Stephen Mitchell Talks Tao Pushback
Stephen Mitchell has introduced us to both Rainer Maria Rilke and Lao-tzu. He did the same for a lot of people, we suspect--his translation of the Tao Te Ching has sold over a million copies. Now he's on a book tour for The Second Book of the Tao, which is based on the writings of Lao-tzu’s disciple Chuang-tzu and Confucius’s grandson Tzu-ssu. He's in town Saturday, February 28, at the Elliott Bay Book Company for a 2 p.m. appearance. We ask him a few "We haven't read your book yet" questions below--after the jump there's an excerpt he selected just for Seattlest.
Author Stephen Mitchell (Photo: John D. Fellers)
Tzu-ssu, as one would expect from Confucius’ grandson, is more orderly, more conventional, likes to quote the poetic classics. Chuang-tzu is wild, outrageous, leaps from thought to thought like an ibex, laughs to himself in high amusement at the exquisite humor of reality. Both of them know the mind inside-out and speak with the authenticity of people who are living in harmony with the way things are.
The Second Book has been described as an "antimanual" to the Tao Te Ching. In what sense?
Two senses, at least: 1. of the same kind but situated opposite, exerting energy in the opposite direction, and 2. opposite in kind to. The Tao Te Ching is concerned with showing us how to live clearly and kindly in every realm of human existence (or non-existence): government, family life, the vibrant life of the mind alone with itself. The Second Book of the Tao, and especially the chapters that come from Chuang-tzu, says, "Screw it!" (There must be a Chinese ideogram that means this but is infinitely subtle and polite.) "No need to bother with all such nonsense about leading the people and following the people. How absurd! Take care of your own mind, and the whole universe will take care of itself. And don’t believe me: test it for yourself." There is no contradiction between manual and anti-manual. They are just different aspects of the same insight.
You're known as a "poetic" rather than literal translator—primarily by literalists we imagine. In this translation, where did the poetry emerge?
When I translate poetry, of course I’m "poetic"! Otherwise, only the corpse of the poem remains, not its living reality. Something is always lost in translation, and it’s my job to find what can make up for that loss. When I translate prose, though, I’m a lot more literal.
Adapting texts, which is what I did for The Second Book of the Tao, is a different kind of venture from translation. Sometimes I have been quite literal, as with the marvelous prose stories and parables from Chuang-tzu. Often I have been very free. The poetry emerges from every corner and through the cracks in the floor, because the animating consciousness is so visual and concise. I was going to say, because it is so clear, but clarity doesn’t always equal poetry. The great examples of that are the sutras of the Buddha, which are at the opposite end of the spectrum from poetry: a dazzling clarity, but as prosaic as a shopping list.
There's something about the condensed, even aphoristic nature of these wisdom "bites" that makes us think of the online fondness for very short narrative bursts (of blogs, for instance). But can the Tao be blogged?
If it can, then this is what that looks like. The difference is that—although the chapters in this book have the feeling of the spontaneous, the off-the-cuff, the jazz riff—the language is not casual or sloppy: it’s dense, witty, lyrical, multi-layered, multi-faceted like a diamond. You can read it twenty or fifty times and always find something nourishing in it, always feel a sense of freshness. I haven’t read too many blogs that I would care to read again even once.*
(*We're sure Stephen meant to add, "Present company excepted," but was cut off or distracted. An excerpt from his book is after the jump.)
An excerpt from Stephen Mitchell's The Second Book of the Tao, courtesy of the author.
40
Are you worried about the world?
Do you think that it needs your guidance?
Don’t the heavens turn by themselves?
Don’t sun and moon find their places?
What masterminds all this?
What creates all the connections?
What, without any effort,
makes everything happen in its time?
Is there some hidden mechanism
that makes life be as it is?
Do things just happen to turn out
exactly the way they do?
Do clouds make the rain, or is it
rain that makes up the clouds?
What force puffs them and punctures them?
The winds rise in the north,
they blow now west, now east,
and wander across the heavens.
What, without any effort,
stirs up this unfathomable joy?
COMMENTARY
Some people have an Atlas complex: they carry the world on their shoulders. They believe that if they put the world down, it couldn’t carry on by itself. Worry and fear, they think, are the motivators for right action. If they saw the world as perfect, they think, they would be complacent and passive; they would just stay at home and cultivate their own gardens.
But what if cultivating your own garden were the best way to help the world? What if your little backyard could, with the proper care, grow enough vegetables and fruits to feed a million people? What if your gardening inspired a thousand of your neighbors to do the same?—"But a backyard can’t feed a million people."—Ah, my dear fellow, it’s a metaphor. I’m not talking about physical food, or even, necessarily, physical people.
Worrying about the world is a dead end. When nuclear proliferation is solved, global warming pops up. When global warming is solved, overpopulation starts looming. Then there’s always the burning out of the sun, and the infinite expansion or contraction of the universe, which leaves us at zero any way you slice it.
When the mind discovers what it is, we wake up from these mortal dramas as if from a dream. All possible disasters have already happened, and if a future appears, we thread it through the eye of the needle. And whether we act or don’t act, voilà: miraculously, without exception, things turn out exactly the way they do.
