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Zusatztext “A NEW ENGLISH VERSION OF THE CLASSIC CHINESE DAO DE JING . . . Provoke[s] the reader to see the text with fresh eyes. This is a valuable find for anyone who wants to reengage a foundational work.” — Publishers Weekly Informationen zum Autor Roger T. Ames is a professor of Chinese philosophy at the University of Hawai’i. He is also editor of the journal Philosophy East & West . He is the author of several interpretive studies of classical Confucianism, including Thinking Through Confucius (with David L. Hall). His translation of Sun-tzu: The Art of Warfare is recognized as a landmark of contemporary Chinese military and philosophical studies and his translation of The Analects of Confucius (with Henry Rosemont, Jr.) has become a popular classroom text. David L. Hall was a professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at El Paso. His early research on A. N. Whitehead and American philosophy led him to rethink our understanding of both Daoism and classical Greek philosophy, and resulted in the publication of The Uncertain Phoenix and Eros and Irony . In addition to the interpretive studies of classical Chinese philosophy, he continued to publish in American philosophy with Richard Rorty: Prophet and Poet of the New Pragmatism. Klappentext In 1993, archaeologists unearthed a set of ancient bamboo scrolls that contained the earliest known version of the Dao de jing . Composed more than two thousand years ago, this life-changing document offers a regimen of self-cultivation to attain personal excellence and revitalize moral behavior. Now in this luminous new translation, renowned China scholars Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall bring the timeless wisdom of the Dao de jing into our contemporary world. In this elegant volume, Ames and Hall feature the original Chinese texts of the Dao de jing and translate them into crisp, chiseled English that reads like poetry. Each of the eighty-one brief chapters is followed by clear, thought-provoking commentary exploring the layers of meaning in the text. This new version of one of the world's most influential documents will stand as both a compelling introduction to Daoist thought and as the classic modern English translation. Preface and Acknowledgments The Daodejing has probably been translated into the English language more often than any other piece of world literature. Why translate it again? An entirely reasonable question. And a reasonable question requires a reasonable answer. Recent archaeological finds (Mawangdui 1973 and Guodian 1993) have provided us with textual materials that are physically more than a millennium earlier than previously available versions of Daodejing . Such finds challenge the authority of existing translations to the extent that these new materials have increased our knowledge of the text and of the circumstances of its transmission. And there is broad scholarly agreement that these early redactions of the Daodejing do indeed cast important new light on the structure and the meaning of this defining document in Daoist philosophy. In addition to providing new insights into an old document, these archaeological finds have also provided us with textual materials that are importantly different from what has been available up until now, enabling us to resolve some persistent linguistic problems. Undoubtedly the most substantial addition to the Daodejing are the fourteen strips– The Great One Gives Birth to the Waters –that appear as an integral element within one of the Guodian versions of the text. Beyond the seamless physical consistency of these strips with the rest of this early exemplar of the Daodejing , they contain a discussion of Daoist cosmology that not only uses the familiar Daodejing vocab...
