As is evident from the last post, I am gearing up to teach the classics. First up, the Daodejing. I put this first because I see it as an introduction to a more expansive cosmology (compared to Confucianism). For me, it is easier to move students from the very broad notion of Dao in the DDJ to the more human-focused Dao of Confucianism (I was going to say the Confucian Dao is "anthropocentric," but that sounds too strong to me…).
By way of preparation I am re-reading the Ames and Hall introductions to their translation. And this passage, in the "Historical Introduction," strikes me as particularly useful:
…Two often remarked characteristics of the Daodejing are palpable absences: it contains no historical detail of any kind, and it offers its readers no doctrines in the sense of general precepts or universalistic laws. The required "framing" of the aphorism by the reader is itself an exercise in nondogmatic philosophizing where the relationship between the text and its student is one of noncoercive collaboration. That is, instead of "the text" providing the reader with a specific historical context of philosophical system, its listeners are required to supply always unique, concrete, and often dramatic scenarios drawn from their own experience to generate meaning for themselves. This inescapable process in which students through many readings of the text acquire their own unique understanding of its insights informed by their own life experiences is one important element in a kind of constantly evolving coherence. The changing coherence of the text is brought into a sharpening focus as its readers in different times and places continue to make it their own. (8)
This is especially helpful to me because m primary concern is what the text can mean to us now, in our own time. Of course that requires consideration of what the text meant in its own time, the Warring States period of China. But what it meant then and what it might mean now are not one and the same thing. Indeed, by the terms of Ames and Hall's discussion of the DDJ's epistemology (if we can call it that), we should not expect there to be a singular, settled meaning of the text that transcends time and context.
To some degree I think the same perspective can be taken on the other texts in my class: The Analects, Mencius, Zhuangzi and Han Feizi. The Confucians and Legalists provide much more in the way of historical details and general precepts, thus the authors do more of the framing of the text (Zhuangz pokes fun at these very processes). But even with that greater initiative on the part of the writers, I think it is still necessary for the students to take an active role in generating meaning for themselves in order to discover what the texts can mean in our time.
The Useless Tree 
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