The Project Gutenberg eBook, Study of Inner Cultivation, by Anonymous, Translated by Bruce Linnell

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Title: Study of Inner Cultivation

Author: Anonymous

Release Date: January 15, 2012 [eBook #38585]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STUDY OF INNER CULTIVATION***

Copyright (C) 2011 by Bruce Linnell

Note that an accompanying PDF file correctly displays the English and
Chinese characters.

                Guanzi, Number 49 : Study of Inner Cultivation
                  Translated by Bruce R. Linnell, PhD (2011)

Background ————— The "Nei Ye" or "Nei Yeh", variously translated as "Inner Enterprise", "Inner Training", "Inner Cultivation", or "Inner Development" (and "Inward" may be substituted for "Inner" in any of the previous), is generally considered to have been written around 350-300 BC (after Confucius, but before the Dao De Jing). Its influence can be seen in many aspects of Daoism (including the Dao De Jing itself) and in traditional Chinese medicine. It is a brief work (only 1/5 as long as the Dao De Jing), written in short, often rhymed, verses. It has been preserved in the "Guanzi", a collection of diverse writings that was compiled during the third century BC. There is no name given for the author.

While available for millennia, the Nei Ye has just started to receive serious scholarly attention in the last few decades. It describes how to build up and store various spiritual forces such as Qi and "essence" (there is no indication that "essence" refers to reproductive fluids, which appeared later in Chinese thought), and how to control one's heart/mind. It shows no influence of any school of Chinese religious or philosophical thought, other than using a few basic Confucian terms. It does have a few concepts in common with the work by Mencius, but as they were probably both written about the same time it is impossible to tell who influenced who (or if they were both influenced by something else).

While the Nei Ye has many similarities, including writing style, with the Dao De Jing, it also differs significantly in its perspective. For instance, there is no social commentary, no political or military advice, nor any explanation of how the universe was created or how it works. There is no mention of yin and yang, "non-action" or "non-being", nor does it advocate a feminine/receptive attitude. It does not criticize Confucianism, nor does it present the sage as a person with some kind of better understanding of reality. Even the terms Dao and De apparently don't mean the same thing in the Nei Ye as they do in the Dao De Jing - for example, both Dao and De are described in some passages as being able to "arrive" and "settle" in a person.

There are two scholarly books that discuss the Nei Ye at length and provide complete translations :

   W. Allyn Rickett, "Guanzi : Political, Economic, and Philosophical
      Essays from Early China", vol. 2, 1985 (revised 1998).

   Harold D. Roth, "Original Tao: Inward Training (Nei-yeh) and the
      Foundations of Taoist Mysticism", 1999.

There is also another very recent translation available on the web, that is copyright-free as far as I can determine :

   Robert Eno, "Guanzi : The Inner Enterprise", 2005
      www.indiana.edu/~p374/Neiye.pdf

Translations often differ significantly because there are at least five early manuscripts to draw upon, dating from around 1300 to 1600 AD. In addition, Chinese scholars in the last few centuries have made many suggested modifications to the existing original sources. Attempting to reverse centuries of possible transcription errors, they replaced many symbols which apparently make no sense with symbols that have a very similar shape and/or sound (often to complete a rhyme), and whose meaning seemed more appropriate. To make matters worse, there are no readily available printed copies of the oldest manuscripts in their original form, so the Chinese symbols used for this work came from various web sites and were cross-referenced against Roth's book (below). Every care has been taken to ensure that the symbols used here are correct, but how accurately they match the original manuscripts is unknown.

The Translation Process ———————————- Often, translators just try to get the general "feel" of what the Chinese is trying to say, and then write an English sentence that means about the same thing. What I tried to do (for no other reason than to see if it could be done) was to preserve as much of the original Chinese as possible by always using each symbol in the English sentence, and an exact translation of each symbol wherever possible, with as few added English words as possible. This sometimes results in sentences that are somewhat stilted in English, but that I hope retain more of the original Chinese way of thinking. I also tried to use the same English word for the same Chinese symbol whenever possible, so that the English reader could better see what the writer(s) were trying to say. Occasionally more than one English meaning for a symbol fits equally well, and the translator must pick just one. However, I sometimes took both meanings and combined them into a single phrase, such as "heart/mind", or "fair and just". Exact translations are interpreted when they either don't make as much sense literally, or when the resulting phrase would be awkward in English.

The approach used here for the corrected symbols was to always use the original symbol whenever possible, and only use a suggested correction when the original symbol makes no sense.

While I originally intended to present each sentence "as is" (with no additional interpretation of the sentence as-a-whole on my part), there are many sentences which do not seem to make sense without a context. The more I study the Nei Ye, the more I have come to believe that it is talking about aligning the heart/mind, not the physical body, to receive Dao, De, Qi and essence. In particular, I believe that some references to "form" are referring to the "form of the heart/mind" (a phrase which is used explicitly three times), and so have added that phrase in two more places, indicated by [brackets]. In addition, a couple of references to "returning" are assumed to be referring to returning to one's nature (a phrase which is used explicitly once), and they are also indicated by brackets. There are a few more personal assumptions indicated by brackets. Other scholarly and personal interpretations are explained in the footnotes.

The section (—-) and sub-section (blank line) divisions are entirely due to the hubris of the translator. As far as I know, there are no section markers in the original manuscripts, because Rickett, Roth, and Eno often use different divisions.

Definitions
—————-
Some of the terms that are used repeatedly need to be