Publisher's Synopsis
This is the first edition from the only Latin translation manuscript that has been found until now. According to the researchers, there might have been four translations of this Ancient Chinese Classic but the only one that has been discovered is currently located in the British Library (Chin. Ms. Chin. H20).
The manuscript was donated or sold to Mathew Raper by Jean-Baptiste Joseph de Grammont, then given to the Royal London Society in 1788. The famous British sinologist James Legge, who saw the manuscript, said that the translator's intention was to demonstrate the Mysteries of the Most Holy Trinity and of the Incarnate God, which were anciently known to the Chinese nation. In fact, the translation is attributed to Jean-François Noëlas, a disciple of Jean-François Foucquet, who in turn, had been a disciple of Joachim Bouvet, the initiator of the Figurism movement. This movement considered that some periods of Chinese history, wherein the Universal Truth could be found, did not belong solely to the Chinese but to all of humanity. Furthermore, the Figurists believed in the existence of various allusions to the Christian Mysteries in the Chinese Classics, especially in the Yijing. Thus, influenced by this view, the translator's arrangement of the Daodejing manuscript from the British Library that has been consulted for this edition has a different order of texts compared to the original Chinese text, because he intended to put those chapters related to the Christian Mysteries first. However, in this edition the Canonical Chinese order is followed and the commentaries referring to the Mysteries have been omitted.
