James Legge (1815-97) is primarily known as the great missionary translator of the Confucian Classics . However, after his installation as the first Professor of Chinese at Oxford University in 1876, Legge was a close associate of Max Müller and participated in the production of the Sacred Books of the East (1879East ( -1910)), the foundational documents for the new discipline known as the comparative science of religions. By virtue of his translations for Müller's Sacred Books (1891), Legge was the most important figure contributing to the late Victorian invention of 'Taoism' as a 'world religion' located 'classically', 'essentially', and 'purely' within certain ancient texts or 'sacred books', especially a single enigmatic text or Taoist 'bible' known as the Tao Te Ching, attributed to the sage Lao Tzu. It was Legge's Protestant (and resolutely anti-Catholic) paradigm of an early philosophically and morally pure Taoism (identified with the Tao Te Ching), as distinguished from a later ritualistic and magical Taoism (associated with the machinations of the Taoist 'popes') that set the context for the Western understanding of the Taoist tradition for much of the twentieth century. Recent revisionary developments in Taoist scholarship reflect some of the important methodological issues of interpreting the 'special nature' of Chinese religious tradition first debated by Legge and others such as Herbert Giles during the Victorian period.
1999 Academic Press
James Legge and Sinological Orientalism
James Legge (1815-97) is today vaguely, if at all, remembered as the heroically industrious missionary scholar who translated the Chinese Confucian Classics (Legge 1861(Legge -72, 1879(Legge , 1882(Legge , 1885(Legge , 1893-95)-95). The simple biographical facts of Legge's long life-a Scottish Congregationalist of the 'middling' class stationed in Malacca and Hong Kong for the London Missionary Society who later, upon retirement from the mission field, became the first Professor of Chinese at Oxford in 1876-seem to reveal an unbending dedication to a righteous God and a tedious scholarship that is insufferably Victorian. It has been Legge's fate to be yet another 'forgotten Victorian sage', memorable only as an anachronistic monument of steadfast evangelical piety and quaintly wholesome Victorian earnestness-or, in Legge's own characteristically humble self-description, a 'moderate Calvinist' with a 'habit of working' (Legge 1897).
Legge was somewhat like the ancient Chinese sage known to the West as Confucius: someone who simply 'believed in and loved the ancients'. Both were just resolute translator-scholars, or to use Confucius' words, simple 'transmitters'. Neither Legge nor Confucius was, to borrow from Legge's translation of this famous line from the Analects, a cultural transformer or 'maker' (Legge 1893, p. 195). This analogy with Confucius's own mock self-appraisal suggests some of the problems with traditional under-estimations of Legge's contributions to nineteenth-century discourse concerning Chinese tradition and to the overall Western attitude, and specialised academic approach, to other cultures and religions. In fact, a close reading of the record of Legge's intellectual and professional odyssey, spanning almost all of the nineteenth century, documents a much more richly complex and liminal portrait of a man whose life mirrors much of the intellectual and religious turmoil, and many of the significant cultural transformations, of the Victorian era. 1