The phenomenological method, however, limits physics in certain respects since it seeks "lived time" as the ground of the time that physics measures; and it points back as well to a long tradition of time-meditation (Hegel, Kant, Descartes, Augustine, Aristotle, Plato, Parmenides, etc.), and, earlier still, to the most ancient of time-travelers: those mystics, east and west, who roam in time where they please, since they "transcend life and death, beginning and end" (
Chuang Chou, The World, 3rd century BC).--Carl Levenson, Idaho State University.
Throughout, references will be made to sources of Taoist influence available to Yeats, with an emphasis on the main Taoist texts: Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching and Chuang Chou's Chuang Tzu.
For example, his prose poems, which have often puzzled reviewers, seem to be modeled on the meditative tales--often presented in dialog form- of Chuang Chou's Chuang Tzu (written around 300 BCE), the second most important text in the Taoist canon.
(40) Chuang Chou had put it in the context of the ever-changing tao: "No one lives longer than one who dies in childhood; a man who lives eight hundreds years is young.
(107) They rework an earlier poem from 'Vacillation' (1932), in three stanzas which could represent an acknowledgement of the three texts by Chuang Chou, Sun Tzu, and Lao Tzu which remain, to the present day, the most popular sources of Taoist ideas in the West:
(31) Chuang Chou, the other main thinker in Taoism and the attributed author of the Chuang Tzu, is mentioned in 'The Critic as Artist' (Oscar Wilde, 'The Critic as Artist', in Ibid., p.
This text will be referred to in subsequent notes as 'Chuang Chou').