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I V\t"..od (ActioV\: ChIACH'19 TZIAJ MClJl'tiV\ BlAbeJl'J ClV\d RedeV\ lAV\d GleichV\isse des TschIAClV\9-tse M artin Buber's Reden und Gleichnisse des Tschuang-tse (Talks and Parables of Chuang Tzu) is more than just an antiquated study of a Taoist text. It is the chronicle of a creative and exciting encounter between Buber and Chuang Tzu, between one of the modern West's most influential thinkers and one of ancient China's most inspiring literary documents. The volume represents a fresh voice in the longstanding sinological task of interpreting Chuang Tzu, it represents a turning point in Buber's philosophical development, and it represents a concrete example of what we in the academy call "comparative mysticism." It is the first of these subjects with which this book is primarily concerned, though the sinological inquiry cannot really be isolated from the other two issues; how Buber transformed Taoist philosophy and how he was transformed by it are simply complementary perspectives on the same comparative question. This study includes annotated English translations of the text translation and commentary portions of Buber's volume, as well as critical analyses integrating Buber's work into the sinological discourse. The point of departure is the complex interpretive history of Chuang Tzu itself, and how Buber's unique interpretive perspective brings crucial hermeneutic challenges to light. Background: The Text of Chuang Tzu as a Source of Perplexity It is widely accepted that the philosopher named Chuang Chou lived during the fourth and early third centuries B.C.E., roughly two 1 2 Introduction hundred years after Confucius, and midway through the formative "Hundred Schools" Period that produced many of China's most profound thinkers. He wrote against a background of political instability , ongoing debates over moral criteria (principally between the followers of Confucius, who defended the ancient cultural legacy of classical learning and ritualized social interaction, and the followers of Mo Tzu, who advocated mutual benefit as an objective utilitarian standard), and an intriguing "language crisis" over the relationship between names and actualities. Chuang Tzu evidently left behind an uncoordinated body of writings-alternately couched in the vehicles of poetry, paradox, and satire-which coalesced with other assorted documents into a single book about a century after his death. Shortly thereafter, Han dynasty doxographers classified it with many other works under the fairly interchangeable bibliographic headings of "School of Tao" (Tao-chia) and "Huang-Lao," the latter referring to the teachings of Lao Tzu (the reputed author of the Tao Te Ching) and the legendary Yellow Emperor. The exact contours of the text remained quite fluid for several centuries-the search for fragments of up to twenty "lost" chapters continues to be an exciting and intermittently rewarding enterpriseI-and it eventually reached its standard thirty-three chapter form in the hands of Kuo Hsiang, a third century C.E. philosopher and participant in the hsuan-hsueh ("Profound Learning") movement which first categorized "Lao-Chuang" as a singular mystical tradition.2 From the beginning of this process of compilation through the modern era, the identity and purport of Chuang Tzu have been debated vigorously. And while it would certainly be a daunting task to reconstruct the entire interpretive history, its breadth can be well illustrated through a summary of some key and interesting moments in the life of the text. Over the years, Chuang Tzu has been variously identified as a mystic's chronicle, a work of radical individualism, a philosophical statement of freedom, and even a linguistic and epistemological treatise. It has indirectly informed the legacies of Taoist asceticism, landscape painting, and romantic poetry, while also contributing to the ancestries of traditions as diverse as Ch'an Buddhism and shamanistic immortality cults. The text has been viewed as both brilliant pastoral literature and the abject remnant of a moribund slave-owning class, and it continues Introduction 3 to be employed by a Taiwanese monastic community as a manual for meditation.3 Given the complexity of the text's history within China, it is not surprising that the task oftranslating it into Western languages, a project that is barely a century old, has produced a number of disparate documents. The finest of the early translations -those of Herbert A. Giles (1889) and James Legge (1891)often bear only a superficial resemblance to modern renderings. Even more puzzling is that the rigorous and technically dazzling translations by two excellent contemporary sinologists, Wu Kuangming (1990) and the late Angus Charles...

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