Is "Confucius asking Lao Tzu" credible? A brief description of the many mysteries surrounding Lao Tzu's work

Familiar idioms such as "Skynet recovery, omission without leakage", "late success of the great instrument", "dust with light", "the sky is long and long", "self-knowledge" and so on are all from Lao Tzu. As a representative of ancient Chinese classics, Lao Tzu has probably only been comparable to Confucius's Analects for thousands of years.

"Lao Tzu: A Return to the "Tao"" [Japanese] Shuko Kamizuka by Zhang Yao Translated by Life, Reading, and Xinzhi Sanlian Bookstore

In the late Qing Dynasty, when systematically analyzing and sorting out ancient Chinese philosophy with Western disciplines, scholars found that Lao Tzu had a strong philosophical ontological thought, and its exploration level was not only lingering in the real world, but pursuing the ultimate truth of all things. This kind of profound thinking about truth and truth is considered by many scholars to be the root of Chinese philosophical thought. Lao Tzu is highly regarded in Hegel's History of Philosophy and Max Weber's Confucianism and Taoism. So far, Lao Tzu has been translated into English, French, German, Spanish and other languages, of which the fundamental "Tao" has been literally translated as "DAO", which has become a common term in Europe and the United States.

Historically, people have interpreted Lao Tzu in a variety of ways. Some focus on the interpretation of Lao Tzu's thought from a metaphysical point of view, some expound Lao Tzu as a religious principle, some interpret it from the perspective of health care, and some interpret it from a political aspect or in combination with Confucianism. In recent years, many people have tried to place Lao Tzu in modern society, trying to find the wisdom of the ancients from the conflicts of environmental, social, economic and other modernities. However, there are still many mysteries surrounding Lao Tzu that have not been solved, and who is its author? In what era did you live in? Is the version of Lao Tzu that we see now the same as what the ancients saw? These issues remain obscure in history. Shuko Kamizuka, a Scholar of Japanese Culture and Professor of the Graduate School of Literature at Nagoya University, provides readers with a brief account of the various questions surrounding the work of Lao Tzu.

When it comes to Lao Tzu and his people, people usually take the "History of Lao Tzu Han Fei Lie" as an exposition of Lao Tzu's life, and in Sima Qian's "History of Lao Tzu", the content about Lao Tzu is described in three things: First, Lao Tzu's hometown, name and official position. Second, Confucius asked Lao Tzu. Third, when Lao Tzu left the capital, he met Yin Xi at Guanshou, and Yin Xi asked Lao Tzu to write a book to commemorate it. These three events made Lao Tzu's life quite legendary, and the image of a wise man jumped on the paper, but there were many doubts about these contents. The most important of these is the question of Confucius's questioning of the courtesy of Laozi, which is the core of the value that Confucianism attaches the most importance to, but Laozi's learning is precisely the dissolution of the ritual.

In the thirty-eighth chapter of Lao Tzu, it is written that "the husband of etiquette, the faithful are thin, and the head of chaos", which is Lao Tzu's sharp criticism of etiquette. There is also chapter 18 of Lao Tzu: "The great avenue is ruined, and there is benevolence and righteousness." Wisdom comes out, there are great hypocrisies. The six relatives are discordant, and there is filial piety. The country is in turmoil, and there are loyal subjects. In his book, Lao Tzu warns of human civilization by criticizing Confucianism. Confucianism believes that in order to maintain the order of social life, people must maintain human ethics by blood, but Lao Tzu refuted these views. It can be seen that Lao Tzu's thought has a natural anti-Confucian and anti-etiquette concept, so Confucius greeted Lao Tzu, which in itself violated the ideological core of the two men. From Lao Tzu's criticism of the "benevolence" advocated by Mencius, it can also be seen that Confucianism was quite prevalent in the era of Lao Tzu's books, and it was the mainstream of the ideological circles, so at least it was necessary to push lao tzu's life age to the Warring States period. The "Chronicle of History" also records the grandson of Lao Tzu, who, according to age, should be a figure who lived after Confucius's era. The touching encounter between two great thinkers in Chinese history may have been just a beautiful imagination.

In the "Records of History", Sima Qian also listed two other possible lineages of Lao Tzu, one is that the chu sage Lao Laizi was most likely Lao Tzu, who wrote the Fifteen Books related to Taoism, and was a contemporary of Confucius, who lived in seclusion in Chu in order to escape the chaos of war. Another is the Taishi Dan of the Zhou Dynasty, who managed the edicts, rituals, and historical records of the Zhou Dynasty, and he was a man during the Qin Xiangong period who predicted the future of the Qin state. Sima Qian also recorded a variety of possibilities in laozi's biography, which shows that he did not have any certain information about Laozi's origins, but could only be sure that Laozi was a hermit.

With the birth of Lao Tzu, Shuko Kamizuka studied backwards from the original version of the existing text. The Daodejing stele of Longxingguan in Yizhou in the Tang Dynasty, established in the Tang Zhongzong period, is the best-preserved "Tao Te Ching" stone stele so far. The obverse is engraved with the first "Tao Te Ching" "Tao Te Ching" and the back with the next "De Jing". Before the excavation of Mawangdui's book Lao Tzu, it was the oldest Lao Tzu text in the world. Through the study of the phrase "Skynet is restored, neglect is not leaked", Shuko Kanzuka found that the version of Yizhou Longxingguan was not the only version at that time, and in other popular versions, this sentence was recorded as "Skynet restored, neglected but not lost". Although the author has not determined the era and use of these two versions through various comparisons, which is the original version? These questions, along with the excavation of the Mawangdui No. 3 Han Tomb in 1973 and the bamboo jian in the Tomb of Guodian No. 1 in 1993, have solved the historical doubts for the reader.

Lao Tzu unearthed in these two tombs restores the birth of the book to the Warring States period before the Han Dynasty. The Book of Lao Tzu unearthed by Mawangdui is divided into the Jia Ben of the late Qin and early Han Dynasties and the B Ben of the Liu Yingshi of the Han Hui Emperor, both of which are divided into two parts, and compared with the currently popular Lao Tzu, the order of the upper and lower parts is just the opposite, with the "De Jing" in the front and the "Dao Jing" in the back. The content is roughly the same as the current Lao Tzu, and many of them are only slightly different in the use of words. The difference between "omission without omission" and "omission without loss" mentioned earlier is clearly written as "omission without loss" in the record of the second book of Lao Tzu, which is also the source of the correction of this saying in the new dictionaries and textbooks.

Part of the book answers various questions about the birth of Lao Tzu and the process of rheology, trying to clarify the thinking in the few historical materials. The other part of the book interprets the interpretation of the "Tao" in the content of Lao Tzu, the understanding of the "Tao", and the use of the "Tao", hoping to reflect the thought of Lao Tzu a thousand years ago through the works. As a professor specializing in ancient Chinese philosophy, Shuko Kanzuka wrote this book with the hope of recommending Lao Tzu to Japanese readers through the simplest and most capable language. In the confusion of the 21st century, people have revived the idea of Lao Tzu, and there are various scholars expounding Lao Tzu in Chinese and Japanese bookstores, as well as various editions of Lao Tzu. Shuko Kamizuka ponders why we still need Lao Tzu now, and perhaps in the clues of the Tao, people can find ideas to solve the problem of modernity, find words that heal our bodies and minds from Lao Tzu, and find the balance of life again.

Original title: "Confucius Asks Li Laozi" is credible

Text/Hong Yu

Source/Beijing Evening News