The Diversity of Perspectives on Language in Daoist Texts and Traditions
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The Diversity of Perspectives on Language in Daoist Texts and Traditions Paul R. Goldin 1 Accepted: 1 September 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
In their award-winning essay “Incongruent Names: A Theme in the History of Chinese Philosophy,” Paul J. D’Ambrosio, Hans-Rudolf Kantor, and Hans-Georg Moeller trace a sustained response to what they call the “mainstream position in the ancient Chinese philosophy of names,” for which they endorse John Makeham’s formulation: “Congruent names, that is, names corresponding accurately to a referent (such as shi [實] or xing [形]), were generally desired whereas incongruent names were deemed problematic” (D’Ambrosio, Kantor, and Moeller 2018: 307; hereafter “D’Ambrosio et al.”). D’Ambrosio et al. identify a counterdiscourse, originating in Laozi 老子 and Zhuangzi 莊子 and amplified in the Six Dynasties, which holds, in a nutshell, that names cannot perfectly correspond to any referent because reality defies specification in language. Without oppugning their thoughtful interpretations of such texts, I would encourage D’Ambrosio et al. to abandon their characterization of this counterdiscourse as “Daoist.” Anyone familiar with the extensive hierarchy of Celestial Master Daoism (e.g., Kleeman 2016: 118–124) will be nonplussed by statements like “a good Daoist will avoid accepting official positions” (D’Ambrosio et al. 2018: 310). Good Daoists have been accepting official positions for centuries. Simply put, the problem is that there is more to Daoism than Laozi and Zhuangzi (and the particular xuanxue 玄學 interpretations that D’Ambrosio et al. privilege—more on this below). Early Daoist documents such as The Scripture of Supreme Peace (Taiping Jing 太平 經) affirm, contrary to what “Daoists” are supposed to believe, that revealed scriptures perfectly denote ultimate reality, as in this excerpt, where the Master explains why he has written the graph “ten” (shi 十) for the students’ edification:
* Paul R. Goldin [email protected]
1
Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania, 847 Williams Hall, 255 S. 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305, USA
Paul R. Goldin
“Graphs” are the accumulated graphs of the Heavenly scriptures that I am currently exposing. “Ten” [means] that the scriptures truly, faithfully, reliably, and limpidly reflect Heaven, with no misrepresentation in ten parts out of ten; there is not a single instance of equivocation. (Wang 1960: 64, my translation; cf. translation in Hendrischke 2006: 155) No Daoist skepticism of language here! To be sure, The Scripture of Supreme Peace does not attribute such power to all language—only to the “Heavenly scriptures (tianshu 天書)” (with the additional stipulation that these can be understood only under the guidance of the right master). The problématique here, however, is not that language is inherently inadequate; rather, what has gone wrong, according to this text, is that society has venerated the wrong classics. Other Daoist traditions are less optimistic about human language.1 For example, in tal
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