writers. The has been done by Mr. Giles in his version of Chuang-tzŭ , which is otherwise for the most part so good. Everywhere on his pages there appears the great name “God;”—a blot on his translation more painful to my eyes and ears than the use of “Nature” for Tao by Mr. Balfour. I know that Mr. Giles’s plan in translating is to use strictly English equivalents for all kinds of Chinese terms. The plan is good where there are in the two languages such strict equivalents; but in the case before us there is no ground for its application. The exact English equivalent for the Chinese tʽien is our heaven. The Confucianists often used tʽien metaphorically for the personal being whom they denominated Ti (God) and Shang Ti (the Supreme God), and a translator may occasionally, in working on books of Confucian literature, employ our name God for it. But neither Lao nor Chuang ever attached anything like our idea of God to it; and when one, in working on books of early Taoist literature, translates tʽien by God, such a rendering must fail to produce in an English reader a correct apprehension of the meaning.
There is also in Chuang-tzŭ a peculiar usage of the name Tʽien . He applies it to the being whom he introduces as masters of the Tao , generally with mystical appellations in order to set forth his own views. Two instances from book XI will suffice in illustration of this. In par. 4, Huang-ti does reverence to his instructor Kuang Chʽêng-tzŭ, saying, “In Kuang Chʽêng-tzŭ we have an example of what is called heaven,” which Mr. Giles renders “Kuang Chʽêng-tzŭ is surely God.” In par. 5, again, the mystical Yün-chiang is made to say to the equally fabulous and mystical Hung-mêng, “O heaven, have you forgotten me?” and, farther on, “O heaven, you have conferred on me (the knowledge of) your operation, and revealed to me the mystery of it;” in both passages Mr. Giles renders tʽien by “your holiness.”
But Mr. Giles seems to agree with me that the old Taoist had no idea of a personal God, when they wrote of Tʽien or Heaven. On his sixty-eighth