For Christmas my sister gave me a gift card to the local book store.  Yesterday I went over and picked up four books – and my daughter came along and got one for herself.  Among my pile was Hans-Georg Moeller’s, The Philosophy of the Daodejing (Columbia, 2006).  I started reading it last night and was rewarded with an interesting idea in the first chapter:

But how can the Laozi be read if it lacks an author, a clearly stated topic, and a beginning and end?  How can it be read if it was not written to be read?  Given its peculiar form, the Laozi can hardly be compared with the traditional linear texts of our culture, such as books, essays, or speeches.  In a certain sense it is, surprisingly, easier to compare it to nontraditional and nonlinear texts such as the so-called hypertext of the Internet.  The hypertext of the Internet also lacks a specific author, it has no beginning or end, and it is not dedicated to the exclusive treatment of one specific issue.

 He is drawing on scholarship that emphasizes the oral origins of the text and its uncertain provenance.  And I think he is right to make the comparison to hypertext.  I would push a bit further, however, and suggest another comparison: wiki.  Here’s a definition (Wikipedia itself would not come up – did the earthquake in Taiwan disrupt it?) from something called webopedia:

(n.) A collaborative Web site comprises the perpetual collective work of many authors. Similar to a blog in structure and logic, a wiki allows anyone to edit, delete or modify content that has been placed on the Web site using a browser, including the work of previous authors. In contrast, a blog,
typically authored by an individual, does not allow visitors to change
the original posted material, only add comments to the original content.

     Wikis are not necessarily linear but networked: you can move through one by following links in whatever direction you like.   They do not have beginnings or ends.   Just like the Tao Te Ching.

    There is, however, one big difference: the Tao Te Ching, as a text, did stabilize and crystallize somewhere around the 4th century BCE or so – maybe later, but certainly by the Han dynasty.  It is hard now to change the text all that much; there is too much historical and academic and cultural inertia.

     Yet, even with that caveat, I think it is right to see the text as a network, to move through it in a variety of ways, not simply front to back.  Also, there continues to be a continuing collaborative and dynamic global conversation on the meaning of the text.  There are many English translations and each renders the text in a somewhat different way.  Scholars may prefer one or another but it is near impossible to establish, in any definitive way, the "standard" translation.  That multiplicity and openness is wiki-like, or so it seems to me.

     At the end of the day, this is just another reminder of how the sensibility of Taoism – and to a lesser extent Confucianism – is very much in tune with postmodern conditions….