Tsai's Enlightening Tao Te Ching (must read!)

The Tao Te Ching or Tao Te Ching is an ancient Chinese book of philosophy. And at first glance you may think this is a confusing book. It consists of 81 short chapters written in often cryptic poetry. But with a deeper reading you may come to find that it contains profound wisdom. The Tao Te Ching is one of the classics of ancient Chinese philosophy. Others include the Zhuangzi, Sun Tzu's Art of War, you may have heard of those. These books that I'm holding here are by the comic artist C.C. Tsai. He has transformed the ancient Chinese classics into comic book form which are fun and really accessible and a delight to read. I'm excited to tell you that today the 20th of August 2020 the illustrated Tao Te Ching is being released in English. And the translator is Professor Brian Bruyer of the University of Eastern Michigan. He's a fascinating man and I was lucky enough to sit down to have a conversation with him. This video is the first of three where Brian and I talk about this fascinating book and get deeper into the wisdom of the Tao. Enjoy. So hello audience. Welcome to this conversation with Brian Bruyer. We have him with an amazing backdrop. Brian what is that photo behind you? Hi George. This is a photo of Sun Moon Lake. Sun Moon Lake. Well that is a very open water image. Very in keeping with the topics that we'll talk about. If any of the audience have watched the Zhuangzi video you'll see just how fun and accessible and just a joy to read they are. And the Tao Te Ching I have managed to have a sneak early peek and I can confirm it's a really fantastic resource to be able to see both Brian's and Tai's interpretations and look on the Tao which will help any explorer of this fascinating and rich world of Taoist philosophy. So welcome Brian. Thank you so much for making the time to tell us about this book that's coming up and some of your wisdom. Thanks for having me George. Great. Well excited to get deeper into some of the wisdom of the Tao Te Ching and some of your work. So let's just start high level. For someone who is new to Taoism and they might have heard about it. Could you just tell us a bit about what the Tao Te Ching is and a bit about that book? Yeah the Tao Te Ching dates from around the 5th century BC. We're not sure exactly how far back it goes and we're not sure exactly what time it took form. Scholars generally think that it took form over maybe a few centuries. Some people say it's a collection of sayings. I think it's a bit more than that because it does seem to have some coherent philosophical content. It seems to have been written for somebody who was number one going to take a position of high power in society and number two is interested in cultivating themselves so that they could take that position responsibly. Yes. Written over multiple centuries. I mean the Chinese and certainly the story that Master Gu, my master tells me is that it is written by Lao Tzu. What's this sort of evidence of it being written over centuries versus an individual? Yeah this is a difficult question. We have the earliest copy we have dates to around the 3rd century BC and it was dug up out of the ground but it's only partial. So some people look at this and say well this is proof that it accreted over time. That's hard to say because you never know what was going through people's minds when they buried books with dead people. So other people see it as a comprehensive coherent philosophical essay and they take the coherence as evidence that it was written by more or less a single person and that it can be taken as a philosophical book in its own right. I think there is plenty of opportunity within the book. You don't have to read too much into it yourself to see that it can be quite insightful and as far as I can tell it's generally free of the kind of contradictions that would indicate that it's not genuine. So as a philosopher I think it's worth taking seriously as a philosophical text. Certainly for a diversity of people who find the Tao Te Ching, certainly in my life not knowing hardly anything about Taoism and then finding this book full of cryptic poems but somehow still resonated with me despite having been written in ancient China over 2000 years ago. Let's go on to the book that we will be discussing and this is the C.C. Tsai's illustrated comic version of this. The original style of Lao-tzu is these kind of esoteric, mysterious poems that are kind of like, I can never say this word, a Rorschach blot where it gives you what you need in that reading and so it's open enough that you can kind of read into it. And then we have here an illustrated comic book which is obviously a different style and I'm guessing with Tsai's kind of interpretation and your translation. I was wondering kind of how did you navigate that and is that something that you thought about in the creation of this book? Yeah it's an interesting book in the sense that it's going through two hands of interpretation instead of just one. Normally a translation goes through the interpretation of the translator, that's unavoidable. In this case what C.C. did is he took the classical Chinese language and he wrote the comic book in modern contemporary Chinese and so when I translated into English my job was to translate his contemporary Chinese into contemporary English but I didn't think it would be very responsible of me to do that without an eye to the classical Chinese as well. So I did both and the text as you read it, I think, so one thing we did in this series is we made sure that we included the classical Chinese text in the margins and so if you do read some Chinese you can read along with the classical Chinese and see how it's rendered into English and anybody who's able to do that I think will see that the English actually tracks nicely with the original Chinese from the ancient text. And supported very beautifully with all these fantastic images. Even here in Master Gu's school we have original Chinese copies of Sai's comics. Could you speak a bit about the man and the influence that he's had in Asia? Right, so C.C.'s a really interesting character and if you ever have a chance to go to Hangzhou and visit him I recommend that you do that. He dropped out of school when he was 15, I think. He set his mind on becoming a professional illustrator. He sent a submission to a comic book company in Taipei. They didn't know how old he was but they hired him on the spot. So he left home and that's when he started working and never went back to school. So if you think about it, here's a man who dropped out of school essentially after middle school and is working with some of the most difficult texts in the tradition. And the way that he's been able to do that is he is an indefatigable scholar himself. He reads and reads. If you go to his house you'll see bookcase after bookcase of collections that he's accumulated over the years. So I've worked and interacted with many scholars in the field and I've never met anybody as well read as C.C. So the work he's done, so not only does he understand the material quite well, he has this amazing knack for putting it into simple accessible images that really jump off the page. So I fell in love with these comics when I was, how old was I then? About 22, 21 or 22. I was in Taiwan studying Chinese and I saw these books and I fell in love with them immediately. And not because I'm a longtime comic fan. I grew up reading the newspaper comics as opposed to superhero comics. So I did have a love for those kind of comics and these resonated with me in that sense that they encapsulate an idea and bring it across in a really engaging way. Yes and that's certainly something, I don't have a comic book reading history but just the effortlessness and yeah, I've said it a couple of times already, the accessibility of these books to have this ancient wisdom and it's fascinating to hear that, you know, how well ready he is in the collections of classics that he has. And then that challenge of encapsulating that in square boxes makes me think of, you know, Calvin and Hobbes, which in my generation, very popular on Reddit. And, you know, the author of those comics is also somewhat of a philosopher, someone who can see into, you know, how society works and then helps us understand these ideas with images. It's funny you mentioned Calvin and Hobbes because I have very few comic books at home besides CC's but that's what, that and The Far Side I do have, yeah. Yeah, powerful, interesting people. And certainly in the modern age, you know, despite Calvin and Hobbes being discontinued many years ago, that's something that has lived on for its humour and profundity.