New (ancient) manuscripts of the Daodejing

[Mark Saltveit]

The "received" version of the Daodejing that most of us see comes from Wang Bi's edition (approx. 250 C.E.) But at least four older texts have been found, which change our understanding of much of the chapters.

 

1. The Guodian Bamboo Strips (300 B.C.E.)

2. The Mawangdui Silk text (168 B.C.E.)

3. The Beida Text (150 B.C.E.)

4. The Fu Yi "ancient version" (574 C.E/202 B.C.E depending on who you believe)

 

 

Maybe I missed it but I don't see any discussion of that here. I recently wrote an article on the subject at Taoish.org and would like to hear what people think.

 

Does anyone know of any other ancient versions?

[dawei]

Hi Mark,

 

Nice to see you posting here again. The TTC study chapters here had a version of Hendrick's at each first post, who is one of the few versions based on the MWD (which there is an A and . Hendricks also did a version on the fewer Guodian chapters.

 

I have an e-version of the Guodian and could send it to you via email. I like to refer to it often as the character changes which occur later are much more frequent than most might think.

 

The MWD has been translated or commented on by a few... I have a few references somewhere.

 

I have the Beida in chinese but I don't think anyone has done a translation based on it.

 

The Fuyi seems to bypass Wang Bi and go back to some earlier characters... but it is only interesting once one realizes that what we call the Wang Bi received has been edited itself!

 

Prior to Wang Bi, Heshang Gong's commentary was the accepted thought... but Wang Bi wrote a commentary and yet his TTC shows in many places it does not agree with his commentary in many places. This is shown through the work of such as Wagner (http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Reading-Daodejing-Philosophy-Mandarin/dp/0791451828). I have this e-book too, if you want it.

 

JMO... Wang Bi's is not actually so reliable in understanding the original... but as it is the 'received' the masses have it.

[dawei]

Oh... other versions

 

The very first commentary is actually Han Fei Zi... a legalist. (I have this)

 

The Celestial masters wrote a commentary too, called the Xiang'er. Bokenhamp translates it in his Early Daoist Scriptures.

 

There is a Concubine version which Wagner mentions.

 

Also, the Yan Zun Version is used by Wagner in some of his books (I have two books by Wagner).

[Mark Saltveit]

Thanks, I would love any and all. ;-) I can offer you in return a copy of my book "The Tao of Chip Kelly" -- I'm pretty sure there is no better book on Daoism and American football.

 

Do you find Wagner authoritative? It looks great, though there is a funny typo on Amazon. It gives Wang Bi's years as 126 CE - 249 CE. I'm pretty sure he died young but a Daoist adept living 123 years, why not?

 

What and when are the Yan Zun and Concubine versions? I have not heard of those. I do have Bokenkamp's book and his (unpubicized) translation of the parts of the DDJ quoted in the Xiang'er.

 

Part of my interest was spurred by the comment on Chapter 80 that Henricks may have mistranslated a character on the MWD silks that reads "funeral vessels" as "weapons" -- that changes the entire meaning of that chapter!

 

Thanks,

 

Mark

[ChiDragon]

There must be an error about Wang Bi's year. According to my time table, it is 226 to 249 CE.

Edited February 23, 2014 by ChiDragon

[dawei]

Thanks, I would love any and all. ;-) I can offer you in return a copy of my book "The Tao of Chip Kelly" -- I'm pretty sure there is no better book on Daoism and American football.

 

emails sent

 

Do you find Wagner authoritative? It looks great, though there is a funny typo on Amazon. It gives Wang Bi's years as 126 CE - 249 CE. I'm pretty sure he died young but a Daoist adept living 123 years, why not?

 

Wagner's works are very much worth their reading.... also see:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Craft-Chinese-Commentator-Philosophy/dp/0791443965/ref=sr_1_11?ie=UTF8&qid=1393188165&sr=8-11&keywords=rudolf+wagner

 

And I find his Wang Bi book better than say Richard John Lynn's similar attempt...

http://www.amazon.com/The-Classic-Way-Virtue-Translations/dp/0231105819/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1393188656&sr=8-1&keywords=richard+john+lynn

 

 

What and when are the Yan Zun and Concubine versions?

 

Wagner mentions both in his book (sent).

 

Yan Zun is maybe 50BC. The Concubine version is the one which Fu Yi claims to have used dating to around MWD-A.

 

 

In the document I sent you, The Old Master, by Hongkyung Kim:

"the Fu Yi edition is closer to Text B than to Text A, despite the claim that it was taken in 574 from the tomb of Xiang Yu’s concubine, whose time almost corresponds with the time of Text A"

 

Part of my interest was spurred by the comment on Chapter 80 that Henricks may have mistranslated a character on the MWD silks that reads "funeral vessels" as "weapons" -- that changes the entire meaning of that chapter!

 

I commented on this in ch. 80 thread.

[Mark Saltveit]

Thanks!

[Apech]

The "received" version of the Daodejing that most of us see comes from Wang Bi's edition (approx. 250 C.E.) But at least four older texts have been found, which change our understanding of much of the chapters.

 

1. The Guodian Bamboo Strips (300 B.C.E.)

2. The Mawangdui Silk text (168 B.C.E.)

3. The Beida Text (150 B.C.E.)

4. The Fu Yi "ancient version" (574 C.E/202 B.C.E depending on who you believe)

 

 

Maybe I missed it but I don't see any discussion of that here. I recently wrote an article on the subject at Taoish.org and would like to hear what people think.

 

Does anyone know of any other ancient versions?

 

Just as out of interest ... I was reading the intro to Shaughnessy's I Ching (a translation of the Mawangdui text) and he comments on the order of the hexagrams given in this version being different to the received King Wen version. He then goes on to suggest that because of some textual indicators that there are reasons to believe that the received version (King Wen attributed) is actually older than the Mawangdui version. Which intrigued me as it reminds us that just because a version is the oldest archeological find does not make it either 'the original' or even authoritative.

 

There is a tendency in academics to want pare everything back to the supposed pure original. I think this idea has to be handled with care.

 

Also since he has been mentioned I find myself a huge fan of Wang Bi based on reading Lynn's translations of both the DDJ and the YiJing. In the intro to the DDJ there is Wang Bi's discussion of non-being which I think is excellent and clear. To think this man only lived to be 23! What more would he have done if he had survived longer.

[Mark Saltveit]

I don't think anyone would dispute that Wang Bi is a giant of Daoist scholarship. We also don't know what his starting materials were. He may have had one text of the DDJ, or a dozen wildly varied ones, or a fragment of a longer work.

 

Good point on age.... most likely there were rather different variants, some "died out" or were lost or supressed. Some books exist only in fragments that were quoted in other books. I've researched a Greek writer, Sotades who invented the palndrome. Everything he wrote was destroyed because of his notoriety (he was executed for criticizing Emperor Ptolemy II after Ptolemy married his own sister). Only 10-20 fragments exist, and all because they were quoted.

 

It's easy to find fairly recent and very inaccurate versions of classic books such as the Tao Te Ching-- some 100 years, some 20.

[dawei]

I don't think anyone would dispute that Wang Bi is a giant of Daoist scholarship. We also don't know what his starting materials were. He may have had one text of the DDJ, or a dozen wildly varied ones, or a fragment of a longer work.

 

This is where Wagner's book(s) are really interesting... he has some charts to show how Wang Bi's received text compares to his notes and then compares to the various older manuscripts and one can then see the implication that he must of had varying sources (or manuscripts).

 

Wang Bi was a Confucian... or a neo-daoist.

 

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neo-daoism/

[Apech]

This is where Wagner's book(s) are really interesting... he has some charts to show how Wang Bi's received text compares to his notes and then compares to the various older manuscripts and one can then see the implication that he must of had varying sources (or manuscripts).

 

Wang Bi was a Confucian... or a neo-daoist.

 

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neo-daoism/

 

 

he was also a Legalist ... in fact he was in philosophical terms what in the west would be called a Renaissance man.

Edited February 26, 2014 by Apech

[dawei]

he was also a Legalist ... in fact he was in philosophical terms what in the west would be called a Renaissance man.

 

A confucian-daoist-legalist... ergo, Huang-Laoist

 

This is what Sima Qian (historian) describes as the quintessential daoist of his day.

[Mark Saltveit]

I just wrote an article at Taoish.org about a lost section of the Tao Te Ching found in the Guodian texts, at least according to Prof. Sarah Allan of Dartmouth, who is one of the leading experts on the subject.

 

There were 14 extra slips mixed in with Bundle C of the Guodian Laozi. They were described as a separate document called “Da Yi sheng shui” (“The Great One produced water)" in the first Chinese version of the Guodian text. But she makes a compelling argument (which others have supported) that while the first 8 of the slips are a separate text, the last 6 are part of that version of the Tao Te Ching, or proto-Tao Te Ching as some call it. (These slips where not separate from the TTJ when found; notches from the binding rope show that they were bundles together.)

 

It starts out:

 

What is below is soil, but we call it ‘earth’.
What is above is vapor, but we call it ‘sky’.

“Calling it ‘Way’ is using its honorific; may I ask its name?

[Apech]

I just wrote an article at Taoish.org about a lost section of the Tao Te Ching found in the Guodian texts, at least according to Prof. Sarah Allan of Dartmouth, who is one of the leading experts on the subject.

 

There were 14 extra slips mixed in with Bundle C of the Guodian Laozi. They were described as a separate document called “Da Yi sheng shui” (“The Great One produced water)" in the first Chinese version of the Guodian text. But she makes a compelling argument (which others have supported) that while the first 8 of the slips are a separate text, the last 6 are part of that version of the Tao Te Ching, or proto-Tao Te Ching as some call it. (These slips where not separate from the TTJ when found; notches from the binding rope show that they were bundles together.)

 

It starts out:

 

 

Thank you Mark very interesting.

 

Its easy to forget that the idea of a book with a fixed text is a modern thing.

[dawei]

I just wrote an article at Taoish.org about a lost section of the Tao Te Ching found in the Guodian texts, at least according to Prof. Sarah Allan of Dartmouth, who is one of the leading experts on the subject.

 

There were 14 extra slips mixed in with Bundle C of the Guodian Laozi. They were described as a separate document called “Da Yi sheng shui” (“The Great One produced water)" in the first Chinese version of the Guodian text. But she makes a compelling argument (which others have supported) that while the first 8 of the slips are a separate text, the last 6 are part of that version of the Tao Te Ching, or proto-Tao Te Ching as some call it. (These slips where not separate from the TTJ when found; notches from the binding rope show that they were bundles together.)

 

It starts out:

 

I do think it is a compelling argument to consider that this should possibly be considered a part of the text. Parts of that text (Da Yi Sheng Shui) contain lines which are in the DDJ (25). But the original team which dealt with the Guodian finds, could not find a reason to leave it together with the DDJ as their knowledge of the other versions (MWD, Deida, HSG) have never mentioned or included them.

 

It has an incredible visual cosmology more like an unrolling.. and the emphasis on water rather than Dao puts it among other very ancient texts which did the same thing.

[Mark Saltveit]

True. Prof. Allan's interpretation is that the first 8 of those 14 slips, that cosmology, was a sort of appendix to the Daodejing, but that the last 6 were actually part of it. The type of wording seems to support that.

 

The team that produced that first Chinese book seems to have followed basically circular reasoning like that -- "well, we haven't seen this in any other Daodejings so it must not be part of it." And most Western researchers have followed them. Of course, if that's your logic, it's impossible to find any lost portions.

 

So that's why this research by Prof. Allan (and other researchers) has gotten so little attention.

[Mark Saltveit]

One of the problems is that in the original, there were no chapter numbers, no book or chapter titles, etc. But these 14 other slips were literally tied to the other sections of the Guodian Laozi (with string), and there were no other works mixed in. They actually lined up the notches that string made on the edges of the strip as part of the verification.

 

The only indication of where chapters may have begun and end was a mark, like a dot or little square, between them. Both Guodian and Mawangdui had some chapters that combined more than one of what we now consider the final 81 chapters, but were mostly the same.

[dawei]

What is also strange is that no subsequent find of the text exists either. And I don't know of any mention or quote of it by others... so it was never even considered for the Daoist Canon.

[Mark Saltveit]

it is perhaps analogous to the Gospel of Thomas and other "apocryphal" Christian texts that were ruled out of the Bible when it was assembled, even though many scholars identify that one book anyway as having been written closer in time to the lifetime of Christ and more authentic based on archaeological and historical analysis.

 

The only reason we even know about that text is that it was found in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

 

(edit: I wrote "Gospel of Peter" the first time by mistake. There is such a book but it's considered much less authentic.)

Edited March 7, 2014 by Mark Saltveit

[dawei]

Good point... As I have been fascinated with cosmology, I have read and researched this text only second to the DDJ.

 

The one reason I see it as potentially not belonging to the DDJ is that the DDJ is rather inferior in such a developed cosmology. But there is a line for line repeated in both... but that line is also in The Spring and Autumn Annuls which reflects the State of Lu history 772-481 BC.

 

“I do not know its name but if pressed, I call it Great"...

 

Which simply begs research into 'Great'... or at that time, "Great One" -- Da Yi.... first characters of the text in question !

[Aetherous]

This was a really great thread.

In doing a forum search, I was attempting to find a couple of forum members that I recall from years prior...one of them discussed the different versions of the DDJ, but in a less developed way compared to the info in this thread. Another discussed how the DDJ was assembled by a political group rather than a person named Laozi...unfortunately I haven't had any luck finding info on the latter.

[thelerner]

side note, I remember a post someone wrote about going to China for an open Taoist convention and made a comment that the DDJ wasn't written by Laozi.  That got them pretty much black balled and considered a persona non grata from that point on. 

[Albion]

Heads up for Mark. Check out this book:  'Daoism Excavated' by  Wang Zhongjiang:

 

https://www.amazon.com/Daoism-Excavated-Manuscripts-Contemporary-Scholarship/dp/1931483620/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1474149442&sr=1-1&keywords=Daoism+Excavated#customerReviews

 

It doesn't go into the DDJ/TTC MSS until about 3/4 of the way through the book. But it's the best (newest) reference work to the MSS that you spoke about here.

 

It's only got one review at Amazon.com but I bought it anyway, and I wasn't disappointed, I don't think that you will be either.

 

If you purchase it, when you finish reading the research, I'd be interested to know what you think of Wang Zhongjiang's writing, and his research.

 

I thought that it was very well done, and I hope that you will like it too!

 

Keep on Daoing,  Differently Abled Daoist

[dust]

side note, I remember a post someone wrote about going to China for an open Taoist convention and made a comment that the DDJ wasn't written by Laozi.  That got them pretty much black balled and considered a persona non grata from that point on. 

 

Hehe. Sounds like 'Taoists' are just as susceptible as anyone else to congruence bias and cognitive inertia.

 

(clever phrases! -- I looked them up on Wiki... I mean: the inability/unwillingness to consider alternative hypotheses or revise already-formed beliefs, regardless of contradictory evidence.)