A Translation of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching and Wang Pi's Commentary by Paul J. Lin; Lao Tzu;Wang PiReview by: William G. BoltzJournal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 100, No. 1 (Jan. - Mar., 1980), pp. 84-85Published by: American Oriental SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/601426 .

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84 Journal of the American Oriental Society 100.1 (1980)

counterparts in the four Ethiopic manuscripts and in the Latin and Syriac where these are extant. While VanderKam admits that he is working with "an exceedingly small per- centage of Jub.'s text," of which "the overwhelmingly larger part . . . must be restored" with "a high degree of uncertainty and even arbitrariness" (pp. 91-92), he concludes that the evidence warrants the cautious assertion that a critical Ethi- opic text is a highly reliable witness to the original Hebrew, frequently even in word order. Significant variants are rare, and in two instances, the Ethiopic appears to have preserved a better text than the Qumran fragments. The best Ethiopic manuscript is B, on which Charles based his edition.

VanderKam has worked carefully, always in consultation with the photographs and in dialog with scholarly opinion. His optimistic estimate of the value of the Ethiopic Jubilees, with its caveats, seems warranted, although it should have been further qualified by some indication of the extent to which these portions of Jubilees are quotations of the Bible itself.

In chapter 2, operating with Cross' theory of local texts, VanderKam identifies the Hebrew Genesis behind Jubilees as a Palestinian text. His evidence includes: "a large majority of cases" in which Jubilees agrees with the Samaritan Penta- teuch against the Masoretic Text; and "a considerable major- ity of instances" in which Jubilees sides with the LXX where it opposes the MT. Where Jubilees supports the MT against the LXX, however, the MT finds support in the Samaritan Pentateuch. Most often Jubilees agrees with the LXX, indi- cating the use of a Palestinian text that broke from that tradition relatively early. Interestingly, Jubilees agrees with the Ethiopic Bible far fewer times than with any other version.

Chapter 3 treats the date of Jubilees, setting the terminus ad quem at 100 B.C.E. on the basis of paleographical analysis and the terminus a quo at 161 B.C.E. on the basis of alleged allusions to the Maccabean wars. Similarities and differences with the Qumran Scrolls indicate that Jubilees was written by "a proto-Essene before the Essenes departed for Qumran," i.e., before the high priesthood of Simon and probably, of Jonathan. "Jub. was almost certainly written between 161 and 140 B.C. and probably between 161 and 152 B.C." (p. 284).

Two factors constitute a problem for VanderKam's dating in the Maccabean period. 1) The apocalypse in 23:16ff. makes no reference to Antiochus Epiphanes, his pollution of the temple and his edict-an unusual set of omissions for a document of this period. 2) The sharp strictures against a series of antinomian practices (see pp. 241-46) that our sources place in the period before 168 B.C.E. make more sense before the Maccabean restoration than after it.

This calls for a close evaluation of alleged events in the Maccabeans wars. Presenting an old argument with new force and detail, VanderKam sees in the wars between the Amorite kings and Jacob and his sons (chap. 34 and T. Judah) a covert

reference to Judas Maccabeus' northern battles, especially the battles with Nicanor (pp. 217-29). The argument has its difficulties. Of the nine cities that he mentions, four of the names must be emended-more or sometimes less convinc- ingly-from a corrupt text. Three of the nine are not mentioned in Maccabean sources. Four of the remaining six are cities fortified by Bacchides after Judas' death. Only two (one name emended) are known to have been sites of Maccabean battles. Finally, in Jubilees, the battles are not uniquely or specially connected with Judah.

A second set of alleged allusions to Judas' battles occurs in Jub 37-38, the account of the war between Jacob and his sons and Esau, his sons, and their allies (pp. 230-46). How- ever, notably lacking in the list of enemies that corresponds with 1 Macc 5 are Judas' opponents in Gilead and Simon's in Galilee. Moreover, VanderKam's assertion notwithstanding, Judah (= Judas Maccabeus) is not all that prominent in Jub 38, and the expression,"Judah and his brothers," sever- al times repeated by VanderKam, never occurs in Jub 38. Furthermore, the details of the battles disagree in the two sources. In 1 Macc 5, Judas divides his forces into three groups, with Joseph and Azariah being defeated. In Jubilees, the sons of Jacob divide into four groups, each of them victorious, and in areas different from those described in 1 Macc. 5. Thus, the parallels adduced by VanderKam are, in this reviewer's opinion, less convincing than VanderKam suggests, and hence a date before 168 B.C.E. remains a viable option.

These critiques notwithstanding, VanderKam has advanced the discussion of Jubilees, and his book should be studied and his arguments carefully scrutinized. There is yet much to be done in Jubilees, and VanderKam has helped us along the way.

GEORGE W. E. NICKELSBURG

UNIVERSITY OF IOWA

A Translation of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching and Wang Pi's Commentary. By PAUL J. LIN. Pp. xxvii + 198. Michigan Papers in Chinese Studies, No. 30. Ann Arbor: CENTER

FOR CHINESE STUDIES, THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN.

1977.

Wang Pi (224-49) is perhaps the most scholarly and most conservative of the early Tao Te Ching (TTC) commenta- tors, and is certainly one of the most deserving of full study and translation. With the recent Ma wang tui manuscript finds of the TTC text the need for a thorough study of the Wang Pi commentary has become even more apparent. Mr. Lin's translation of both the text and Wang Pi commentary takes note of the Ma wang tui manuscripts only briefly in a

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Reviews of Books 85

short section on differences between the Wang Pi version of the text and the Ma wang tui versions, added as Appendix III (pp. 157-76).' The differences are, with rare exception, expressed only in terms of an English translation, with no specifications of the variants in Chinese wording or structure, and thus are of little value for serious textual comparison. Although the author mentions these manuscript discov- eries in his Introduction (pp. x-xi), he seems not to have paid much attention to their potential worth in solving some of the textual problems he enumerates further on. In discussing the possibility that commentaries have become incorporated into the text proper, for example, he allows that "It is generally accepted . .. that Wang Pi's commentary has been integrated into Chapters 31 and 66, and that in Chapter 32 his commentary has been partially combined with the text" (p. xii). It need no longer be so accepted. A quick comparison of the Wang Pi version of the text with the Ma wang tui manuscripts shows without a doubt that the texts of Chapters 31, 32, and 66 in the former are substantially the same as they were in the early 2nd ct. B.C., and must be regarded as uncontaminated by Wang Pi's commentary.

Mr. Lin is not by any means unaware of the need for textual collation, nor of the difficulties that confront anyone trying to understand the TCC. He refers now and then to seven different editions of the Wang Pi text, and mentions textual variations between them when they occur. Beyond this he seems almost completely innocent of the basic philo- logical tools needed to handle the formidable textual, in particular the lexical, problems.2

Chief among the weaknesses of Mr. Lin's translations is his insistence on using terms from the Western philosophical and religious lexicon to translate words central to the Chi- nese intellectual and speculative tradition, without carefully considering the appropriateness or inappropriateness of their cultural connotations. To take only one chapter as an ex- ample, we find in the space of a few lines in Ch. 16 these cases: ming' translated as 'destiny', chcangb translated as 'eternity', hsiung' as 'evil', and chiud as 'everlasting' (p. 28). All four of these English words carry not far beneath their surfaces a heavy Judeo-Christian semantic burden, in each case entirely inappropriate to the Chinese counterpart. The terms 'eternity' and 'everlasting' cannot be divested of their associations with the notion of a "soul" and concepts of "life-after-death." Nor can the word 'evil' be used without deeply felt undercurrents of the question of "original sin" and all that this suggests. Using such culturally loaded translations as these, and thereby forcing their Western connotations onto the Chinese, is an act of linguistic imperialism of the first order, and leaves us with the seriously mistaken impression that early Chinese thinking matched the philosophical and religious edifice of the West point by point. Furthermore, it inevitably obscures the real meaning of the original and camouflages the need for detailed

semasiological study of the difficult Chinese terms them- selves.3

Mr. Lin guarantees a rather significant misunderstanding of several parts of the text when at the outset he character- izes Wang Pi's philosophy as concerned with "the basic metaphysical problem of being and non-being" (p. xviii), and then goes on to see the TCC proper in the same terms. Whatever rudimentary and awkwardly expressed sense of "being" and "non-being" might be present in Wang Pi's notes, the fact is that for the TCC itself, as for all Chinese texts prior to the advent of Buddhism, the question of "being" and "non- being" is not only neither basic, nor metaphysical, it is not a problem at all. This is so simply because Classical Chinese, spared the ontological quagmire bequeathed the Indo- Europeans by their linguistic forebears, has no verb "to be." Consequently, neither the "being" - "non-being" opposition, nor the alleged conflict between Being and Existence, both so urgent to the Western mind, ever arises. By trans- lating the text (e.g., ch. 1, 2, 40) in such terms as "being" and "non-being" (yuv and wuh) Mr. Lin cuts himself off com- pletely from the meaning of the original, cryptic as that might be, and colors every such passage with the hues and tones of the Western ontological landscape, portraying the TCC as more at home in the Parmenidean salons of the West than in the Gerontidean grottos of the East.

To offer up a new translation of the TCC is a brave act, all the more so when it includes a translation of so important a commentary as Wang Pi's, and Mr. Lin deserves our admira- tion and respect for the courage of his efforts. But it is also true that for such a translation to accurately render the sense of the original it must follow directly on an exhaustive philo- logical study of the text, and this unfortunately is wanting in the present work.

WILLIAM G. BOLTZ

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY

I Appendix I (pp. 147-49) is a translation of Ssd-ma Ch'ien's biography of Lao TzO (Shih chi 63), and Appendix II (pp. 151-56) is a translation of Ho Shao's biography of Wang Pi (included in the commentary to the biography of Chung Hui, San kuo chih 28).

2 Mr. Lin would like, it seems, to lay part of the blame for these problems at the feet of the Chinese language itself: ". . . the nature of the Chinese language itself creates difficulty in interpreting the Tao Te Ching. The Chinese language is ideo- graphic and pictographic, each word forming a picture, but lacking inflectional elements to denote grammatical classifi- cations. Sentence structure relies exclusively on word order and context. The subject-predicate syntactic structure so basic in English and other Indo-European languages is non-existent

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