Taoism For Dummies by Jonathan Herman

Author:Jonathan Herman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-05-28T04:00:00+00:00

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The potter’s wheel of Heaven revisited

The Chinese terms that translate as the hinge of the Way, Heaven’s whetstone, and Heaven’s potter’s wheel are actually quite obscure and have given translators fits for at least a century. If you compare translations side-by-side, you’ll find that one version translates Heaven’s whetstone as “Heavenly equality,” while another renders it as “framework of nature,” both of which improve on an older version that tried “invisible operation of Heaven.” For the reader who doesn’t know Chinese, it can be kind of a crapshoot.

But the particular term t’ien-chün, the potter’s wheel of Heaven, which appears on two occasions in the Chuang Tzu, has gained some modicum of Taoist immortality in modern American popular literature, thanks to a wonderfully memorable mistranslation. The 19th-century missionary-scholar James Legge, who translated both the Tao Te Ching and the Chuang Tzu, committed what today would be an elementary faux pas of translation, when he translated the same phrase two completely different ways. In the first instance, he rendered t’ien-chün as the “equal fashioning of Heaven,” which was relatively consistent with the way he was translating similar terminology. But in the second case, perhaps because it appeared in one of the later mishmash chapters and was threatening what would happen if you couldn’t get things harmonized, Legge came up with a pretty menacing-sounding sentence: “Those who cannot do this will be destroyed on the lathe of Heaven.”

Does this sound familiar? That’s the translation that inspired the title of Ursula K. Le Guin’s short novel, The Lathe of Heaven, and Legge’s phrase actually gets quoted early on in the story. The irony here, which Le Guin has since acknowledged and rolled with in characteristically Taoistic fashion, is that Chuang Tzu really couldn’t have possibly intended the term chün to mean “lathe,” because the lathe hadn’t been invented yet during that period in ancient China! But to tell you the truth, I’m not sure “Heaven the Equalizer” or “Potter’s Wheel of Heaven” would have made as compelling a title.

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