Tao Te Ching by Laozi (reading comprehension books txt) 📕

“The Tao of heaven” means the Tao that is heavenly, the course that is quiet and undemonstrative, that is free from motive and effort, such as is seen in the processes of nature, grandly proceeding and successful without any striving or crying. The Tao of man, not dominated by this Tao, is contrary to it, and shows will, purpose, and effort, till, submitting to it, it becomes “the Tao or Way of the sages,” which in all its action has no striving.

The characteristics both of heaven and man are dealt with more fully by Chuang than by Lao. In the conclusion of his eleventh book, for instance, he says:⁠—“What do we mean by Tao? There is the Tao (or Way) of heaven, and there is the Tao of man. Acting without action, and yet attracting all honour, is the Way of heaven. Doing and being embarrassed thereby is the Way of man. The Way of heaven should play the part of lord; the Way of man, the part of minister. The two are far apart, and should be distinguished from each other.”

In his next book, (par. 2), Chuang-tzŭ tells us what he intends by “Heaven:”⁠—“Acting without action⁠—this is what is called heaven.” Heaven thus taken its law from the Tao. “The oldest sages and sovereigns attained to do the same,”⁠—it was for all men to aim at the same achievement. As they were successful, “vacancy, stillness, placidity, tastelessness, quietude, silence, and non-action” would be found to be their characteristics, and they would go on to the perfection of the Tao.18

The employment of Tʽien by the Confucianists, as of heaven by ourselves, must be distinguished therefore from the Taoistic use of the name to denote the quiet but mighty influence of the impersonal Tao; and to translate it by “God” only obscures the meaning of the Taoist writers. The has been done by Mr. Giles in his version of Chuang-tzŭ, which is otherwise for the most part so good. Everywhere on his pages there appears the great name “God;”⁠—a blot on his translation more painful to my eyes and ears than the use of “Nature” for Tao by Mr. Balfour. I know that Mr. Giles’s plan in translating is to use strictly English equivalents for all kinds of Chinese terms.19 The plan is good where there are in the two languages such strict equivalents; but in the case before us there is no ground for its application. The exact English equivalent for the Chinese tʽien is our heaven. The Confucianists often used tʽien metaphorically for the personal being whom they denominated Ti (God) and Shang Ti (the Supreme God), and a translator may occasionally, in working on books of Confucian literature, employ our name God for it. But neither Lao nor Chuang ever attached anything like our idea of God to it; and when one, in working on books of early Taoist literature, translates tʽien by God, such a rendering must fail to produce in an English reader a correct apprehension of the meaning.

There is also in Chuang-tzŭ a peculiar usage of the name Tʽien. He applies it to the being whom he introduces as masters of the Tao, generally with mystical appellations in order to set forth his own views. Two instances from book XI will suffice in illustration of this. In par. 4, Huang-ti does reverence to his instructor Kuang Chʽêng-tzŭ,20 saying, “In Kuang Chʽêng-tzŭ we have an example of what is called heaven,” which Mr. Giles renders “Kuang Chʽêng-tzŭ is surely God.” In par. 5, again, the mystical Yün-chiang is made to say to the equally fabulous and mystical Hung-mêng, “O heaven, have you forgotten me?” and, farther on, “O heaven, you have conferred on me (the knowledge of) your operation, and revealed to me the mystery of it;” in both passages Mr. Giles renders tʽien by “your holiness.”

But Mr. Giles seems to agree with me that the old Taoist had no idea of a personal God, when they wrote of Tʽien or Heaven. On his sixty-eighth page, near the beginning of book VI, we meet with the following sentence, having every appearance of being translated from the Chinese text:⁠—“God is a principle which exists by virtue of its own intrinsicality, and operates without self-manifestation.” By an inadvertence he has introduced his own definition of “God” as if it were Chuang-tzŭ’s; and though I can find no characters in the text of which I can suppose that he intends it to be the translation, it is valuable as helping us to understand the meaning to be attached to the great name in his volume.

I have referred above (par. 11) to the only passage in Lao’s treatise, where he uses the name Ti or God in its highest sense, saying that “the Tao might seem to have been before him.” He might well say so, for his first chapter he describes the Tao, “(conceived of as) having no name, as the originator of heaven and earth, and (conceived of as) having a name, as the mother of all things.” The reader will also find the same predicates of the Tao at greater length in his fifty-first chapter.

The character Ti is also of rare occurrence in Chuang-tzŭ, excepting as applied to the five ancient Tis. In bk. III par. 4, and in one other place we find it indicating the Supreme Being, but the usage is ascribed to the ancients. In