A N OTE TO THE R EADER
This is one book, but within it are two manuscripts. The first, printed in italics on the left-hand (verso) pages, is based on the classical 1891 rendition of the eighty-one verses of the sacred Chinese text known as the Tao Te Ching, credited to a sage called Lao Tse and translated by the British Sinologist James Legge. On the right-hand (recto) pages is the “second” manuscript (in roman type), the same eighty-one verses of the Tao Te Ching, interpreted in words culled and organized by me from the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great nineteenth-century American philosopher and poet.
The inspiration for creating these parallel texts comes from the epigraph to this book—“all philosophy, of East and West, has the same centripetence”—an observation recorded by Emerson in his essay on Plato when he was thirty-three years old, and already on the road to becoming “America’s Founding Thinker.” Centripetence, of course, refers to the tendency of energy to move or progress toward the center, to the essence of things. As Emerson later wrote, “the hero is he who is immovably centered,” and as Lao Tse put it, “your inner being guard, and keep it free”—both men standing for what Emerson would later call the “infinitude of the human soul.” This veneration of both the depths and heights of the human soul blossoms in their writings into a credo for the conduct of life that elevates quietude, self-awareness, humility, and reverence for the natural world to such a level that it has captivated and inspired generations of men and women. The values contained within the words these sages wrote, no matter how cryptic or mystical they may seem in some instances, have given rise to a kind of “spiritual anthropology,” focused first on a site in ancient China housing a relic document over 2,500 years old, and second on a body of work created by a poet/philosopher in the quite early days of a new and animated country in the Western world. Each set of writings has captivated and inspired seekers to revisit them and probe their wisdom in search of a guiding personal truth.
This book is an effort to bring together these two kindred works. Using fragments of Emerson’s writings ranging in length from a phrase to an entire passage, I have tried to construct new poetic interpretations of Lao Tse’s words. It is not the intent of this rendition of the Tao Te Ching through the prose and poetry of Ralph Waldo Emerson to create an amusing word game by plundering the works of Emerson with a pair of scissors. Any great writer’s words can, by such manipulation, be made to reproduce the work of any other writer.
In this instance, the process by which Emerson’s writings are shown as parallel to the verses of the Tao Te Ching is one in which the shared sense and spirit and philosophy of the two men is displayed. To do this I spent a great deal of time immersed alternately in the work of the two authors, and recollecting the comparable thoughts I discovered in each. For instance, in Chapter 2 of the Tao Te Ching, which is intended to lay out the Taoist notions of complementarity (the yin/yang principle), a close student of Emerson thinks immediately of Emerson’s essay “Compensation,” devoted at least in part to the same idea: the universe is characterized by the sway between nonantagonistic, but opposite forces, “as: spirit, matter; man, woman; odd, even; motion, rest….” Thus, Chapter 2 in my “translation” employs five sentences taken from the “Compensation” essay. But there is a deeper connection to be seen when the dedicated reader of Emerson recalls that he also explored this theme in other places: in his poem “Each and All,” for instance, and in his address “The Method of Nature” as well as in his essay “Spiritual Laws.” Thus, one or more sentences from those sources become the Emersonian “version” of the sacred Taoist text. Conversely, in my daily rereading
This is one book, but within it are two manuscripts. The first, printed in italics on the left-hand (verso) pages, is based on the classical 1891 rendition of the eighty-one verses of the sacred Chinese text known as the Tao Te Ching, credited to a sage called Lao Tse and translated by the British Sinologist James Legge. On the right-hand (recto) pages is the “second” manuscript (in roman type), the same eighty-one verses of the Tao Te Ching, interpreted in words culled and organized by me from the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great nineteenth-century American philosopher and poet.
The inspiration for creating these parallel texts comes from the epigraph to this book—“all philosophy, of East and West, has the same centripetence”—an observation recorded by Emerson in his essay on Plato when he was thirty-three years old, and already on the road to becoming “America’s Founding Thinker.” Centripetence, of course, refers to the tendency of energy to move or progress toward the center, to the essence of things. As Emerson later wrote, “the hero is he who is immovably centered,” and as Lao Tse put it, “your inner being guard, and keep it free”—both men standing for what Emerson would later call the “infinitude of the human soul.” This veneration of both the depths and heights of the human soul blossoms in their writings into a credo for the conduct of life that elevates quietude, self-awareness, humility, and reverence for the natural world to such a level that it has captivated and inspired generations of men and women. The values contained within the words these sages wrote, no matter how cryptic or mystical they may seem in some instances, have given rise to a kind of “spiritual anthropology,” focused first on a site in ancient China housing a relic document over 2,500 years old, and second on a body of work created by a poet/philosopher in the quite early days of a new and animated country in the Western world. Each set of writings has captivated and inspired seekers to revisit them and probe their wisdom in search of a guiding personal truth.
This book is an effort to bring together these two kindred works. Using fragments of Emerson’s writings ranging in length from a phrase to an entire passage, I have tried to construct new poetic interpretations of Lao Tse’s words. It is not the intent of this rendition of the Tao Te Ching through the prose and poetry of Ralph Waldo Emerson to create an amusing word game by plundering the works of Emerson with a pair of scissors. Any great writer’s words can, by such manipulation, be made to reproduce the work of any other writer.
In this instance, the process by which Emerson’s writings are shown as parallel to the verses of the Tao Te Ching is one in which the shared sense and spirit and philosophy of the two men is displayed. To do this I spent a great deal of time immersed alternately in the work of the two authors, and recollecting the comparable thoughts I discovered in each. For instance, in Chapter 2 of the Tao Te Ching, which is intended to lay out the Taoist notions of complementarity (the yin/yang principle), a close student of Emerson thinks immediately of Emerson’s essay “Compensation,” devoted at least in part to the same idea: the universe is characterized by the sway between nonantagonistic, but opposite forces, “as: spirit, matter; man, woman; odd, even; motion, rest….” Thus, Chapter 2 in my “translation” employs five sentences taken from the “Compensation” essay. But there is a deeper connection to be seen when the dedicated reader of Emerson recalls that he also explored this theme in other places: in his poem “Each and All,” for instance, and in his address “The Method of Nature” as well as in his essay “Spiritual Laws.” Thus, one or more sentences from those sources become the Emersonian “version” of the sacred Taoist text. Conversely, in my daily rereading
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