{"title":"Stephen Mitchell’s Version of the Tao Te Ching: A Spiritual Interpretation","authors":"Penghua Fan, Senlin Yu","doi":"10.1093/litthe/fraa023","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\n This article analyses Stephen Mitchell’s interpretation of the Taoist classic Tao Te Ching. With his adoption of the concepts from Zen Buddhism and his borrowing of ideas from Christianity, Mitchell’s version of the Tao Te Ching is not a scholarly faithful translation but rather a spiritual interpretation that is heavily improvised. The importance of this spiritual interpretation lies in the way Mitchell fuses the horizon of Chinese Taoism with his own Zen practice and the English-speaking reader's horizon of Christianity. However, this contribution is offset by the limitation of Mitchell’s work. His version of the Tao Te Ching risks estranging itself from the sociocultural context of the Chinese original, misleading English-speaking readers, and displacing Taoist thought with Buddhist and Christian teachings.","PeriodicalId":43172,"journal":{"name":"Literature and Theology","volume":"37 1","pages":"486-493"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2000,"publicationDate":"2020-12-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Literature and Theology","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1093/litthe/fraa023","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERARY THEORY & CRITICISM","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This article analyses Stephen Mitchell’s interpretation of the Taoist classic Tao Te Ching. With his adoption of the concepts from Zen Buddhism and his borrowing of ideas from Christianity, Mitchell’s version of the Tao Te Ching is not a scholarly faithful translation but rather a spiritual interpretation that is heavily improvised. The importance of this spiritual interpretation lies in the way Mitchell fuses the horizon of Chinese Taoism with his own Zen practice and the English-speaking reader's horizon of Christianity. However, this contribution is offset by the limitation of Mitchell’s work. His version of the Tao Te Ching risks estranging itself from the sociocultural context of the Chinese original, misleading English-speaking readers, and displacing Taoist thought with Buddhist and Christian teachings.
期刊介绍：
Literature and Theology, a quarterly peer-review journal, provides a critical non-confessional forum for both textual analysis and theoretical speculation, encouraging explorations of how religion is embedded in culture. Contributions should address questions pertinent to both literary study and theology broadly understood, and be consistent with the Journal"s overall aim: to engage with and reshape traditional discourses within the studies of literature and religion, and their cognate fields - biblical criticism, literary criticism, philosophy, politics, culture studies, gender studies, artistic theory/practice, and contemporary critical theory/practice.
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