James Legge理雅各

Style & Daoist names

James Legge, The Chinese name 'Li Yage' (James Legge)

Period

Qing dynasty (British)

Dates

1815 — 1897

Role

SinologistTranslatorMissionary

Birthplace

Huntly, Scotland

Life

James Legge was a Scottish missionary and sinologist, a member of the London Missionary Society, who in his early career headed the Anglo-Chinese College in Malacca and moved it to Hong Kong, before becoming, in 1876, the first Professor of Chinese at the University of Oxford. His systematic English translation of the Four Books and Five Classics in The Chinese Classics (1861–1872) laid the foundations of Western sinology. Late in his career, at the invitation of Max Müller, he translated the Daodejing, the Zhuangzi, the Treatise of the Most High on Action and Response and other texts for volumes 39 and 40 of the Sacred Books of the East series, publishing them in 1891 under the title The Texts of Taoism — the first collection of Daoist scripture translations in the English-speaking world to be complete in form, with lengthy introductions and annotations. Legge treated the Daoist scriptures through the methods of classical philology, basing his translations on the commentaries of Wang Bi and Guo Xiang, and distinguishing "philosophical Daoism" from "later religious Daoism" — a dichotomy that exerted deep and lasting influence in the West (and was much criticized and revised by later scholars such as Michel Strickmann and Kristofer Schipper). His translation of the Treatise of the Most High on Action and Response was also an early instance of bringing morality books into Western view. Legge's translations remain in circulation today, marking a crucial stage in the transmission of Daoism to the West.

Contributions & Influence

• Translated the Daodejing, the Zhuangzi and the Treatise of the Most High on Action and Response into English, collected as The Texts of Taoism (1891)
• First Professor of Chinese at Oxford, establishing the scholarly standards of English-language sinology
• Approached Daoist texts through philological method and extensive introductions, pioneering Western Daoist studies
• His division between "philosophical Daoism" and "religious Daoism" long dominated Western discourse and later became the object of scholarly reappraisal

Works

• The Texts of Taoism (Sacred Books of the East, vols. 39–40, 1891)
• The Chinese Classics (1861–1872)
• The Religions of China (1880)