It was necessary for moderns to lie to themselves about Taoism before they could take it seriously. For many, it was necessary to project a dichotomization of "good Taoism" - narcissistically constructed to reflect modern secular individualism - from "bad Taoism" - caricatured in the same terms used to dismiss Catholicism and any other traditional religion. And to make the good "Taoism" palatable to moderns, it was necessary to say that it had no specific teachings or practices that might be unpalatable to modern tastes: as "a Taoist," all a person has to do to be good is "to be one with Nature," or to believe some such comparable tenet of contrarian modernism. (Kirkland and Girardot, 2004)
Or to quote Wikipedia, "Russell Kirkland argues that [versions such as Mitchell's Tao Te Ching] are based on Western Orientalist fantasies and represent the colonial appropriation of Chinese culture" (Tao Te Ching).
This is a meaningful scholarly critique, going right back to Said and Orientalism. It cannot be dismissed lightly.
Mitchell is a well-know translator of ancient religious texts and modern poetry - I grew up around his translations of Rilke and remember selections of his Duino Elegies to be very beautiful. He favors a free "poetic" approach in his translations - in support, he quotes Johnson: "We must try its effect as an English poem. That is the way to judge of the merit of a translation," i.e. stuttering literalism does not make for beautiful poetry or even, in an important sense, an accurate translation. Mitchell's Tao Te Ching is not a translation, however; it is a "version," as he makes clear in the book's concluding, absolutely indispensable question and answer section. Mitchell speaks no Chinese and is no scholar of Chinese culture or history. He worked between a number of literal translations of the Tao Te Ching as he composed his intrepretation. Listen to this:
[I'm not really translating here.] That's why I called the book a version of the Tao Te Ching, not a translation. I gave myself the freedom to take off in any direction, when that felt appropriate. (12)
Here and there, Mitchell takes that freedom very far indeed. He basically composes Chapter 50 on his own, writing as Lao Tzu. If you hadn't read the book's supplementary sections first, you would probably mistake Mitchell's own composition for 2,600-year-old Chinese wisdom, whatever that's supposed to be. Mitchell's priorities also seem suspect. For example, the literal translation of Chapter 3 reads:
The Master rules by emptying people's minds and filling their bellies , weakening their will and strengthening their bones. He sees to it that they lack knowledge and desire, and makes sure that those with knowledge don't dare to act. [Incidentally, this reminds me awfully of the Grand Inquisitor.]
Saying that this depiction of a "proto-fascist leader" simply "couldn't be correct," Mitchell changes the text to
The Master leads
by emptying people's minds
and filling their cores,
by weakening their ambition
and toughening their resolve.
He helps people lose everything
they know, everything they desire,
and creates confusion
in those who think that they know.
Quite a change, no? Altering an ancient text, with a cultural context no doubt far more alien than we might like to imagine, to fit suspiciously into some Western writer's white boy, post-60s meditation fancies. If Mitchell were a scholar, he should rightfully be lambasted and discredited. But Mitchell is not a scholar and is not attempting a scholarly contribution. He is using his own considerable Zen background and training to reinterpret an old text to better suit modern sensibilities, and if that renders the meaning unrecognizable to some imagined, idealized Lao Tzu squatting in bronze age China, so be it. That's all anyone has ever done with religious texts, make them their own, update them for a more contemporary setting. That's how religion manages to survive, by morphing, and really the only difference between Mitchell's wisdom and Lao Tzu's is the latter's considerable pedigree. If the original, "authoritative" Chinese text of the Tao Te Ching is anything like the Bible, it has already undergone revision after revision, adaptation after adaptation, in its long history of recopying and transmission. No, Mitchell isn't even reinterpreting; he is using the Tao Te Ching as an inspirational urtext; he is working from from it, reacting to it, drawing the meaning out to share with others. Perfectly reasonable. The only harm comes from misrepresentation, when a reader takes Mitchell's Tao Te Ching for something other than it is. The scholarly critique of the work is not valid because Mitchell has no illusions as to what he is doing. My only complaint is that this should be made more explicit in the book's brief foreword.
Colonial appropriation? Probably, but the empire has its spiritual needs as well. If you disdain that, you're a short-sighted fuck.
