Book as Object: A Copy of the Taishang Ganying Pian

 

This essay is not really a study of this popular Daoist text as much as an appreciation of the artifact of one copy of the book itself and a bit of a glance up a few of the innumerable paths it, like all other objets d’art, opens to view.  In the last paragraph I venture a few rhetorical firecrackers that might seem out of place in a soberer article. 

 

     My copy of the Daoist text titled Treatise of the Exalted One on Response and Retribution, the T’ai-Shang Kan-Ying P’ien, today transliterated as the Taishang Ganying Pian (太上感應篇), was printed in 1906 [1].  How such a book came to be published -- not only in America, but in LaSalle, Illinois, which might by some standards be regarded as the middle of nowhere – is, unsurprisingly, a story of a few nonconformists.  I grew up near Chicago and LaSalle to me was simply the town by Starved Rock State Park.  In college I had a housemate from LaSalle and I noted his pronunciation of his hometown – “Láy-sal” – with the stress on the first syllable (just as its sister city Peru was called by the natives “Peé-roo”).  [2]

     My book, in excellent condition apart from severe browning of its acidic pages, is a fruit of the business success of a German immigrant, Edward Carl Hegeler.  During the nineteenth century coal and zinc mines were developed in the LaSalle area, in part by this university-educated free-thinker.  Hegeler was a man of philosophic bent who appreciated spirituality yet could not accept orthodox religion.  Once he had become prosperous through his business activities, Hegeler sought to spread his notion of a new sublime vision based in science and uncorrupted by superstition.  In support of his opinions, he became active in the Free Religious Association, a group advocating a rational universal religion [3] and eventually assumed the editorship of the Association’s journal, formerly The Index, as the Open Court magazine, after he had founded the Open Court Publishing Company, which published books as well as another periodical, The Monist. 

     Under the editorship of Hegeler’s son-in-law Paul Carus the company became a significant source of information about Asian philosophy and religion in the West as well as publishing work by Charles Sanders Peirce.  Carus himself had a doctorate from Tübingen and a mind that, like that of the young Augustine, kept inquiring.  Once a Spinozist, he next decided that Buddhism most closely approached his own beliefs and wrote The Gospel of Buddha, modeled on the Christian gospel, in an effort to make Asian spirituality more approachable for Americans.  He eventually adapted Ernst Haeckel’s brand of hylozoism, called panpsychism, terming his own refinement panbiotism, which he described as a variety of monism that holds all nature “is fraught with life; it contains life; it has the ability to live” [4].

     In association with the World Columbian Exposition, the world’s fair in Chicago celebrating the quatercentenary of Columbus’ arrival in  the Western hemisphere,  a Parliament of the World’s Religions was held in 1893.  There Ramakrishna’s disciple, Swami Vivekananda, fascinated the audience with his universalist Hinduism (which was to form the basis for the Vedanta Society).  Among the other representatives of major traditions who appeared at the Parliament was  Soyen Shaku, the first Zen master to teach in the United States.  Carus met Shaku and asked if he would be willing to translate Asian texts for Open Court. Though Shaku declined, he suggested his student D. T. Suzuki, who was to become the most important exponent of Zen in America. 

     Among the projects Carus and Suzuki undertook was the T’ai-Shang Kan-Ying P’ien (as they called it is the old Wade-Giles transliteration).  They produced a curious volume neither wholly popular nor scholarly, spiritual in its final aspirations, but offering a number of rewards short of enlightenment.  The book is designed with care and taste.  The decorative cover, reproduced above, is only the first of its visual charms.  A frontispiece features a magisterial portrait of a grandly bearded Lao Dz looking utterly satisfied by Keichyu Yamada whom Carus then hired to illustrate Open Court’s edition of Scenes from  the Life of Buddha (1898).  Scattered throughout are  curious anonymous line illustrations from late editions of the book. 

     The annotated translation by D. T. Suzuki and Paul Carus follows the Chinese text each page of which is accompanied en face by a grid indicating the meaning of every individual character, in this way giving the reader without knowledge of Chinese some insight into the language while providing Sinologists with the original. 

     The book itself, as its English title Treatise of the Exalted One on Response and Retribution indicates, concerns karma, the cause and effect of people’s actions, with the intention of inculcating a simple morality based on retributive justice.  Job’s counsellors would have agreed with the author of this little book that every good deed unfailingly brings good fortune whereas every sinful or ignorant act brings an inevitable punishment.  Surely Lao Dz himself, like Job, would reject this mechanism as woefully reductive if not outright untrue.  Indeed, everyone can see in lived experience that it is every bit as common for the good to suffer while the wicked prosper.  Though in practical terms too inaccurate to be the governing principle of many people’s actions, the idea of immediate and perfect divine justice is so tempting  it has received wide currency.  This “myth” in the Platonic sense of a “royal lie,” a “needful falsehood” [6] is useful in shaping people’s behavior, influencing them toward selflessness, even if they know in a way that it is a fiction..

     Though attributed to Lao Dz himself (the “Tai-shang” or “grandly high one” of the title, the main text has been dated to  1164 C. E.  From the first, the book enjoyed state patronage and large editions were distributed as an act of virtue by the sponsors and to elicit good behavior from the masses.  In spite of its association with Lao Dz, the book shows little affinity with the Dàodé Jīng.  It is rather a product of the Chinese syncretic tradition that mingles elements of Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism with local folk belief, one product of which is the Lushan school of Daoism [7].  So great was the book’s appeal as a simple way of performing a moral act by distributing a book which encourages virtue among its readers that countless copies were manufactured and given out by religious laypeople and governmental agencies.  In their “Introduction” Carus and Suzuki suggest that perhaps no book has attracted greater devotion or has enjoyed more readers.

     The proliferation of this particular text in numerous editions over the years was enabled by the rise of inexpensive printing but was motivated in the first place by the treatise’s own promises.  Rather like the Gideons (who continue to distribute millions of Bibles annually), pious Daoists sought to accumulate merit by disseminating the Treatise which was classed as a “morality book” (shanshu 善書), a prescriptive guide to righteous behavior. The Open Court volume follows the model of numerous Chinese editions which append narrations of anecdotes that provide particulars of people’s well-deserved benefits and punishments in the present life with occasional recourse to heaven and hell.  The very first tells of a man who always revered the Treatise and, as a result, ascends with his family bodily into heaven, just as tradition says Enoch and Elijah did.  In the second story a poor but devout scholar pawns his clothes to support a printing of the Taishang Ganying Pian and shortly thereafter receives prestigious appointments from the emperor. 

     The main body of the text is a simple catalogue of ethical mandates, the great majority of which would be acceptable in most times and places.  The author illustrates such general rules as “do not proceed in an evil path” with specific positive advice such as advocating aid for the needy  while denouncing evildoers who lie and oppress others.  Some injunctions warn against improper ritual observance or violation of taboos (such as by needlessly killing a snake or a tortoise, by performing an execution on a holiday, or by exposing one’s nakedness at night).  The book thus constitutes a convenient epitome of moral teaching, a little law-book like the Albanian Kanun by which the individual might guide daily behavior.

     Anyone partial to the radical mysticism of Daoist or Advaita or Chan masters is likely to be taken a bit aback when, mingling with robed monks for the first time on a trip abroad, the traveler sees a pious supplicant genuflecting and reverently placing a package of Mallomars on the altar before a figure of the Buddha, while praying for a new baby, good grades, healing, or a promotion.  A certain suggestive potency does linger over such a scene.  It is, if nothing else, a spectacle of need, a touching glimpse into the abyss of human desire.  And the people, one guesses (or hopes) may be perhaps just a bit gentler than their more secular neighbors, for all organized religions teach ethics, laws, and moral rules their leaders say are ordained by higher powers. 

     Yet surely such petitioners have been as often disappointed in their hopes as often as they have been gratified.  Still they return the next time with the same belief in the efficacy of offerings.  Just as a  disappointed practitioner of juju will conclude that someone else must have had a stronger charm, these ordinary laypeople retain their faith in retributive justice in spite of seeing injustice daily. 

     Ethics are only meaningful within human communities, and Ultimate Reality can have little to do with such moral judgements.  Even far short of that last conceptual horizon (when all bets are off), moral concepts would vanish altogether should humankind become extinct.  On the other hand, in all societies religions have flourished, insisting on a patterns of behavior in part rational and functional and in part ritual and magical.  The Taishang Ganying Pian,  by attributing a systematic account of people’s moral obligations and expectations to a recognized sage, provided a guide to conduct that proved useful for centuries in China.   

     Practical it may be, but the book is warm with the glow of faith and scintillating with the peculiar Chinese fancy which seems never to take itself entirely seriously.  One reason a sinner cannot escape judgement, the reader learns, is that when he falls asleep on Kûng Shên Day his misdeeds will be reported to the Director of Destinies (siming 司命), a bureaucrat of the Jade Emperor Yù Huáng.  The informers are what Carus and Suzuki call “three body-spirits.”  In popular Daoism these are more precisely called the Three Corpses or Three Worms, hostile spirits dwelling within the human body, parasites that sometimes seek to bring disease, but always record their host’s moral failings.  From this belief arose the practice of staying up through the night of Kûng Shên in order that the hostile spirits would not then be able to fill out the proper reports in heaven.

     This sort of thing deems to us altogether fanciful.  Did the Chinese actually believe it, or did they merely welcome the opportunity to socialize through a long night?  Did Carus and Suzuki believe that they would bring enlightenment a bit closer with their republishing amid the flatlands of northern Illinois?  Or did they simply enjoy each other’s company and relish intellectual labor as an end in itself?  Did I believe my mind might catch sight of a bright spark from perusing this book? Or was I, too, only  passing the time, just as another might do with a popular novel or a situation comedy?  And you, dear reader, what brings you here?  There may in the end be little distinction between a search for truth and bliss and just getting through the day.  Both bring one at last after all to evening.  But I find that I am dreaming over this odd little volume, the most excellent characteristic of which is perhaps to stimulate dreaming.   

 

  

1.  My copy was printed in 1944 but purchased perhaps twenty years later.  Like the old Dover company and others in the days prior to the 1979 Supreme Court decision that made large inventories impractical, Open Court used to support their backlist forever.  Today Open Court offers a wide range of titles including a series on philosophy and popular culture that includes studies of the philosophical implications of Mr. Rogers, RuPaul, and the Simpsons.

2.  There seems to be a principle of this rural American displacement of accent to the first syllable.  Another Illinois town is Pekin, pronounced “Peé-kin” and named, like Pekin and Canton in Ohio, because its founders thought they were on the exact opposite side of the globe.  Until 1981 the Pekin school’s athletic teams were called the Pekin Chinks. 

3.  In particular on evolution.  Darwin was a regular donor and a subscriber to The Index. 

4.  Paul Carus, “Panpsychism and Panbiotism,” The Monist, Vol. 3, No. 2 (January, 1893).

5.  Among the titles used by other translators are Tai Shang's Treatise on Action and Response, the Treatise on the Response of the Tao, and the Treatise of the Most High on Action and Retribution.  The text was included in volume forty of the Sacred Books of the East series under the title Tractate of Actions and their Retributions in a translation by james Legge, the first Oxford professor of Chinese.

6.  Republic, Bk. III.

7.  In Chinese this is called the sanjiao yiguan (三教一貫) or sanjiao heyi ( 三教合一).  The Lushan sect continues today, including the use of shamans called  "masters of rites" or fashi (法師).

 

 

 

 

The Idea of Nature in Pope’s “Essay on Criticism”

  

Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes; those in  parentheses refer either to lines in the “Essay on Criticism” or the “Essay on Man” or to Canto and stanza in Dryden’s translation of Boileau’s “L'Art poétique.” I use the text of the “Essay on Criticism” available online at https://www.eighteenthcenturypoetry.org/works/o3675-w0010.shtml.

 

     The distinction between the natural and the artificial is among the bipolar oppositions most commonly invoked in the discussion of poetry.  The ancient “Asiatic” rhetorical style, Occitanian trobar clus, and Euphuism, for instance, revel in language that is pointedly artificial in contrast to the Attic style, trobar leu, and Philip Sidney who concluded sonnet 1 in Astrophel and Stella with the line: “’Fool,’ said my Muse to me, ‘look in thy heart and write.’”  His pose, of course, is as much a convention as any. 

    There is nothing “natural” about even such direct and simple lyrics as those of A. E. Housman.  All poetry is simply sounds in the air or marks on a page, with no necessary correspondence to lived experience of the world.  Every work of art is oblique and conventional in signification, relying on sound, symbolism, and allusion.  Though no story is “realistic,” since every narration is “made-up,” some have “seeming reality,” while others strike readers as fantasy, and in poetry some writers seem to rely more heavily on nature and inspiration, while others seem more consciously craftsmanlike.  Each is a pretense, an equally manufactured impression created by the author. 

      Still, a poet’s expressed reaction to nature signifies a whole complex of accompanying attitudes.  Nature is a critical element in the contrast constructed by literary historians between Classical and Romantic ideals.  The Classical artist is associated with inspiration through imitation, achieving effects through mastery of rhetoric, and a general attachment to urbane sophistication, while the Romantic is stimulated by direct experience, expressed in a “spontaneous overflow” of words, responding with “natural” emotion to beauty.  

     While Pope is often considered the prime exponent of a neo-Classical poetics, and his “Essay on Criticism” is intended as an English counterpart of Boileau’s L'Art poétique (itself a revision of Horace), in fact both Pope’s poetic theory and practice are far from doctrinaire.  In numerous important ways, Pope contains the embryo of Romanticism in his own writing, though the meaning his gave to the word “nature” was quite different from later usage including our own. 

     The “Essay” does indeed prescribe rules, but also allows for their violation.  While he cautions “Discretion” (163) in violating traditional artistic practices, he recognizes that “Great Wits may sometimes gloriously offend” (153) and please readers with “lucky LICENCE” (149), constructing   “Nameless Graces, which no Methods teach” (145).  To Pope “Some Beauties yet, no Precepts can declare,/ For there's a Happiness as well as Care” (142-3).  The aesthetic effects beyond those taught in the schools are not necessarily unknown only because of their novelty; according to Pope, they may be in fact beyond analysis.  “Some Beauties yet, no Precepts can declare.” (142)

     A source of inspiration beyond the models of the ancients, beyond even their conscious understanding, was nature, though for Pope the word had a meaning rarely used today.  The most reductive formulations of the Classical-Romantic dualism would premise a Classical preference for civilization, typified, perhaps, by Samuel Johnson’s comment (according to Boswell) “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford." [1]  The Romantic answer would be a reverence for nature as equivalent to “the fair and open face of heaven” as  Keats put it in “To one who has been long in city pent.”

     The word nature to a modern suggests trees and streams, a landscape unshaped by people, but Johnson’s dictionary, which offers eleven definitions, never quite includes this one.  Johnson begins with Nature as a mythological personification and ends with “physics.”  This last comes close to what Pope had in mind when he declared “First follow NATURE” (68).  The “Essay on Criticism” could hardly be more emphatic about the value of nature in the composition of poetry.  To him “That Art is best which most resembles Her” (74) as nature is “At once the Source, and End, and Test of Art” (73). 

     The character of Pope’s concept of nature emerges in his justification for literary convention which insists that  “Rules are Nature still, but Nature Methodiz’d” (88).   The next line insists “Those RULES of old [are] discover’d not devis’d” (89), though, of course, in fact, works of art are always culturally constructed. 

     Nature impresses Pope’s sensibility not as the picturesque but as a beautifully functioning system.  He loves not the nighttime stars, but the patterns of their movements, not the lily but the annual death and rebirth of vegetation as a whole.  Thus to him nature is the spectacle of the system, miraculous in complexity, that animates the universe.  The analogy with literary “rules” or conventions is natural, reinforced by the veneration for the ancients in which it seems that “Nature and Homer were, he found, the same” (136).

     The same privilege Pope grants to generalities underlies his opening passage in which he maintains, somewhat counter-intuitively, that incompetent critics do more harm than bad writers.  By suggesting the wrong general principles, a misguided critic will deny the order that constitutes nature.  

     Among the notions that might seem to be Romantic, but which Pope affirms is the existence of the natural “true Genius” (11) among poets as well as critics.  To him the greatest writers are “Poets, a Race long unconfin'd and free” (652).  To such gifted artists the rules that govern most artistic practice appear as “vulgar Bounds” and the poet flouting them exhibits “brave Disorder,” enabling  by this violation “a Grace beyond the Reach of Art” (155-156).

     Yet in much of what Pope maintains, he is seconding the views of Boileau, the législateur du Parnasse, who, though he said  “A hundred times consider what you've said:/ Polish, repolish” (I, 11), also prescribed  “To study nature be your only care” (III, 49) and insisted the writer should “Strive to be natural in all you Write” (III, 50).  His treatise opens by  declaring that only those born under a “Poetic Influence” should attempt poetry and that “In all you Write, observe with Care and Art/ To move the Passions, and incline the Heart” (III, 30).

     Furthermore, both Boileau and Pope praise Longinus, the author of On the Sublime, who focuses on the reader’s reaction and allows for subjective intuitive judgements.  Boileau had himself translated Longinus, and Pope hails him enthusiastically. 

 

Thee bold Longinus! all the Nine inspire,

And bless their critic with a poet's fire.

An ardent judge, who, zealous in his trust,

With warmth gives sentence, yet is always just:

Whose own example strengthens all his laws;

And is himself that great sublime he draws.

                                                           (675-680) 

The language here emphasizes the reader’s emotional response to a text with word like “fire,”, “ardent,” and “warmth,” and justifies Longinus’ judgment, not through logical reasoning, but because his own writing is powerfully moving.  

     The view of nature that underlies Pope’s literary criticism is expressed as well in his more generally philosophical “An Essay on Man” where nature is divinely inspirited. 

All are but parts of one stupendous Whole,

Whose Body Nature is, and God the Soul

                                            (259-260)

 This holy universal nature is then identified with the aesthetic: “All nature is but art unknown to thee.” (281).  As the godhead is the supreme artist, the order of creation is the ultimate work of art, the model for all human poets.  To him the ancients were able to conform to the dictates of an all-but-deified nature that they borrowed from it some flames of “Coelestial Fire” (198). 

     This nearly numinous concept of nature underlies Pope’s literary theory, allowing him to contain in  embryo significant elements of what came to be Romantic assumptions about art.  His reliance on authority, on the “unities” attributed to Aristotle and other prescriptive rules, and his claim that "True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance,/ As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance" (362–363) are quite real, but they arise from the conviction that reliance on literary tradition and drawing from nature itself are similar processes.   For Pope the contemplation of the phenomenal world and the appreciation of earlier poetry both lead, not through rational processes but through a kind of spiritual apprehension, to an understanding of beauty.  Pope’s conflation of art and nature allows him simultaneously allegiance to the natural and the artificial; for him there is little difference since god is an artist like himself.  In the study of nature and of poetry (and of the divine as well) Pope finds an ineffable element, revelatory yet resistant to analysis, known only by the afflatus Longinus called the sublime.

 

 

1.  This is consistent with the Biblical attitude in which the wilderness is regularly opposed to the garden.

2.  For Boileau reason often stands in place of what Pope calls nature.  “Always let sense accompany your Rhyme” (I, 2).

Portraits from a Floating World: A Passage from Africa to Europe

 

From a 1971 journal – thus the reference to Rhodesia.  This is one of a series of monologues, here a small cluster of voices, heard during the chance encounters of travel.  For others, see “Portraits from a Floating World” in Travel (section 10 of the Index), found under the current month in the Blog Archive on the right of the page.

 

     Once, when the Libyans refused us entry into their country from Tunisia, we turned back toward Europe and booked deck passage to Palermo.  On the route it seemed we were virtually never out of sight of some little island, perhaps just a rock protruding from  the unruly surface of the Mediterranean.  Many of the people we met on board seemed as rootless and itinerant as ourselves which was, at that time, saying something.

     During boarding, before we were sorted into the proper shipboard neighborhood to which our tickets entitled us, we chatted with an older lady traveling alone who looked like something of a lost grande dame.  She told us she had just been on safaris in Kenya and Tanzania and had concluded that she much preferred Rhodesia, saying, “They know how to do things more or less properly there, though  I can’t imagine why.”  We thought we probably knew why she had that impression even if she did not.  She was going next to Russia, then the Balkans, then “the Holy Land,” with further destinations yet  to be settled.  “I read too many books, you see,” she said.  “You begin wanting to see everything, but soon nowhere seems quite right and you always want to move on.”    Every detail of the pre-embarkation formalities confounded her.  When we had to show our passports, she asked rather oddly, ”Do they make you carry one of those, too?”

     Once we had been segregated from the better-off, we encountered a rumpled old Oxonian who was more adrift than the lady.  He was accompanied by a couple of young Swedish travelers who had met him in Libya.  They told us we had been fortunate not to be allowed to enter the country because, apart from the suspicion of Gaddafi’s bureaucrats, the exchange rate was highly artificial, making everything very expensive for foreigners and, besides. the signs were in Arabic only and no one knew English.  They had conducted the British man out of that environment as something of an act of charity and were planning to split from him in Italy.  “We have been with him a week and somehow we don’t know a thing about him.”

     He seemed more communicative with us, saying that he was in the middle of a lifelong quest to learn music.  He had spent years in  Africa, he said, learning drums, then went to Spain for guitar, India for sitar, and so on.  He said that work was to him was ”a tremendously wasteful expenditure of energy . . .Money  is, after all, just pieces of paper,” he went on, “I don’t worry, sometimes I almost starve, but I get along, you know.  Anyway, the government owes me a large sum of money.  Some day that will turn up.  Maybe.”

     He asked Patricia is she would call herself “collegian” or “collegiate,” perhaps curious about some difference in American usage.  “Sometimes I play music,” he said, though he was traveling too lightly to carry an instrument.  He was familiar with Leadbelly and loved jazz.  “I haven’t any idea where I’m going,” he said pleasantly.  He did note that the one place he avoided was the United Kingdom.  “they put you in hospital there.”  He wandered about discussing philosophy with Patricia for half the night.

     One of his Swedish companions gallantly offered Patricia his bunk as we had only deck chairs for the night.  “I prefer the floor or not sleeping at all.  Often I don’t sleep when traveling and it may be two weeks before I get home.  I have had maybe no sleep at all.”  He worked on ships as a service employee.  “People take everything out on waiters.  I shall try to get a job in the engine room next time.”  He was heading back to Sweden to sign on for another voyage, since his purse was nearly empty.  “But people must let me cross no even without money, because I am on my way home.  That is the law, people going home must be allowed to pass whatever their circumstances.  I always travel the cheapest way, sometimes hitching, but I can tell you the only way out of Tripoli is to blow money on a cab.” 

     Two Nigerians whom we met were perhaps even poorer.  In pursuit of their plan to study in the United States, they had applied to American schools and they said they had been accepted by one.  From their home in the Sahel, they had set out to hitchhike across the Sahara.  They had had a rough time persuading the truck drivers who used the sand-covered tracks to take on two passengers, but said any among them who spoke Hausa as they did would be bound by ties of kinship however remote to give them a ride.  They said they still had spent days and nights on their own and had scars on  their hands since the desert, while scorching during the day, became very cold at night, and they had built campfires and burned their hands trying to keep warm.  They told us that their intention was to attend university in Oskaloosa, Oklahoma where they meant to study refrigeration science.  They asked whether Oklahoma was near the coast, and we had to tell them not only that it was in the middle of the country, but that Oskaloosa is in Iowa.