Lao Tzu Stratified:

Lao Tzu Stratified, II: A Sketch
Distantly descended from this piece
Revised 11-13-03

John J. Emerson

Summary: The Guodian text of Lao Tzu comprises about 40% of the whole text and allows us to divide the text into two parts. The non-Guodian 60% can be divided again into Chs. 67-81 (none of which was included in the Guodian text) and the rest of the non-Guodian remainder (from Chs. 1-66.)

Chs. 67-81 prove to be consistent and distinct in theme and style, and should be thought to represent the final layer of the text. (A number of non-Guodian passages in Chs. 1-66 probably also belong to this layer.) However, it is not possible simply to divide Lao Tzu into the Guodian and the final layers, since one major Lao Tzu theme -- the female, mother, and child -- is not found in the final layer and is very weakly represented in the Guodian text.

The Guodian Lao Tzu is heterogenous and hard to characterize in its own right. Rather than simply an early layer of the text, it may represent a selection from what to the compiler(s) had available– a selection which which deliberately excluded certain passages advocating weakness and the feminine. (Alternatively, the tradition honoring the female and child may have come from a separate tradition brought into the text after the Guodian compilation had been assembled.) Except a few passages at the end of bundle C, almost all of the Guodian Lao Tzu is found in the present text. This suggests that the an early, incomplete version of Lao Tzu already existed at that time. It seems highly unlikely, however, that the Guodian Lao Tzu was selected from the 81-chapter text we have today. It seems much more likely that the Guodian Lao Tzu is a selection from the proto-Lao Tzu which preceded the addition of Chs. 67-81 and the other chapters of the final layer.

The Guodian Lao Tzu quotes nothing at all from Chapters 67-81. There was already a strong hint in the Ma Wang Tui text that these chapters had some kind of special status, since in that manuscript the traditional Chs. 80 and 81 do not conclude the book, but appear immediately following Ch. 66 (thus making Ch. 79 the new final chapter). Altogether chapters 67-81 comprise about 20% of the text of Lao Tzu .

When compared to the rest of Lao Tzu, these chapters comprise a distinct group. The word "Tao" only appear four times in these chapters, and always in the phrase "Tao of Heaven" which otherwise only appears twice (in Chs. 9 and 47). The word Te "Virtue" is seen only twice (Chs. 68 and 79), with 13 appearances elsewhere. The phrase "wu-wei" does not appear at all (with 9 or 10 appearances elsewhere). The poetic particle hsi is not seen at all, nor do the woman and child appear, or emptiness and holes. The "cultivation of the body" is spoken of quite differently in these chapters than elsewhere in the book. The poetic, mystical side of Lao Tzu seems mostly lacking, but so does the cynical, manipulative side represented in Chs. 17, 36, 57, 58, and 65.

The positive themes in these chapters are equally striking. Chapters 73, 74, 75, 76, and 80 all talk about the people's fear of death – but from the ruler's point of view. Chapters 67, 69, and 73 all talk about bu kan "not daring", and Ch. 68's pu wu "not fighting" clearly seems to belong with these chapters. Chs. 77, 79, and 81 speak of the sage's generosity and forebearance. Chapters 76 and 78 honor weakness, while Chs. 67 and 68 recommend taking the lower or rear position. Many of these themes are found elsewhere in Lao Tzu, but not in this concentration. Altogether, the thematic consistency of these chapters is very striking: politically-oriented, practical, generous, and benign.

The combination of physical textual evidence and the distribution of themes justify the conclusion that Chapters 67-81 were added to the text of Lao Tzu sometime after the Guodian Lao Tzu was assembled, and thus represent the final layer of the text.

Furthermore, in a number of cases in which Chs. 67-81 cite passages from elsewhere in Lao Tzu, the chapters cited are not included within the Guodian text. Examples include the "companions of death" in Chs. 76 and 50; "knows himself" and "does not display himself" in Chs. 72, 22, 24 and 33; "rolls up his sleeves" in Chs. 69 and 38; and the royal rituals of humiliation in Chs. 78, 39, and 42. There are also many passages in the early non-Guodian chapters not included which seem thematically similar to Chs. 67-81. These minimally include Chs. 12 and 53 (condemning luxury and excessive taxation) and Chs. 27, 49, and 62 ("the good"); however, several more chapters might be considered. According to this theory, when Chs. 67-81 were added to the end of Lao Tzu, a number of other chapters were inserted earlier in the text.

One major group of themes which does not appear in Chs. 67-81 and is weakly represented in the Guodian text. In the non-Guodian part of Chs. 1-66 the mother, woman and child are seen in Chs. 1, 6, 10, 20, 28, 52, and 61. These themes appear only in Chs. 25, 55, and 59 of the Guodian text, and of these the passages in Chs. 25 and 59 are merely rather perfunctory mentions of the mother. While these passages were all (except for Ch. 61) included in the "early layer" of my first dissection of Lao Tzu, I am now reluctant to analyze them that way, since the Guodian Lao Tzu includes passages from all four of my previously-hypothesized layers. But the exclusion of this group of themes both from the Guodian Lao Tzu and from the "final layer" must mean that they also have some special status. Perhaps the Guodian editor / copyist chose not to include them, or perhaps these passages, though old, represented a different tradition which still had not been added to the Lao Tzu text.

In my previous dissection I described Chs. 13, 30, and 31 as the core of Lao Tzu, representing the original Yangist break from court life and from the military striving of the Warring States nobility. Their inclusion in the Guodian Lao Tzu, which excludes most of the other anti-war chapters in Lao Tzu as well as the chapters advocating femininity and softness, suggests that these three chapters were too central to the Taoist heritage to allow their exclusion. Perhaps the Guodian Lao Tzu, like Graham's "J" text of Mo Tzu (also from Ch'u), tried to accommodate the message of Lao Tzu to an aristocratic warrior elite by minimizing the anti-war, anti-tax message to the extent possible, but could not plausibly exclude these chapters since they were everywhere regarded as central to the message of the school.

When the Ma Wang Tui Lao Tzu was found, many assumed that the newly-discovered text, centuries older than any previously-known text, would help us resolve the many problems raised by Lao Tzu's numerous textual variants, thus bringing us closer to the true, original Lao Tzu. To an extent I think that this has happened; for example, there are a number of places where particles found in the MWT version but not other versions clarify the sense.

On the other hand, many passages in the MWT text raised new problems of their own. And at least one problem I thought had been thought settled by the MWT text was unsettled again by the Guodian text. For example, in the Wang Pi text, Ch. 37 reads tzu ting 自定 "decides itself", whereas similiar passages in Chs. 45 and 57 read tzu cheng 正 "rights itself". Both have about the same rhyme and meaning, and a taboo substitition seems possible. When it was found that all three passages read tzu cheng in the MWT text, this conclusion seemed almost assured. But unfortunately, in the still-older Guodian text, Chs. 45 and 37 both read tzu ting, while Chs. 57 still reads tzu cheng, and we're back to about where we started.¹

We can presumably expect to see more "new" Lao Tzu manuscripts in the future. We should be prepared for the possibility that these new manuscripts will leave us farther, rather than nearer, to being able to declare one version of the text to be the "correct original". Maybe no such thing ever existed. It has been suggested that Lao Tzu was widely transmitted orally before it was written down at various places and times, but we don't even really need that explanation. There is no evidence at all in Lao Tzu or elsewhere in the Taoist tradition for the Confucian reverence for written texts as such -- or for spoken words either, as far as that goes. Indeed, the tradition militates against that kind of reverence.

ENDNOTE

1. The textual substitutions of 能 neng "can", 善 shan "good at", and 敢 kan"dares to" also show a text under continual revision. All three words can prefix verbs, and they can be substituted for one another, or just omitted: e.g. "can act", "is good at acting", "dares to act", or simply "acts".

What we see in the three texts (GD, MWT, and WP) is a general tendency to add one of these modifiers, but also sometimes to substitute of one of them for one of the others. In Ch. 30 WP reads "doesn't dare intimidate" where the other two texts simply read "doesn't intimidate"; in Ch. 66 GD simply reads "that by which they become" where the other two texts read "that by which they can become"; and in Ch. 14 (absent from GD) MWT reads "Thus knows the ancient beginning" where WP reads "Thus can know the ancient beginning".

There is a "dare" (GD) to "can" (MWT, WP) substitution in Ch. 32; a "can" (GD) to "is good at" (MWT, WP) substitution in Ch. 66; and a "cannot" (GD, p. 44) to "doesn't dare" (MWT, WP) substitution in Ch. 64. However, the passage from Ch. 64 is seen twice in GD (the only repeated passage in GD, which is really three different manuscripts), and in its second appearance (p. 120) this pasage also read "doesn't dare".

As can be seen, starting from GD there is movement both from "can" to "dare" (Ch. 64), and from "dare" to "can" (Ch. 32). In Ch. 32 of GD, "dare" appears where it doesn't in MWT and WP; in Ch. 30 of GD, "dare" is simply omitted, whereas it appears in MWT and WP; and in one of the two GD versions of Ch. 64, but not the other, "dare" (seen in MWT and WP) is replaced by "can".

Besides the cases mentioned, "good" is absent from the GD text, the MWT text, or both in places where the WP text includes it in Chs. 15 ( 仚 xian "immortal"), 20 ( 美 mei "beautiful") , and 65 (nothing). But only in Ch. 65 is it part of a "good at" construction.

Chart: kan, shan, neng

Variants of ching "quiet, still" in early texts of Lao Tzu

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