China and the West

Tschuang-tse [Zhuangzi]. Reden und Gleichnisse des Tschuang-tse. Deutsche Auswahl von Martin Buber [ID D11978].
Quellen :
Chuang Tzu. Chuang Tzu : mystic, moralist, and social reformer. Translated from the Chinese by Herbert A. Giles. [ID D7731].
The sacred books of China : the texts of taoism. Transl. by James Legge [ID D2559].
Chuang Tsze. The divine classsic of Nan-hua : being the works of Chuang Tsze, taoist philosopher. With an excursus, and copious annotations in English and Chinese by Frederic Henry Balfour [ID D5889].
Lao-tse. Tao te king. Aus dem Chinesischen ins Deutsche übersetzt, eingeleitet und commentirt von Victor von Strauss [ID D4587].

Maurice Friedman : The influence of taoism came relatively early in Buber's thought, and unlike the Vedãnta persisted in his mature thought. While on the one hand Buber seemed to reject some aspects of taoism that he had earlier espoused, on the other this dialogue with Taoism remained of central importance to him throughout his life. Buber's long essay on The teaching of the tao had a great impact on the German Youth movement. Buber was one of the idols of German youth, not because of what he wrote on Hasidism, but because of his publication of Zhuangzi and his essay The teaching of the tao. In this essay Buber was not concerned so much with metaphysical thought as with being as embodied in what he calls the 'central man'. In this connection he dealt with Laozi, whose path he saw as pointing to the 'perfected' or 'completed' man - an image of the human which cannot be spelled out or analyzed. He compared this way many times to the Heraclitean Logos, to Heraclitus whose sense of the opposites was close to the 'yin' and 'yang' of the tao. Each thing reveals the tao through its unity of existence, he declared. Thus the tao is found only in the manifoldness of all things. Here we have unmistakably the mysticism of the particular and the concrete...
In The teaching of the tao Buber spends a good deal of time contrasting two types of action, the one which interferes in the web of things, and the other which, instead of interfering, rests in the work of the inner deed, but is an affecting of the whole, where things happen as you will them, and yet you seem to be doing nothing, where you rule people and yet they do not know that they are ruled. He relates this to the will, the willing person. There is no longer any division between him and what is willed. What is willed becomes being. The perfected man does not interfere in the life of things, he does not impose himself on them, but helps all beings to their freedom. Through his unity he leads them to the unity, he liberates their nature and their destiny, he releases Tao in them. In the life together of human beings, the ruler rules in the same way. He guards and unfolds the natural life of the kingdom. To do this he does not use violence ; he just makes a gesture with his hand. What he wants to happen happens, and yet the people think that they are ruling themselves.