Laozi's Daodejing--From Philosophical and Hermeneutical Perspectives by Chen Lee Sun

Author:Chen Lee Sun [Sun, Chen Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: iUniverse
Published: 1969-12-30T16:00:00+00:00

1. Characters in oracle bones and bronze: popular until 13th CenturyBC.

2. The big seal characters—the script form Laozi was originally written with; popular from 13th to 3rd Centuries BC.

3. Small seal characters—a simplified version of the big seal; popular from 3rd to 1st Centuries BC.

4. Clerical characters for regular scripts; incepted in 1st Century BC until now.

5. Simplified characters; incepted and popularized now.

Before Laozi’s time, at its original introducing inception for the use of the character “Dao”, its reference was “communicating with Heaven”, i.e. reaching to the highest intelligence in the universe. However, come down to Laozi’s time “Dao” referred to seeking the right way to reach Heaven—the highest intelligence in the universe[305]; intelligent reasoning was brought in to explain “Dao”. Accordingly the meaning of Dao evolved to mean ‘the right path’. In the West the philosophical-logical problem was similarly tackled until this day.[306]

Epistemological Linguistics

Laozi was a scholar from the ivory-tower. Inevitably, he was accustomed to the laconic use of language practiced by then inner-circle academicians and politicians. We could trace similar elliptical use of aphorism in Yi Jing(I Ching) and occasionally official prayers in Shi Jing(Ancient Odes). Many difficult words in Laozi’s text could be tackled through comparing their uses in Yi Jing or Ancient Odes. In spite of this, we must not forget that Laozi says that he has his own unique philosophy.[307]

Although in order to study the modern plain Chinese it is not necessary to know the etymology of Chinese, yet it helps for the understanding of the classical Chinese; etymology provides short-cuts to locate the referents of difficult words. Hence it made it easier to understand the original Laozi, i.e. his framework. The next necessary and sufficient measure is resolving the syntactic and semantic difficulties in reading this book. Needham has pointed out:

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