The New Chinese Classics
Quiet Ways: Dau/Dv Jing and the Chinese Meditation Tradition
E Bruce and A Taeko Brooks
(estimated publication date: 2014)

This is the Project's treatment in depth of the Dau/Dv Jing, which even in classical times was one of the most popular of classical texts, and has retained that position down to the present time. What can be added at this late date, to the dozens of previous translations and commentaries? It turns out that there a number of things, starting with the nature of the text itself.

1. The ever-popular and also ever-mystifying Dau/Dv Jing is usually read from beginning to end, and much scholarship on the text in fact stops with Chapter 1. It turns out that the actual core statement in this text is somewhere in the middle, and that additions were later made on both sides of that core. Taking the material in the correct order enormously clarifies what the text is about. Chapter 1 turns out to be, not a primary statement, but an attempt to harmonize a tradition that had already grown in two contrary directions.

2. Placing that compositional sequence in its historical context also helps us to understand what it was up to. The turmoils from which it recoils, and which it later tries to master, were those of the state reformation process of the mid 04th century and later, running on into the perilous years of the early 03rd century. In that period, like the texts of many other advocacy groups, the Dau/Dv Jing increasingly devoted itself to advice on how to run the state. The contrast between the mystical "Dau" first half of the text and its practical "Dv" second half has long been noticed, but it turns out that the shift to statecraft began much earlier than the break between those two halves; it begins almost immediately.

3. Nor is the Dau/Dv Jing the whole story of the Dau/Dv Jing. Parallel to it in time, and not far from it in location (Chi rather than its neighbor Lu) were a series of meditation texts now preserved in the Gwandz. These four texts together cover the same period of composition as the Dau/Dv Jing, and putting them in parallel gives us not one, but two, ways of organizing a meditation tradition, and of relating that tradition to the evolving contemporary art of statecraft. Both series also have important relations with contemporary military thinking, which emphasizes many of the same key points: tactical frugality, the inconspicuous, the unexpected, the search for ultimate control. This relationship is much more richly perceived if both strands of it are considered together.

4. This work uses a Chinese text newly edited from hints contained in the versions archaeologically recovered from Gwodyen (c0288) and Mawangdwei (c0168), but without being confused by the alterations made in both these versions in order to adapt the DDJ to local needs: the tutelage of a future ruler of Chu in the one case, and the plans of a potential rebel against Han in the other. At both sites, the DDJ has a way of combining itself with some outside text of texts, whether cosmological (at Gwodyen) or cosmo-political (at Mawangdwei). This extreme adaptability is explored here as part of the power of the DDJ itself. The use made of the DDJ by the various writers now collected under the title Jwangdz is also explored, as is the adaptation to heavy statecraft thought in the early Han commentaries now embedded in the Han Feidz. None of this material has previously been brought to bear on the DDJ itself.

From the first evidences of meditation technique among the disciples of Confucius in the early 05th century, to the first hints of organization and of meditation masters implied by a famous inscribed jade staff finial, to the surviving texts themselves, which must have proceeded from two such organizations, to the continuingly ingenious uses found for the DDJ in other states and centuries, this book follows the DDJ from its probable origins (in Indian breath control) to its diffusion as part of general Chinese elite culture under the early Empire.

The DDJ is less a text than an event. Those who seek that event as it happened, and as it went on happening after the nominal completion of the text, will find it in this book.

17 May 2007 / Contact The Project / Exit to Publications Page