21/02/2021
Forgetting About Words
By Michael Stanley-Baker
The following article is an excerpt from a beautiful, much-appreciated contribution by Michael Stanley-Baker for The 49 Barriers of Cultivating the Dao, now available directly at a reduced rate of 33.33$ including shipping, from our website’s shop (https://purplecloudinstitute.com/product/the-49-barriers-of-cultivating-the-dao/).
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The transmission of esoteric knowledge has always been a difficult endeavour. Knowledge of the long past comes to us through written texts. The act of writing is an abstraction that constrains and limits meaning, a formalized reduction that stabilizes knowledge into a static form so that it can be preserved and passed on. In so doing, however, it sacrifices nuance, tone, presence, idiom and the personal person-to-person communication contains. It cannot adapt to new contexts, it must be adapted by new readers.
All the more so for a tradition whose opening gambit asserts that true knowledge of the Dao cannot be encapsulated in language: “The Way that can be spoken of is not the eternal Way.” Knowledge of the way is communicated as much by reference to what it is not as to what it is: the space between the spokes of the wheel, the uselessness of an old tree. It is also a tradition which has affirmed tacit, embodied knowledge. The Zhuangzi 莊子 made this position loud and clear through its novel and distinctive approach for its time: telling stories about the embodied skill of craftsmen. Wheelwrights and potters, bug-catchers and butchers – hardly social models of the elite classes for whom written philosophy had emerged at that point as a flourishing intellectual industry. These handy men possessed a secret that could not be told in words. Rather, it must be learned through craft, and performance. It is in the doing of it that one overcomes the problem of language and finds the ineffable way:
蹄者所以在兔，得兔而忘蹄；言者所以在意，得意而忘言。吾安得忘言之人而與之言哉？
The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit; once you’ve gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning; once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words, so I can have a word with him?
In this seminal salvo in Chinese language philosophy, the Zhuangzi’s novel assertion goes beyond the apophatic method of the Daodejing to assert that knowledge can be known outside of language. Once you have the meaning, the intent, behind the words, you can forget the words themselves (de yi er wang yan 得意而忘言). Their true import lies elsewhere. As the tales of craftsmen and knowers of the Dao relate, it can be transmitted through instruction in practice.
This sensitivity to the problems of transmission was institutionalised in early medieval Daoist teaching, with the practice of the oral instruction (koujue 口訣). Secret teachings that accompanied a scripture or talisman, oral instructions provided further information, whether it be a more refined interpretation of a scripture, or detailed practical instructions on how to perform a practice or inscribe a talisman. It is often noted by scholars of Daoism that these oral instructions were highly regarded-without them, a scripture remained inert, useless, unable to transmit the truth. A scripture could be copied, handed down, bought, all without internalizing, or truly understanding that knowledge, an exchange of empty cicada shells without any experience of the life that once lived inside it. It was widely held that scriptures, while valuable and sacred in their own right, even simply as material holy objects, did not grant the authority to practice. Transmitted without oral instructions, one’s practice would be ineffective. The writing down of these oral instructions, copying, or other transmission outside of an initiate lineage was strongly prohibited, on pain of disastrous curses from the gods. Students were to be painstakingly selected, and after a long period of apprenticeship, were the scriptures, and their oral instructions, handed down in a sacred initiation ceremony, where the recipient took on vows to preserve their integrity within the lineage............
............The commentaries by the translators, found in the footnotes throughout, and the encyclopaedic entries in the third section are more than simple aides which help render the Chinese, one-to-one, into English. They are the culmination of years of synthesis of Master Xing De’s teachings, as well as the wider environment and communities in which these studies took place. Filled with vignettes, photos and personal experiences, they communicate much of what it was like to practice in these environments, with these people, and are textured with the ethnographic. In this, they function like the biographies of old, bringing the reader into the life lived of the practices. In this attempt to bring English-language readers into a fully-textured environment of temple life in rural China, Hausen and Tsaur have produced a new form of transmission of the Dao, suffused with its tradition and community.
Dr. Michael Stanley-Baker is an assistant professor in History and the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Nanyang Technical University, Singapore. He is a scholar of Chinese medicine and religion, and is currently co-editing two volumes, the Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine with Dr. Vivienne Lo, and Religion and Medicine in Asia: Methodological Insights and Innovations with Dr. Pierce Salguero. He holds a clinical degree in Chinese medicine, and serves as Vice-President of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicine (IASTAM).
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Post-Scriptum: Our next work entitled ‘The Arts of Daoism’ is already waiting in the wings to be released. It delineates the topics of meditation, stillness cultivation, abstention from grains [bi gu辟谷], sleeping gong [shui gong睡功], dreams, vegetarianism and diet in Daoism, formulae for fasting and meditation incense, including several chapters from the alchemical classic The Essentials of the Shortcut to the Great Achievement [da cheng jie yao 大成捷要]. It will be a mixture of anecdotal and oral transmissions from my teacher Li Shifu and translations of a number of chapters from ancient texts. It is set to be published by the end of March 2021 and editing is in its final stage.
