英原文／鮑樸；AI譯中文本
書評内容：
《老子：關於「德」與「道」的經典》（Tao Te Ching: The Classic Book of Integrity and The Way），梅維恆（Victor H. Mair）著；班騰書店（Bantam Books）出版
《老子古今：五種對勘與析評引論》，劉笑敢著；中國社會科學出版社出版
註：「Dao De Jing」、「Tao Te Ching」和「Laozi」皆指同一個文本，即中國古代經典《道德經》或稱《老子》。「Tao」與「Dao」僅為「道」的不同音譯方式。
2026年6月的最後一週，兩位在中國古代經典《道德經》研究領域備受尊敬的學者相繼離世。他們出生相差不到四歲，逝世時間也僅隔兩天。梅維恆（Victor Henry Mair）是美國漢學家、賓夕法尼亞大學中國文學教授，生於1943年，於6月28日逝世；劉笑敢是北京師範大學道家哲學教授，生於1947年，於6月30日逝世。兩人都在各自的知識傳統中取得了重大突破，並在各自的學術社群中享譽盛名。
兩國公眾對其逝世的反應皆頗為冷淡，這反映出大眾對其專業領域的認知相當有限。然而，這種相對的沉默隱藏了中美共同面臨的危機四伏的飄搖之態：雙方都不知道是否能夠避免一場足以衝擊全世界的毀滅性武裝衝突之際，文化與文明的交流卻大多停滯在邊緣狀態。
兩位學者學術生涯終點的表面相似性，掩蓋了一個更深層且日益緊迫的問題——這已成為當前國際焦慮的主要來源。「多元現代性」（multiple modernities）這一在21世紀之交被提出，并且非常值得關注的論點[1]，似乎描繪了當前正在浮出水面的現實。當代的中國正日益展現出其對「現代性」的理解與西方有著根本性的不同。作為同代學者，梅維恆與劉笑敢提供了一個極具啟示性的範例，展示了「現代化」如何沿著中西各自獨立的認知路徑發展，即便這些路徑曾在同一部古代經典上交匯。
這兩位學術生涯的交匯點可以追溯到1972年。那一年，美國總統尼克森（Richard Nixon）訪問中國並會見了毛澤東，標誌著冷戰時期中美和解的開始。在美國，《時代》雜誌將一本帶有新時代（New Age）色彩的《道德經》譯本列入聖誕節推薦書單，預示著這部中國古代經典正成為西方大眾精神生活中歷久彌新的元素。同樣在1972年的中國，考古學家發掘了長沙馬王堆漢墓，該墓葬屬於西漢早期（西元前206年—西元9年）的一個貴族家庭。隨著隨後幾個月發掘工作的推進，3號墓中出土了兩份《道德經》帛書，即約西元前168年的馬王堆帛書甲本與乙本。這些手稿比當時通行的版本至少早了五個世紀。
在1972年，梅維恆和劉笑敢的學術道路都尚未完全定型。直到1976年，這兩份經修復的帛書照片圖版及完整文本釋文，才以單著形式首次供學者和公眾查閱。當時，梅維恆正在哈佛大學攻讀中國研究，並於當年獲得博士學位。而劉笑敢的學術之路則因歷史環境遭遇了更深刻的延宕。作為20世紀下半葉的本土中國學者，這身份並未必然讓他更接近這部古代經典。相反地，劉笑敢接受基礎教育的時期，傳統文化正遭受批判，古典文本也基本上從正規教育課程中被抹去。在劉笑敢成年時，已經鮮少有人能在沒有白話翻譯的幫助下閱讀文言文。直到1978年文革後恢復研究生招生，劉笑敢才被北京大學哲學系錄取，並於1981年獲得哲學碩士學位。
1980年，一份更為精校且具權威性的馬王堆帛書版本終於出版。當梅維恆決定翻譯《道德經》時，他完全意識到其中近乎無法克服的困難：文本看似簡短實則高深、語言密度極高，且詮釋的可能性似乎無窮無盡。二十年來，他曾誓言「絕不嘗試翻譯《道德經》」。然而，新發現的馬王堆手稿改變了他的想法。他相信，這些手稿使得「產生一個比以往出版的任何譯本都更準確、更可靠的全新《道德經》譯本」成為可能。他的譯本於1990年問世，此時距離劉笑敢於1993年獲得北京大學哲學博士學位還有三年。劉笑敢隨後成為道家思想領域最受推崇的專家之一。
自西元二世紀以來，圍繞《道德經》展開的研究著作數量多得驚人，無數的「注」（對經典文本的重新闡釋）與「疏」（對前人註解的進一步解釋）層出不窮。梅維恆指出，其數量已「超過一千五百種」。
追隨其前輩英國漢學家亞瑟·威利（Arthur Waley, 1889-1966）的腳步，梅維恆將這些後世的衍生變化視為理解原文真實含義的障礙。正如威利在1934年所言：「從王弼（約西元240-249年）以降直到18世紀的所有評論都是『經院式』的；也就是說，每個評論家都根據自己特定的教義來重新詮釋文本，而無意或不想去發現其原本的含義。從我的觀點來看，它們因此是毫無用處的。」透過使用已知最早的手稿進行翻譯，梅維恆認為「有可能剝離兩千年來因各種宗教、哲學和政治意圖而試圖『改良』文本的註釋與詮釋，清除其造成的扭曲與遮蔽。」
這種對《道德經》歷史累積與文本流變的看法，本質上成為梅維恆與劉笑敢研究方法的分水嶺。在劉笑敢對該文本展開成熟研究時，一個更早的版本已然面世：1993年出土的郭店楚墓竹簡老子（一般認為約西元前300年）。其字體古老，內容僅約為現今通行本的五分之二，且章次與標準版本大相徑庭。劉笑敢率先將包括最早竹簡本在內的五個重要版本進行逐字比對（原文對照）；接著，他選取了文本異同的典型案例，以探究該文本歷史演變的本質（對勘擧要）；最後，也是至關重要的是，他透過現代哲學訓練的視角提出了自己的詮釋，並廣泛地與西方知識傳統展開對話（析評引論）。
儘管採用了不同的方法，兩位學者都獲得了極具價值的洞見。梅維恆並非第一個提出《道德經》在凝聚成相對固定的成文手稿前存在「口傳史」的人。然而，他是現代英語世界中這一觀點最有力、最堅定的推動者之一。他透過指出文本內部的重複、押韻、公式化表述和諧音模式，使這一論點極具說服力；這或許受到了西方關於《伊利亞德》和《奧德賽》等荷馬史詩背後口傳傳統研究的啟發。這種比較視角無疑豐富了中國對《老子》文本前歷史的理解，這是一個至關重要但仍有待開發的領域，尤其考慮到中國對寫作文字的深厚崇敬（即古語所云的「文以載道」）。
在關於「意義」的問題上，劉笑敢也取得了實質性的突破。透過文本對勘，劉笑敢試圖解釋《老子》文本為何會如此演變。在此過程中，他以現代實證方法證實了傳統中國學者長期以來心領神會、且被20世紀學者如余英時以當代語言所描述的現象：
「經典之所以歷久而彌新正在其對於不同時代的讀者，甚至同一時代的不同讀者，有不同的啟示。但是這並不意味着經典的解釋完全沒有客觀性，可以興到亂說。」[2]
這種區別可以理解為「本義」（meaning）與「衍生義/時代意義」（significance）的不同[3]。文本中所包含的客觀性屬於其原始的「本義」——這正是亞瑟·威利和梅維恆等翻譯家試圖透過文獻學分析來恢復的層面。然而，中國的古代經典（或稱「經」）從來不僅僅是一個固定的文字客體。它是一個旨在隨歷史環境變化而激發新洞見的文本，允許讀者將自身的知識、經驗和時代關懷帶入其中。這種當代的啟示，便可稱之為它的「衍生義/時代意義」。
梅維恆本人沉浸於對「本義」的探求，並對自己獲得的洞見引以為傲。在準備譯本時，他寫道自己花了「整整兩個月」的時間，只為替「德」尋找一個滿意的英文對應詞。他最終選擇了「integrity」（完整/正直）而非「virtue」（美德），因為他希望這個詞的範疇更廣，而不僅僅帶有狹隘的道德化暗示。相比之下，劉笑敢則毫不避諱討論文本的當代意義。在他的著作中，「民主」與第49章相聯繫，「科學」與第40和47章交織，而「女性主義」則與第6章呼應，諸如此類。
當梅維恆於1990年出版其譯本時，《道德經》在英語世界已經有了百餘種譯本。自那時起，英文版本的數量持續增長，根據大眾統計清單，僅僅針對第一章的英譯版本就已記錄了175種以上[4]。西方有許多讀者和學者從老子那裡獲得了真正的啟示。然而，這些知識如何被運用於更廣泛的戰略利益（如果確實有被運用的話），目前仍不明朗。
誠如我們現今所知，《道德經》一直是中國文明的基石文本，在其歷史發展是延續中國文明活力「道統」存在的鮮明例證。在中國，截至2025年，對《道德經》的研究著作總數估計高達約3,700部[5]。自馬王堆帛書出版以來，湧現出的註釋譯本、專題研究和大眾解讀數量，遠远超過了以往所有時代的總和。儘管一般大眾對這一專業領域的進展大多不甚了了，但部分讀者可能已經開始將源自老子的洞見，應用於人工智能、管理學以及商業戰略等全新領域。
因此，梅維恆與劉笑敢為《道德經》帶來的突破，皆以各自的方式展現出重大意義。他們平行的人生軌跡所揭示的，不僅僅是對一部古代經典的共同學術興趣。他們的影響力在西方與中國這兩個獨立的知識傳統中悄然展開。他們共同照亮了現代社會對中國經典的兩種截然不同的接軌方式，或許，也昭示了兩個現代世界之間那日益引人注目且影響深遠的分流。
尾註：
[1] 該詞主要與以色列社會學家薩繆爾·諾亞·艾森斯塔特（Shmuel N. Eisenstadt）相關，特別是他發表在《代達羅斯》（Dædalus）2000年專刊上的論文《多元現代性》（Multiple Modernities）。
[2] 由本文作者英譯。原中文引自：余英時，《猶記風吹水上鱗》，弘雅三民圖書股份有限公司，2022年。
[3] 「meaning」與「significance」在該中文著作中即以英文標註：余英時，《猶記風吹水上鱗》，弘雅三民圖書股份有限公司，2022年。
[4] 數據由 ChatGPT 於 2026-07-06 估算，提示詞為：「在梅維恆譯本之前和之後，總共有多少個《道德經》的英文譯本？」
[5] 數據由 DeepSeek 於 2026-07-06 估算，提示詞為：「請估算一下中國歷史上總共出版過多少對《道德經》的研究，請按時期列出 。」
China and the West: Heading towards different modernities?
By Bao Pu
Reviewed:
1. Tao Te Ching: The Classic Book of Integrity and The Way, by Victor H. Mair 梅維恆; Bantam Books
2. Laozi Ancient and Modern《老子古今 五種對勘與析評引論》, by Liu Xiaogan 劉笑敢; China Social Sciences Press中國社會科學出版社
NOTE: “Dao De Jing”, “Tao Te Ching” and “Laozi” all refer to the same thing: 道德經the Chinese ancient text by Laozi老子. “Tao” and “Dao” are different transliterations of the same concept.
Two respected scholars of the ancient Chinese classic Dao De Jing were born within four years of each other and died within two days of each other in the last week June 2026. One was American, the other Chinese. Victor Henry Mair 梅維恆, an American Sinologist and professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania, was born in 1943 and died on June 28. Liu Xiaogan 劉笑敢, a professor of Daoist philosophy at Beijing Normal University, was born in 1947 and died on June 30. Each had made significant breakthroughs within his intellectual tradition, and each was well known within their scholarly communities.
The quiet public reactions to their deaths in both countries is a reflection of the broader public’s limited awareness of their specialized fields. Yet this relative silence points to a precarious condition shared by their respective countries: while the threat of a catastrophic and world-changing armed conflict between them looms, cultural and civilizational exchange takes place largely in obscurity.
The apparent similarity in the final moments of their careers disguises a deeper and increasingly urgent problem, one that has become a major source of international anxiety. The idea of “multiple modernities,” proposed with renewed force at the turn of the twenty-first century[1] , does appear to describe a real emerging condition. Contemporary China is increasingly showing signs that its idea of “modernity” differs profoundly from that of the West. As scholars of the same generation, Mair and Liu offer a revealing illustration of how “modernization” could progress along separate intellectual paths, even when those paths overlapped around the same ancient text.
The point of convergence in their scholarly lives may be traced back to 1972. That year, President Richard Nixon visited the People’s Republic of China and met Mao Zedong, marking the beginning of Sino-American rapprochement in the midst of the Cold War. In the United States, a New Age rendition of the Tao Te Ching appeared on the Christmas gift list of Time Magazine, signaling the ancient Chinese text’s emergence as a durable element of Western popular spirituality. In China that same year, archaeologists opened the Mawangdui tombs, which belonged to an aristocratic family of the early Western Han Dynasty (206 BCE–9 CE). As the excavation continued over the following months, Tomb No. 3 was found to contain two silk manuscripts of the Dao De Jing, the Mawangdui silk manuscripts known as Manuscript A and Manuscript B（帛書版道德經 甲本 乙本）dating to approximately 168 BCE. These manuscripts were at least five centuries older than the commonly transmitted versions of the text.
In 1972, neither Mair nor Liu’s intellectual path had taken definitive shape. The photographic plates of the two restored silk manuscripts, together with full textual transcriptions, were first made available to scholars and the wider public in monographic form in 1976. At the time, Mair was pursuing Chinese studies at Harvard and completed his Ph.D. that year. Liu’s scholarly path was delayed more profoundly by historical circumstance. Being a native Chinese scholar in the latter half of the twentieth century did not necessarily bring him closer to the ancient Chinese text. On the contrary, Liu received his basic education during the time when traditional culture was condemned and classical texts were largely erased from formal educational programs. By the time Liu came of age, few in the population could read classical texts without the aid of vernacular translations. Only in 1978, when graduate admissions resumed after the Cultural Revolution, was Liu admitted to the Department of Philosophy at Peking University. He received his M.A. in philosophy in 1981.
In 1980, a much more refined and authoritative edition of the Mawangdui silk manuscripts was finally published. By the time Mair decided to translate Dao De Jing, he was fully aware of the almost insurmountable difficulty: the deceptive brevity of the text, the density of its language, and the seemingly inexhaustible possibilities of interpretation. For two decades, he had vowed that he would “never attempt to translate the Tao Te Ching.” Yet the newly discovered Mawangdui manuscripts changed his mind. They made it possible, he believed, “to produce a totally new translation of the Tao Te Ching far more accurate and reliable than any published previously.” His translation appeared in 1990, three years before Liu received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Peking University in 1993. Liu subsequently became one of the most respected specialists in Daoist thought.
Since the second century A.D., there have been a staggering number of works devoted to the Dao De Jing, commentaries(注) and sub-commentaries (疏) that reinterpret the classic text and explain previous commentaries. Mair referred to the number as being “more than fifteen hundred.”
Following his predecessor British sinologist Arthur Waley (1889-1966), Mair treated these variations as obstacles to the true meaning of the original text. According to Waley in 1934: “All the commentaries, from Wang Pi’s (王弼《老子注》, ca. 240-249 AD) onwards down to the eighteenth century, are ‘scriptural’; that is to say that each commentator reinterprets the text according to his own particular tenets, without any intention or desire to discover what it meant originally. From my point of view, they are therefore useless.” By using the earliest known manuscripts for translation, Mair thought “it possible to strip away the distortions and obfuscations of a tradition that has striven for two millennia to ‘improve’ the text with commentaries and interpretations more amenable to various religious, philosophical, and political persuasions.”
This view of the historical accumulation and textual variation of the Daodejing essentially marked the point at which Mair’s approach diverged from Liu Xiaogan’s. By the time Liu undertook his mature research on the text, an even earlier version had come to light: the Guodian Laozi on bamboo slips (郭店楚簡本), unearthed in 1993 and generally dated to around 300 BCE. Its script is archaic; its contents amount to only about two-fifths of the most circulated text; and its chapter order differs substantially from the standard version. Liu was the first to compare, word by word, five of the most important versions, beginning with the earliest bamboo-slip version (原文對照). He then examined selected cases of textual variation in order to determine the nature of the text’s historical evolution (對勘擧要). Finally, and importantly, he offered his own interpretation through the lens of modern philosophical training, largely in conversation with the Western intellectual tradition (析評引論).
Despite these different approaches, both scholars arrived at valuable insights. Mair was not the first to propose that the Dao De Jing had an oral prehistory before it became a relatively solidified written text. He was, however, one of the most forceful modern English-language advocates of that view. He made the argument persuasive by drawing attention to repetition, rhyme, formulaic phrasing, and homophonic patterns within the text; possibly influenced by Western scholarship on the oral traditions behind Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Such a comparative perspective certainly enriches Chinese understanding of the pre-textual history of the Laozi, a crucial but still underexplored field. This is especially significant given the deep Chinese reverence for the written word, expressed in the classical phrase “writing carries the Dao.” (文以載道).
On the question of meaning, Liu Xiaogan made a breakthrough of his own. Through textual comparison, Liu sought to explain why the Laozi evolved as it did. In doing so, he confirmed, by modern empirical methods, something that traditional Chinese scholars have long implicitly understood and that twentieth-century scholars such as Yu Ying-shih described in currently comprehensible terms: “The reason classics remain ever fresh through the ages lies precisely in the fact that they offer different illuminations to readers of different periods, and even to different readers within the same period. But this does not mean that the interpretation of classics is entirely without objectivity, or that one may say whatever one pleases on a whim.”[2]
This distinction may be understood as the difference between “meaning” and “significance.”[3] The objectivity contained in the text belongs to its original meaning — the level of meaning that translators such as Arthur Waley and Victor Mair sought to recover through philological analysis. The Chinese classic, or jing 經, however, was never meant to be merely a fixed verbal object. It was a text designed to generate new insights with changing historical circumstances, allowing readers to engage it through the knowledge, experience, and concerns of their own age. Such contemporary insights may be called its “significance.”
Mair himself was deeply absorbed in the problem of meaning and indulged on the insight he gained. In preparing his translation, he wrote that he spent “two full months” searching for a satisfactory English equivalent for de 德. He finally chose “integrity” rather than “virtue,” because he wanted a word broader in scope and less narrowly moralistic in implication. Liu, by contrast, was not shy to discuss the contemporary significance of the text. In his work, “democracy” appears in connection with chapter 49, “science” with chapters 40 and 47, and “feminism” with chapter 6, among other examples.
By the time Mair published his translation in 1990, the Tao Te Ching had already appeared in well over a hundred English renditions. Since then, the number of English versions has continued to grow, with broad public lists now recording more than 175 renderings of the first chapter alone.[4] There are many readers and scholars in the West who have gained true insights from Laozi. Yet how such knowledge might be used, if at all, in the service of broader strategic interests remains unclear.
As we now understand it, Dao De Jing has been the foundational text of Chinese civilization, a living cultural project throughout its history. In China, the total number of studies of the Dao De Jing has been estimated at approximately 3,700 works by 2025.[5] Since the publication of the Mawangdui silk texts, an enormous number of annotated translations, specialized studies, and popular interpretations have appeared, far exceeding the total output of all previous eras combined. Although the general public remains largely unaware of developments in this specialized field, it is possible that some readers have already begun to apply insights drawn from Laozi to new domains such as artificial intelligence, management, and commercial strategy.
The breakthroughs that Mair and Liu brought to the Dao De Jing were therefore significant, each in their own way. Their parallel lives reveal more than a shared scholarly interest in an ancient classic. Their influence unfolded quietly within two separate intellectual traditions: the West and China. Together, they illuminate two distinct modern engagements with the Chinese classics, and perhaps also the increasingly consequential divergence between two modern worlds.
Endnotes:
[1] The phrase is most closely associated with the Israeli sociologist Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, especially his essay “Multiple Modernities” in the 2000 special issue of Dædalus.
[2] English translation by author of this article. Original quotation in Chinese by: 余英時Yu Ying-Shih,《猶記風吹水上鱗》You ji fengchui shui shang lin, 弘雅三民圖書股份有限公司Hongya Sanming Book Co. Ltd., 2022.
[3] ”meaning” and “significance” are used in English in this otherwise Chinese text: 余英時Yu Ying-Shih,《猶記風吹水上鱗》You ji fengchui shui shang lin, 弘雅三民圖書股份有限公司Hongya Sanming Book Co. Ltd., 2022.
[4] Statistic estimated by ChatGPT, 2026-07-06, Prompt Question: “How many English translations of the Tao Te Ching were there before and after Victor H. Mair’s translation?”
[5] Statistic estimated by DeepSeek, 2026-07-06, Prompt Question:「請估算一下中國歷史上總共出版過多少對《道德經》的研究，請按時期列出 。」
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