Dao De Jing 1

he 4th century BCE Chinese classic, the Dao De Jing (道德經), attributed to the legendary sage Laozi (老子), is often read today as a discourse on metaphysical and mystical thought.  However, its composition in the middle of a 260-some year long Chinese civil war, and the fact that a number of its later chapters are directly addressed to rulers of small states, makes it much more likely that it was a sort of handbook on rulership in its original context.  In fact, its earliest commentaries in Chinese were written by a political advisor.  While it drew on cosmological themes, these themes were largely employed for the purposes of exposing what it believed to be flawed ways of governing (mostly Confucian ones) and counseling its readers on wise ruling.  

In this series of forthcoming posts, I'd like to translate and make a few comments on some of the text's most interesting chapters on governing and society.  Of course, I invite your thoughts.  And, if anyone would like to discuss a chapter I leave out, feel free to bring it up.  Apologies in advance for the uneven spacing in some of these posts, I'm not sure why the format messed me up here, but I'm not able at this point to figure out how to change it.


Literally over a hundred published translations of the Dao De Jing into English exist, it's actually the most-frequently translated text from any Asian philosophical tradition into Western languages.  But the plasticity of the Chinese language itself and the varying perspectives of its translators make every rendition unique.  Everyone always talks about how to translate the first chapter.  So, here is my version.

DDJ 1

道可道         Paths (that) can guide
非常道.        are not constant paths.
名可名.        Names (that) can name
非常名.        are not constant names.
無名            "Nothing" is called
天地之始;     the beginning of heaven and earth;
有名            "something" is called
萬物之母.     the mother of the myriad things.
故常無欲      Thus, if constant nothing is preferred
以觀其妙;     subtleties will be seen;
常有欲         if constant something is preferred,
以觀其徼.     boundaries will be seen.
此兩者，      These two things,
同出            proceeding forth together,
而異名.        yet are differently named.
同謂之玄.     Together, they are called dark,
玄之又玄，   dark and ever more dark,
衆妙之門.     the gateway to a multitude of subtleties.

First, some semantic and grammatical notes.

The first has to do with how the all-important word 道 (often rendered "way") is to be understood here.  It's an extremely common word among all philosophical persuasions in ancient China, and like a host of words, it can be used both nominally and verbally.  As a noun, 道 can mean "path," "course," "method" or "way," though the last of these is more abstract and covers the range of its major nominal meanings, e.g. "a way to go somewhere," "the way things work," "the way one lives or does things" ect.  The character combines the words "foot" or "going on foot" and "head," and so has the sense of a person walking in some set direction.  I like what Roger Ames has recently written about the word having a "processual" or "gerund"-like sense, akin to such words in English as "work" or "building," which have the denotations of both a completed product as well as the process involved in making the product.  Now, as a transitive verb in classical Chinese, 道 almost always means "to guide" or "to give someone directions," which is to say it has to do with speech that informs someone of how something is done or arrived at.  Finally, in most cases in classical Chinese, there is no morphological difference between singular and plural forms of a noun (almost no plural endings), and one has to determine from the context which one is meant.  I have chosen the word "paths" above because it seems to me, in the present chapter, what is being talked about are at least two things as well as two approaches to understanding and comporting with the world.  At least here then, 道 is not some rarified, divine "thing," but a way to approach living, just as in the parallel sentence 2, 名 are "names" that can name things.  The chapter is primarily about how to live, and only secondarily about reality.

The only other major grammatical point I want to make regards how to translate sentence 3.  Lots of translations have something like: "without names, heaven and earth began; with names, heaven and earth have a mother."  In my view, several recent translators have definitively shown that this kind of rendition is wrong.  There are two reasons.  First of all, this sort of translation completely botches the rather simple grammar of the clauses.   天地之始 and 萬物之母 are unambiguously noun phrases ("the beginning of heaven and earth," "the mother of the ten thousand things" respectively), and so to think 無 and 有 are in this case adjectival quantifiers (which they in many other cases can be) of 名, as in "without names," "with names," would leave these clauses with no explicit predication.  It seems clear then that, in both these clauses, 名 is a verb ("named" or "called"), and so 無 and 有 are what one calls the alternative noun phrases in question.  In addition to the grammar, there is one other fact about the stanza that supports this reading.  Sentence 5 begins with the words 此兩者 "these two things."  The last word 者 is very strictly used as an individual identifier; it cannot refer to two modes of something (lacking and having something) but only to distinct things, which again in this case are  無 and 有.  One may of course still want to quibble over how to render these last two words, but something like the above is the only sensible way to render the grammar of sentence 3.

Ok, enough with grammar and semantics; what is the stanza saying?  The chapter talks about three pairs of alternatives, "nothing and something," "preferring either nothing or something," and "seeing subtleties or boundaries."  With "nothing," one has the beginnings of heaven and earth, which is subtle and can't be talked about precisely, while with "something" one has the "mother of the myriad things," or rather, the production of all the diverse things and beings in the midst of the world where we find ourselves.  


In fact, there are two ways that two clauses of sentence 4 could be sensibly translated.

The first is the one most commonly found in translations:

故常無欲         Thus, constantly lack desires
以觀其妙;        so subtleties can be seen;
常有欲以         constantly have desires
觀其徼.           so boundaries can be seen.

Or, one can do it this way, which I've chosen above:

故常無             Thus, (if) constant nothing
欲以觀其妙;      is preferred, subtleties will be seen;
常有                (if) constant something
欲以觀其徼.      is preferred, boundaries will be seen.

I've talked about this with a friend of mine who is a far better classical Chinese scholar than I am for some time, and he argues for the second alternative, and thinks it's more consistent with the distinction between "these two things" (此兩者) that starts the very next sentence.  It's possible he is right.  But the first rendering is also quite appealing because I don't think the entirety of the text ever argues that either "nothing" or "something" are constant or can be constantly abided with; they always alternate in the goings-on of the world.  Once again, how one parses a line in Classical Chinese is always tricky.

But I do think, on either reading, one gets a similar message and a similar connection between the lines.  The beginning of heaven and earth is shrouded in mystery, because they emerged from "nothing," from "emptiness," from "non-distinctness," and so that beginning cannot easily be talked about or described or understood.  However, the world as it exists now, with all its distinct things, their differences, their specific relations, is concrete, and so it can be spoken about and understood, and the functions of things in the world as it stands now can be delineated (their boundaries can be seen).  So, if one either "prefers to concentrate on nothing," or, alternatively, has "no desires," one can see the subtleties of the world, the "nothing" that, in chapter 11, makes all things useful.  On the other hand, if one "prefers to concentrate on something," or alternatively, "has desires," one will see the "something" of things, which, again in chapter 11, gives things their concrete specificity, their matter, their benefit.  Depending on what one prefers, or depending on whether one is desireless or desiring, different patterns and values in the world will be disclosed, and one will see these different patterns and values in different ways, and thus live life differently according to them.  Neither path is "constant" or "ever-present" (常), for, even though they "emerge" or "proceed" together (同出), they can be alternatively adopted, either by different people or by the same person.  But even though perhaps in some ultimate sense, these two "things" of the world, "nothing" and "something," "subtlety" and "limits" go together or are united (同), exactly how they do or are so is a mystery, it is shrouded in "darkness" (玄. which is actually a color, a deep dark red).  

For all the abstruse metaphysical speculation to which this strange stanza has led in both China and in comparative discussions over the centuries, it is very significant that it is immediately followed by half a dozen chapters on the best way, among various alternatives, to govern.  The Dao De Jing is very much a political text.