C. F. # 3: Hey Jude, Daoism, Cross-Pollination
(The cool footnotes are coming fast and furious as 2023 draws to an end. This is impeding my progress on my next major newsletter installment, a deep dive into soybeans and organic farming and nitrogen pollution and the capitalist perversion of agriculture which I had hoped to publish before Christmas. But readers seem to like these footnotes, and the serendipity of this particular divertissement proved impossible to ignore.)
While doing some stair climbing on a rainy morning this Monday, I was listening to the most recent chapter of Andrew Hickey’s fantastic A History of Rock in 500 Songs, an epic three-hour-plus exploration of the Beatles’ Hey Jude.
As is inevitably the case with this podcast, I learned something that I did not know: The lyrics of George Harrison’s song The Inner Light, released by the Beatles in 1968, are based on a chapter from Laozi’s Dao De Jing, (“The Way and its Power.”)
As Hickey explains it:
After John and George had appeared on the David Frost show talking about the Maharishi, in September 1967, George had met a lecturer in Sanskrit named Juan Mascaró, who wrote to Harrison enclosing a book he’d compiled of translations of religious texts, telling him he’d admired “Within You Without You” and thought it would be interesting if Harrison set something from the Dao De Jing to music.
I own this song on vinyl, but the last time I listened to it before today was well before I ever stepped foot in the Far East or became even cursorily acquainted with Daoism. Of course now I wonder: it’s entirely possible that the sitar-inflected Beatles songs I listened to over and again as a child were my first cultural exposure to Asia. Could Within You Without You have set me on the path to Taiwan? Did George Harrison turn me on to the Dao???!!!
More interestingly, Hickey observes:
The song has come in for some criticism over the years as being a little Orientalist, because in critics’ eyes it combines Chinese philosophy with Indian music, as if all these things are equally “Eastern” and so all the same really. On the other hand there’s a good argument that an English songwriter taking a piece of writing written in Chinese and translated into English by a Spanish man and setting it to music inspired by Indian musical modes is a wonderful example of cultural cross-pollination.
Regular readers will know that my inclination is to subscribe to the later interpretation, since this newsletter is all about cross-pollination. I’m also delighted by the parallel of the hybridity of The Inner Light with my last cool footnote, tracking the genetic journey of rice to China to India to Central Vietnam and back to China. Not to mention the historical truth that the intermingling of Indian Buddhism and Chinese Daoism nurtured the emergence of Chan (Zen) Buddhism. Food, religion, philosophy, and music: where would we be without the cross-pollinators?
The Dao De Ching text in question is usually numbered as Chapter 47. There are as many different translations as there are translators, but I enjoy this one, from the version concocted by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English.
Without going outside, you may know the whole world.
Without looking through the window, you may see the ways of heaven.
The farther you go, the less you know.
Thus the sage knows without traveling;
He sees without looking;
He works without doing.
(Which also turns out to be a remarkably accurate description of the researching and writing process for this post!)
Lastly, if there are any Beatles fans in your life who are unacquainted with the work of Andrew Hickey, turn them on! They will love you for it. When I received the email this weekend that the topic of the newly dropped episode was Hey Jude, my first thought was Merry Christmas to ME!