Livia Kohn, the noted Daoist scholar and practitioner has recently published a new book titled Daoist
China: Governance, Economics, Culture. It's available at the Three Pines Press for a little under $30, US.
It's a simple book with a lot of useful information. It consists of a lot short little essays that deal with a specific issue in modern China---usually from a Daoist perspective. Each chapter ends with a list of links so anyone with an interest can pursue their exploration of the issue in greater depth.
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| Livia Kohn, image c/o Boston University |
It's a simple book with a lot of useful information. It consists of a lot short little essays that deal with a specific issue in modern China---usually from a Daoist perspective. Each chapter ends with a list of links so anyone with an interest can pursue their exploration of the issue in greater depth.
The list of chapters pretty much describes all the stuff she deals with. The first twenty are:
1. The China Experiment
2. The Party
3. Religious Control
4. The Chinese Daoist Association
5. The White Cloud Temple
6. Complete Perfection
7. Levels of Priesthood
8. The Kundao Curriculum
9. Personal Attraction
10. Tourism
11. Sacred Mountains
12. Daoist Sites
13. Laozi
14. New Expansions
15. Public Spectaculars
16. Martial Arts
17. Mount Wudang
18. Spreading Abroad
19. International Masters
20. Daoism in the West
After these, they go on for a further forty to total out at sixty.
This is a format that I find increasingly drawn to as a reader. I have to measure my time with an eye-dropper because of all my commitments, so the ability to take a ten or twenty minutes to read a short chapter means that I can read the book whenever I have a moment with nothing to do. And I've also gotten to the point where I am pretty happy if I can learn one or two things in reading a book. (Just to give an example, Kohn makes a throw-away statement early on about Daoist initiates being encouraged to travel and learn from different teachers---called "cloud walking". This is useful to me because I had the same understanding, although I have come across writers who've said that this describes a type of walking meditation. It's nice to have some confirmation from a respected scholar with lots of experience talking to Daoists in China.)
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Years ago as part of a lawsuit against Walmart aimed at preserving a Jesuit retreat centre, I gave a little demonstration of a Daoist ritual. I freely admit that I'm no expert on such things, but I did some research and came up with what I hope was a reasonable approximation. I wore some robes, and burnt a "paper horse" that I downloaded from the Internet. Then I burnt some requests to various members of the pantheon with "Hell money" as "travelling money". When I was finished, I told the Jesuits to throw the ashes in a nearby pond as a gift to the local dragon. I then went inside, gave a little talk, and, answered questions.
It was received quite well by most of the folks present---who were a collection of interested citizens and members of the clergy. On the way out, however, a friend who is a Benedictine nun said a strange thing to me, "Oh it must be so liberating to be able to make all this stuff up from thin air". I sometimes hear this from people. They've never heard about Daoism before, so it's "just make believe"---not "real" like what they grew up with. I try (sometimes with greater or lesser success) to not be offended by this, but it is simply not true. Daoism does exist. It is a recognized tradition, and it has a history, books, buildings, etc. Professor Kohn's book is a useful antidote to this idea because it not only shows the "nuts and bolts" of modern Chinese Daoist culture, it helps people understand how it's sensibility is still important to the culture of the world's second largest economy.
It was received quite well by most of the folks present---who were a collection of interested citizens and members of the clergy. On the way out, however, a friend who is a Benedictine nun said a strange thing to me, "Oh it must be so liberating to be able to make all this stuff up from thin air". I sometimes hear this from people. They've never heard about Daoism before, so it's "just make believe"---not "real" like what they grew up with. I try (sometimes with greater or lesser success) to not be offended by this, but it is simply not true. Daoism does exist. It is a recognized tradition, and it has a history, books, buildings, etc. Professor Kohn's book is a useful antidote to this idea because it not only shows the "nuts and bolts" of modern Chinese Daoist culture, it helps people understand how it's sensibility is still important to the culture of the world's second largest economy.
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I recently started getting involved in the Reddit subgroup about Daoism. I need to market my latest book (Digging Your Own Well), and the open secret about social media is that flogging yourself on it actually works. I was a bit reticent to do so, however, because there is a large section of the population that has gotten a bad English version of the Laozi and thinks that all there is to Daoism is to just read it over and over again. If they really want to get esoteric and read a commentary, they will break down and look at Benjamin Hoff's The Tao of Pooh. The problem with this is that there is a huge body of Daoist literature---much of it now in English translation---and a continuing tradition that teaches a wide variety of spiritual practices. With the tremendous resources that now exist through the Internet to learn more and more, why would someone just read a (often bad) translation of one book over and over again instead of reaching out to learn more?
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1 comment:
I think (from the perspective of a poet who loathes how poetry is taught on the rare occasions it is any more) that a lot of sticking to one translation may be put at the feet of educational deficiencies. The only exposure most people ever get in school to translation and how it works is through poetry, and that is for all intents and purposes not taught any longer. Very few people have the opportunity to learn that translation does not equal transliteration, and what the challenges are in moving between languages (especially back and forth between Eastern and Western languages), and just how much of a role interpretation plays in translation. Result: "The words say what they say, you move them from one language to another in one-to-one correspondence, and that's translation, so why read more than one?"
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