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Texts of Taoism Volume 1
These two volumes contain the complete James Legge translation of the sacred writings of the great mystical religion that for millennia has counterbalanced the official Confucianism of the Chinese state. Together with the Confucian canon, these writings have been avidly studied by generations of Chinese scholars and literary men and their place in the formation of Chinese civilization is central.
First published as volume xxxix and xl of Max Müller's Sacred Books of the East series, these volumes contain the complete texts of the Tao Te Ching attributed to Lao Tzü; the writings of Chuang Tzü; and several shorter works; the T'ai Shang or Tractate of Actions and Their Retributions, the Ch'ing Chang Ching or Classic of Purity, the Yin Fu Ching of Classic of the Harmony of the Seen and Unseen, the Yü Shu Ching or Classic of the Pivot of jade, and the Hsia Yung Ching or Classic of the Directory for a Day. Many of these lesser documents are to be found in translation only in this collection.
Professor Legge, who held the chair in Chinese language and literature at Oxford for 20 years, introduces the collection with a discussion of differences among Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, the authorship of the Tao Te Ching, the real meaning of Tao in Chinese thought, and other backgrounds.
Orientalists and students of religion have long recognized this collection as indispensable. But laymen will find that the Tao Te Ching is not only profound but provocative and stimulating and that the parables and tales in the work of Chuang Tzü are delightful reading.
First published as volume xxxix and xl of Max Müller's Sacred Books of the East series, these volumes contain the complete texts of the Tao Te Ching attributed to Lao Tzü; the writings of Chuang Tzü; and several shorter works; the T'ai Shang or Tractate of Actions and Their Retributions, the Ch'ing Chang Ching or Classic of Purity, the Yin Fu Ching of Classic of the Harmony of the Seen and Unseen, the Yü Shu Ching or Classic of the Pivot of jade, and the Hsia Yung Ching or Classic of the Directory for a Day. Many of these lesser documents are to be found in translation only in this collection.
Professor Legge, who held the chair in Chinese language and literature at Oxford for 20 years, introduces the collection with a discussion of differences among Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, the authorship of the Tao Te Ching, the real meaning of Tao in Chinese thought, and other backgrounds.
Orientalists and students of religion have long recognized this collection as indispensable. But laymen will find that the Tao Te Ching is not only profound but provocative and stimulating and that the parables and tales in the work of Chuang Tzü are delightful reading.
432 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1891
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
March 28, 2013
There seems little point in making judgements of a book that has survived well over two thousand years. It's as intriguing and rewarding to the quester now as it was (presumably) when it was written and Legge (writing in the 1890s) is good company as an editor, sensible and impartial on the great unresolvable matters here at issue. I have been looking for this book (the Chuang Tzu sections) on and off for forty years and found it in a secondhand book in the Sydney northern suburbs, not the most likely place on earth to have found it. It's less enigmatic than the incomparable Lao Tse, and of course there's much more of it.
December 8, 2015
"The first two sections of Chuang Tzu constitute one of the fiercest and most dazzling assaults ever made not only upon man's conventional system of values, but upon his conventional concepts of time, space, reality, and causation as well" (Burton Watson, 5).
You might think from this that anybody reading Chuang Tzu could catapult right out of the ordinary into the "unconventional." Conventioneers would sit cross legged on the ground, legs askew at their death, hair reasonably white amid the miniature green roses. Rows and rows would look as much like garden statues as flesh and blood. This is no assault, emptying as the wind blows. It should not be sought. That at least was my parting with Henry Burlage-Tzu. In a man's last days a stillness comes.
庄子 The Wind, The Wind! Free Yourself From the World!
Calmed then from the worry that his three created universes had caused, this simpleton too sat beside Zhuangzi and detached. It was necessary that universes spin out. Don't worry about the corn or sleep out in September. Breathe in, breathe out. The Bein' Not Bein' democrat outside existence says, "anybody sometime sums it up they kill it." Burton Watson, good to say, "free yourself from the world" (Basic Writings, 3), then he kills it. The greatest impediment to Zhuangzi is wu-wei. Is tgat a hije? Kill Buddha if you see him on the road. Kill zen koans. Kill interpreters of meaning. Only Jesus you cannot kill. He's really the only one of these characters that I know.
We-Wei Aplenty
Poetry or drivel, Legge or Burton, abstracts flop wu-wei back on Chuang Chou and judge his conformity to their abstract. Was Jesus Christ a Christian? You belong to this group if you point and say we-wei plenty and in the Sermon on the Mount get close, a seeker reading theology! 'Backstracted original don't fit. Tolkien proved this done with the Beo(wulf). Monsters of porridge with elbow patches and paychecks know dialects, but this is life Geowulf.
I. In I. we combat a moth: Mr. Phang wing cloud! A flyin' mountain fish changed to a bird "rouses itself," and transports to the pool of heaven, meaning South Ocean. Look inside, it's a bird or a man or a plant. It's a yarrow tree with breeze fields that quiver in its beams. It's a horse. It's a tortoise! Molecules of dust crackle with crocs that inhabit the other worlds but come here when other species lose.
Cedar branches shoot right up out of my hands when I learn that "the first two sections of Chuang Tzu constitute "one of the fiercest and most dazzling assaults." I couldn't sit still. At the back, in Vol. II, my friends were waiting, not just the crocs, but the tortoise and yarrow, the skull and mugwort stump, sheep, cicada, the singing goose, and pastures of spring shells of luminous unembodied multi-form white Elderica colts. Weigh that pig, paunch and hoof, you weasel. Know the kind, the jack of all trades that mastered the mind.
Mr. Big Phang figured Wind among the first suspects. We confirmed this through independent study. Wind like water (I, 2). In the matter of their contention wind is greater than water! The argument that if it "be not great it will not support great wings," bears the blue sky on the back of Mr. Phang. He flies south. Offended cicada and little dove think it super how Phang flew. But Phang didn't have to pound grain at night for dinner like them. I'm only giving here the facts as they are known.
Zhuangzi leaves no union moot. Union is onion. We learn the onion moot when we reach the age of no consent. That then was 70 when they took you out to plant. When we get there we think maybe it has been raised. Then we learn it will come, it will come. Mayhap older, youthful age says, "if you're not 70 what can you know." What can cicada and little dove know? What can small know of great, youth of age? Just wait till you are empty yourself, poured out on the ground. "The experience of a few years does not reach to many." Offensive talk in a democracy. The nut. Crack it. Then mushroom clouds of dew morning sprout.
There is a mature tree in all this called Ming-ling. Five hundred years or so. To it spring and fall are the same. This tree is like the tortoise that lives longer than a man. One old man, though, Takhun, lived 8000 years. Have grasshopper, cicada, little dove lived long enough to see the fruition of the promises of God? Phang Bird, Ming-ling Tortoise, Man Phang Zu lived 700 years in vigor. It is out of this long life that Zhuangzi wrote. It comforts me to know he thought it was worth writing. Quail sees on Phang's mountain back those wings of sky. In the difference of small and great, youth and age, Yung-tze of Sung laughs. He has come of age. His universes, a universe is his own child, spin their desire as he thinks, "though the whole world praised him he would not have done more, and though all condemned him he would not have done less." Say what you will. That is the way I feel. They are all praising and blaming, Yung-tze stopped the piety of the condemning quail. What is that, daughters in law?
The proper measure of Chuang Tzu is "still he had not planted himself firmly in the right position." What is the right position? Lieh-tze also rode the wind, but with indifference against the external, "for though he had to walk, he still had to wait." This walk-wait-stop-go-come is the crux. Along the road where the fire is out the owls of last night sleep, three men patrol, I pass them, the driver looks diseased.
Legge tickets Chaung Tzu for audacity for his "extravagant style," as if, in the old view of the Book, "Kwang-tze intended himself by the Great Phang" (I, 128). Conditioned by Whitman and Rambo The French we accept such fantastics, but the end of Book I smarts with some talk of "a Spirit-like man whose flesh and skin are as smooth as ice and white as snow" (171). Division of small and great ends up with the old time honored question, what to do about the calabash. What use is it, or, what use is the Ailantus or Phang for that matter, or mountain hellebore, so large and useless to quail, or for that matter, what use am I? The good news in Section II is that a great wind that blows through these apertures. The wind blows, nothing but the wind blowing and blowing.
You can read Part II, here
II.
So what is the first element? Shall we call up Anaxagoras and have him run the numbers. How does one become two? Zhuangzi actually says the first element is wind. I am one with him in this. The wind parted the sea. Once there was a large geographical giant, a man of the south suburb who fell asleep on his stool. He lost consciousness, they say. Neither he nor we know what. "I just lost myself" (176). Even though all the western mystics know exactly what he didn't, he don't. Compared to slaked lime, what comes up?
The Great Wind
All this is likened to breath blowing through a bamboo flute, the notes of Man, Earth and Heaven. The great Wind blows through their "myriad apertures." Search me O God and know my thoughts. The flute forest trees of earth, the caves, the Hopi blow hole are like the nose, mouth and ear. The sounds that issue from them alike are caused by wind. So the world and its people are a bamboo flute with nine openings. To judge the sounds, mainly the rhetoric, requires separating small and great, young and old. The whole complex of interactions is a failing, "like music from an empty tube, or mushrooms from the warm moisture. (He doesn't like mushrooms. Too temporary.) Day and night succeed one another and come before us and we know not whence they sprout (179). Mushroom is a word for dialectic that sprouts large and small, internal and external.
"Given the body, with its hundred parts, its nine openings, and its six viscera, all complete in their places, which do I love the most?" (180). That there are nine openings by the way extends to the whole of the academy, science, philosophy, argument, affirmation and negation of the predetermined mind. These are all described by the saying, "he went to Yueh today and arrived at it yesterday" (180). This is more of that AfterZen stuff, when "nobody will have heard of Buddha tomorrow," which speech comes from a mind not made up. Chirp. And if it is made up it is predetermined soup. Ya can't win. Why don't cha jus' stop!
Opposite views produce each other, Republican and Democrat (182). He wants to stand in the center of the right (of thought) where he can respond without end to the changing views of the affirming and denying (183). He resolves it with the joke. What is a horse? Finally an answer to Salinger's Riddle. The universes of man will dispute. His sons will tell him what is a horse. It is different from what he said was a horse. They point that out, affirm and deny horsing around. That's it. "Separation led to completion, then ensued dissolution" (184). He says to give up this devotion to our own views and adopt the ordinary meaning of the simple use of things. Then stop (184). The ordinary is so arcane it can't be found among the immortals. Immortality, sagacity, the superior man are all synonyms for idiot. We will give everything to restore the commonplace world. I keep giving everything and taking it back.
All the simple passionate events
I give to restore
the commonplace year,
the ultimate security of innocence,
the it-can't-happen-to-me world.
So whether there is nothing or something (185), the subject of all Greek thought, the biology of abortion and the cosmology of Stephen Hawking are all decay of thought, wind, music. Even though "the scintillations of light from the midst of confusion and perplexity are indeed valued by the sagely man" (187), STOP Begin thought with, since Heaven and Earth "are spoken of as one, must there not be room for speech? One and Speech are two; two and one are three" (188) Sepher Yetzirah! STOP
"Let us abjure such procedure and simply rest" (188), he says. Otherwise "we have the saying, Disputation is a proof of not seeing clearly" (189). Too late for me to offer my dispute of his numbering existence with no existence, that if one were to say there was no existence before the beginning of that and that no existence (187) would be one because it is named, that not being proves existence is! Which fact has brought it to be! QED! STOP When you name or not name you bring to be! QED. STOP. It's like a telegram. How do you know but every bird that cuts the airy way when I say, I know it, I really (am showing that) I do not know it... and when I say I do not know am showing that I do" (191)? STOP
Such argument resolves THE acquisition of Job's three friends WITH our speaker, or if you like, Socrates in the Agora. These result in leaving the real for dreams where "the stupid think they are awake" (195). Changeable beings, these shadows, penumbras: "The penumbra asked the Shadow, saying, formerly you were walking and now you have stopped...how is it that you are so without stability?" (196) Likewise the Butterfly Kau. "I, Kwang Kau dreamed I was a butterfly flying about and s uddenly I woke and was myself again, the veritable Kau" (197). So which is which in the "Transformation of Things?"
I want to say of this metaphor that the ordinary is realer than dream. In all animals, butterflies, cicadas, centipedes, elk, fish, bird--and plants, mugwort, bamboo, ailanthus, yarrow--lies the only way the sounds the wind blows from the apertures are felt. This speaking, for all dissolves in affirming and denying, is a reflection of this in the mirror behind and in our portrait. Animal mirrors, plant mirrors speak the thing to me, the Veritable AE
Chaung Tzu is that early humorist of China who did stand up in the third century stand up.
Where the almond tree blossoms and desire is no longer stirred.
Pleistocene Horse
Genghis Khan’s horse is 60 miles long
What is a horse, the universe will dispute. His sons will tell him what is a horse. It is different from what he said was a horse. They point that out, affirm and deny horsing around. That's it. "Separation led to completion, then ensued dissolution" (184). He says let us give up this devotion to our own views and adopt the "ordinary," meaning the simple use of things. Then stop (184). The ordinary is so arcane it can't be found among the immortals. Immortality, sageness, the superior man are all synomyms for idiot. We give everything to restore the commonplace world.
Note from Pleistocene horse: He wants to stand "in the center where he can respond without end to the changing views" of the affirming and denying (Legge, Chuang Tzu, 183). He resolves it with the joke, his horse. What is a horse? His son will tell him what is a horse. It is different from what he said was a horse. They point that out, affirm and deny horse around. My kingdom horse! That they should all be unhorsed. Now comes the horse quote which in the age of sound bites is as a horse:
"By means of a finger (of my own) to illustrate that the finger (of another) is not a finger is not so good a plan as to illustrate that it is not so by means of what is (acknowledged to be) not a finger; and by means of (what I call) a horse to illustrate that (what another calls) a horse is not so, is not so good a plan as to illustrate that it is not a horse, by means of what is (acknowledged to be) not a horse. ( All things in) heaven and earth may be (dealt with as) a finger; (each of) their myriads may be (dealt with as) a horse. Does a thing seem so to me? (I say that) it is so. Does it seem not so to me? (I say that) it is not so. We used to argue these things on long tennis trips, like the say that said, "Dust Storms May Exist," and austere elements of the periodic table. But it was a joke!
"Separation led to completion, then ensued dissolution" (184). Let us give up devotion to our views and adopt the "ordinary." The ordinary can't be found among the immortals.
I have not progressed beyond my farm ancestors. Each morning I am at the fields in daylight, and earlier in the barn, tools ready, tending, My fields are historical fences, boundaries, my stock that night’s teaching when I awake. I am a farmer planting weeding hoeing, repairing on the family farm that has been around 300 years.
wonder kammer and it said seventeenth-century cabinets filled with preserved animals, mythic creatures! In 1587, Gabriel Kaltemarckt advised Christian I of Saxony that three types of item were indispensable in forming a "Kunstkammer" or art collection: firstly sculptures and paintings; secondly "curious items from home or abroad"; and thirdly "antlers, horns, claws, feathers and other things belonging to strange and curious animals. So Holy Cow here are some of the sort. Anyway, what won’t go in a wonder kammer?
Item: Trojan Horse-Trojan Horse Trojan Horse was let in the city because of its art. This replica was found in old papyrus. It had Greece in the belly. After a light spray of shino over found clays with B mix laminated, red shino sprayed and waxed, some trigger pulls of clear penetrated the wax and diffused the orange.
Other questions of the sort are also undertaken at http://humanbotany.blogspot.com/ and other sites common to this blog.
You might think from this that anybody reading Chuang Tzu could catapult right out of the ordinary into the "unconventional." Conventioneers would sit cross legged on the ground, legs askew at their death, hair reasonably white amid the miniature green roses. Rows and rows would look as much like garden statues as flesh and blood. This is no assault, emptying as the wind blows. It should not be sought. That at least was my parting with Henry Burlage-Tzu. In a man's last days a stillness comes.
庄子 The Wind, The Wind! Free Yourself From the World!
Calmed then from the worry that his three created universes had caused, this simpleton too sat beside Zhuangzi and detached. It was necessary that universes spin out. Don't worry about the corn or sleep out in September. Breathe in, breathe out. The Bein' Not Bein' democrat outside existence says, "anybody sometime sums it up they kill it." Burton Watson, good to say, "free yourself from the world" (Basic Writings, 3), then he kills it. The greatest impediment to Zhuangzi is wu-wei. Is tgat a hije? Kill Buddha if you see him on the road. Kill zen koans. Kill interpreters of meaning. Only Jesus you cannot kill. He's really the only one of these characters that I know.
We-Wei Aplenty
Poetry or drivel, Legge or Burton, abstracts flop wu-wei back on Chuang Chou and judge his conformity to their abstract. Was Jesus Christ a Christian? You belong to this group if you point and say we-wei plenty and in the Sermon on the Mount get close, a seeker reading theology! 'Backstracted original don't fit. Tolkien proved this done with the Beo(wulf). Monsters of porridge with elbow patches and paychecks know dialects, but this is life Geowulf.
I. In I. we combat a moth: Mr. Phang wing cloud! A flyin' mountain fish changed to a bird "rouses itself," and transports to the pool of heaven, meaning South Ocean. Look inside, it's a bird or a man or a plant. It's a yarrow tree with breeze fields that quiver in its beams. It's a horse. It's a tortoise! Molecules of dust crackle with crocs that inhabit the other worlds but come here when other species lose.
Cedar branches shoot right up out of my hands when I learn that "the first two sections of Chuang Tzu constitute "one of the fiercest and most dazzling assaults." I couldn't sit still. At the back, in Vol. II, my friends were waiting, not just the crocs, but the tortoise and yarrow, the skull and mugwort stump, sheep, cicada, the singing goose, and pastures of spring shells of luminous unembodied multi-form white Elderica colts. Weigh that pig, paunch and hoof, you weasel. Know the kind, the jack of all trades that mastered the mind.
Mr. Big Phang figured Wind among the first suspects. We confirmed this through independent study. Wind like water (I, 2). In the matter of their contention wind is greater than water! The argument that if it "be not great it will not support great wings," bears the blue sky on the back of Mr. Phang. He flies south. Offended cicada and little dove think it super how Phang flew. But Phang didn't have to pound grain at night for dinner like them. I'm only giving here the facts as they are known.
Zhuangzi leaves no union moot. Union is onion. We learn the onion moot when we reach the age of no consent. That then was 70 when they took you out to plant. When we get there we think maybe it has been raised. Then we learn it will come, it will come. Mayhap older, youthful age says, "if you're not 70 what can you know." What can cicada and little dove know? What can small know of great, youth of age? Just wait till you are empty yourself, poured out on the ground. "The experience of a few years does not reach to many." Offensive talk in a democracy. The nut. Crack it. Then mushroom clouds of dew morning sprout.
There is a mature tree in all this called Ming-ling. Five hundred years or so. To it spring and fall are the same. This tree is like the tortoise that lives longer than a man. One old man, though, Takhun, lived 8000 years. Have grasshopper, cicada, little dove lived long enough to see the fruition of the promises of God? Phang Bird, Ming-ling Tortoise, Man Phang Zu lived 700 years in vigor. It is out of this long life that Zhuangzi wrote. It comforts me to know he thought it was worth writing. Quail sees on Phang's mountain back those wings of sky. In the difference of small and great, youth and age, Yung-tze of Sung laughs. He has come of age. His universes, a universe is his own child, spin their desire as he thinks, "though the whole world praised him he would not have done more, and though all condemned him he would not have done less." Say what you will. That is the way I feel. They are all praising and blaming, Yung-tze stopped the piety of the condemning quail. What is that, daughters in law?
The proper measure of Chuang Tzu is "still he had not planted himself firmly in the right position." What is the right position? Lieh-tze also rode the wind, but with indifference against the external, "for though he had to walk, he still had to wait." This walk-wait-stop-go-come is the crux. Along the road where the fire is out the owls of last night sleep, three men patrol, I pass them, the driver looks diseased.
Legge tickets Chaung Tzu for audacity for his "extravagant style," as if, in the old view of the Book, "Kwang-tze intended himself by the Great Phang" (I, 128). Conditioned by Whitman and Rambo The French we accept such fantastics, but the end of Book I smarts with some talk of "a Spirit-like man whose flesh and skin are as smooth as ice and white as snow" (171). Division of small and great ends up with the old time honored question, what to do about the calabash. What use is it, or, what use is the Ailantus or Phang for that matter, or mountain hellebore, so large and useless to quail, or for that matter, what use am I? The good news in Section II is that a great wind that blows through these apertures. The wind blows, nothing but the wind blowing and blowing.
You can read Part II, here
II.
So what is the first element? Shall we call up Anaxagoras and have him run the numbers. How does one become two? Zhuangzi actually says the first element is wind. I am one with him in this. The wind parted the sea. Once there was a large geographical giant, a man of the south suburb who fell asleep on his stool. He lost consciousness, they say. Neither he nor we know what. "I just lost myself" (176). Even though all the western mystics know exactly what he didn't, he don't. Compared to slaked lime, what comes up?
The Great Wind
All this is likened to breath blowing through a bamboo flute, the notes of Man, Earth and Heaven. The great Wind blows through their "myriad apertures." Search me O God and know my thoughts. The flute forest trees of earth, the caves, the Hopi blow hole are like the nose, mouth and ear. The sounds that issue from them alike are caused by wind. So the world and its people are a bamboo flute with nine openings. To judge the sounds, mainly the rhetoric, requires separating small and great, young and old. The whole complex of interactions is a failing, "like music from an empty tube, or mushrooms from the warm moisture. (He doesn't like mushrooms. Too temporary.) Day and night succeed one another and come before us and we know not whence they sprout (179). Mushroom is a word for dialectic that sprouts large and small, internal and external.
"Given the body, with its hundred parts, its nine openings, and its six viscera, all complete in their places, which do I love the most?" (180). That there are nine openings by the way extends to the whole of the academy, science, philosophy, argument, affirmation and negation of the predetermined mind. These are all described by the saying, "he went to Yueh today and arrived at it yesterday" (180). This is more of that AfterZen stuff, when "nobody will have heard of Buddha tomorrow," which speech comes from a mind not made up. Chirp. And if it is made up it is predetermined soup. Ya can't win. Why don't cha jus' stop!
Opposite views produce each other, Republican and Democrat (182). He wants to stand in the center of the right (of thought) where he can respond without end to the changing views of the affirming and denying (183). He resolves it with the joke. What is a horse? Finally an answer to Salinger's Riddle. The universes of man will dispute. His sons will tell him what is a horse. It is different from what he said was a horse. They point that out, affirm and deny horsing around. That's it. "Separation led to completion, then ensued dissolution" (184). He says to give up this devotion to our own views and adopt the ordinary meaning of the simple use of things. Then stop (184). The ordinary is so arcane it can't be found among the immortals. Immortality, sagacity, the superior man are all synonyms for idiot. We will give everything to restore the commonplace world. I keep giving everything and taking it back.
All the simple passionate events
I give to restore
the commonplace year,
the ultimate security of innocence,
the it-can't-happen-to-me world.
So whether there is nothing or something (185), the subject of all Greek thought, the biology of abortion and the cosmology of Stephen Hawking are all decay of thought, wind, music. Even though "the scintillations of light from the midst of confusion and perplexity are indeed valued by the sagely man" (187), STOP Begin thought with, since Heaven and Earth "are spoken of as one, must there not be room for speech? One and Speech are two; two and one are three" (188) Sepher Yetzirah! STOP
"Let us abjure such procedure and simply rest" (188), he says. Otherwise "we have the saying, Disputation is a proof of not seeing clearly" (189). Too late for me to offer my dispute of his numbering existence with no existence, that if one were to say there was no existence before the beginning of that and that no existence (187) would be one because it is named, that not being proves existence is! Which fact has brought it to be! QED! STOP When you name or not name you bring to be! QED. STOP. It's like a telegram. How do you know but every bird that cuts the airy way when I say, I know it, I really (am showing that) I do not know it... and when I say I do not know am showing that I do" (191)? STOP
Such argument resolves THE acquisition of Job's three friends WITH our speaker, or if you like, Socrates in the Agora. These result in leaving the real for dreams where "the stupid think they are awake" (195). Changeable beings, these shadows, penumbras: "The penumbra asked the Shadow, saying, formerly you were walking and now you have stopped...how is it that you are so without stability?" (196) Likewise the Butterfly Kau. "I, Kwang Kau dreamed I was a butterfly flying about and s uddenly I woke and was myself again, the veritable Kau" (197). So which is which in the "Transformation of Things?"
I want to say of this metaphor that the ordinary is realer than dream. In all animals, butterflies, cicadas, centipedes, elk, fish, bird--and plants, mugwort, bamboo, ailanthus, yarrow--lies the only way the sounds the wind blows from the apertures are felt. This speaking, for all dissolves in affirming and denying, is a reflection of this in the mirror behind and in our portrait. Animal mirrors, plant mirrors speak the thing to me, the Veritable AE
Chaung Tzu is that early humorist of China who did stand up in the third century stand up.
Where the almond tree blossoms and desire is no longer stirred.
Pleistocene Horse
Genghis Khan’s horse is 60 miles long
What is a horse, the universe will dispute. His sons will tell him what is a horse. It is different from what he said was a horse. They point that out, affirm and deny horsing around. That's it. "Separation led to completion, then ensued dissolution" (184). He says let us give up this devotion to our own views and adopt the "ordinary," meaning the simple use of things. Then stop (184). The ordinary is so arcane it can't be found among the immortals. Immortality, sageness, the superior man are all synomyms for idiot. We give everything to restore the commonplace world.
Note from Pleistocene horse: He wants to stand "in the center where he can respond without end to the changing views" of the affirming and denying (Legge, Chuang Tzu, 183). He resolves it with the joke, his horse. What is a horse? His son will tell him what is a horse. It is different from what he said was a horse. They point that out, affirm and deny horse around. My kingdom horse! That they should all be unhorsed. Now comes the horse quote which in the age of sound bites is as a horse:
"By means of a finger (of my own) to illustrate that the finger (of another) is not a finger is not so good a plan as to illustrate that it is not so by means of what is (acknowledged to be) not a finger; and by means of (what I call) a horse to illustrate that (what another calls) a horse is not so, is not so good a plan as to illustrate that it is not a horse, by means of what is (acknowledged to be) not a horse. ( All things in) heaven and earth may be (dealt with as) a finger; (each of) their myriads may be (dealt with as) a horse. Does a thing seem so to me? (I say that) it is so. Does it seem not so to me? (I say that) it is not so. We used to argue these things on long tennis trips, like the say that said, "Dust Storms May Exist," and austere elements of the periodic table. But it was a joke!
"Separation led to completion, then ensued dissolution" (184). Let us give up devotion to our views and adopt the "ordinary." The ordinary can't be found among the immortals.
I have not progressed beyond my farm ancestors. Each morning I am at the fields in daylight, and earlier in the barn, tools ready, tending, My fields are historical fences, boundaries, my stock that night’s teaching when I awake. I am a farmer planting weeding hoeing, repairing on the family farm that has been around 300 years.
wonder kammer and it said seventeenth-century cabinets filled with preserved animals, mythic creatures! In 1587, Gabriel Kaltemarckt advised Christian I of Saxony that three types of item were indispensable in forming a "Kunstkammer" or art collection: firstly sculptures and paintings; secondly "curious items from home or abroad"; and thirdly "antlers, horns, claws, feathers and other things belonging to strange and curious animals. So Holy Cow here are some of the sort. Anyway, what won’t go in a wonder kammer?
Item: Trojan Horse-Trojan Horse Trojan Horse was let in the city because of its art. This replica was found in old papyrus. It had Greece in the belly. After a light spray of shino over found clays with B mix laminated, red shino sprayed and waxed, some trigger pulls of clear penetrated the wax and diffused the orange.
Other questions of the sort are also undertaken at http://humanbotany.blogspot.com/ and other sites common to this blog.
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December 13, 2011I didn't understand many of these verses. It seems to be a study on opposites. We obtain everything by desiring nothing. Generally, it seems like Tao is a path of simplicity and contentment. But I didn't understand much of it so I need to read a book that includes a commentary.
March 5, 2016
Great read. Taoism cuts through the clutter of imposed values and instructs the way to live as life is intended. Very deep, but it is beckons man to become what he had been before ego got in the way. Almost an attempt to go back to before the Fall of Man. Can't wait to begin the second volume.
August 16, 2019
Essential reading for any Taoist
November 30, 2025
My favorite book
May 27, 2015
I first read The Texts of Taoism, Volume One, in about 1983. It was written in 1890 by James Legge of Oxford.
Prior to this version, I had read a few interpretations of the Tao Te Ching and this wasn't my favorite. But having pondered upon and studied this subject for 32 years, and even attempted my own translation, I now appreciate just how great of job he did. He followed the text quite closely and so even if it isn't as elegant as some, it is excellent as translation. Volume One also gives you a nice chunk of The Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi).
Prior to this version, I had read a few interpretations of the Tao Te Ching and this wasn't my favorite. But having pondered upon and studied this subject for 32 years, and even attempted my own translation, I now appreciate just how great of job he did. He followed the text quite closely and so even if it isn't as elegant as some, it is excellent as translation. Volume One also gives you a nice chunk of The Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi).
July 18, 2024
"To understand the Tao one must be partaker of its nature. " ~Legge
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