Taoist and Buddhist mysteries in the interpretation of the Tao-te ching

Abstract

After over a century and a half of increasingly superfluous translations of the Tao-te ching one might be pardoned for thinking that there was no further need for sinologists to devote attention to this text. Nothing could be further from the truth. The publication in 1974 of two manuscripts from the tomb at Ma-wang-tui dating to the early years of the 2nd century B.C., together with some previously unknown works of the same period, constituted as sensational an advance in our knowledge as could possibly be imagined, short of an autograph copy revealing the identity of Lao-tzu himself. Quite apart from answering (and raising) a host of textual questions, these finds have afforded us a startling glimpse of the significance assigned to the Tao-te ching during the early Han. This in turn has served to remind us that the continuous transmission of the text has involved marked discontinuities in the construction placed upon it, discontinuities which Western sinology has in the past been all too remiss in tracing.