Revolutionizing received opinion of Taoism's origins in light of historic new discoveries, Harold D. Roth has uncovered China's oldest mystical text -- the original expression of Taoist philosophy -- and presents it here with a complete translation and commentary. Over the past twenty-five years, documents recovered from the tombs of China's ancient elite have sparked a revolution in scholarship about early Chinese thought, in particular the origins of Taoist philosophy and religion. In Original Tao, Harold D. Roth exhumes the seminal text of Taoism -- Inward Training (Nei-yeh) -- t from a tomb but from the pages of the Kuan Tzu, a volumius text on politics and ecomics in which this mystical tract had been buried for centuries. Inward Training is composed of short poetic verses devoted to the practice of breath meditation, and to the insights about the nature of human beings and the form of the cosmos derived from this practice. In its poetic form and tone, the work closely resembles the Tao-te Ching; moreover, it clearly evokes Taoism's affinities to other mystical traditions, tably aspects of Hinduism and Buddhism.Roth argues that Inward Training is the foundational text of early Taoism and traces the book to the mid-fourth century B. C. (the late Warring States period in China). These verses contain the oldest surviving expressions of a method for mystical inner cultivation, which Roth identifies as the basis for all early Taoist texts, including the Chuang Tzu and the world-rewned Tao-te Ching. With these historic discoveries, he reveals the possibility of a much deeper continuity between early philosophical Taoism and the later Taoist religion than scholars had previously suspected. Original Tao contains an elegant and lumius complete translation of the original text. Roth's comprehensive analysis explains what Inward Training meant to the people who wrote it, how this work came to be entombed within the Kuan Tzu, and why the text was largely overlooked after the early Han period.
Product Identifiers
Publisher
Columbia University Press
ISBN-10
0231115652
ISBN-13
9780231115650
eBay Product ID (ePID)
95145335
Dimensions
Weight
425g
Height
155mm
Width
231mm
Additional Product Features
Place of Publication
NY
Series Title
Translations from the Asian Classics
Translated by
Harold Roth
Author Biography
Harold D. Roth is professor of religious studies and East Asian studies at Brown University. He is the author of The Textual History of the Huai-Nan Tzu.
