The Ineffable Trigrammaton
Jean Pierre Abel-Remusat's Translation of Daodejing

This paper explores the first French translation of Laozi’s Daodejing, published by the first French Chinese professor Jean Pierre Abel-Remusat (1788-1832) in 1823, entitled: Memoire sur la vie et les opinions de Lao-Tseu, philosophe chinois du VIe siecle avant notre ere, qui a professe les opinions communement attribuees a Pythagore, a Platon et a leurs disciples. This translation contains only five (1, 25, 41~42, 14) out of the eighty one chapters of Daodejing and is reinterpreted systematically as a text that secretes the most sacred mystery of the Sovereign of the world. The significance of Abel-Remusat’s translation of Daodejing is that it lays the foundation of Modern European scholars' interpretations of Taoism. Inspired by Abel-Remusat, three approaches to Daodejing, sinological, religious and philosophical, are proposed by his students Stanislas Julien (1797-1873) and Guillaume Pauthier (1801-1873), as well as the German philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) respectively. The contribution of this paper is the discovery that Abel-Remusat, not only inherits the early figurist Jesuits’theological interpretation of thought of Laozi, goes a step further asserting that the Trigrammaton Yi-Hi-Wei ( 夷、希、微，IHV) discovered in chapter 14 of Daodejing is a correct Chinese transcription of the Hebrew Tetragrammaton YHWH. The former is in his view, very uniquely, a rather more precise symbol as it represents the three attributes of the Creator: “being, intelligence and life.”