reden und Gleichnisse, Herman proffers provocative interpretive observations aimed, essentially but not exclusively, at three audiences: sinologists, Buber scholars, and scholars of comparative religion. Vis-à-vis sinologists, Herman's historically oriented hermeneutic suggests that Buber's Reden und Gleichnisse contributes significantiy toward resolving the historical questions related to textual meaning and "authorial intent" by claiming that "the general spirit" of Buber's interpretation ofthe Taoist teaching ofthe Chuang Tzu and its literary form as parable "is certainly plausible," despite "the linguistic and historical limitations" that prevented Buber from demonstrating greater "sensitivity to the subdeties ofChinese thought" (pp. 127-128). While admittedly sympathetic, Herman seems at times too ready to find a way to salvage Buber's analyses by finding, at one level or another, a grain oftruth in them. For example, Buber's "Afterword" emphasizes tiiat Chuang Tzu received the teaching ofTaoism from Lao Tzu, who had fixed it philosophically but left it "concealed," and that Chuang Tzu's innovation consisted in poetically recasting that "teaching " in...