The Emperor and His Councillor: Laozi and Han Dynasty Taoism

Abstract

During her lifetime, Anna Seidel (1938-1991) was much appreciated by her anglophone colleagues, and her ideas continue to exert a profound influence on Taoist studies in the English-speaking world today. In this light, it is surprising that her most important book-length publication, La divinisation de Lao-tseu dans le taoïsme des Han, published in 1969, has never been made available in English. This is not for want of an intention to do so, at least indirectly. After Anna Seidel's premature death, Hubert Durt and Ursula-Angelika Cedzich, two colleagues with whom she had worked closely, prepared to compile a volume of her collected writings, which Princeton University Press initially showed a strong interest in publishing. At the time, some of Anna's friends, myself included, translated her French and German publications. These translations remained unpublished when, for reasons unknown to me, the book project was abandoned. The never-realized book was to include two articles originally published in 1978, in which Anna Seidel, at the behest of her former teacher Herbert Franke, presents the gist of La divinisation in her native German. Published in Saeculum, a self-described "Annual Review of Universal History" widely read in academic circles at the time, they are directed at an audience that was highly educated yet unfamiliar with things Chinese to a degree that is hard to imagine today. This explains a somewhat generalizing tone and occasional digressions on Western comparanda familiar to the intended readership. I was assigned to translate the first of these two articles, which covers the different stages in the transformation of the philosopher Laozi into a divine figure, leading up to a commented translation of the "Inscription Honoring Laozi," a key Eastern Han document used in Anna Seidel's study. (The second, shorter article is concerned with the rise of a Taoist "church" at the end of the Han period.) Rereading the article today, I find that it has lost none of its freshness and lucidity. Even though additional evidence has become available (including Warring States-period manuscripts of apparent forerunners of the Laozi texts that would surely have been of great interest to Anna Seidel), and even though a huge amount of secondary scholarship has been published, Anna Seidel's core ideas still hold up very well, as does her method of analysis, in which religious thought is taken as a barometer of socio-political history and yet religion is kept intact as an internally consistent subsystem of Chinese culture. As the article resonates on many levels with the other contributions to the present volume, I decided to include it as a salut d'outre-tombe from Anna Seidel to her old friend Lothar Ledderose. I hope it will remind readers of the enduring importance of her work and perhaps trigger the publication in this journal of the other translations prepared for the abortive volume, if they can still be found. Rather than giving a literal translation, I have aimed to bring out Anna Seidel's ideas as clearly and readably as possible. In doing so, I took considerable liberties with the wording, freely adding, eliding, and rearranging text passages. I have, moreover, corrected a few minor inaccuracies and provided some additional Chinese characters and references to classical texts. However, I have refrained from updating the references to secondary works, which in any case are few as Anna Seidel directs the serious reader to the French version of La divinisation for a full scholarly apparatus. In rendering passages from Chinese texts, rather than quoting from a published translation, I have endeavored to render the article's original formulations. The romanization (except for "Taipei" and words related to "Tao") has been changed to Hanyu Pinyin.