ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Martha Cheung's Anthology of Chinese Discourse on Translation. Her very first entry contains the famous opening lines of the Laozi, the eponymous title of a book that later came to be known as the Daodejing Classic on the Way and Virtue. Martha's juxtaposition of 'Nothingness is the name of the beginning of the world' with 'Substance is the name of the mother of all things' says explicitly that there are two origins, two sources, one called the beginning of the world, and the other called the mother of all things. This chapter traces some of the intellectual lines of force that smuggled ancient Chinese thought into Western esotericism and, later, Idealism and Romanticism. Dualisms like substantial versus insubstantial and real object versus just talk are Western constructs that are utterly alien to Daoist thought, with its strong orientation to undifferentiated experience.
