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  • Religious and Philosophical Aspects of the Laozi
  • Tze-ki Hon (bio)
Mark Csikszentmihalyi and Philip J. Ivanhoe, editors. Religious and Philosophical Aspects of the Laozi. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. xi, 258 pp. Paperback $23.95, ISBN 0-7914-4112-1.

A short text consisting of merely five thousand characters in the original Chinese, the Laozi (or Dao de jing) is popular in the West among scholars and general readers alike. As a seminal text of Daoism, the Laozi has been translated many times into different European languages and studied from a variety of perspectives including mysticism, comparative religion, medicine, and ethics. However, despite its popularity, little has been done to examine critically the approaches used to study this important text. To fill this void, Religious and Philosophical Aspects of the Laozi gathers together nine essays by prominent Laozi experts in North America, China, France, and Japan. By bringing together writings from different parts of the world, the two editors of this collection, Mark Csikszentmihalyi and Philip Ivanhoe, place the Laozi in the context of international scholarship, demonstrating its broad appeal to scholars around the globe and its diverse readings. Thanks to the two editors' translations, three essays originally written in French (Isabelle Robinet), Chinese (Liu Xiaogan), and Japanese (Tateno Masami) are made available to English readers.

Among the nine contributions, the two by Isabelle Robinet and Zhang Longxi are particularly important in demonstrating the Laozi's broad appeal to scholars around the globe. In her essay, Robinet offers a critical review of the works by four contemporary Anglo-American scholars: Benjamin Schwartz, A. C. Graham, Chad Hansen, and Michael LaFargue. Based on her study of the Daoist and Confucian commentaries to the Laozi, she parts company with them on such issues as the mystical union with Dao, the inadequacy of language, and the art of governing. Perhaps some may find Robinet's disagreement with these four somewhat trivial, but it is nevertheless fascinating to see how the Laozi provokes debates among scholars of different cultural and national backgrounds. If in Robinet's essay we see the Laozi help to cross cultural and national boundaries, in Zhang Longxi's essay we see it bring together past and present and East and West. In his elegantly written and theoretically inspiring essay, Zhang summarizes comments on the Laozi by the prominent contemporary Chinese scholar Qian Zhong-shu. Paraphrasing and translating from the second volume of Guan zhui bian (The tube and awl chapters), Zhang gives us a glimpse of Qian as a cosmopolitan scholar, who is equally at home in Chinese and European scholarship. With his knowledge of the Chinese commentarial tradition, Qian criticizes the scholars of the Qing for studying the Laozi narrowly for philological purposes, while with his understanding of European literature and philosophy, he compares the Laozi with [End Page 394] Greek aesthetics and Hegelian dialectics. As in the case of Robinet, we find Qian render the Laozi not merely as a Chinese text but also as a world classic.

As the two editors point out in their introduction, Religious and Philosophical Aspects of the Laozi is intentionally diverse for the purpose of reflecting "the ambiguous history and polysemantic nature of the text" (p. 27). The diversity of this collection is particularly clear in its inclusion of essays that represent a wide variety of approaches to studying the Laozi. Some of the authors here understand the Laozi in light of its long-standing commentarial tradition (Mark Csikszentmihalyi, Isabelle Robinet). Others emphasize the need to read the Laozi in relation to contemporary life (Robert G. Henricks, Bryan W. Van Norden). Yet others explore new possibilities for reading the Laozi based on different understandings of its historical context and core ideas (Harold D. Roth, Tateno Masami, Liu Xiao-gan, Philip J. Ivanhoe). These differing approaches attest to the multiple possibilities of interpreting the Laozi and give support to the two editors' appeal for not seeking one way to read the text.

Diverse as they may seem, there are a few common threads that join the essays more closely together than the title of the book suggests. One common thread is the contributors' refusal to read the...

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