A COLLATED AND CRITICAL STUDY OF THE <i>XIANG'ER COMMENTARY</i> TO THE <i>LAOZI</i>. 老子想爾注校證. Edited and translated by DavidChai. Collected Works of Jao Tsung‐i, 5. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2024. Pp. xix + 30 figures + 282. Hardback, €129.00.

This volume results from a project by the Jao Tsung-i Academy at Hong Kong Baptist University, which envisages English language publications of some of Jao's studies. Based in Hong Kong, Professor Jao (also Ráo Zōngyí 饒宗頤) was one of the twentieth century's most influential sinologists. When, in 1956, he published work on the Dūnhuáng manuscript entitled Xiǎng'ěr 想爾, which was held in the British Library, he changed the specialists' perceptions of the beginnings of the Daoist religion and the Lǎozǐ's Wirkungsgeschichte. He continued to publish on the text's origin, whose author was probably the second-century CE founder of the Daoist church, and the text's complex role in intellectual and religious history. While the Xiǎng'ěr was not transmitted, its moral rules were influential enough to have been extracted as the “Xiǎng'ěr precepts” and included in a text of the Daoist canon. Jao's pervasive knowledge and interpretative inquisitiveness linked, for solid reasons, Xiǎng'ěr passages to the thoughts on breath (qì) expressed in fourth and third centuries BCE advice on meditation, literary essays from the second century CE, ideas on social policy expressed in the religious Scripture on Great Peace, and the frequently debated vitality rituals of the early Daoist church. Thanks to the intellectual historian David Chai's thoughtful work, Jao's proposals, firstly accompanied by a complete documentation of their sources, are now a pleasure to work with. In 1997, Stephen Bokenkamp published his English translation of the Xiǎng'ěr. Despite considerable stylistic differences between his and Chai's adaptation of Jao's Mandarin translation, both go mainly in the same direction. The Western reader may, in good trust, turn to the volume at hand for a convenient bilingual reading of the old text, which, central as it is, deserves more mainstream attention.