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

Abstract

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.