Franslating ranslating the Tao Te Ching has been a work of love. Friends and colleagues have helped me along the way. Among them is Paul Goodberg, my spiritual teacher for some twenty years. His companionship and spiritual training in esoteric traditions from central Europe and Latin America was invaluable to me because he would ask questions I would never have thought to ask, which inevitably invited me to deepen my understanding of the Chinese text. Paul also introduced me to my editor, Linda Sparrowe, who helped me revise the introductory chapters and book proposal and introduced me to my publisher. Paul and Linda's enthusiasm for my translations of the poems never wavered.
On the everyday side, neighbour, friend, author, and poet Patricia Florin was a constant support. I am grateful for her friendship and reflections on my poems as I was drafting and revising them. Likewise, friends and colleagues in various spiritual communities and in the field of transpersonal psychology were a source of support for what I might otherwise have thought too radical a project. Fortunately too my acquisitions editor at Inner Traditions, Jon Graham, agreed that translating the Tao Te Ching from the perspective of the Divine Feminine was timely. He and the Inner Traditions staff have been another ongoing source of support and encouragement.
My Journey to the Tao
n 1977 I was a thirty-year-old tenured professor, comfortably settled into my life-teaching psychology and supervising research at an elite private American university. Asia was "the Orient," a faraway place overflowing with ancient traditions and largely untouched by Western TV and media. And yet, mysteriously, Asia called to me, speaking to me in ways nothing else did. I needed to get there. So I resigned from my university position and, almost overnight, dropped into another world, embarking on an adventure that continues to unfold today. As few signs were transliterated from Chinese characters into Roman letters, I had to learn to read basic Chinese quickly so I could find the women's restroom, get on the right train and off at the right station, and buy more than just items I recognized like vegetables, eggs, and beer.
I kept reading, kept learning, and before long fell in love with the etymology of Chinese characters and the elegance of Chinese calligraphy. Everywhere I traveled in those years in Asia-China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Laos-1 sought out the national art museums and spent hours in the rooms dedicated to Chinese calligraphy. The beauty of the various forms of calligraphy touched me, and the reverence the Chinese gave to the characters inspired me. "Now here's a culture that knows what matters," I thought.
Living in Asia in my early thirties challenged almost every thing I thought I knew about the world. I learned the hard lev son of accepting things as they were and not as I thought they were or as I wanted them to be. Looking back, I realize that I had begun to learn what the Chinese call wei wu wei, which means to "act without acting" or "know without knowing" Not having a car and having to walk or take public transportation everywhere, I mingled with hundreds, if not thousands, of Asian people every day. I was so happy to be in Asia. I suspect that I was like a young child, imitating the people near me as infants do. In so doing, I embodied their wei wu wei effortlessly and cer-tainly came back to the United States a revised human being.
Discovering the Divine Feminine Tao 40 Years Later
Since wei wu wei is an essential lesson of Lao-tzu's Tao Te Ching, this on-the-ground learning gave me the experiential and embodied understanding I needed to translate the text into English decades later. In fact, wei wu wei was invaluable to me first as a reader and then as a translator-because it allowed me to wait for a poem to reveal itself to me instead of chasing down meanings intellectually or multi-tasking. I had to slow down, turn off my agenda, and listen until a great silence entered my being.
Being with the Tao Te Ching and reading it with wei wu wei patience, I often found esoteric gems in the poems that had not made it into any English translations I had read over the years.
These phrases would flash at me and speak to me intimately. spiritually. However, it was not until I retired that I wondered if I could translate the Chinese manuscript for myself. After all, I could read basic Chinese and scholarly books were now available to help me with the Chinese characters that I did not recognize. Perhaps in translating the poems initially just for my own benefit and delight, I might discover something new in the Tao Te Ching or something new about myself.
To my surprise, I discovered that the Tao was profoundly feminine! Never could I have predicted that because, in the English translations I read, the Tao is commonly referred as "It" throughout the poems. How could so many translators, almost all men, not have noticed that the Tao is consistently referred to as "mother," "virgin," and "womb of creation," all of which are clearly feminine and hardly gender neutral? Only in a rare poem do a few translators refer to the Tao as "She" when the reference to "mother" or "womb" is blatant. Therefore, as I continued to translate the poems, I kept asking myself, "Am I really the first to notice that the Tao is feminine throughout the poems?" English translators typically determine gender by the context provided in the Chinese text rather than by gram-mar, so how could nouns like "mother," "virgin," and "womb" not signify a Divine Feminine Tao? My friends could not understand why I was so surprised. They just said some version of "Just the same old thing. Why would other translators want to recognize a feminine Tao and challenge the general consensus about the correct pronoun to use?" But, having recognized the Tao in this intensely feminine way, I could not possibly refer to the Tao as anything other than "She." There was no going back. You will see what I mean in the next chapter.
Send as free online greeting card
Email a Friend
Manage Wishlist