Religion (1999) 29, 107–121

Article No. reli.1999.0187, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

‘Finding the Way’: James Legge and the Victorian

Invention of Taoism

N. J. GIRARDOT

James Legge (1815–97) is primarily known as the great missionary translator of the

Confucian Classics (1861–72, 1893–95). However, after his installation as the first

Professor of Chinese at Oxford University in 1876, Legge was a close associate of Max

Müller and participated in the production of the Sacred Books of the East (1879–1910),

the foundational documents for the new discipline known as the comparative science

of religions. By virtue of his translations for Müller’s Sacred Books (1891), Legge was the

most important figure contributing to the late Victorian invention of ‘Taoism’ as a

‘world religion’ located ‘classically’, ‘essentially’, and ‘purely’ within certain ancient

texts or ‘sacred books’, especially a single enigmatic text or Taoist ‘bible’ known as the

Tao Te Ching, attributed to the sage Lao Tzu. It was Legge’s Protestant (and resolutely

anti-Catholic) paradigm of an early philosophically and morally pure Taoism (identified

with the Tao Te Ching), as distinguished from a later ritualistic and magical

Taoism (associated with the machinations of the Taoist ‘popes’) that set the context for

the Western understanding of the Taoist tradition for much of the twentieth century.

Recent revisionary developments in Taoist scholarship reflect some of the important

methodological issues of interpreting the ‘special nature’ of Chinese religious tradition

first debated by Legge and others such as Herbert Giles during the Victorian period.

? 1999 Academic Press

James Legge and Sinological Orientalism

James Legge (1815–97) is today vaguely, if at all, remembered as the heroically

industrious missionary scholar who translated the Chinese Confucian Classics (Legge

1861–72, 1879, 1882, 1885, 1893–95). The simple biographical facts of Legge’s long

life—a Scottish Congregationalist of the ‘middling’ class stationed in Malacca and Hong

Kong for the London Missionary Society who later, upon retirement from the mission

field, became the first Professor of Chinese at Oxford in 1876—seem to reveal an

unbending dedication to a righteous God and a tedious scholarship that is insuVerably

Victorian. It has been Legge’s fate to be yet another ‘forgotten Victorian sage’,

memorable only as an anachronistic monument of steadfast evangelical piety and

quaintly wholesome Victorian earnestness—or, in Legge’s own characteristically

humble self-description, a ‘moderate Calvinist’ with a ‘habit of working’ (Legge 1897).

Legge was somewhat like the ancient Chinese sage known to the West as Confucius:

someone who simply ‘believed in and loved the ancients’. Both were just resolute

translator-scholars, or to use Confucius’ words, simple ‘transmitters’. Neither Legge

nor Confucius was, to borrow from Legge’s translation of this famous line from the

Analects, a cultural transformer or ‘maker’ (Legge 1893, p. 195). This analogy with

Confucius’s own mock self-appraisal suggests some of the problems with traditional

under-estimations of Legge’s contributions to nineteenth-century discourse concerning

Chinese tradition and to the overall Western attitude, and specialised academic

approach, to other cultures and religions. In fact, a close reading of the record of Legge’s

intellectual and professional odyssey, spanning almost all of the nineteenth century,

documents a much more richly complex and liminal portrait of a man whose life mirrors

much of the intellectual and religious turmoil, and many of the significant cultural

transformations, of the Victorian era.1

? 1999 Academic Press

0048–721X/99/020107 + 15 $30.00/0

In contrast to some standard denominational accounts and his own daughter’s

hagiographical biography (see Helen Edith Legge), Legge was someone who increasingly

challenged the conventional evangelical missionary theology and who, during his

twenty-one year career as a Nonconformist ‘Eastern Sage’ at an Oxford undergoing

major institutional reforms, played a significant public role in institutionalising Sinology

as a secular academic profession devoted to specialised philological and historical

research on the ancient Oriental ‘classics’. Furthermore, through his often overlooked

association with Max Müller at Oxford and the production of the monumental

fifty-volume anthology known as the Sacred Books of the East (Müller 1879–1902), Legge

brought China for the first time into the ‘universal’ history of ‘world religions’ and

directly participated in the academic establishment of Müller’s new comparative ‘science

of religion’.2

SuYce it to say that at Oxford University in the 1870s Legge was still very much a

believing Christian, but he was no longer a typical missionary-translator or an ordinary

British ‘amateur scholar’. By 1876, his former missionary colleagues back in China had

actually declared him a ‘heretic’ for daring to compare Confucianism with Christianity

(see Legge 1877). It is within this kind of context that Legge’s expanded set of

the Chinese Classics known as the ‘Sacred Books of China’ (Legge 1879, 1882, 1885,

1891) may be said to represent the definitive sinological contribution to what

Raymond Schwab (1950/84), Edward Said (1979), and others (see Girardot, Victorian

Translation) have identified as the nineteenth-century tradition of ‘Orientalism’. There

is, in other words, a strong case to be made for Legge’s role in articulating and

institutionalising an authoritative Orientalist discourse concerning China, and particularly

through the canonisation of certain ancient texts that served to define the ‘original’

and ‘essential’ meaning of Chinese tradition, the establishment of a whole rhetorical

genre of ‘comparative’ scholarship concerning Chinese religion and philosophy.3

Legge is, then, a kind of threshold figure for the late Victorian development of an

imperial logic of representation concerning the always problematic Chinese manifestations

of an ‘Orientalism’ most closely identified with the romantic ‘Indomania’ of the

early nineteenth-century comparative philology.4 A complete revisionary portrait of

Legge’s contributions to the sinological phase of the Western Orientalist project, and his

contextual and intertextual participation in the new relativising methods and pluralistic

temper of the science of ‘comparative religion’, is beyond the scope of this article. Here

I want only to highlight an important, though much neglected, aspect of Legge’s

evolving interests as a scholar that belie his exclusive identification with the Confucian

classical tradition yet, at the same time, indicate the controlling presence of a common

Orientalistic logic of representation. If by virtue of a lifetime of labour on behalf of the

‘Confucian’ Classics, Legge may be thought of as the sinologue of ‘Confucianism’ par

excellence, it may also be said that, roughly from the late 1870s after the death of Stanislas

Julien in Paris down to almost the end of the century, Legge was the leading Western

scholar of ‘Taoism’, which had, up until that time, been the ‘least known of the Oriental

religions’ ( Jackson, p. 95).5

There is suYcient reason therefore to argue that Legge was the single most important

figure contributing to the late Victorian invention of ‘Taoism’ as a reified entity located

‘classically’, ‘essentially’, ‘purely’ and ‘philosophically’ within certain ancient texts or

‘sacred books’—or, more accurately, within a single enigmatic ‘classical’ text or Taoist

‘bible’ known as the Tao Te Ching (Book of the Tao and Its Power) attributed to the

sage Lao Tzu. Thus the taxonomic crystallisation of ‘Taoism’ as a classifiable construct

within Victorian tradition may be rather precisely dated to the appearance in 1891 of

108 N. J. Girardot

Legge’s translations of the ‘Texts of Taoism’ that made up volumes 39 and 40 of the

Sacred Books of the East. At the least, it may be said that with the publication of these

translations and the canonisation of the Tao Te Ching and the Chuang Tzu, Taoism—

more precisely, the early, pure, spiritual, moral and philosophical doctrines of the earliest

texts—for the first time in Western consciousness became one of the ‘world religions’,

or what Müller (1879), more technically, comparatively and scripturally classified as one

of the six Oriental ‘Book Religions’.6 Let me only point out that this conception of an

early, pure or authentic Taoism distinguished from a later dissolute tradition of ritual and

‘Taoist popes’—very much like the Protestant idea of an originally pure Christianity that

suVered the material corruptions of Roman Catholicism—was wholly an imaginary

construct since there was no organised, or socially self-conscious, movement of ‘Taoists’

at the time of the shadowy sages known as Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu.7

Legge’s extensive Taoist studies—including various articles, reviews, lectures and

essays beyond his massive translations for Müller (e.g. Legge 1880, 1883, 1893)—

consolidated the Victorian understanding of Taoism and also, allowing for certain

important qualifications, set much of the underlying tone, textual context and hidden

logic for subsequent Western discussions of this tradition within Sinology, the general

history of religions and popular culture. While only an interloper within the domain of

sinological Buddhology, Legge was truly one of the inventors of the Taoist tradition in

the West. Moreover, the power and persistence of the nineteenth century ‘Leggian’

image of classical Taoism—and its intertwined Protestant, Orientalist and essentialist

logic also indicate why the historical, textual, and social complexities of the living

sectarian Taoist tradition have only recently been appreciated by Sinologists and

historians of religion. A more accurately ambiguated picture of the Taoist tradition has

within the past few years started to filter down into a popular Western awareness still

largely mesmerised by the ‘sublime mysteries’ of the Tao Te Ching and its newest

incarnation as the ‘Tao of Pooh Bear’.8

Naming the Way in the Early Nineteenth Century

Legge builds upon a meagre and fitful, though influential, Western legacy of translation

and interpretation concerning the Tao Te Ching that goes back to the Jesuit missionaries

to China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (see Dehergne). The Western

awareness of Taoism is, however, especially indebted to the great French academic

Orientalists of the early nineteenth century. The pioneering Parisian sinologues—

especially Abel Rémusat (1823), Jean Pierre Pauthier (1831) and Stanislas Julien

(1842)—brilliantly, haltingly, and often with great personal animosity and pedantic fury

staked out the textual and intellectual terrain for a rudimentary European consensus

concerning the ‘school of Tauism’.9 These French eVorts culminated with Julien’s

elegant 1842 translation of the Tao Te Ching. For the first time in Europe the meaning

of the ‘Tao’ was established in relation to strict philological considerations and with

regard to the testimony of the native commentarial tradition (especially Wang Pi). In

contrast to Rémusat’s judgment that the Tao was best understood as a kind of Chinese

variation on the Enlightenment principle of ‘Rationality’, ‘Intelligence’, or ‘Logos’ and

to Pauthier’s claim that its meaning was primarily rooted in ancient Vedic or Brahmanic

philosophy, Julien simply translated the term in its indigenous Chinese sense of Voie or

Way—that is, the path or method of phenomenal reality. Julien’s work, building upon

the views of Rémusat, also tended to emphasise a basic developmental pattern that

distinguished between some originally pure system of thought and morality (in

‘Finding the Way’: James Legge and the Victorian Invention of Taoism 109

Rémusat’s estimation, the ‘sublime’ philosophy of the Tao Te Ching that ‘breathes

mildness and good-will’) and its eventual superstitious decline as witnessed in the pagan

horrors of the living tradition (see Julien and Rémusat).

During the late 1840s and 1850s, some limited discussion of Taoism in English was

also appearing for the first time among Protestant missionaries in China (see GutzlaV;

Edkins 1855, 1859; Chalmers 1868). But apart from some oVhanded comments based

on personal observation within the treaty port cities of China, these early Protestant

accounts were mostly deferential to the ‘relentless textuality’ of the great Rémusat and

Julien. The French ‘sinologists de chambre’, after all, had the good fortune of being

sequestered from the ‘horrid devil worshippers’ and Taoist ‘popes’ of the living

tradition, and could focus their attention more fully upon the fascinating philological

problems and metaphysical enigmas in Lao Tzu’s pristine little treatise. Down to the

mid-century, British missionary and consular scholars in the field would almost always

defer to the professional academics in their Parisian libraries.

However, by the time of the 1870s, particularly as witnessed in the pages of the China

Review (1872–1901) published in the British colony of Hong Kong, there was an

evident passage in the Anglo-American world from the old ‘singularly listless’ amateur

scholarship, dominated by ‘gentleman scholars’ engaged in missionary, political and

commercial pursuits in China, to the self-consciously ‘scientific’ Oriental discipline of

‘Sinology’. The scholarly prominence of the China Review (and other English language

journals like the Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society and the

Chinese Recorder) coincides with the rising fortunes of the British empire toward the end

of the century and suggests that British sinological Orientalism had temporarily

surpassed French scholarship. During this period, symbolically bracketed by the demise

of Julien in 1873 and Legge’s tenure at Oxford from 1876–97, much of the influential

and technically competent Sinology was being done by English-speaking missionaries

and civilian oYcials still in the field in China or by those, such as Legge, who had

returned home to become full-time scholars.10

As an extension of the growing awareness of Buddhism and other forms of

philosophically ‘pure’ Oriental religion and literature during the last half of the century

(see Almond), there was an upsurge of interest in the still dimly understood subject of

Taoism from the 1870s through to the 1890s. Most notable in this regard were the

numerous new English, German and French translations of the infinitely malleable Tao

Te Ching—an activity which, while experiencing periodic lulls, continues unabated to

this day and has resulted in this little work’s peculiar status as the most frequently

translated, or creatively mistranslated, of all Asian texts (see Marceron and Walf).

Equally important during this period was that, for the first time, the ‘marvellous literary

beauty’ and ‘surprisingly modern thought’ of the other early Taoist ‘classic’ known as

the Chuang Tzu was discovered (see Giles 1889). This interest resulted in a series of

translations and appreciative expositions that embraced the work of the Oxonian Legge

(1891), the British consular oYcial Herbert Giles (1889) and the decadent literary figure

Oscar Wilde (1890).

Legge’s ‘Right Course’ and the Victorian Image of Taoism

The exemplary figure for all of these developments, concerning Taoism in particular

and sinological Orientalism in general, during the last quarter of the nineteenth century

was the new professor of Chinese at Oxford, James Legge. Winner of the first Prix

Julien in 1875 for his original edition of the Confucian Classics (Legge 1861–72) and

110 N. J. Girardot

appointed in 1876 as a fellow of Corpus Christi College and as the first Professor of

Chinese (the first Nonconformist to hold such a position at Oxford), Legge was

generally recognised as the most distinguished European sinologue in the world.

Moreover liberated, as he put it, from the ‘long nightmare’ of sectarian squabbles with

missionary antagonists over the ‘interminable question’ of naming God for a standard

Chinese translation of the Bible, Legge was free to expand his scholarly interests under

the impact of Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East project. In the twenty years of his

Oxford career (from 1876–97), Legge produced a prodigious number of new translations,

monographs, articles and lectures on all manner of sinological subjects—

including Confucian tradition, Chinese philology, history, literature, Buddhism and

Taoism. Here I will focus only on those writings dealing with his new-found interest in

Taoism, especially his important review article on the ‘Tao Teh King’ for the British

Quarterly Review of 1883, his disputation with Herbert Giles in the late 1880s (Legge

1888 and Giles 1885–86, 1888); and, finally, his production in 1891 of the Taoist

volumes for Max Müller’s Sacred Books.

1883: The ‘Tao Teh King’

This article in the British Quarterly Review is Legge’s first really confident presentation of

his scholarly understanding of Taoism. It also represents a surprisingly sensitive reading

of the Tao Te Ching that sums up and modestly advances earlier Western scholarship.

Taking up the perplexed terminological discussion concerning the best translation of

Lao Tzu’s ‘Tao’ (variously at the time: Rationality, Supreme Intelligence, Logos/Word,

Way, Nature or even ‘God’ in the theosophical speculations of Victor Von Strauss),

Legge concludes that Tao may best be translated as the ‘Course’, as in the course of a

river, the course of events and of course the course of discourse. Straining to distinguish

this somewhat awkward translation from Julien’s ‘Way’, he says quite appropriately that

tao not only has metaphysical implications but also connotes a ‘course of action or way

of living’ or ‘method or rule inculcating such a course’ (Legge 1883, pp. 42–5).11

In Legge’s estimation, an appropriate translation of the title of Lao Tzu’s little book

becomes ‘The Sacred Text of the Right Course and Its Characteristics’ (Legge 1883,

pp. 46–7)—a reading that alludes to Legge’s characteristic Evangelical scruples concerning

moral cultivation, to his increasingly empathetic and parenthetical methods of ‘sense

by sense’ translation, and to his newfound Müllerian concern for ‘sacred books’. It is

important to realise that the use of the qualifying term ‘sacred’ as found here and in

the Sacred Books of the East is not necessarily related to the idea of revelation or even

the doctrine of God. Rather, for Müller, and it would seem now for Legge, the

classification of a book as ‘sacred’, depends on its archaic, classic, authoritative and

‘written down’ status. As Legge notes concerning the Latin word textus and the Chinese

ching, both etymologically refer to the idea of ‘thought woven into writing’ (Legge

1883, p. 46)—that is, ancient thought given special authority and classical weight by

being intentionally transcribed and systematised by an author. In this sense it was

important for Müller and Legge to maintain that the ‘sacredness’ of the Eastern books

was directly linked to their demonstrable textuality, antiquity and authoritative integrity.

After a sympathetic discussion of the moral ‘right course’ for the individual and

government, Legge focused on the meaning of the Tao in relation to the origin and

course of nature. While the Tao may not be seen as equivalent to the creator God,

Legge is left with the quandary as to whether God is present at all in the Tao Te Ching.

He therefore struggles to a conclusion that he will subsequently reject. Here he says that

God is at least implied by the five or six references to ‘Heaven’ (t’ien) or the ‘Way of

‘Finding the Way’: James Legge and the Victorian Invention of Taoism 111

Heaven’ (t’ien tao), which, as seen in the Classics and as corroborated by Müller’s

comparative science of religions, document a special philological relation between the

word for sky and the word for God. It is with regard to this issue, as Legge says, that ‘we

find the fathers of the Chinese race at one with those of the Aryan race’ (Legge 1883,

p. 58).

As seen from his explicit appeal to Müllerian principles concerning a Sky God in this

article, Legge was clearly influenced by his relationship with Müller at Oxford. But it

must also be said that, as a sinological Orientalist acutely conscious of the singularity of

the Chinese language and tradition, Legge did not adopt Müller’s more extreme

philological methods, or ‘Aryan’ comparative principles. Part of the reason for his

caution was simply that, in its ‘classical solitude’, China remained something of a

linguistic singleton that did not fit easily into a comparative philological theory so

completely grounded in the Indo-European hypothesis of Orientalist scholarship (see

Schwab; Girardot, Victorian Translation). Moreover, by the late 1870s Müller himself was

coming under increasing criticism not just for the apparent exaggerations of his infamous

solar mythology theory but also for his philological methods (for example, his use of the

category of the ‘Turanian Language Family’ to classify the Chinese language, his idea

that in Chinese all words were already ‘roots’ and his notorious ‘ding-dong’ theory of

language origin) and his idealistically inclined philosophical assumptions.12

The article on the ‘Tao Teh King’ is a good example of Legge’s still reverent

‘comparative’ methods regarding the coherence of ancient ‘classics’ and the integrity of

sage ‘authors’. It is this factor, as it was also for Müller’s own romantic conception of the

‘symbolic meaning’ of sacred books and forgotten bibles, that distinguishes Legge’s

‘parenthetical’ methods of sinological translation, as well as his conception of Taoism,

from the turn of the century modern—more irreverent, critical, historical and

destructive—forms of Sinological Orientalism practised by the young and pugnacious

Herbert Giles. Legge is, accordingly, very much of a transitional figure in the history of

Sinology who displays many of the larger ‘betwixt and between’ tensions seen in the

emergence of all the ‘human sciences’ during the last part of the Victorian era. A crucial

factor is the passage from a kind of late, idealistic, and still biblically inspired and

theologically motivated, ‘hermencutics of trust’ (exemplified by the innate historical and

literary piety of Legge’s Sinology and Müller’s science of religion) to a more highly

specialised, rationalistic and secularly academic ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ concerning

the traditional integrity of ancient history, texts and authors. Legge is interesting because

he represents the cusp of this kind of transitional process with regard to the Western

academic study of China and religion.

1885–88: The Remains of Lao Tzu or Lao Tzu Remains?

A pivotal event with regard to the tense passage from a method of trust to one of

suspicion concerning Taoism is seen in the dispute provoked by the Peking-based

British consular oYcial and part-time scholar Herbert A. Giles, who in 1885 published

a ‘very controversial’ article on ‘The Remains of Lao Tzu’ for the China Review. In the

spirit of Germanic ‘higher criticism’ and the later ‘doubting antiquity’ movement among

native Chinese scholars, Giles contentiously rejected Legge’s views on the impressive

‘system’ of ancient Taoist thought by arguing that there was no real evidence at all for

an actual sixth-century historical personage named Lao Tzu. Furthermore, Giles

maintained that the text known as the Tao Te Ching was best understood as a late Han

dynasty forgery patched and padded together with various authentic early ‘remains’

112 N. J. Girardot

interspersed with an unknown editor’s much later and very ‘feeble’ and ‘inane’ ideas (see

Giles 1885–86).

The battle that ensued from Giles’ initial blast at some of the cherished sinological

pieties of the time engaged most of the European sinologues having any interest in early

Taoism and can be traced down until the turn of the century when the spirit of Giles’

approach is absorbed into the mainstream assumptions of twentieth-century sinological

scholarship. But beyond the fact that Giles had challenged one strain of a prevailing

Orientalist faith which aYrmed the integral truth of ancient documents, he was also

contesting the pretense of a tradition of translation that operated with the idea that it

was possible, through a repeatedly deepened empathy with the ancient author’s mind

expressed in the text, to know and reproduce some originally coherent system of

thought in another language.

Given this kind of direct assault on his integrity as a translator and sinological scholar,

Legge published, with encouragement from the editor of the China Review, a lengthy

rejoinder to Giles (see Legge 1888, pp. 195–214). This article reads as a poignant

reiteration of Legge’s scholarly faith in the integrity of the ancient Chinese documents

and his ‘unshaken’ conviction in traditional native testimony that Lao Tzu had in fact,

‘written the book’ known as the Tao Te Ching. Most revealing is Legge’s defence of his

translator’s credo, which prompts him to appeal to an old Horacian principle derived

from his Latin Classical scholarship. Thus, as classical scholars would say, ‘when Homer

nods’, even his epic verse may seem ‘feeble’ and ‘absurd’. Such typical lapses in ancient

classical texts, or in the Gospels, do not necessarily call into question the overall integrity

of authorship until, as Legge puts it, ‘a fuller sympathy with the writer is established in

the mind of the student’.13

Most important for Legge was his fascinating thought experiment based on Gospel

parallels. ‘Casting things over in his mind’, he reasons that if the received Gospel of

Mark was made up of 81 paragraphs like the Tao Te Ching and 70 of these were found

to be present in texts certainly dating to the third and fourth century, then the result for

‘all critical students of the New Testament’ would be to ‘confirm their faith in the

whole of the old Gospel and not to destroy it’. Finally, toward the end of this article

Legge restates his ‘typical procedure’ as a translator, which he had developed early in life

when, as a college student in Scotland, he was working on the Latin and Greek classics

and, most recently, had perfected in his work on the Book of Changes (see Legge 1882).

This is a ‘symbolic’ method that depends on the ‘slow progress’ of entering into the

thought of an ancient author with ‘one’s own mind’. Based on this testimony, it is clear

that Legge was particularly impatient with Giles’ reliance on the quick and dirty

methods of critical ‘demolition’ rather than on the hard work of slowly mastering the

ancients by becoming ‘en rapport’ with their thought. The hidden implication is that this

principle applies especially to those works which, like the Tao Te Ching and the Book of

Changes, are seemingly incoherent or ‘absurd’. The issue finally comes down to the fact

that Giles’ ‘most unmeasured abuse’ of both Lao Tzu and Legge should have been more

‘civil’ and have been concerned to ‘correct’ rather than to ‘chastise’. This rhetorical

invocation of a kind of Victorian and Confucian propriety is particularly telling in that

it brings out Legge’s inability to adjust to a new critical climate and faith that was so

resolutely premised on a systematic methodological mistrust of the past.

Giles’ response to Legge, appearing in the same issue of the China Review, acerbically

stressed that, in the spirit of ‘accurate’ translation and the objective scholarship of

the Germanic ‘Higher Criticism’, ‘there should be no respect of persons’ (Giles 1888,

pp. 238–41). Going to what he saw as the heart of the matter, Giles called attention to

‘Finding the Way’: James Legge and the Victorian Invention of Taoism 113

the ‘shallowness of Dr. Legge’s logic’, which was too trusting of questionable

authoritative dicta that gave the ‘benefit of doubt’ to ancient authors like Lao Tzu and

Homer, or for that matter, to the evangelist Mark. Pointing out that the integrity of

Homer had already been challenged by the Classical ‘Separatists’, he especially chides

Legge for his ‘unhappy’ appeal to Gospel parallels. As he says, ‘there is not one particle

of evidence, save faith, that [the gospels] were in existence until 120 years after the

Crucifixion of Christ’. Moreover, and here is the rub, ‘many people who lack faith’ had

already found the gospels to be documents compiled, like the later padding of the

‘remains’ of Lao Tzu, in the second century from traditional and fragmentary sayings

of Jesus.

Seizing upon another kind of methodological faith—that of Legge’s belief that his

special translator’s rapport with the mind of Lao Tzu had given him a ‘key’ to the

symbolic meaning of the Tao Te Ching’s philosophy—Giles attacks not only Legge’s

own presumption but some of the basic assumptions undergirding the production of the

Sacred Books of the East. He thereby indirectly chastises Müller for including the Book of

Changes among the ‘sacred books’ in a translation by Legge (1882) which ‘is a by-word

of reproach to a great scholar and an object of derision to the world at large’. Turning

the screws of his criticism, Giles concludes by observing that the Tao Te Ching is a work

that is ‘unknown to the masses’ of the Chinese people and is ‘widely unread by native

scholars who one and all regard it as a spurious production of the Hans’. Since it is an

obvious forgery that is not genuinely ancient, authoritative or religious, the Tao Te

Ching cannot be considered a ‘sacred book’ or to have anything ‘to do with the Taoist

religion of China’ (Giles 1888, pp. 240–1).

1891: The ‘Texts of Taoism’ and the Sacred Books of the East

Naively believing he had ‘rebutted every attempt of Mr. Giles’ to cast doubt on the

‘genuineness’ of ancient classical Taoism, Legge did not respond to Giles’ rejoinder and

steadfastly proceeded with his culminating contribution to Taoist studies. This came

about in 1891 when, after fifteen years of labour, he finally completed his contractual

obligations for Müller by publishing the two-volume ‘Texts of Taoism’ for the Sacred

Books of the East Series. These volumes, which represent the definitive summation of

nineteenth-century Taoist scholarship, include a complete annotated translation of the

Tao Te Ching, the Chuang Tzu and the twelfth-century popular moral tract the Kan Ying

P’ien (Treatise on Actions and Their Retributions) which exhibited the ‘practical’ side

of the mostly grotesque living religion. In addition to these key works of the Taoist

‘system’, Legge appended a few short, randomly assorted, ‘vague and shadowy’

specimens of the ‘mysticism’ of the later Taoist religion (Legge 1891, pp. xi–xxii).

In these volumes, Legge stressed that the purely speculative philosophical and moral

system of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu must be kept distinct from the more ‘ordinary’ or

vulgar ‘sense’ of religion found in the later tradition. By ‘ordinary’, Legge explains that

he is referring to those developments after the first century when, as a ‘degraded adjunct

of Buddhism’, Taoism began to ‘organise itself as a Religion’ and, in a manner similar

to the Roman Catholic transformation of Christianity, grafted onto itself ‘monasteries

and nunneries . . . images and rituals’. Here Legge also advances a curious theory that he

had only hinted at before. This concerns his understanding of the defining historical

relation, or classificatory distinction, between the early spiritual system of the Taoist

Classics and the vulgar materialistic and ritual practices of the later tradition. It seems in

fact that the ‘purity’ and integrity of the beginnings have been somewhat diluted since,

as Legge says, much ‘prolonged study and research’ led him to the ‘conclusion that there

114 N. J. Girardot

was a Taoism earlier than [Lao Tzu]’. Legge’s historical conception at this point is not

entirely clear except that he seems to be struggling, not very cogently, toward a

Müllerian style application to China of Herderian notions of an oral—a wildly ‘fabulous’

or excessively ‘mythic’—tradition that predates, surrounds and dangerously compromises

the purity of ‘written down’ thought and morality found in Classics or ‘Sacred

Books’ (Legge 1891, pp. 1–4).

This theoretical perspective for Legge constitutes another line of defence against

Giles’ argument that various ‘feeble absurdities’ in the Tao Te Ching demonstrate its

fragmentary and totally spurious character. On the one hand Lao Tzu’s book represents

a creative, systematic, scriptural and Protestant-like reformation of the oral and ritual

primordium in terms of its higher, spiritual, metaphysical and moral aspirations. On the

other hand the later Taoist tradition, under the pernicious influence of the corrupt

Mahayana Buddhism, drew upon only the co-existing primeval materialistic practices

and fabulous mythic instincts. But part of the reason for Legge’s cooler and more

modulated attitude toward the ‘purity’ of Taoism may in fact be related to Müller’s

response to public criticism engendered by the new science of religion and the

appearance of Oriental ‘Bibles’—that is, the need for a ‘more scholarlike spirit’ that did

not bow to either the unfounded fears or the foolish enthusiasms of the non-academic

public over ‘Oriental Wisdom’. In the preface to the Sacred Books of the East and in the

earlier fund-raising prospectus for a ‘Program of Translation of the Sacred Books’,

Müller therefore cautioned against the notion that the Sacred Books would prove to be

full of only ‘primeval wisdom’, the purity of ‘religious enthusiasm’ and the elevated

sentiments of ‘moral teachings’. As he put it, the ‘proper use’ of the translations should

be the more ‘scholarlike’ placement of these ancient oriental books within a ‘truly

historical’ framework (Müller 1879, pp. ix–xxxviii, xxix–xlvii).

One outcome of these considerations is that, even though Müller’s intent was to

make the Sacred Books accessible to the general public, it may often be the case that ‘no

one but the historian will be able to understand the important lessons which they teach’.

Müller is referring, of course, to the lessons of historical development which, not so

surprisingly or strangely given commonplace assumptions of an imperialistic and

colonial age, document, despite all fearful resemblances and comparative homologies,

the advanced nature of Western civilisation, the ‘higher’ superiority of the Christian

religion and the objective ‘power’ of the Western humanistic sciences. Even if the

public ignores or fears these tediously accomplished productions, it is still the critical

mission of the scholarly elite in the academy to appropriate, define, classify, translate and

publish all such textual objects. The method is, then, as Müller suggests here, one of

compiling and controlling the literary heritage of Oriental tradition for ‘science’ the way

a museum ‘colonises the past’ by collecting, classifying, and displaying the material

artifacts of history (see Müller 1879, pp. ix–xxxviii, xxix–xivii; Müller 1884, 1891).

This Müllerian ‘rhetoric of domination’ concerning the aggressive methods of

apprehending and representing the products of non-Western civilisations, as well as a

whole martial vocabulary and strategy of battle, dramatises the intellectual and emotional

convergence of nineteenth-century missionary methods, the comparative ‘sciences of

man’ and academic Orientalism. As the German educated, ex-missionary editor of the

China Review, E. J. Eitel, put it: once the professional Sinologist is armed with the

critical methods that give him the historical ‘facts’ and ‘Quellen’ of ancient Chinese

texts, he will be ‘more than a match’ for ‘the native scholars’. After all, as Eitel says, the

struggle that is enjoined with Oriental civilisations will be won not by missionary

evangelisation, not ‘with shot and shell’, and not ‘by feats of engineering skill’ but by

‘Finding the Way’: James Legge and the Victorian Invention of Taoism 115

‘the more subtle weapons of Western science, on the battle field of practical, speculative

and critical philosophy’ (Eitel, pp. 1–8).

The issue of Taoism at the end of the nineteenth century was two-fold. From one

perspective, it could be carefully defined, classified and tamed as a textual object or

sacred book-religion by Müller and Legge’s relatively reverent and civil methods of

comparison. Yet in the sense suggested by Giles’ more overtly suspicious, combative and

non-comparative approach, it could be made to disappear altogether as a ‘religion’ by

being reduced to other fragmented, though ostensibly more ‘objective’ and ‘natural’,

philological and historical categories. For both methods, the fundamental question was

really the matter of the self-interested control of the past through varying intellectual

strategies of representation that often, in the final analysis, produced similar ideological

results—the dominion over the Other in the interest of some preconceived Same.

Which of these methods, rhetorical strategies or faiths is more true to the complex

otherness of the Chinese traditions collectively called ‘Taoism’ is still, relatively

speaking, an open question.

‘Taoism’ after ‘Leggism’

The end of the nineteenth century marks a sinological turning point that is indicated on

the one hand by the deaths of Legge and Müller, respectively, in 1897 and 1900 and on

the other hand by Giles’ assumption in 1898 of the Chair of Chinese at Cambridge

University and by the powerful renewal of French sinology as evidenced by the work

of Edouard Chavannes and Paul Pelliot. The symbolic nature of these events as related

to the sinological evaluation of the ancient Taoist texts is that while, during his lifetime,

Legge had won the particular battle over Lao Tzu’s ‘sacred’ spiritual integrity, Giles’

style of methodological agnosticism had, by the end of the century, triumphed in the

disciplinary war over the kind of academic ‘faith’, or lack thereof, that is proper toward

early Chinese documents and the significance of Chinese religion.

After the turn of the century, Legge’s reputation suVered with respect to his faith in

the purity of the past, even to the extent that such mock pieties and unscientific

methods were branded by the younger generation of professional Sinologists as the

‘Errors of Leggism’ (Kingsmill 1906, pp. 192–3). It is also true that Legge’s erstwhile

attempt, in the spirit of a cautious sinological Orientalism and by virtue of his

participation in the Sacred Books of the East project, to bring China into the context of

the comparative science of religions was largely abortive. Some of the reasons have to do

with the changing sinological evaluation of the pure ‘sacrality’ or ‘spirituality’ of early

Taoism and the apparent absence of any significant mythological tradition. Even more

importantly, it relates to the fact that the whole notion of an ancient Chinese ‘religiosity’

rooted in the presence of a monotheistic High God within the Chinese Classics was

now, on the basis of both comparative anthropological evidence and sinological

exclusivity, being severely questioned.

This represents a fascinating turnabout for Legge’s position. Whereas before, as a

missionary, he, as the discoverer of a Chinese Sky God, had been viciously attacked by

other more conservative missionaries on theological grounds, now, as a professional

scholar, he was assaulted for the same findings by Sinologists who were profoundly

disturbed by the ambiguity and fragmentary nature of the textual evidence. This

situation suggests a kind of hidden transposition or deep discursive aYnity of ‘faiths’

since, though couched in diVerent terminology, both groups strangely enough ended up

aYrming the total otherness of China regarding religious tradition. China was forever

116 N. J. Girardot

the great exception to all other pagan civilisations—because it had an explicit ancient

monotheism similar to the Hebrews or, because it had no real theism, religion or

mythology at all. For both theologically oriented missionaries and professionally

disinterested Sinologists, a conclusion such as Legge’s was therefore logically and

evidentially impossible. Finally, and putting aside any further discussion of the intriguing

and hardly closed question of an ancient Chinese ‘High God’, mainstream academic

Sinology after Leggism was mostly satisfied with what was taken as the manifest

secularity and rationality of the Classical Confucian canon—principles that were

ironically also based largely on Legge’s translation of the Classics.14

With respect to the dominant Western conception of Taoism as an entity, like

‘Buddhism’, that was ‘grounded in the past, ideally conceived, and textually constructed’

(Almond 1988, pp. 12–13), it is not necessary to document here how much of the old

nineteenth-century image promulgated by Legge, appropriately updated and disguised,

continues within the academic study of world religions and within popular culture

down to the present day. Rather in the spirit of the premise that in changing the Tao

stays fundamentally the same, it is more interesting and revealing to focus on those

twentieth-century sinological scholars who should have been among the first to know

better. It can be said that until quite recently much of the old internal Protestant logic

of the ‘pure and the corrupt’ regarding Taoism, most powerfully and scholastically

articulated by Legge, was still intact within even specialised sinological circles. One need

only peruse some still standard handbooks such as William Theodore De Bary’s Sources

of Chinese Tradition (1960) and Wing-tsit Chan’s Source Book in Chinese Philosophy

(1963). The terms were changed to protect the innocent, but the fundamental neglect

and distortion of the later Taoist tradition was in many ways the same.

While allowing for some important exceptions within French scholarship, this meant

that if ‘Taoism’, however defined, was not totally ignored as irrelevant to the elite, and

fundamentally secular, Chinese civilisation, then it was considered only in terms of its

marginal ‘philosophical’, ‘literary’ or ‘sociological’ impingement on the development of

the Confucian ‘Great Tradition’. Even the anonymous fragments of some kind of

ancient ‘Taoism’ were distinctly privileged over the later sectarian ‘religious’ tradition

which was, perhaps, no longer ‘corrupt’ precisely in the quasi-anti-papist terms of

the nineteenth century but was surely civilisationally deficient as a manifestation of

the ‘little’ or ‘vulgar’ aspects of Chinese history. Thus down until the 1970s, and very

much in keeping with Legge’s old perspective on these matters, a fundamental and

essentialising distinction was still made between what was safely, anciently, philosophically,

civilisationally and textually ‘pure’ and what was most often viewed as

the superstitiously religious, chaotically ritualised and politically irrelevant sectarian

tradition.

The amazing persistence of such stereotypes in Western Sinology down to the 1970s,

when Kristofer Schipper’s groundbreaking work on the sectarian tradition was becoming

known, is rather touchingly indicated by the testimony of John Lagerwey, an

American sinologist who had gone to Paris in 1975 to study with Schipper.15 As

Lagerwey says, he thought at the time, as many Sinologists still do, that ‘Chinese history

belonged to an ‘‘agnostic’’ Confucian elite, and Chinese society to the ‘‘superstitious’’

masses’. ‘Lov[ing] Taoist philosophy’, Lagerwey tells us that he fundamentally ‘believed

the scornful judgment of others concerning Taoist religion’. It therefore came ‘with the

force of revelation’ for Lagerwey to learn from Schipper’s courses that what he believed

about ‘Taoism’ was a particularly powerful fiction of sinological science: ‘It is not so.

What you believed is false. The truth is . . .’ (Lagerwey, pp. xvii–xviii). Perhaps the

‘Finding the Way’: James Legge and the Victorian Invention of Taoism 117

truth is that ‘Taoism’ remains a fascinating and ironically meaningful imaginary

construct precisely because it resists all easy Western definitions and essentialising

classifications. Both concretely as a living aspect of Chinese tradition and more

philosophically and religiously as a repository of ancient ideas and practices, it forces us

to reconsider what reverses all such abstract dichotomies the ‘pure and corrupt’, the

‘great and little’, and (for that matter) the yin and the yang. It has always been a

tradition, whether expressed in anonymous ancient texts or within current liturgical

ritual, that invites and even encourages its own deconstruction.

The Way that was found—the Way imagined, spoken, written and invented; the

‘course’ of Taoist discourse—is not the Tao. And the way that was set forth by James

Legge in the nineteenth century was certainly not the ‘enduring and unchanging Tao’

(Legge 1891, p. 47). But as seen from the perspective of Legge’s own life-long capacity

for change and as someone with a deep faith in the possibility of new revelations,

whether religious or scholarly, it is possible, I think, that he would see the meaningful

ambiguity in what the Tao has represented in, and for, Western consciousness. Recently

those sinologists who have found the path and know about the Way say diVerent and

sometimes contradictory things. For example, Nathan Sivin (1978), in keeping with

Forest Gump and Winnie the Pooh, has suggested that in Chinese tradition ‘Taoism is

as Taoism does’. John Lagerwey (1987), who has now found the Way, says that Taoism

is the ‘religion of the people of the land’ (p. xv). And Kristofer Schipper (1993), one of

the pioneering twentieth-century scholars of the living Taoist tradition, says only that

‘the Body knows’. But even today what is known about Taoism—and to what degree

the old dichotomy between a pure philosophical-mystical Taoism and a corrupt

religious-ritualistic Taoism, the early classical texts and the later organised religion and

Taoist canon, still has validity—remains moot. As Lao Tzu reputedly said in the little

text of the Tao and its power, ‘the Tao that can be Tao’ed is not the Tao’.

Notes

1 For biographical details concerning Legge, see Girardot, Victorian Translation; Ride; Pfister

1990, 1991.

2 Concerning all of these issues related to Oxford University, the rise of sinological Orientalism,

and Max Müller’s ‘science of religion’, see Girardot, Victorian Translation.

3 For Legge’s stature as the epitome of nineteenth-century sinological Orientalism see, for

example, Wright.

4 On the ‘Indomania’ of the nineteenth century, see especially Schwab.

5 Regarding the contested categories of ‘Confucius’ and ‘Confucianism’, see Jensen; Girardot,

Victorian Translation.

6 Müller’s six Oriental ‘book religions’ were Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism,

Taoism and ‘Parsi-ism’. See the discussion of these matters in the ‘Preface to the Sacred Books

of the East’ and ‘Program of a Translation of the Sacred Books of the East’, Müller 1879,

pp. ix–xxxviii, xxxix–xlvii.

7 For a discussion of the sinological discourse concerning an early pure Taoist philosophical

tradition and a later corrupt tradition of magic and ritual, see Girardot 1972, 1985.

8 On popular fabulations of Taoism in the West, see Girardot, ‘My Way’, forthcoming.

9 On the ‘school of Tau-ism’ in European scholarship during the middle years of the nineteenth

century, see Hardwick, pp. 55–76.

10 For a somewhat desultory account of British sinology in the nineteenth century, see Barrett. A

more positive view of British sinological Orientalism during the ‘Leggian Epoch’ from the

1870s to the end of the century is found in Cordier and in Girardot, Victorian Translation.

11 In his 1879 preface to his first volume for the Sacred Books, Legge mentioned that he felt

Julien’s ‘Way’ was ‘too materialistic to serve the purpose of a translation’. See Legge 1879,

p. xxi.

118 N. J. Girardot

12 For some trenchant criticism of Müller, see, among other works, Dowling and Wheeler-Barclay.

13 On the overall issue of ‘reading Homer’ in the Victorian period as related to the interpretation

of the Bible and the ‘higher’ forms of Germanic criticism, see Turner, pp. 135–86.

14 On the overall problem of the ‘High God’ at the end of the nineteenth-century, see Baylis.

Concerning recent sinological discussion of an ancient Chinese High God, see Eno.

15 On the significance of Schipper’s work, see Girardot, ‘Kristofer Schipper and the Resurrection

of the Taoist Body’, in Schipper, pp. ix–xviii.

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N. J. GIRARDOT is Professor of Comparative Religions in the Department of

Religion Studies at Lehigh University. He is the author of Myth and Meaning in Early

Taoism (University of California Press, 1983, 1989) as well as various other books and

articles on Chinese religion, visionary folk art and American popular culture. His most

recent book is The Victorian Translation of China. James Legge and the Transformation of

Missionary Tradition, Sinological Orientalism, and the Comparative Science of Religions in the

Nineteenth Century (University of California Press, forthcoming).

Religion Studies Department, Maginnes Hall, Lehigh University, Bethlehem PA 18015

U.S.A. Email: njg0@lehigh.edu

‘Finding the Way’: James Legge and the Victorian Invention of Taoism 121