Chapter 8 The Genesis of Dao Knowledge at the Beginning of Orientalism
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Abstract
This chapter aims to ascertain and analyze the flow of knowledge of the Dao and the translation of Daoist terms over several generations of Jesuits in China, from the Jesuit Figurists to the French Sinologist Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat. It also aims to determine the role of the Jesuit translators in the spread of Dao and Daoist terms in China and Europe. I will draw exploratory lines connecting the Jesuit translators of the Dao, their notes on the Dao, and the Daoist classics, thereby rendering a definite genealogy of the Dao from the Jesuits to their successors. This, it is hoped, may prove that their focus on the Dao was no mere historical contingency, but rather that their translations helped form the genesis of Dao knowledge and presented Chinese philosophy fairly on the world stage while their contemporaries shaped prejudiced outsider-interpretations out of the cultural attitudes of European imperialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.