The Tao Te Ching is estimated by most scholars to have been written around 600 B.C. Lao Tzu, the supposed author, has always been the object of relentless speculation by scholars. Apart from a brief reference in the Historical Records of Ssu-ma Ch'ien, written in the second century B.C., there is not much biographical information from his period to go on. He has for the most part, been constructed by later commentators out of the smoke of dead ashes.

He is attributed many different identities, both historical and mythological, and there is a four hundred year period in which scholars guess he lived. ¹ Undeniably, an author cannot be truly attributed to the Tao Te Ching without a complex web of questions of identity surfacing from in between the cracks and chasms of his history.

Simultaneously, the same thing can be said of his book, the Tao Te Ching. No original copy exists, and the copies we do have access to are hundreds of years older than when the book was alleged to have been written. The multiple copies are all different, each containing their own version of Lao Tzu's words.

This already convoluted history just gets fuzzier when we find the text being translated into Western languages, opening up a whole other chapter. The first translation was made into Latin by Jesuit missionaries in 1788, who brought it back to England. The first English translation was made by the Reverend John Chalmers in 1868, following several French translations of the early 19th century. Since then, over ninety English translations have been written. These can be categorized generally in the following ways:

Scholarly Translation: Word for word academic translation from the original Chinese in its historical context Parenthetical Scholary Translation: Scholarly translations with parenthetical additions to render passages more readable. These tend to be more wordy that Scholarly Translations. Literary Paraphrase: paraphrasing from the original text to render into English the poetic resonances embedded in the Chinese while still bearing close contact with the “proper” translation as a direct reference. Metaphysical Paraphrase: paraphrasing the metaphysical gestalt of the words in contemporary language in relation to the present, loosely following another translated version of the text. Metaphysical Metaphrase: Using the text as an indirect reference towards a subjective expansion or expression, often having little or no resemblance to the original text or context.

In chapter 20 of the aforementioned canonical work, Lao Tzu for the first and last time speaks of himself in an experiential first hand mode of address. This chapter, Lao Tzu's brief moment of the melancholic autobiographical, contains a set of comparisons between himself and the world. He characterizes the world as a place of feasts, joy, merriment, abundance, energy, cleverness, and intelligence. He characterizes himself as quiet, homeless, confused, dim, meandering, stupid and naive. This modest self-portrait is the only glimpse we get into the author of the “5,000 word classic”.

In the work, “How to get from `Resentment' to `Revelation' and back again safely,” multiple translations of this chapter are embedded in five video games, each adding new facets to Lao Tzu's character, each attempting to pinpoint an indescribable moment. We see the same camera shots over and over, but with new meanings based on the different contexts created by the gaps in the translations. Over the course of the readings, each meaning shifts and rotates, some becoming polemical to each other.

The vertigo shot in the library is a physical enaction of the space between the world (us, the viewers) and the individual. We get close and and then back away again, but each time in a different empty public space. Then there is a credit and high score sequence. This repeats itself over and over, like a video game demo screen, forever advertising what is impossible to “play”

History of Great Light:

In 1884, Frederick Henry Balfour opened his translation of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching with the lines:

“It occasionally happens that a sudden ray of clear and valuable light is thrown upon a long disputed subject from a source the very existence of which was unsuspected, and the authority of which would certainly never have been allowed.” ²

This light Balfour speaks of is an illumination whose source is shadowy and intangible, but nonetheless, as clear as day.

John Lord, in his 1883 Beacon Lights of History series, attempts “to give the substance of accepted knowledge pertaining to the leading events and characters of history extending over a period of over six thousand years” ³ and seeks to “present what is true rather than what is new“. In Lord's temple to truth, Lao-tse' is given as a half-page footnote to a 40 page chapter on Confucius. Lord dismisses Lao Tzu as one whose influence is felt only by “inferior people“ in China, in contrast to the “wise, mighty, and noble“ followers of Confucius.

Lord's decidedly colonialist bent sheds much light on his claim that both ancient Chinese philosophers will soon give way to the influence of the West's heaviest hitter, God. Whether the appropriately named Lord succeeds in shedding the latest light on the oldest knowledge is here a matter of his privileging of light [read `truth'] to the Western scholar, who flashes heliotropic metaphors like searchlights that see only what they reflect.

This heliotropic metaphor, as Derrida warns in “White Mythology,” furnishes us with too little knowledge. ⁴ Such a ray of light has no sensory bearing and thus, makes for bad metaphor. But this bad metaphor somehow creates a lucidity that transforms the ambiguous and brings it to the light of day. This light comes from nowhere to clear up the sky and to reveal to us that this bad metaphor describes well.

As Balfour himself wrote on the impossibility of the translation of the word `Tao': “The letter killeth; and in the present instance it has killed all sense and meaning out of the word it was attempting to explain.” Even so, the word `Tao' has become a frequently used word in the English language and has accumulated new meanings to which its original meanings can be added to.

A final note on the heliotrophic debate is the blurb on the back cover of Margins of Philosophy, which says of the book: “...a source of true illumination for those prepared to follow his [Derrida's] arduous path.” So the heliotropic metaphor remains both bad and accurate, not to mention in heavy demand and circulation, eclipsing accuracy with its swift stochastic cloud formations.

The fecundity of the Tao Te Ching for heliotropic metaphors is quite astonishing and in reading through the scores of translations I have accumulated, the most frequent place to find such a metaphor is in the translator's preface, especially where giving their justification for publishing yet another translation. That their own translation “throws the most light” on the true meaning of the text is frequently the reason given. These bad metaphors twitter and twinkle like little stars, immense energies so far removed as to be almost illegible to the eye.

Pouring my hot tears upon the margin of the road: I have been slowly dying ever since I was a young boy. Death has been felt, cold, in my bones. It seeps rather than erupts, wet and weeping, from a numbing bog, creeping. Death creeps. Patti Smith's question haunts me: “Am I all alone in this generation?” Lao Tzu's tomb; like a haunted house.

Ciphers that decode revelation tell me only that bright lights shine. But which light? The light of the day? The light of spirit? The light of reason? Which light validates and proves revelation? Which light throws itself onto words and makes them truth? Which light alchemically sheds itself onto a text in order to make good with its rays? Or is it the ambiguity of a bad metaphor that “promises more than it gives,” a clever con done convincingly?

As for Lao Tzu the author, he is caught in a very sticky web through the proliferation of his work. The meanings contained in his work will continue to be debated, reevaluated, retranslated, and rewritten. He will not be getting much sleep. Perhaps he should have kept it to himself. I am sure he considered it. Lao Tzu the man, at least, has it better off. He does nothing else but sleep. He is content and still, “a wave in the river of darkness and light.” ⁵

Matthew Wilson, 1994

See Also:

Words: their play and their ghostliness
History, ghosts, and Death
Self-portraiture, autobiography, and uncertainty
The ghosted image and the heuristic hero

1. A detailed commentary of the differing accounts of Lao Tzu's life can be found in Wing Tsit Chan's The Way of Lao Tzu, Macmillan, NY, 1963
2. Frederic Henry Balfour, Taoist Texts: Ethical, Political, and Speculative, Trubner & Co., London, 1884
3. John Lord, Beacon Lights of History: The World's Heroes and Master Minds, Vol. 1:The Old Pagan Civilizations, James Clarke & Co., NY, 1883
4. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, University of Chicago Press, 1982
5. Chang Heng, “The Bones of Chuang Tzu”, translated by Arthur Waley in 170 Chinese Poems, 1918