A Study of Taoism in Thoreau’s Works

Abstract

On the thesis entitled “The Puzzle of Taoism in Thoreau’s Works” in Comparative Literature, Vol 60, I have tried to demonstrate the assumption that Thoreau must, in one way or another have been acquainted with Taoist literature and thus integrated Taoist principles into his own thoughts and writings. In spite of acknowledging these striking affinities between Thoreau and Taoism, most critics ruled out the possibility that Thoreau might have been familiar with Taoist works. It was because certainly Thoreau makes no reference to this school or its representatives directly or indirectly. For this reason, when they professed to discuss the relationship between Thoreau’s philosophy and Taoism, they have ascribed it to mere coincidence rather than influences. In order to correct this erroneous scholastic attitudes toward Thoreau's Taoism, on the previous thesis, I have focused on proving that the affinities between Thoreau's and the Taoists' thought is as the result of his enthusiastic reading of the Taoists' works. To do so, the direction of my study was concentrated on collecting several convincing pieces of evidence showing the process of how and when Thoreau became familiarized with Taoist literature. During his college days, Thoreau first read about Rémusat’s study of Lao Tzu in Victor Cousin’s Introduction to the History of Philosophy, and that in the periods between the 1810s and 1840s, Rémusat translated a number of versions of the Tao Te Ching into French, which were definitely accessible to Thoreau. Furthermore, through Pauthier's footnotes in Les Livres Sacrés de l’Orient, Thoreau not only learned of Lao Tze and his Tao Te Ching, but also grasped the essential notion of Taoism from the translater's comparison between Confucianism and Taoism. In order to give more concrete shape to the reasoning that Thoreau must have been influenced by Taoism, this study focused on investigating how the main philosophic principles of the Taoists― Wu-Wei Zi-Ran(無爲自然): letting nature be, leaving nature as it is. Nature itself remained intact― were assimilated with Thoreau's Transcendental Idealism. While describing less-known but significant sources of Thoreau's Taoism from a comparative perspective, the argument that Lao Tzu exerted influence on Thoreau seemed, in my view, fairly established. To analyze their affinities from a comparative perspective, some significant parallels between the Taoists' and Thoreau's thoughts, specifically, their similar mystical conceptions of Nature, their interesting symbolism of water, the ideas of living simply in harmony with nature and their refusals of the unjust policy of the government and the political institution of man were investigated. Like the Taoists, who used the metaphor of water to express their idealism of Wu-Wei Zi-Ran(無爲自然), for example, Thoreau metaphysicized water as the ontological equivalent― as the symbol of a living and a life-giving part of nature. Like Lao Tzu and Chuang, while he used the metaphor of water to express his Transcendental ideas, Thoreau showed an endearing reverence toward water. Like the Taoist, to Thoreau, water was an emblem of the highest good, or the Tao. Like Chang Tzu, who described water as a perfect mirror to recover his spirit of all the dross and corrupting matter which encrust him, Thoreau likened the mind of the Transcendental self to a mirror of water. The segments of evidence that have been demonstrated, in my view, are sufficient to conclude that Thoreau must, one way or another, have been acquainted with Taoism. and that, therefore, the Taoist ideas should be treated as "influences" rather than "parallels." It is hoped that the arguments I have mentioned above have offered sufficient evidence to repudiate the casual claims that the influences of Taoist thought are tangential.