Some English Translations of the Daodejing

The Daodejing may be the single most-translated Chinese text. Nevertheless, finding an English edition of the Daodejing which is suitable for use in the classroom or individual study is something of a challenge. When I first started teaching the Daodejing, I used the Penguin Classics edition with D. C. Lau's translation. This translation dates from 1963, but is still very useful. The translation is clear, with few idiosyncratic choices. Lau's only bias is that he reads the work more as a political treatise than a mystical work (whereas in fact it may be both). The Penguin Classics edition provides an extensive introduction, glossary, and chronological table, and supplementary essays on "The Problem of Authorship" and "The Nature of the Work."

Lau's translation holds up exceptionally well, and is still referenced by other scholars. A lot has changed in the field of scholarship on the Daodejing since 1963, however. Lau's translation predates the discovery of the Mawangdui and Guodian texts of the Daodejing, for example. The Mawangdui texts were found in 1973 in a tomb dating from 168 BC. Two copies of the Daodejing were found at Mawangdui--the "A" and "B" texts, both written on silk. The A and B texts are mostly complete, though they contain differences both from each other and from the received (Wang Bi) edition of the Daodejing. For example, the order of the Dao and De books of the Daodejing is reversed in the Mawangdui texts, with the De book coming first. The Mawangdui texts also lack the chapter divisions of the received edition, and contain many (mostly minor) textual variations.

The Guodian text, written on bamboo, was discovered in 1993 in a tomb dated from before 300 BC. The Guodian text is the oldest copy of the Daodejing to be discovered, but is incomplete, though it contains 14 bamboo strips with material not included in the received edition of the Daodejing.

Some recent translations of the Daodejing have been based on the Mawangdui or the Guodian texts instead of that of the received edition. Robert Henricks, for example, has put out both a translation based on the Mawangdui texts and a translation based on the Guodian text. I have only read the former, which is published under the name Te-Tao Ching (Ballantine Books, 1989)--to reflect the reversed order of the Dao and De books in the Mawangdui texts. Henricks' translation of the Mawangdui texts is clear and a delight to read:

When the highest type of men hear the Way, with diligence they're able to practice it; When average men hear the Way, some things they retain and others they lose; When the lowest type of men hear of the Way, they laugh out loud at it. If they didn't laugh at it, it couldn't be regarded as the Way (ch. 41).

The Hackett edition of Henrick's translation contains a very helpful philosophical introduction, and some useful textual notes throughout. I used Henricks' translation when I taught an undergraduate seminar on Indian and Chinese philosophy in the spring of 2010. The translation and ancillary materials worked well, but I decided it is better to use the received, Wang Bi edition of the Daodejing when students are reading the text for the first time. This is largely because the Wang Bi edition is the one referenced by all of the classical commentaries and by most contemporary scholarship. It was also a distraction to have to explain to my students the various ways in which the edition we were studying differed from the received edition, and how this might affect their subsequent reading about the Daodejing.

The last time I taught the Daodejing, in the spring of this year, I used the translation by Stephen Addiss and Stanley Lombardo (Hackett Publishing, 1993). This translation contains a brief (but nonetheless helpful) introduction by Burton Watson, a glossary of Chinese words, and, most surprisingly, works of original calligraphy by translator Stephen Addiss. This translation of the Daodejing is currently my favorite, because it is the clearest and most literal that I have yet to find. The Daodejing is a very terse text, even by the standards of classical Chinese, and partially on account of this it gives rise to many difficulties in interpretation. Most translations of the Daodejing contain as many interpretations as straight translations, but Addiss and Lombardo endeavor to adhere as closely as possible to the original text of the received edition, even where this makes for hard going in English. For example, here are the first two lines of the first chapter of the Daodejing, as translated by Addiss and Lombardo: "Tao called Tao is not Tao. / Names can name no lasting name." Addiss and Lombardo capture the concision of the original text, and this makes it all the more useful for teaching purposes, because it lets students grapple themselves with the issues of interpretation. It is not for nothing that the esteemed scholar of Daoism, Livia Kohn, has said of Addiss's and Lombardo's work that "This is by far the best translation on the market today, and I have been praising it to whoever would listen." (Incidentally, Addiss's calligraphy is also of high quality, and contains both traditional and contemporary pieces, which seem to resonate with the spirit of the Daodejing.)

Despite all these strengths, I will not be using the Addiss and Lombardo translation the next time I teach the Daodejing. The translation is excellent, but the Hackett edition is lacking in terms of a sufficiently robust historical and philosophical introduction, and in terms of providing sufficient interpretive notes and commentary to help students who may be struggling with the text. The glossary of terms also suffers greatly from the fact that it seems to only make reference to those Chinese characters which happen to appear in the one line of Chinese text which has been printed alongside each of the chapters of the English translation. Given the brevity of the text, it would have made much more sense to provide a complete facing-page copy of the Chinese characters, instead of choosing somewhat arbitrarily to restrict the Chinese to one line per chapter.

Hackett has another good translation of the Daodejing in print, this one by noted sinologist Philip J. Ivanhoe (first published in 2002, and reprinted in 2003). Ivanhoe's translation is clear, adheres closely to the text of the received edition, and contains few idiosyncratic readings: "A Way that can be followed is not a constant Way. / A name that can be named is not a constant name." The Hackett edition contains a brief but helpful introduction, fairly extensive textual notes, and an appendix which discusses the language of the Daodejing. I would have liked to have seen a more extensive introduction, and more extensive notes discussing the interpretation of both individual lines and whole chapters of the text. Nevertheless, I am currently planning on using Ivanhoe's translation the next time I teach the Daodejing.

Two other recent translations are worthy of note. The first is Roger T. Ames' and David L. Hall's Daodejing: "Making This Life Significant": A Philosophical Translation (Ballantine, 2003). This edition contains the original Chinese text from the Wang Bi edition and a medium-length commentary by the translators alongside each translated chapter. This seems like a promising format for an edition of the Daodejing intended for use by students and scholars. This edition contains both a historical introduction and a separate (and lengthy) philosophical introduction, a glossary of key terms, a thematic index, and an appendix with a translation of a text called The Great One Gives Birth to the Waters (which comprises the 14 bamboo strips found in the Guodian text of the Daodejing that have no parallel in either the Mawangdui texts or the Wang Bi edition).

While I like the format of Ames' and Hall's translation, and I like their stated goal of creating an edition of the Daodejing with specialized commentary by and for philosophers (not just sinologists), in practice I find fault with several characteristics of this edition. For one thing, I would have liked to see more traditional commentaries and contemporary scholarship cited in their chapter by chapter commentaries. More importantly, I found the style of their translation wanting, in part because it seems (for lack of a better expression) "too clever by half": "Way-making (dao that can be put into words is not really way-making; / And naming (ming) that can assign fixed reference to things is not really name-making." Their translation contains too much interpretive interpolation for my taste, and does not convey the graceful (albeit frequently ambiguous) simplicity of the original. Ames' and Hall's interpretive commentaries and introductions also seem biased and idiosyncratic, containing their own philosophical musings when it would be more helpful to provide a context for interpretation grounded in the traditional commentaries on the one hand and recent work by scholars on the other. Indeed, this tendency toward the idiosyncratic is seen in the tile of their work itself: the phrase "Making This Life Significant" is inserted after Dao De Jing, and this choice reflects the heavy-handed approach Ames and Hall fall into in attempting to reveal the work's philosophical significance.

The last translation I will mention is by Edmund Ryden, and published by Oxford World's Classics (2008). The translation is based on the received edition of the text, but Ryden occasionally also makes use of the Mawangdui and Guodian texts for some of his readings and interpretations. Each chapter of the translation is cross-referenced with the corresponding section of the Mawangdui texts (and the Guodian text, where appropriate). This edition has a very informative introduction by Benjamin Penny, a very brief commentary on each chapter prior to the translation, textual notes, and an index of key terms and images which appear in the text. This apparatus is useful, though I would have liked to see more extensive introductory comments on each chapter with at least a few references to classical commentaries and contemporary scholarship. The main problem with this edition, at least for me, lies in the idiosyncracies in Ryden's translation. For example, Ryden translates de as "life force," and he uses feminine pronouns whenever referring to the Dao: "Look at her and you do not see her: name her invisible; / Listen to her and you do not hear her, name her inaudible" (ch. 14). Neither of these choices is woefully misleading or inaccurate, and both are thought-provoking, but I find these and other unusual choices in Ryden's translation to be quite distracting, especially when taken as a whole.

Wang Bi on Progress and Goals

"Being good at making progress lies in not hurrying, and being good at reaching goals lies in not forcing one's way." -- Wang Bi (226-249), Outline Introduction to the Laozi.

Were the Inca literate?

There is a fascinating article on Slate about the quest to decode Incan khipus, knotted cords which were used to record numbers, and which may have also been used to record written information as well. According to the article, the financial record-keepers of the Inca seemed to out-perform Spanish accountants when their figures were compared in 16th-century lawsuits. Apparently, the Spanish eventually put the kibosh on the use of khipus, in characteristic fashion:

The Spaniards' institutional response to this singular accounting system, originally benign, shifted in 1583, when Peru's nascent Roman Catholic church decreed that khipus were the devil's work and ordered the destruction of every khipu in the former Inca empire. (This was the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition, and the church was making a major push to convert natives from their pantheistic state religion.)

What can one say? The brutal destruction of cultures is as depressing as it is common in history. One only hopes that the surviving khipus will one day be decoded.

Links

1. The absence of top predators unravels ecosystems.

2. NASA's next space telescope may be scrapped.

3. $625 cookbook.

Links of Interest

1. Carl Bernstein on Murdoch's Watergate.

2. What's it like to work at a call center in India?

3. "Harnessing the power of feedback loops."

4. Meditation is roughly as effective as morphine at reducing pain.

Links

1. The recession hits Irish gangs.

2. Google to re-brand Blogger and Picasa.

3. Interview with Gary Klein on the role of intuition in expert decision-making.

David Brooks on House Republicans

Conservative columnist David Brooks wrote a piece yesterday criticizing House Republicans for failing to make a budget deal with House Democrats. I do not stay very informed about contemporary politics, but based on what I have been reading in the news, Brooks' column rings true:

But we can have no confidence that the Republicans will seize this opportunity. That’s because the Republican Party may no longer be a normal party. Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.

The members of this movement do not accept the logic of compromise, no matter how sweet the terms. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch in order to cut government by a foot, they will say no. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch to cut government by a yard, they will still say no.

The members of this movement do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities. A thousand impartial experts may tell them that a default on the debt would have calamitous effects, far worse than raising tax revenues a bit. But the members of this movement refuse to believe it.

The members of this movement have no sense of moral decency. A nation makes a sacred pledge to pay the money back when it borrows money. But the members of this movement talk blandly of default and are willing to stain their nation’s honor.

Brooks' words are a damning indictment of the anti-tax ideology of the contemporary Republican party. I agree with Republicans that tax rates are too high, but as Brooks points out, there are a lot of other issues on the table, and the tax issue should not be viewed as a trump card or sine qua non of politics. It is unfortunate that the Republicans, who portray themselves as the party of fiscal responsibility, are not proving more effective stewards of the government's finances. I would consider voting for Republicans if they focused on effectively promoting personal freedom and sound economic policies, but they seem excessively focused on promoting militarism, moralizing crusades, and an extreme and economically unsound anti-tax ideology.

John R. McRae, Seeing through Zen

I recently read a book about the early history of Zen Buddhism called Seeing through Zen: Encounter, Transformation, and Geneaology in Chinese Chan Buddhism, by John R. McRae, a professor of East Asian Buddhism at Indiana University.

McRae's book presents a summary of the early history of Chan, from its origins in China during the Tang Dynasty, through its mature development during the Song. McRae criticizes a lot of the previous histories of Chan, for naively treating legendary stories as factual, and for adopting both an overly-romanticized view of Chan during the Tang Dynasty on the one hand, and an overly-cynical view of Chan during the Song Dynasty on the other. There has been a tendency to regard Tang-Dynasty Chan as uniquely authentic and rigorous, and to regard Song-Dynasty Chan as having degenerated from its original state of rigor and sincerity. Interestingly, this conceit seems to have originated in part as a literary device among Chan texts from the Song Dynasty itself.

McRae's book is formed from a collection of essays which were edited together to form a single continuous narrative. While his history of early Chan is not comprehensive, the resulting text does not feel too broken-up, and it works well as a general introduction to recent work on the history of early Chan.

I will probably have more to say about Seeing through Zen in a later blog post, as it is a text rich with implications both for historians and practitioners of Zen, and at some point I would also like to write about another book by McRae, The Northern School and the Formation of Early Ch'an Buddhism. Until then, I would just like to highly recommend both of these works to anyone interested in the history of Zen.

The Illusions of Psychiatry?

Marcia Angell recently wrote a two-part article in the New York Review of Books containing numerous criticisms of the field of psychiatry. Angell's article contains a review of three books: The Emperor's New Drugs by Irving Kirsch; Robert Whitaker's Anatamoy of an Epidemic; and Daniel Carlat's Unhinged. I am interested primarily in discussing Irving Kirsch's claim that psychiatric drugs are no more effective than placebos, and Robert Whitaker's criticisms of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR).

Irving Kirsch gives two main arguments in defense of his claim that psychiatric drugs are no more effective than placebos. The first is that, when one takes into account all of the clinical trials conducted by pharmaceutical companies--not just those successful trials which are more likely to get published in medical journals--placebos are 82% as effective as the six psychiatric drugs approved by the FDA between 1987 and 1999 (Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Celexa, Serzone, and Effexor). This result shows that the drugs are at best not much more effective than placebos.

Kirsch's second main argument is that the apparent extra degree of effectiveness of psychiatric drugs over placebos is actually due to an enhanced placebo effect. Kirsch notes that the psychiatric drugs believed to be effective all have noticeable side effects. The problem is that the presence of noticeable side effects undermines the double-blind control put on the trials. Because the actual drug causes noticeable side effects, and because a placebo does not cause side effects, it is possible for a patient to figure out if he has been given the actual drug and not a placebo. The fact that the medications appear to work better in treating severe cases of mental illness may simply be due to the fact that higher doses tend to be given in severe cases, and the side effects are therefore more noticeable. When side effects are noticeable, it becomes more likely that the patient believes he is receiving the actual drug, and thus more likely that the placebo effect occurs. Thus, psychiatric drugs may out-perform placebos (by a small margin) just because they are better at producing a placebo effect.

Crucial to Kirsch's analysis is data from unpublished studies conducted by drug companies on the effectiveness of the psychiatric drugs in question. Kirsch had to use the Freedom of Information Act to get the FDA to release the data. The FDA requires drug companies to give them data on all of the trials conducted by drug companies--not just selected trials or trials which have been published in medical journals. However, the FDA only requires that two of the trials show clinical effectiveness before giving a drug approval. This is problematic, because drug companies can conduct any number of trials in an attempt to show effectiveness, and even if two of the trials do show effectiveness, these two trials do not necessarily reflect the overall data set. The FDA basically allows the drug companies to cherry-pick trials in determining the effectiveness of a drug.

The second part of Angell's article contains a discussion of Robert Whitaker's criticisms of the DSM-IV-TR and its predecessors. Angell portrays the DSM as largely the creation of one man, Robert Spitzer, a former professors of psychiatry at Columbia University. Angell portrays Spitzer as not giving sufficient weight to views other than his own in producing the DSM; Spitzer both hand-picked the 15-member task force who developed the DSM, and said in an interview in 1989 that "I could just get my way by sweet-talking and whatnot," for example. Angell claims that Spitzer's work on the DSM was biased by his goal of producing a diagnostic manual that would facilitate the use of psychiatric drugs to treat mental disorders. Finally, Angell notes that the DSM is free of citations to back up its decisions regarding the classification of and diagnostic criteria for mental disorders, which undermines its claims to represent an informed scientific consensus.

I would add that the DSM is inherently problematic in that its definitions of mental disorders and diagnostic criteria are generally symptom-based. My understanding is that it is preferable, perhaps essential, for a disease to be identified and diagnosed not on the basis of symptoms alone (especially behavioral symptoms, which are often hard to reliably assess), but rather on the basis of measurable physical indicators--such as the presence of antibodies in the blood in the case of a viral infection. The criteria proposed by the DSM seem to at best identify syndromes which consist of characteristic clusters of abnormal behaviors, and not true diseases with specific etiologies and biological markers.

I don't know enough about psychiatry to say whether Angell's article gives an accurate picture of the state of psychiatry as a whole, or whether she is exaggerating the problems the discipline faces. Nevertheless, I think she presents enough information to give reason for concern. I do think that psychiatry's medial model has great potential to help people with mental disorders, but it may be that this potential has been realized even less than we think.