Tao Te Ching

Some readers will have attended the I Ching seminar in October run by Shantena and his wife Cruz and based on his magisterial Eranos edition. This book is a companion volume and is an absolute masterwork that is essential reading for anyone seriously interested in the Tao Te Ching. I have several translations and used these to teach the text at Winchester College in the 1980s, trying to give the boys a sense of the subtlety of the language and meaning. This work takes the process as far as it will go and gives the reader invaluable insights, also into the very nature of interpretation, language and meaning. On the basis of the latest scholarship, Shantena dates the compilation of the text to around 200 BCE although its origins go back much further. The restrictions of Aristotelian binary logic need to be set aside since 'each word contains a multiplicity of resonances and each sentence can be read in various ways' – hence opposites need to be held together, a right hemisphere function.

There is a fascinating and revealing section on the author's own background in physics, especially with respect to the quantum measurement problem and superposition of states that are never finally resolved into a single well-defined state in good Aristotelian fashion. This view corresponds to Whitehead's panexperientialism where duality of subject and object emerges 'from the undifferentiated non-dual background of existence', also corresponding to explicit language and naming. Shantena explains the origins of this work in his collaboration with Rudolf Ritsema (1918-2006) at Eranos. There is 'an intrinsic indeterminacy' in the text, which is structurally laid out by giving alternative translations then a schematic rendering involving the Chinese character, its transliteration, a single translation and the many dictionary equivalents that generate 'fields of meaning'. Each chapter follows the same scheme of multiple equivalent translations, commentary and exemplary comparative scholarship in relation to other traditions. This is a quite extraordinary achievement and surely the definitive English edition that deserves the utmost attention from the reader, whose understanding will be immeasurably enhanced by the process of close study and reflection.