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The Fl1rther t-lermenel1tic Ql1estion The MatteI'" of Textl-\a I ReceptioV\ The Interpretive Framework T he last of the three hermeneutic chapters addresses the possibility of relating Buber's dialogical principle directly to Chuang Tzu's mystical philosophy, a topic which on the surface seems only tenuously linked to the preceding analyses of Buber's contributions toward textual reconstruction and interpretation, which had focused more specifically on his text translation and commentary. Nevertheless, it will be demonstrated that there is a sound hermeneutic basis for such a line of inquiry, and that this approach does reflect an appropriate extension of the conclusions drawn from the previous chapters. More importantly, a focused investigation will in fact reveal a plausible analogue to the I-Thou relation in the original Chinese text, a resonance which not only provides the single most significant indicator that a comparative study of Chuang Tzu and Buber is ultimately worthwhile, but also carries important implications for the modern study of mysticism, which is currently dominated by a particularistic methodological paradigm. As noted repeatedly in the previous two chapters, Buber's interpretive essay (especially when read apart from the text translation) presents a sometimes uneasy synthesis of a pure monism and a proto-dialogically suffused monism, where the former perhaps presents itself to the reader as the more pronounced of the two and certainly leaves a pantheistic imprint that is nowhere to be found in Buber's mature dialogical thought. Indeed, this vestige of Buber's pantheism is the one consistent thread that weaves together disparate parts of the commentary, from the largely methodological 157 158 I and Tao groundwork on the oneness of the teaching, through the metaphysical treatment of the unity of Tao, to the epistemological and ethical arguments on the non-knowing and non-doing of the unified man.! The cumulative result of this presentation of oneness is a misleading implication that Chuang Tzu displays a self-annihilating and world-renouncing zest for the ecstatic experience of unity. Indeed , the text translation does verify that Buber found in Chuang Tzu a significantly "escapist" motif, where the sage is portrayed as one who "pays no attention to worldly things" (19), who leaves behind the mundane reality of the existential world and chooses instead to "swing on the light wings of emptiness beyond the six directions" (37). In a number of passages, the return to the creative source of being is depicted not as a renewal of self within the hereand -now (as illustrated at length in the previous chapter), but as a breakthrough to a qualitatively distinct realm, such as "that height of great light, where the wellspring of the driving primordial power is, and ... the gate of profound mystery, where the wellspring of the restraining primordial power is" (42). And in a few important cases, there is the serious implication that the experience of Tao entails a dissolution of self into the greater whole, an idea that is most antithetical to Buber's later philosophy: "But I finally came to enrapture; for enrapture means turned-out-fromsense , turned-out-from sense means Tao, and Tao means the great absorption" (50). Buber's emphasis on this theme of unity and absorption is furthered by his choice and adaptation of translated material, as he disproportionately represents the core of examples that illustrate various sages apparently reveling in some kind of mystical experience .2 In these episodes, one can discern three closely related characteristics ascribed to the enlightened beings-otherworldliness, immortality or imperviousness to harm, and superhuman powersall of which are likely metaphorical expressions of ecstatic experience . The "otherworldly" depictions are those which simultaneously affirm some aetherial realm of existence and devalue that which is immediate. "Who can climb to Heaven, roam through the clouds, abandon space, forget existence, forever and ever without end?" (35). At times, flight from the conventional world is explicitly identified with the experience of unity, as when reaching "the palace of nowhere" places one "amidst the oneness of all things" (63), or The Further Hermeneutic Question 159 when the state of being "removed from all bounds" is to be "one with the all-pervasive" (37). Moreover, those who achieve ultimate freedom from and indifference to worldly realities are often represented as liberated from ordinary human vulnerabilities to pain or injury, since the usual causes of harm are relegated to the status of the merely mundane. "Thus they could scale heights and feel no anxiety; plunge into water and feel no wetness, step through...

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