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

Preface

When I inform colleagues that the subject of this book is Martin Buber's 1910 translation of and commentary on the Taoist classic, Chuang Tzu, the vast majority of them-sinologists, Buber scholars , and comparative religionists alike-are astonished to learn that such a work even exists. "When," they ask, "did Buber learn Chinese?" "Did he really publish Reden und Gleichnisse des Tschuang-tse more than a decade before he wrote I and Thou?" "What is the significance of this work in the development of Buber's dialogical philosophy?" But once my associates realize that Buber's actual sinological skills were minimal and that he based his work chiefly on English translations, their initial astonishment invariably mingles with some skepticism about the merit of evaluating a dated study by a nonspecialist. "Didn't Buber simply pass along the misinterpretations and erroneous translations of his sources?" "How could such an obviously unscholarly document offer any substantial contributions to the sinological discourse?" "Does it even really matter that Buber briefly became a Taoist dilettante?" I sometimes counter these concerns with a handful of standard, marginally convincing defenses. I might argue that how and why any major Western thinker seriously approached a Chinese classic is, in and of itself, an important historical question. Or, I might point out that Buber's work had some significant social and political impact, particularly with the German Jewish Youth Movement. However, my real justification for this project is that I had detected a thematic resonance between Chuang Tzu and I and Thou years before I had ever heard of Buber's Taoist studies. In fact, a seminar paper written shortly before my initial exposure to Buber already seemed to anticipate a dialogical interpretation of Chuang Tzu, as I argued that Taoist enlightenment is characterized by "an intense personal freedom, where individuality and integrity are maintained IX x Preface without the threat of egoism" (Herman 1985:14). Shortly after my initial encounter with I and Thou, as well as the corpus of Hasidic and Kabbalistic mysticism, I presented a paper that challenged the historical particularism dominating Jewish studies and related the dialogical principle to various typologies of mystical experience put forth by modern theorists and methodologists. With the brashness of an aspiring scholar, I wrote in the introduction, "This approach is admittedly experimental, but perhaps it is the germination of a project directed both to broaden the bases of contemporary Jewish scholarship, and to demonstrate the imperative of Jewish contributions to the newly-emerging discipline of inter-faith dialogue" (Herman 1986:4). In the body of the paper, I drew direct connections between Buber and Chuang Tzu and concluded by asking, "Can typological similarities bring Jews to discover a kinship with diverse cultures originally thought to be foreign and unrelated" (16)? But while I grew increasingly interested in developing some type of project dealing with both thinkers, I was at first unable to find the spark, the rigorous methodological basis or historical foundation that would inform a meaningful juxtaposition and distinguish it from the kinds of romantically drawn parallels that have so often undermined the credibility of comparative religion as a discipline. Ironically, it was when I had all but abandoned any hope for proving this study feasible, that my wife-to-be Ellen Rae Gallow, then a student at the Episcopal Divinity School, called to my attention Buber's German translation of Chuang Tzu. As it turns out, this romantic, impressionistic, and astonishingly perceptive volume hardly represents a "lost" work-the Encyclopedia ofReligion does list it as one of Buber's early "studies in mysticism" (Silberstein 1987:317), and the commentary portion has been available in English translation for quite some time-but it has certainly occupied a relatively obscure position next to Buber's Hasidic and dialogical writings, and it is never mentioned in mainstream sinological discourse . Needless to say, this "discovery" provided the crucial pivot I had been seeking. The resonance I had previously detected between Buber and Chuang Tzu was no longer an imagined similitude , but a very real affinity between the two thinkers, the embryo of which was fortuitously chronicled in one often forgotten document . And as the focus of my preliminary research became more Preface xi clearly defined, I learned that the Taoist work represented not only a transitional stage between Buber's very early Hasidic studies and the first edition ofI and Thou, but also the onset of his ongoing involvement with Chinese philosophy and religion. Most notably, Buber followed Reden...