Editorial Reviews  
Book Description  
Documents uncovered over the past twenty-five years from the tombs of Chinas ancient elite have sparked a revolution in scholarship about the development of early Chinese thought, in particular the origins of Taoist philosophy and religion. In this remarkable book, Harold Roth exhumes the seminal text of TaoismInward Training (Nei-yeh)not from a tomb but from the pages of the Kuan Tzu, a voluminous text on politics and economics in which this mystical tract had been "buried" for centuries. Inward Training is composed of short poetic verses devoted to the practice of breath meditation, and to the insights about the nature of human beings and the form of the cosmos derived from this practice. In its poetic form and tone, the work closely resembles the Tao-te Ching; moreover, it clearly evokes Taoisms affinities to other mystical traditions, notably aspects of Hinduism and Buddhism. Roth argues that Inward Training is the foundational text of early Taoism and traces the book to the mid-fourth century, B.C. (the late Warring States period in China). These verses contain the oldest surviving expressions of a method for mystical "inner cultivation," which Roth identifies as the basis for all early Taoist texts, including the Chuang Tzu and the world-renowned Tao-te Ching. With these historic discoveries, he is able to reveal the possibility of a much deeper continuity between early philosophical Taoism and its later religious expressions than scholars had previously suspected. Roth provides an elegant and luminous complete translation of the original. In his analysis, he seeks to explain what Inward Training meant to the people who wrote it and to explain how this work came to be "entombed" within the Kuan Tzu and why the text was largely overlooked after the early Han period.  

About the Author  
Harold D. Roth is associate professor of religious studies and East Asian studies at Brown University. He is the author of The Textual History of the Huai-Nan Tzu.