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

Topical Book Reviews 133 And despite my specific criticisms, I fmd this an extr~mely valuable work that deserves serious study by anyone interested in interfaith dialogue.I Harold Kasimow Department of Religious Studies Grinnell College I and Tao: Martin Buber's Encounter with Chuang Tzu, by Jonathan R. Herman. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. 278 pp. $49.50. Is there any real justification to the claim that a thematic resonance exists between Chuang Tzu and Buber's I and Thou? Given that Buber's sinological skills were minimal at best, and that he based his "translation" of Chuang Tzu (Reden und Gleichnisse des Tschuang-tse), written a decade before I and Thou, almost entirely on the English translations of Giles and Legge, can it be evaluated as anything other than a dated study by a non-specialist? In I and Tao, Jonathan Herman takes up a range of hermeneutical challenges embedded in these questions and rethinks them by suggesting several possibilities: the possibility of relating Buber's dialogical principle directly to Chuang Tzu's mystical philosophy; the possibility that I and Thou represents a crystallization of an ongoing reception of Chuang Tzu; the possibility that Chuang Tzu was the original dialogical philosopher; and, most significantly, the possibility that I and Thou can be regarded in part as a protracted transformation ofself before the text of Chuang Tzu. Rejecting the standard "view that Buber's initial engagement with Chuang Tzu marks a transitional philosophical stage," Herman contents that "the fundamental ingredients of the I-Thou relationship are in fact already present within Buber's encounter with Chuang Tzu . .." (p.163). The book is divided into two sections: 1) annotated re-translations (from German to English) of Buber's text (from Chinese to English to German) of Chuang Tzu, followed by Buber's commentary, and 2) three hermeneutical chapters and a brief conclusion. Like Buber's translations of Hasidic tales, his Taoist text contains a "self-conscious hermeneutical framework" reflected in the text itself and in his "Afterword," or "Nachwort," originally translated by Maurice Friedman as "The Teaching of the Tao" in Buber's 1957 collection ofessays, Pointing the Way. Herman's translation ofBuber's IAn earlier version of this review appeared in CCAR Journal, Vol. 41, No.1 (Winter 1994), pp. IOO~I03. 134 SHOFAR Spring 1999 Vol. 17, No.3 translation of the text of Chuang Tzu is not the fIrst. Of a recent "free rendering" of the same material by Alex Page, Chinese Tales (1991), Hennan writes that Page "was not particularly familiar with either Chuang Tzu or Buber and had a general disinterest in mysticism" (p. xi). Hennan, on the other hand, followed Buber's Gennan in the original edition as precisely as possible, and provides scholarly annotations based on the original Chinese. Although the henneneutic chapters of the second part depend upon the text and commentary of the fIrst part, due to their interrelated originality they are of great interest. In the fIrst, "The Historical Question: The Matter of Textual Reconstruction," Hennan focuses on Buber's approach to the text as "a poetic parable-presentation ofthe 'teaching'" (p. 108) which elicits personal transfonnation. More than the resulting "translations," it is Buber's henneneutic that most interests Hennan. In the second, "The Henneneutic Question: The Matter of Textual Interpretation," it is Hennan's intention to determine the "suppositions and goals ofBuber's henneneutic agenda" that establish "criteria by which one can evaluate the legitimacy ofhis conclusions" (p. 154), and then to explore his translation and commentary (and their relation to one another) in light of these criteria. In the most signifIcant of the three chapters, "The Further Henneneutic Question: The Matter of Textual Reception," Hennan "addresses the possibility of relating Buber's dialogical principle directly to Chuang Tzu's mystical philosophy (p. 157). Here the plot thickens. Buber's critique of mysticisms of unity (and, by implication, of his own earlier views) is well known. It is Hennan's admittedly unorthodox contention, however, that I and Thou is "the second interpretative layer of Buber's ongoing engagement with Chuang Tzu, the first being his commentary portion" (p. 168). Anticipating that his proposal may be...