A Chinese Reading of the Daodejing: Wang Bi's Commentary on the Laozi with Critical Text and Translation

A NOTE ON PREVIOUS TRANSLATIONS

116 A Chinese Reading of the Daodejing struction of the Laozi that had enormous impact on all later commentators of whatever philosophical or religious bent, and, in the same process, the philosophical exploration of, and elaboration on, the perceived meaning of the Laozi by a young genius of the third century c.e. A NOTE ON PREVIOUS TRANSLATIONS This translation is not the first. The three earlier efforts, Paul Lin’s (1977),7 Ariane Rump’s (1979),8 and Richard Lynn’s (1999),9 have all based their translations of the common modern editions of Wang Bi’s Laozi text and his Commentary. Lynn has taken notice of some of the problems with this text but has basically remained within the confines of Hatano Tarô’s collection of notes and Lou Yulie’s rather weak edition. None of the translators has taken cognizance of the seminal work of Shima Kuniô. This marks an important difference with the work presented here. And as no critical edition was attempted, no or little references is made to the manuscript record. The first two translations have proceeded from a notion that there is a Laozi with an intrinsic meaning to which Wang Bi offers a commentary. They have therefore felt free to stick to existing translations of the Laozi, in the case of Rump, the one presented by Wing-tsit Chan quite independently of the Wang Bi commentary, and they have attached their translation of Wang Bi’s commentary. No effort at an extrapolative reading of the Laozi text through Wang Bi’s commentary has been made. This methodological flaw has had very unsatisfactory results, because the commentary seems more often than not quite random and out of tune with the “meaning” of the text. Lynn has made significant headway in this area. His translation moves in the direction of an extrapolative effort, and in quite a few cases, successfully so. He has not made his translation strategy explicit, so we have to go by his actual procedure. This leaves a mixed message of extrapolative translation, adhesion to time-honored, if nonsensical, readings , and personal beliefs and preferences. He will translate the first phrase of Laozi 5 as “Heaven and Earth are not benevolent and treat the myriad things as straw dogs” in the way hundreds of translators have done before him and will then translate Wang Bi’s commentary to this phrase: “Heaven and Earth do not make the grass grow for the sake of beasts, yet beasts eat the grass. They do not produce dogs for the sake of men, yet men eat dogs.” Evidently, Wang Bi did not read “straw dogs” but read “grass and dogs.” As the reader is kept in the Wang Bi: Commentary on the Laozi 117 dark about this, he or she will have to wonder why Wang Bi should write such a stupid commentary. In general, the translation seems to lack an understanding of the historicity of the meaning of a text. Lynn firmly believes that the Laozi is a text that gives advice to anyone reading it about how to behave. While this might or might not be the case, it definitely was not the way in which Wang Bi read it. If there is an implied reader in Wang Bi’s commentary, it is the ruler. The reflections on the philosophical bases of stable rule that Wang Bi extracts from the Laozi make sense to no one else. In fact, in Wang Bi’s reading, there is not a single prescriptive phrase in the entire Laozi. Lynn’s translation supplies the prescriptive language out of a reading tradition that he does not seem to have reflected critically. In Wang Bi’s commentary on Laozi 5, for example, he translates after the passage quoted above, “Heaven and Earth make no conscious effort with respect to the myriad things, yet because each of the myriad things has what is appropriate for its use, not one thing is denied support. As long as you use kindness derived from a personal perspective, it indicates a lack of capacity to leave things to themselves.” While this gives homely advice, it can do so only by introducing a new subject, “you,” which Wang Bi fails to provide. The second phrase simply continues with the subject of the previous phrase, namely, Heaven and Earth, and reads, to use here the language proposed by Lynn’s translation: “Should they [Heaven and Earth] confer kindness on their own [initiative], they would be unable...