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This Substack assumes a basic standard of human decency. Those who are purposefully cruel, dehumanize others, show contempt for the law, or celebrate violence — or those who impose such people on the rest of us through political support — should not be here.

(Read more here.)

谷神不死 是謂玄牝

玄牝之門 是謂天地根

綿綿若存 用之不勤

Mandarin & English

Here is the chapter with the pinyin and a character-by-character glossing interleaved between lines:

(1) 谷神不死，是謂玄牝。

gǔ shén bù sǐ, shì wèi xuán pìn.

[valley/ravine] [spirit/numen/divine] [not] [die/perish], [this] [call] [profound/dark/obscure] [female animal/valley].

(2) 玄牝之門，是謂天地根。

xuán pìn zhī mén, shì wèi tiān dì gēn.

[profound/dark/obscure] [female animal/valley] [’s] [gate], [this] [call] [[Heaven][Earth]=cosmos] [root/basis].

(3) 綿綿若存，用之不勤。

mián mián ruò cún, yòng zhī bù qín.

[thread/floss/continuous] [thread/floss/continuous] [as if/seem/like] [exist/remain], [use] [it] [not] [toil/struggle].

The Shape (Seeing the Whole)

Now we come to the Spirit itself. Consider two mountain peaks facing each other, and the Valley between.

A voice calls out,

An echo replies,

A Sound

From Nothing,

A Something

Without Form,

Neither a Nothing

Nor a Something,

A concentration

Of Pure Breath-Energy.

This is the Valley Spirit.

— Liu Yiming (1734–1821) (via Minford)

With just 25 characters in three lines, this is the shortest chapter we have seen so far (and the third shortest of the entire text). It is also the first chapter to make the feminine its central metaphor for the dao 道. Chapter 1 gave us a passing reference to “the mother of all things” in its fourth line, but here the image becomes an extended theme — and one we will return to again and again.

The first line opens with the “valley spirit,” an epithet for the dao 道, then names it in its final two characters: something like “profound feminine” or “dark female.”

The second line picks up those same two final characters and makes them the first half of an image — “gate of the dark female” — with the birth-canal metaphor clear and reinforced by the phrase that follows: “root of the cosmos.”

Note that both lines point toward emptiness. The first is not concerned with the material valley — its slopes, its floor, perhaps a stream — but with the “spirit” residing in the space they enclose: where Liu’s echo sounds. And the womb is implicitly behind the “gate of the dark female” of line two.

The final line opens with a reduplicative binome — mian mian 綿綿 — a doubled character used to imagistic effect, a device we will encounter many times in later chapters. And the entire final line ties the chapter to the ideal of an inexhaustible source emerging from emptiness: a loose mass of wadding or floss, womb-like perhaps, from which thin threads are spun endlessly. There is thus a kind of three-chapter arc here, continuing the bellows of Chapter 5 and the opening statement about the Dao 道 itself in Chapter 4.

Line by Line

The above is the shape of the chapter as I see it. But let’s take a closer look at the exact words and phrasings, as well as how others have interpreted and translated them.

Lines 1-2

(1) 谷神不死，是謂玄牝。

gǔ shén bù sǐ, shì wèi xuán pìn.

[valley/ravine] [spirit/numen/divine] [not] [die/perish], [this] [call] [profound/dark/obscure] [female animal/valley].

(2) 玄牝之門，是謂天地根。

xuán pìn zhī mén, shì wèi tiān dì gēn.

[profound/dark/obscure] [female animal/valley] [’s] [gate], [this] [call] [[Heaven][Earth]=cosmos] [root/basis].

These two lines need to be examined as a unit, because of the anadiplosis — your Word of the Day, meaning “rhetorical repetition at the beginning of a phrase of the word or words with which the previous phrase ended”1 — of xuan pin 玄牝, which closes line 1 and opens line 2.

Pin 牝 refers specifically to a female animal, typically one used for breeding — not female in general, and not a human woman. But it also carries a secondary sense, “valley,” which sets up a nice parallel with gu 谷 at the start of line 1.

According to Kroll, gushen 谷神 is an epithet for the dao 道. And recall that the end of Chapter 1 used xuan 玄 and men 門 to point to the dao as well — 玄之又玄，衆妙之門 (“deep and deeper yet, gate of all mysteries”). So it is safe to say this imagery is all about the dao 道 itself, not poetry for its own sake.

Across representative translations, gushen 谷神 reliably becomes “spirit of the valley” or “valley spirit,” and gen 根 almost invariably becomes “root.” Victor Mair’s rendering is typical:

The valley spirit never dies— / it is called “the mysterious female”;

The gate of the mysterious female / is called “the root of heaven and earth.”

Brook Ziporyn is the only one in my collection whose rendering registers that pin 牝 refers to animals:

The spirit of the valley, imponderable and undying: / an obscure she-beast.

The gateway of this obscure she-beast: / the root of heaven and earth.

These two also show some of the range on xuan 玄. Ziporyn, obscurely, goes with “obscure” — the only one in my collection to do so. Mair’s “mysterious” is the most common choice, taken by over half my translators. “Profound” is used by Chan and Yang, and Ivanhoe chooses “enigmatic.”

After “mysterious,” the next most common choice for xuan 玄 is “dark.”

Here is David Hinton:

The valley spirit never dies. / It’s called dark female-enigma,

and the gateway of dark female-enigma / is called the root of heaven and earth

And here is Red Pine, with unusual choices for both pin 牝 and men 門:

The valley spirit that doesn’t die / we call the dark womb

the dark womb’s mouth / we call the source of Heaven and Earth

Red Pine’s “womb” for pin 牝 and “mouth” for men 門 push the birth imagery further than the graphs strictly say, but they draw out what the anadiplosis was building toward: a single sustained image of origin. That image comes to a head in the final line, where the chapter turns from naming the source to describing how it gives forth.

Line 3

(3) 綿綿若存，用之不勤。

mián mián ruò cún, yòng zhī bù qín.

[thread/floss/continuous] [thread/floss/continuous] [as if/seem/like] [exist/remain], [use] [it] [not] [toil/struggle].

The reduplicative binome that opens the final line gives me a chance for a second Word of the Day — “phonaesthetics,” the study of the beauty and pleasantness associated with the sounds of certain words or parts of words (and a fun fact for fellow LOTR fans: the term was coined by JRR Tolkien).

But the doubling of mian 綿 is not only about sound — it works to imagistic effect as well: a thin thread of silk, going on and on (and on). The thread’s extreme thinness is suggested by the next two characters, ruo cun 若存 — “as if it exists.” And the ending gives us the only (potential) instruction in the whole chapter, suggesting that this unceasing thread is as inexhaustible as the bellows of Chapter 5 — “use it without struggle” is an acceptable rendering of the final phrase.

From our panel of translators for lines 1-2, Hinton takes that final phrase as just such an imperative:

gossamer so unceasing it seems real. / Use it: it’s effortless.

Mair implies it can be used, but stops short of an instruction proper:

Gossamer it is, / seemingly insubstantial, / yet never consumed through use.

And Ziporyn and Pine both opt for straightforward declaratives.

Ziporyn:

A gauzy fabric ever spreading, a mere semblance of a presence— / but gently active, / and activated gently.

and Pine:

as elusive as gossamer silk / and yet it can’t be exhausted

The split here is worth noticing: qin 勤 (“toil/struggle”) negated by bu 不 can be heard as a description of the source — it never wears out — or as an instruction to us — draw on it without straining. Nothing in the graphs forces the choice, and the line supports either.

With its short length, its imagery of valleys and silk, its balanced (roughly) four-beat phrasing, and its phonaesthetic binome near the end, this is one of the most songlike of the archaic chapters, very reminiscent of the Shijing (“Book of Songs”), the fountainhead of Chinese poetry.

The resemblance is not just a matter of imagistic mood either. The Shijing runs on exactly these devices — reduplicative binomes, end-stopped four-beat lines, dense sound-patterning — and a chapter like this one lets us hear how much the Daodejing inherited from that formal world, regardless of what it went on to do with it philosophically.

Sitting With It

Heshang Gong says of the first half of line 3 (“Soft and gentle. This is her way of existence”) — “(The breath) should be soft and gentle, unnoticeable and subtle, returning to be as though not there.” (Reid translations)

Try this visualization exercise for a minute or three:

Somewhere quiet, sit comfortably and breathe easily — mouth shut, so through your nose only. Imagine the air around you as a soft, boundless wad of silk floss — a source you can draw from that never runs dry. Begin with the out-breath: gently empty your lungs from the abdomen, a little more than usual but without straining, and then simply release.

Notice that the in-breath starts on its own — air drawn in on the body’s own recoil, before you add any effort — and let it come as a fine, unbroken thread of silk spun in from that endless mass.

Draw it gently, so the thread never breaks; keep it continuous, with no holding or pausing at the top; then let the exhale go easily and draw the next thread finer still.

Let each breath grow quieter and thinner of its own accord, until the thread is so fine it seems barely there at all — “continuous silk, seeming-perhaps-to-exist” (mian mian ruo cun 綿綿若存). If you ever feel short of breath or lightheaded, the drawing has outrun the body — return to an ordinary breath and the image of the silk mass, and begin again.

Another View

Here’s a psychoanalytic take on the image of xuan pin 玄牝 (“dark feminine”) — it’s not a reading of the Daodejing of course, but rather the cross-cultural archetypal aspects of the image — courtesy of the Jungian Erich Neumann:

“In its entire phenomenology, the elementary character of the Feminine appears as the Great Round, which is and contains the universe. Its positive and negative aspects encompass the upper and the lower, the nearest and the remotest. Night sky, earth, underworld, and primordial ocean are correlated with this feminine principle, which originally appears as dark and darkly embracing...

“Whether, as in countless myths, the source of all life is the primordial ocean or whether it is earth or heaven, these sources have one thing in common: darkness. It is this primordial darkness which bears the light as moon, stars, and sun, and almost everywhere these luminaries are looked upon as the offspring of the Nocturnal Mother.” — The Great Mother (1955; Manheim translation 1962)

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This Substack assumes a basic standard of human decency. Those who are purposefully cruel, dehumanize others, show contempt for the law, or celebrate violence — or those who impose such people on the rest of us through political support — should not be here.

(Read more here.)

天地不仁 以萬物為芻狗

聖人不仁 以百姓為芻狗

天地之間 其猶橐籥乎

虛而不屈

動而愈出

多言數窮不如守中

Mandarin & English

Here is the chapter with the pinyin and a character-by-character glossing interleaved between lines:

(1) 天地不仁，以萬物為芻狗；

tiān dì bù rén, yǐ wàn wù wéi chú gǒu;

[[Heaven][Earth]=cosmos] [not] [benevolent/humane/kind], [thereby/use/take] [[ten thousand][things]=all creatures] [do/as] [straw] [dog].

(2) 聖人不仁，以百姓為芻狗。

shèng rén bù rén, yǐ bǎi xìng wéi chú gǒu.

[[sage/holy][person]=Sage] [not] [benevolent/humane/kind], [thereby/use/take] [[hundred][surnames/clans]=the people] [do/as] [straw] [dog].

(3) 天地之間，其猶橐籥乎？

tiān dì zhī jiān, qí yóu tuó yuè hū?

[[Heaven][Earth]=cosmos] [’s] [between/space/interval], [it] [like/similar to] [[sack/bellows][pipe/flute]=bellows or ‘bagpipe’] [(interrogative particle): “hoo”]?

(4) 虛而不屈，動而愈出。

xū ér bù qū, dòng ér yù chū.

[empty] [and/yet] [not] [exhaust/yielding], [move/change/act] [and/yet] [more/increasingly] [emerge/produce/expel].

(5) 多言數窮，不如守中。

duō yán shuò qióng, bù rú shǒu zhōng.

[much/many] [speak/words] [frequently/often] [end/deplete/exhaust], [not] [as if/like] [keep/guard/preserve] [inner/center].

The Shape (Seeing the Whole)

“Why do we spend so much time talking? Is it not because this gives us a tangible sense of our identity, confirmed by being part of social life? Sometimes this also is the motivation of the self-important person in authority, anxious to appear to her people as someone ‘Good.’ By contrast, if we are just looking into ourselves, by ourselves, we easily lose a tangible sense of our own existence. Our being seems evanescent and empty. But this Emptiness is worth holding onto. Attended to and cultivated, it is a potential source of endless energy.” — Michael LaFargue

Chapter 5 breaks cleanly into three parts: lines 1-2 are a tight parallel couplet, lines 3-4 are an image with its explication, and line 5 is a standalone aphorism.

The first two lines are exactly parallel — each ten characters, with only positions 1-2 and 6-7 changing between them — and the parallelism carries the argument: the cosmos’s indifference toward individual creatures is offered as a model for how the Sage should rule. And though the idea of a sage or ruler being “not benevolent” might sound harsh for a spiritually-inclined text, as we will see in the next section, this is easily misread.

Lines 3 and 4 pair up as image and gloss. Line 3 offers the picture of the cosmos as a bellows (or perhaps a musical instrument; see below), and line 4 spells out what it means. That picture — an empty, inexhaustible bellows in constant productive motion — echoes Chapter 4’s opening lines about the Way being empty yet inexhaustible in use.

The final line then stands alone as a maxim, one of several like it in the Daodejing, on the exhaustion of overtalking and the value of inner quietude.

The connection between these three parts is looser than in the previous chapters. LaFargue’s summary above is one way to hear them as a single meditation — the anxious talking of the self-important person (line 5), the empty productive interior he or she might otherwise inhabit (lines 3-4), and the disposition that refuses the performance of benevolence (lines 1-2). But keep in mind that the Daodejing is not a treatise; it is a composite text, its parts bundled by thematic resonance rather than continuous argument. The reader is invited to hear resonances, not follow syllogisms.

Line by Line

The above is the shape of the chapter as I see it. But let’s take a closer look at the exact words and phrasings, as well as how others have interpreted and translated them.

Lines 1-2

(1) 天地不仁，以萬物為芻狗；

tiān dì bù rén, yǐ wàn wù wéi chú gǒu;

[[Heaven][Earth]=cosmos] [not] [benevolent/humane/kind], [thereby/use/take] [[ten thousand][things]=all creatures] [do/as] [straw] [dog].

(2) 聖人不仁，以百姓為芻狗。

shèng rén bù rén, yǐ bǎi xìng wéi chú gǒu.

[[sage/holy][person]=Sage] [not] [benevolent/humane/kind], [thereby/use/take] [[hundred][surnames/clans]=the people] [do/as] [straw] [dog].

Wing-Tsit Chan produced a most straightforward rendering of these lines:

Heaven and Earth are not humane ([ren]). / They regard all things as straw dogs.

The sage is not humane. / He regards all people as straw dogs.

Three characters and compounds here are worth dwelling on: ren 仁 (“humane”), chugou 芻狗 (“straw dog”), and baixing 百姓 (“hundred clans”).

Start with ren 仁. This was the key virtue in Confucianism, so the opening is a critique of Confucian thought. Paul Fischer’s parenthetical tic “(contrivedly)” hints at the kind of benevolence being targeted:

Heaven and Earth are not (contrivedly) good, because they take the myriad things to be as straw dogs. Sages are not (contrivedly) good (either), because they take the people to be as straw dogs.

Ames & Hall are even more explicit about the ritualized nature of this benevolence, using the phrase “institutionalized morality:”

The heavens and the earth are not partial to institutionalized morality. / They take things (wanwu) and treat them all as straw dogs.

Sages too are not partial to institutionalized morality. / They treat the common people as straw dogs.

But even setting aside the dig at Confucian ritual, being “not humane” does not mean being its opposite. As Chan notes in his commentary, “the Taoist idea here is not negative but positive, for it means that Heaven and Earth are impartial, have no favorites, and are not humane in a deliberate or artificial way.”

For this reason I am skeptical of David Hinton and Victor Mair’s translations for this couplet; both render “not humane” as “inhumane.” But bu 不 is a simple negation, not a word implying “the opposite of.” Here is Hinton:

Heaven and earth are Inhumane: / they use the ten thousand things like straw dogs.

And the sage too is Inhumane: / he uses the hundred-fold people like straw dogs.

And DC Lau’s “ruthless” is more perplexing still:

Heaven and earth are ruthless, and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs; the sage is ruthless, and treats the people as straw dogs.

But it is only those three in my collection of over two dozen translations who render bu ren 不仁 in such a harsh light; the vast majority incline toward a simpler “not humane.”

Now let’s look at the perplexing term chugou 芻狗 (“straw dog”).

To understand it we can turn to Chapter 14 of the Zhuangzi. Here is Martin Palmer’s translation of the relevant section:

“[Musician Chin said,] ‘The straw dogs, before they are set out for the sacrifice, are kept in a basket which is covered by a beautifully designed embroidery. Meanwhile, the representatives of the dead and the official in charge of the rituals pray and prepare themselves to fetch the straw dogs. However, once they have been presented, they are just trampled on, head and back, by those around. The left-over bits are swept up and burnt by the grass-cutters. That’s all they’re worth by then...’”

Ames & Hall relate this well to “non-benevolence,” moving beyond Chan’s simple impartiality toward a more temporal understanding — where (as Ecclesiastes has it) “to every thing there is a season.” They note that “‘straw dogs’ as sacrificial artifacts are celebrated according to the proper season, then abandoned when that season has passed. Even a clutch of straw is entitled to reverence at the proper time and place. In the natural cycle, all things have their moment, and when that moment passes, they must pass with it.”

Interestingly, the use of straw dogs as ritual objects of sacrifice seems not to have been particularly widespread in ancient China, or perhaps was lost over the centuries. Neither Wang Bi nor Heshang Gong, the vastly influential (circa) 3rd-century CE commentators, takes the characters as a compound; both instead read a “for” between “straw” and “dog.”1

Here is the relevant part of Wang Bi’s commentary: “Heaven and Earth do not make the grass grow for the sake of beasts, yet beasts eat grass. They do not produce dogs for the sake of men, yet men eat dogs” (Lynn translation).

And Heshang Gong: “people are highly valued, (yet) Heaven and Earth see them as they see grass and straw (for) dogs and farm animals… Sages see the hundred clans as they see grass and straw for dogs and farm animals. They do not honour people with any expectation of reciprocal courtesy in their minds” (Reid translation).

Finally, the compound baixing 百姓 (literally “the hundred clans”) likely does not mean “people” in a general sense, much less “common people,” despite the latter phrase’s popularity among translators. The Daodejing has other words for people and groups — ren 人, min 民, and zhong 衆 , for example, all of which are used repeatedly in the text.

Baixing 百姓 is a specific choice, one that Arthur Waley traces back to the Book of Songs and the Hongfan chapter of the Book of History. Its use suggests that Laozi means not “all people” in general but groups of political actors — which implies in turn that “the Sage” here is the sage ruler, in keeping with the Daodejing’s general address to those who govern.

With all of that in view, I think that Lee & Wang arrive at a nice rendering of the first two lines. They drop the tight parallel and make some strong interpretive choices, but words like “charity” and “bias” get to the philosophical heart of things, and their inserted “sacrificial” makes plain at once what straw dogs were.

Lee & Wang:

Heaven and earth are without charity, / treating all things as sacrificial straw dogs.

Likewise, having no bias, / the sage sees all as straw dogs.

Lines 3 & 4

(3) 天地之間，其猶橐籥乎？

tiān dì zhī jiān, qí yóu tuó yuè hū?

[[Heaven][Earth]=cosmos] [’s] [between/space/interval], [it] [like/similar to] [[sack/bellows][pipe/flute]=bellows or ‘bagpipe’] [(interrogative particle): “hoo”]?

(4) 虛而不屈，動而愈出。

xū ér bù qū, dòng ér yù chū.

[empty] [and/yet] [not] [exhaust/yielding], [move/change/act] [and/yet] [more/increasingly] [emerge/produce/expel].

Except for the compound tuoyue 橐籥, lines 3-4 are straightforward, and translators typically land somewhere near these versions from John Minford and Addiss & Lombardo:

Minford:

The space between Heaven and Earth / Is like a Bellows,

Empty but never exhausted. / The more it is worked, / The more issues forth from it.

Addiss & Lombardo:

Yet Heaven and Earth / And all the space between

Are like a bellows: / Empty but inexhaustible, / Always producing more.

Every translator except one in my collection takes tuoyue 橐籥 as a bellows and nothing more — But Edmund Ryden picks up a potential dual meaning:

Heaven and earth are like the bellows and the blow-tube:

As emptiness increases, they inhale less and less; / As they press together, they expel more and more.

Ryden’s argument for the dual reading comes from the Guodian tomb text: “In the received version the second character is read as yue and simply seen as another word for bellows. The Guodian version suggests that originally the Way was being compared both to the bellows and to the bamboo pipe, which is still often used for making a fire.”

But this, I think, misrepresents the received tradition. Wang Bi, its foundational source, explicitly decomposes the compound: “tuo [open-ended sack] here means a paituo [bellows], and yue [pipe] means a yueyue [mouth organ]” (Lynn translation).

Heshang Gong likewise seems to hear a musical instrument, given his emphasis on musical energy: “The center of a bagpipe is hollow and empty, yet people can obtain musical energy from it” (Reid translation). Dan Reid adds that the instrument referred to might be something like the sheng, which dates back to at least 1100 BCE: “literally ‘bag-flute.’ Heshang Gong’s commentary seems to suggest a musical instrument, perhaps similar to the sheng.”

Why virtually all modern translators drop the musical reading, I am not sure. The bellows is the more striking image, true; but music was central to Confucius’s ethical vision — fundamental to ritual practice and the cultivation of virtue, paired with li 禮 (ritual propriety) as the twin pillars of the civilizing project. And since the chapter’s first line already invokes the core Confucian virtue of ren 仁, tuoyue 橐籥 could well be a callback to that opening — deepening the chapter’s engagement with Confucian thought.

Ryden’s line 4 is also unusual. Rather than emphasize the inexhaustibility of empty space, he works with the in-and-out movement of the bellows, like breath. As his note explains: “they inhale less and less: another possible reading is ‘the vacuum is never exhausted’, in which case this line and the next both describe the limitless capacity of the bellows. My reading sees a contrast between the inward and outward movements of the bellows.”

Line 5

(5) 多言數窮，不如守中。

duō yán shuò qióng, bù rú shǒu zhōng.

[much/many] [speak/words] [frequently/often] [end/deplete/exhaust], [not] [as if/like] [keep/guard/preserve] [inner/center].

The final line is a self-cultivation aphorism, an imperative that follows from the rest of the chapter. The same three translators as we used for lines 3-4, plus Paul Fischer, give us the range of options in broad strokes.

Addiss & Lombardo nicely bring back the root exhaust to tie this line to the preceding two — “inexhaustible” in line 3, “exhausting” here:

Longwinded speech is exhausting. / Better to stay centered.

Minford is similar:

“Many Words are soon spent. / Hold Fast to the Center.”

These people all use “center” for zhōng 中, as is common. Also common are words like “within,” as in Fischer:

Much speech and frequent exhaustion is not as good as preserving what is within.

Fischer is unusual, however, in taking the first four characters as two pairs — “much speech” and “frequent exhaustion.” Far more common is to read “much” and “frequent” as both modifying speech, with “exhaust” as the verb, as Minford and Addiss & Lombardo do.

Ryden makes two interpretive leaps in his rendering of the final line:

To talk too much is merely chatter; / It cannot match retaining emptiness.

First, he effectively drops qiong 窮 (“exhaust”), exchanging it for “merely chatter.” Second, he assumes that zhong 中 was really meant to be zhong 盅. His note explains: “traditionally the character zhong is read as the ‘mean’ or the ‘centre’, but it seems to make more sense to read it as a homophone which can mean ‘empty’.”

Does it indeed “make more sense”? Not to one who knows much about Daoist internal cultivation, in which zhong 中 carries a specific technical meaning: the inner center of the person, guarded and cultivated in breathing and meditation practices that continue to this day. The character appears a dozen times in the short Neiye (內業: “Inner Work”) alone, concentrated in the chapters most focused on cultivation practice. (We will take up the Neiye and this contemplative tradition more fully in a context essay after Chapter 10.)

Let’s return to Michael LaFargue, whose commentary opened the previous section, for a complete translation of the entire chapter:

“Heaven and Earth are not Good

they treat the thousands of things like straw dogs.

The Wise Person is not Good

he treats the hundred clans like straw dogs.”

The space between heaven and earth isn’t it like a bellows?

Empty, but not shrivelled up,

set it in motion and always more comes out.

Much talking, quickly exhausted.

It can’t compare to watching over what is inside.

Sidebar on Textual Variants

The only major difference between the Mawangdui texts and the received version is in the final line. Red Pine points it out and explains it well:

“The only textual variation of note involves the appearance in both Mawangtui texts of wen (hear) in place of yen (talk) in line [five]. But since wen (hear) was often used for wen (ask), the meaning would not be significantly different whichever reading one prefers.”

Sitting With It

The chapter closes on shou zhong 守中 — “guard the (inner) center.” In the Daoist internal cultivation tradition just mentioned, this is not metaphor. The center is felt bodily, located in the middle of the lower abdomen, just a couple inches below the navel — what Chinese medicine and internal cultivation practices call the lower dantian (丹田: “elixir field”).

Try the following this week. Pick a solitary chore — washing dishes, folding laundry, sweeping, chopping vegetables, etc. Set a repeating one-minute timer on your phone and then begin.

When the timer goes off, notice what your mind is doing. Almost certainly you will be chattering to yourself — narrating, planning, remembering, arguing with someone who isn’t there. Even though it is just self-talk, it is a form of the duō yán 多言 — “much speech” — that the chapter names, running just as busily inside the head as it does out loud in conversation.

So when the timer dings, stop the internal chattering, and move your attention down to your lower abdomen. Sink into it a little. Feel your body from the inside, from that center outward. Then return to the chore.

The timer will go off again. You will be chattering again. Notice; sink; return. Repeat.

Another View

Second century AD Stoic Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, writing about the cosmos and the sage both being “not benevolent”:

“Some things nature is indifferent to; if it privileged one over the other it would hardly have created both. And if we want to follow nature, to be of one mind with it, we need to share its indifference. To privilege pleasure over pain—life over death, fame over anonymity—is clearly blasphemous. Nature certainly doesn’t.” — Meditations 9.1 (Gregory Hays translation)

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道沖而用之或不盈

淵兮似萬物之宗

挫其銳, 解其紛

和其光, 同其塵

湛兮似或存

吾不知誰之子象帝之先。

Mandarin & English

Here is the chapter with the pinyin and a character-by-character glossing interleaved between lines:

(1) 道沖而用之或不盈。

dào chōng ér yòng zhī huò bù yíng.

[Way] [empty/infuse/surge] [and/yet] [use] [it] [perhaps/sometimes] [not] [fill/full/overflow].

(2) 淵兮似萬物之宗。

yuān xī sì wàn wù zhī zōng.

[deep/abyss/profound] [(exclamatory particle: “shee”)] [resemble/seem] [[ten thousand][things]=all creatures] [’s] [ancestor/source/exemplar].

(3) 挫其銳，解其紛，

cuò qí ruì, jiě qí fēn,

[crush/grind/press down] [his/her/their] [sharp/keen/point], [loosen/untie/release] [his/her/their] [tangle/confusion],

(4) 和其光，同其塵。

hé qí guāng, tóng qí chén.

[harmony/peace/blend] [his/her/their] [light/shine/glory], [join/together/similar] [his/her/their] [dust/world].

(5) 湛兮似或存。

zhàn xī sì huò cún.

[deep/clear/tranquil] [—shee—] [resemble/seem] [perhaps/sometimes] [exist/remain].

(6) 吾不知誰之子，象帝之先。

wú bù zhī shéi zhī zǐ, xiàng dì zhī xiān.

[I/me/my] [not] [know/understand] [who] [’s] [child/offspring], [image/representation/simulate] [highest god/emperor] [’s] [previous/first/ancestor].

The Shape (Seeing the Whole)

“In passages such as this one, I think it is the profound modesty of the language that offers what so many people for so many centuries have found in this book: a pure apprehension of the mystery of which we are part.” — Ursula K Le Guin

This is a relatively short chapter, and it begins a string of short chapters that will run for a while. It breaks into three parts — lines 1-2, 3-4, and 5-6 — with the last two lines less a pair than a summary and reversal.

It is also one of the Daodejing’s more “mystical” chapters. While metaphysical interpretations can be made for nearly any chapter in the text, in most cases they have to be imposed. Here, though, a metaphysical position is openly staked: this is the first chapter to speak of what I’ll call the “Cosmic Dao” — and because that Dao 道 is ineffable, I call it mystical.

The first two lines offer this Dao 道 as a kind of ineffable “ground of being” — “the mystery of which we are part” is Le Guin’s phrase. Of course the ineffable cannot be described so much as pointed toward, so Laozi reaches for hedge words like huo 或 (“perhaps”) and si 似 (“seem”), and for the paradox of an empty, but unfillable, thing.

Lines 3-4 share their structure with lines 3-4 of Chapter 3: four pairs of words, each joined by qi 其 (“his/her/their”). They also match, verbatim, the final four pairs from a six-pair chain in Chapter 56. And as in those chapters, the indeterminacy of qi 其 leaves open who is doing what to whom — more on that in the next section.

Lines 5-6 close the chapter. The fifth line echoes the second: despite the different characters, both open with phrases that could be translated as “deep — shee! — it seems…”. But where line 2 makes the Dao 道 the source of all things (recalling line 4 of Chapter 1), line 5 seems to, perhaps, question its very existence.

The final line then takes what looks to me like a polemical turn. The word di 帝 means the highest god — in Shang times it was called Shangdi 上帝, and with the founding of the Qin dynasty it came to be incorporated as a title: huangdi 皇帝 (“emperor”). But during the Warring States it still carried the sense of highest god, and could also point more broadly to gods and deified ancestors. We will see how various translators render it below — but whatever the English, this line would have told a practitioner of traditional religion that the Dao 道 comes before even that which they worship.

Line by Line

The above is the shape of the chapter as I see it. But let’s take a closer look at the exact words and phrasings, as well as how others have interpreted and translated them.

Lines 1-2

(1) 道沖而用之或不盈。

dào chōng ér yòng zhī huò bù yíng.

[Way] [empty/infuse/surge] [and/yet] [use] [it] [perhaps/sometimes] [not] [fill/full/overflow].

(2) 淵兮似萬物之宗。

yuān xī sì wàn wù zhī zōng.

[deep/abyss/profound] [(exclamatory particle: “shee”)] [resemble/seem] [[ten thousand][things]=all creatures] [’s] [ancestor/source/exemplar].

These opening lines present the Dao 道 as something empty and yet inexhaustible — drawn on endlessly without ever running dry — and as the deep source from which all things come.

Most of the couplet’s characters are straightforward, but one worth pausing on is chong 沖. Its everyday sense runs toward water in motion — surge, pour, rush — and Brook Ziporyn is the one translator in my collection who keeps that motion alive rather than settling the character into a single sense:

The course: / a gushing through / a jumbling together / an emptying out— / yet harnessed for use by every random unfilled space.

So deep an abyss it seems / the very source of all the ten thousand things—

Most translators resolve chong 沖 toward one of the senses folded into that “emptying out” — empty. This is not a stretch, since chong 沖 is closely related to zhong 盅, an empty vessel. Ames & Hall render the line on exactly that basis, and say in their notes that they read chong 沖 as zhong 盅:

Way-making being empty, / You make use of it / But do not fill it up.

So abysmally deep— / It seems the predecessor of everything that is happening (wanwu).

Arthur Waley introduces the idea of a vessel, and its emptiness is something one can endlessly draw from:

The Way is like an empty vessel / That yet may be drawn from / Without ever needing to be filled.

It is bottomless; the very progenitor of all things in the world.

The vessel image is helpful. The Dao 道 is not empty in the sense of being nothing, but in the sense of being inexhaustible. We will meet this idea multiple times in Chapter 11.

Before moving on to the next lines, two smaller points are worth a digression.

The first is a word none of these three translates: huò 或 (“perhaps”). Read more literally, the first line runs something like “use it, and perhaps it does not fill.” Losing that hedge arguably loses that “modesty of language” which Le Guin praises, and suggests a level of certainty about the ineffable that I don’t think the Sage would have.

I point this out because huo 或 is the first of the chapter’s hedges — repeated in line 5, followed by si 似 (“seem”) and at the end by bu zhi 不知 (“I do not know”) — the vocabulary by which Laozi keeps declining to say more about this thing than that it seems to be so.

The second is a question of pronouns and objects of reference — about where the emptiness belongs. All three translations above, and the vast majority I’ve read attach the not-filling to the Dao 道. But the line can also be read with the emptiness landing on the one who uses it. As Red Pine has it:

The Tao is so empty / those who use it / never become full again

On this reading the point is not that the Dao 道 is an inexhaustible well but that drawing on it keeps you from filling back up — from swelling again with the self, the scheming, that fullness a Daoist is better off without.

The question of pronouns and objects also happens to be the key question of lines 3-4.

Line 3-4

(3) 挫其銳，解其紛，

cuò qí ruì, jiě qí fēn,

[crush/grind/press down] [his/her/their] [sharp/keen/point], [loosen/untie/release] [his/her/their] [tangle/confusion],

(4) 和其光，同其塵。

hé qí guāng, tóng qí chén.

[harmony/peace/blend] [his/her/their] [light/shine/glory], [join/together/similar] [his/her/their] [dust/world].

These lines echo lines 3-4 of Chapter 3 in structure, with the indeterminacy of qi 其 again forcing an interpretive choice. But this time, the fact that the same four pairs also turn up in Chapter 56 — which is clearly about self-cultivation and thus things one should do — suggests that here they more likely describe what the Dao 道 itself does. Almost all translators chose this route. But even so, there is still opportunity for multiple readings.

Wing-Tsit Chan reads the four pairs as the Dao acting on itself:

It blunts its sharpness, / It unties its tangles. / It softens its light. / It becomes one with the dusty world.

Red Pine is with the majority in reading them as what the Dao does to all creatures — Chan’s “its” becomes “our”:

it dulls our edges / unties our tangles / softens our light / and merges our dust

Ames & Hall keep it general, neither reflexive nor directed at any particular object (we will address their unusual final phrase shortly):

It blunts the sharp edges / And untangles the knots; / It softens (he) the glare / And brings things together on the same track.

A minority does turn the lines into instructions to the reader. The early commentator Heshang Gong already reads them this way — glossing “untie the tangles,” for instance, as a matter of releasing knots of hatred by giving one’s thoughts over to the effortlessness of the Dao 道.

Yang Jwing-Ming makes the imperative explicit, which fits his “Qigong Interpretation” approach:

Blunt down the sharpness and untie the tangles, / harmonize the light (with others), and situate with dust.

But so does the more scholarly DC Lau:

Blunt the sharpness; / Untangle the knots; / Soften the glare; / Let your wheels move only along old ruts.

Lau also changes the final phrase to one like Ames & Hall’s above. But this is not a difference in manuscripts, as one might expect: the one complete example from the tomb has tong qi chen 同其塵 just like the received text: “join with the dust” — chen 塵 meaning something like the dust of the ordinary world. Of the two Mawangdui copies, B reads 同其塵 exactly as the received text does, while A preserves only 同 before breaking off into lacuna. Neither offers a “rut.” The character Lau renders that way is the same 塵 everyone else reads as dust.

So why does Lau, and then Ames & Hall several decades later, make such a change?

In his notes, Lau argues the sense from a parallel in the work of the third-century CE literatus Lu Ji. Lau points to a line — 比迹同塵 — from one of Lu Ji’s poems, in which 同塵 sits beside 比迹 (“matching tracks”), and reasons that Lu Ji treats the two phrases as synonymous. If 同塵 means the same as “matching tracks” there, then 塵 is being used for the rut or groove worn into a road, not for dust — and Lau carries that sense back into Chapter 4, giving us wheels in old ruts rather than a settling into common dust.

Ames & Hall show no such reasoning; their “same track” simply arrives, without a note defending it. But writing forty years after Lau — whose was the standard scholarly translation for a generation — they were almost certainly influenced by him.

To join the dust is to mingle with the world, to come down to the level of common things. To keep to the old ruts is to fall in with its worn grooves. The two are not far apart — both are images of not holding oneself above the ordinary — but they part ways enough to matter.

Lines 5-6

(5) 湛兮似或存。

zhàn xī sì huò cún.

[deep/clear/tranquil] [—shee—] [resemble/seem] [perhaps/sometimes] [exist/remain].

(6) 吾不知誰之子，象帝之先。

wú bù zhī shéi zhī zǐ, xiàng dì zhī xiān.

[I/me/my] [not] [know/understand] [who] [’s] [child/offspring], [image/representation/simulate] [highest god/emperor] [’s] [previous/first/ancestor].

The fifth line echoes the second — another word implying depth, another exclamatory xi 兮, another hedge in si 似. Like yuan 淵 before it, zhan 湛 carries a cluster of watery, downward senses, and the translators spread across them. Robert Henricks hears the submerged sense:

Submerged! It seems perhaps to exist.

We don’t know whose child it is; / It seems to have [even] preceded the Lord.

Ziporyn takes the clarity in the character — zhan 湛 can mean clear or translucent as well as deep:

So translucent, / a mere semblance of a presence,

something without known parentage: / an image of what precedes / even the highest deity.

And Ames & Hall keep to depth:

So cavernously deep— / It only seems to persist.

I do not know whose progeny it is; / It prefigures the ancestral gods.

Whatever the shade of zhan 湛, the fifth line does something remarkable with its hedges. This is the most fundamental thing the chapter can point to — the source of all things, from line 2 — and yet the text only says it seems, perhaps, to exist: si huo cun 似或存, “seem” and “perhaps” stacked one atop the other. Such reticence is woven throughout the chapter, and here reaches its densest point.

Then the final line, and — to my mind — the chapter’s real payoff: xiang di zhi xian 象帝之先. The key character is di 帝. In the Warring States it meant the highest god — in Shang times, Shangdi 上帝 — and by extension the gods and deified ancestors generally. All three translations above read it as a divinity of some kind, and the range they show is telling: “the Lord” (Henricks), “the highest deity” (Ziporyn), “the ancestral gods” (Ames & Hall). Others in my collection simply write “God.” But however they render it, the sense is the same: whatever sits at the top of the old religious order, the Dao 道 comes before it.

But di 帝 gained a second life. With the founding of the Qin dynasty, centuries after this text was composed, di 帝 was folded into the imperial title huangdi 皇帝 — “emperor.” That sense postdates the Daodejing, but the two are close enough that it can bleed backward. Yang Jwing-Ming writes:

(It is) so profound, / it seems to exist. / I don’t know whose offspring is it? / It has existed (even) before the (heaven) emperor.

The choice of “emperor” here comes at least in part from the commentary Yang is following. In his comments he quotes the Yuan-dynasty scholar Wu Cheng, who glosses the word thusly: “Emperor means the master of the heaven (ie, Nature).” But notice what Wu Cheng is doing — he is using the ruler-word to name a cosmic office, the one who presides over Heaven and Nature, not a political throne. In his hands “emperor” is a metaphor for a divine, ordering role.

The issue is that the metaphor does not survive the crossing into English. “Emperor,” cut loose from Wu Cheng’s gloss, lands in a modern reader’s ear as a political institution that postdates the text. Yang’s parenthetical “(heaven)” is an attempt to carry Wu Cheng’s “master of heaven” back into the line, to keep the emperor a cosmic one.

There is also the question of how we read xiang 象 and xian 先 in the final line. Yang flattens the phrase into plain chronology (“it has existed before”), while Ziporyn keeps xiang 象 near its image sense (“an image of what precedes”) and Ames & Hall render it “prefigures.”

Turning xian 先 into a simple temporal priority, the Dao existing earlier in time than di 帝 is the most literal construal, and the most tempting to a modern eye. But I take it as a continuous derivation — not a temporal “this before that,” but a continuous process of creation. The Dao 道 is what everything issues from, and therefore that which nothing precedes.

Sitting With It

With the first three chapters I was able to find simple personal experiments to illustrate the ideas they expressed. But this chapter is so dedicated to the ineffable “Cosmic Dao” that I can’t think of an exercise you can do over the course of a week to get an experiential feel for what is being discussed.

In fact, field reports suggest that there’s no shortcut1 — the only way to reliably induce this kind of experience is through an extended program of meditation. If this is of interest to you, I wrote a no-nonsense primer for a friend ten years ago and have published it a few places since. You can find it here.

It’s just a description of the most basic form of practice, as well as tips to make the practice stick. It’s not Daoist meditation per se, but rather the foundation upon which all Daoist meditation techniques that I know of build.

Give it a thousand hours — maybe more, maybe less — and there is a good chance that you will spend some time hovering at the edge of perceiving this ground which “seems, perhaps, to exist” (si huo cun 似或存).

Another View

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. — John 1:1 (King James Version)

When I read the final line of this chapter, I am reminded of the opening line of the Gospel of John.

To understand why, you first need to understand that the Greek behind “the Word” is λόγος (logos) — and “Word” is a terrible translation of logos. The constellation of English around logos includes words like reason, account, ratio. For the Stoics, whose ideas had permeated educated Greek thought for centuries before John wrote, it was the ordering principle that runs through and structures the cosmos — very nearly what the Daodejing often means by 道.

But when St Jerome created the Latin Vulgate — the basis for nearly all Biblical studies in Europe over the next millennium — he chose to render logos as Verbum, passing over the ratio that the Romans Cicero and Seneca had both used for the Stoic logos. It was not a careless choice: where Greece and Rome had no cult of the divine word, Judaism had made God’s utterance the engine of creation. Verbum loses the ordering power that ran nearest to Dao 道, and instead plugged logos into the power of holy scripture. And thus the English “Word,” inherited from that choice, keeps the force of the spoken command while letting the ordering-principle quietly fall away.

But what John does with logos echoes our final line. He opens his Gospel by placing logos before God. He uses the Greek θεός (theos) — but given the context this means Yahweh, a personal deity whose roots lie in the same kind of inherited, personal Bronze Age god that di 帝 named.

John, like Laozi, reaches behind that deity toward the philosophers’ ordering-principle, then folds the two together in the next breath: the Word also was God. Laozi leaves his principle standing apart (or so it seems, though his hedging technically leaves things open), while John fuses his back in. But the reach is the same — behind the old personal god, toward the principle beneath the world.

This is a rich subject, especially if we include other traditions’ names for and pointers toward the “ground of being.” And since the Daodejing will discuss it again and again over the next 77 chapters, we will have several occasions to return to it.

(New here? Check out the introduction first.)

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This Substack assumes a basic standard of human decency. Those who are purposefully cruel, dehumanize others, show contempt for the law, or celebrate violence — or those who impose such people on the rest of us through political support — should not be here.

(Read more here.)

NB: I am taking a one-week break from longer form essays, so here is a short entry that plays off of some of the ideas in my two previous posts: translation and interpretation, and the meaning of wuwei 無為.

Next week we will read Chapter 4 — I have decided that my planned context essay on commentaries will be better positioned after we read a few more actual Daodejing chapters.

~

We discussed the idea of wuwei 無為 at the end of my last essay, and I thought that reading a story that illustrates the idea might help you grasp this fairly “untranslatable” term more than my explanation.

One great example comes from the Zhuangzi, Daoism’s “second text” after the Daodejing. The Zhuangzi will get its own context essay eventually, and I’ll reference it often (in fact I already have). Today though I would just like to present an excerpt from it, and to show three renderings. The first two are translations proper, and the third is an “interpretation.”

Burton Watson

Woodworker Qing carved a piece of wood and made a bell stand, and when it was finished, everyone who saw it marveled, for it seemed to be the work of gods or spirits. When the marquis of Lu saw it, he asked, “What art is it you have?”

Qing replied, “I am only a craftsman—how would I have any art? There is one thing, however. When I am going to make a bell stand, I never let it wear out my energy. I always fast in order to still my mind. When I have fasted for three days, I no longer have any thought of congratulations or rewards, of titles or stipends. When I have fasted for five days, I no longer have any thought of praise or blame, of skill or clumsiness. And when I have fasted for seven days, I am so still that I forget I have four limbs and a form and body. By that time, the ruler and his court no longer exist for me. My skill is concentrated, and all outside distractions fade away. After that, I go into the mountain forest and examine the Heavenly nature of the trees. If I find one of superlative form and I can see a bell stand there, I put my hand to the job of carving; if not, I let it go. This way I am simply matching up ‘Heaven’ with ‘Heaven.’ That’s probably the reason that people wonder if the results were not made by spirits.”

Brook Ziporyn

The woodworker Celebrant was carving a bellstand. When it was done, all who saw it were astonished, as if they had seen the doings of a ghost or spirit. When the Marquis of Lu saw it, he asked, “What technique do you have for this?”

Celebrant replied, “I am just an artisan—what technique could I have? However, there is one thing. When I am going to make a bellstand, I dare not let it deplete my vital energy. Rather, I fast to quiet my mind, and after three days, I no longer presume to care about praise or reward, rank or salary. After five days, I no longer presume to care about honor and disgrace, skill and clumsiness. After seven days, I become so still that I forget I have four limbs and a body. When this happens, for me it is as if the ducal court has ceased to exist. My skill becomes so focused that everything external slides away. Then I enter into the mountain forests, viewing the inborn Heavenly nature of the trees. My body arrives at a certain spot, and already I see the completed bellstand there; only then do I apply my hand to it. Otherwise I leave the tree alone. So I am just matching the Heavenly to the Heavenly. This may be the reason the result suggests the work of spirits!”

Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton was a mid-20th century Trappist monk who engaged in cross-cultural dialogue with Zen Masters and other Far Eastern thinkers. He did not speak Chinese and could not read the original text, but — like LeGuin and Mitchell — instead produced an interpretation. As he explains it:

“The texts from Chuang Tzu assembled here are the result of five years of reading, study, annotation, and meditation. The notes have in time acquired a shape of their own and have become, as it were, ‘imitations’ of Chuang Tzu, or rather, free interpretative readings of characteristic passages which appeal especially to me.”

Here is Merton’s rendition:

Khing, the master carver, made a bell stand

Of precious wood. When it was finished,

All who saw it were astounded. They said it must be

The work of spirits.

The Prince of Lu said to the master carver:

“What is your secret?”

Khing replied: “I am only a workman:

I have no secret. There is only this:

When I began to think about the work you commanded

I guarded my spirit, did not expend it

On trifles, that were not to the point.

I fasted in order to set

My heart at rest.

After three days fasting,

I had forgotten gain and success.

After five days

I had forgotten praise or criticism.

After seven days

I had forgotten my body

With all its limbs.

“By this time all thought of your Highness

And of the court had faded away.

All that might distract me from the work

Had vanished.

I was collected in the single thought

Of the bell stand.

“Then I went to the forest

To see the trees in their own natural state.

When the right tree appeared before my eyes,

The bell stand also appeared in it, clearly, beyond doubt.

All I had to do was to put forth my hand

And begin.

“If I had not met this particular tree

There would have been

No bell stand at all.

“What happened? My own collected thought

Encountered the hidden potential in the wood;

From this live encounter came the work

Which you ascribe to the spirits.”

Sources

Merton, Thomas. The Way of Chuang Tzu. New Directions, 1965.

Watson, Burton. The Complete Works of Zhuangzi. Columbia University Press, 2013 (revised from 1968).

Ziporyn, Brook. Zhuangzi: The Complete Writings. Hackett Publishing, 2020.

(You can find more versions of Zhuangzi at my main Source & Bibliography page.)

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This Substack assumes a basic standard of human decency. Those who are purposefully cruel, dehumanize others, show contempt for the law, or celebrate violence — or those who impose such people on the rest of us through political support — should not be here.

(Read more here.)

不尚賢, 使民不爭

不貴難得之貨, 使民不為盜

不見可欲，使心不亂

是以聖人之治

虛其心, 實其腹

弱其志, 強其骨

常使民無知無欲

使夫知者不敢為也

為無為, 則無不治

Mandarin & English

Here is the chapter with the pinyin and a character-by-character glossing interleaved between lines:

(1) 不尚賢，使民不爭；

bù shàng xián, shǐ mín bù zhēng;

[not] [elevate/honor] [worthy/virtuous/able], [cause/make/let] [people] [not] [contend/compete/strive];

(2) 不貴難得之貨，使民不為盜；

bù guì nán dé zhī huò, shǐ mín bù wéi dào;

[not] [prize/value] [difficult] [acquire] [’s] [goods/possessions], [cause] [people] [not] [do/act] [thief/steal];

(3) 不見可欲，使心不亂。

bù jiàn kě yù, shǐ xīn bù luàn.

[not] [see/show] [can/approve] [desire/want/intend], [cause] [heart-mind] [not] [disorder/confusion/disturb].

(4) 是以聖人之治，

shì yǐ shèng rén zhī zhì,

[[this/it][by means of]=therefore] [[sage, holy][person]=Sage] [’s] [govern/regulate/treat],

(5) 虛其心，實其腹，弱其志，強其骨。

xū qí xīn, shí qí fù, ruò qí zhì, qiáng qí gǔ.

[empty/hollow] [his/her/their] [heart-mind], [fill/substantial] [their] [belly/abdomen], [weak/soft] [their] [will/intent/ambition], [strong/strengthen/power] [their] [bone].

(6) 常使民無知無欲。

cháng shǐ mín wú zhī wú yù.

[real/constant/always] [cause] [people] [without/lack/absence] [know/understand] [without/lack/absence] [desire/want/intend].

(7) 使夫知者不敢為也。

shǐ fū zhī zhě bù gǎn wéi yě.

[cause] [that/those] [know/understand] [those who/that which] [not] [dare/venture] [do/act] [(affirmation particle)].

(8) 為無為，則無不治。

wéi wú wéi, zé wú bù zhì.

[do/act] [without/lack] [acting/doing], [then] [without/lack] [not] [govern/regulate].

The Shape (Seeing the Whole)

“Daoists cherished neither political competition nor an economy based on demand. Politically and economically, they envisioned a state of contentment rather than one of contention.” — Hans-Georg Moeller

Chapter 3 is composed of two main parts. Very generally, lines 1-3 are about how social ills such as contention, thieving, and disorder arise from the promotion of things like worthiness, expensive goods, and objects of desire. Lines 4-8 then discuss how the Sage acts instead.

This structure is very similar to Chapter 2, which also moved from a diagnosis to the Sage’s response. And like Chapter 2, the second part here breaks down further — though unlike Chapter 2, the first part’s three lines all share a single structure.

Line 4 introduces the Sage again, with a wrinkle: this time the frame is governing (according to most readings, though as we’ll see, the text leaves things a bit open to interpretation).

Line 5 then consists of two pairs of three-character phrases, each with qi 其 (”his/her/their”) in the middle, and each pair a contrast: empty/fill, weaken/strengthen. Lines 6 and 7 round out what the Sage does. All of these run counter to how advisors and rulers actually went about governing during the Warring States.

Finally, line 8 caps the chapter with a classic bit of Daoist paradox: do without doing (wei wuwei 為無為), and nothing will be left ungoverned. The paradox sits in the wuwei 無為 itself — how does one act without acting? And its promised payoff is stranger still: such non-action leaves nothing undone. Huh? We’ll explore this more deeply at the end of the next section.

Line by Line

The above is the shape of the chapter as I see it. But let’s take a closer look at the exact words and phrasings, as well as how others have interpreted and translated them.

Lines 1-3

(1) 不尚賢，使民不爭；

bù shàng xián, shǐ mín bù zhēng;

[not] [elevate/honor] [worthy/virtuous/able], [cause/make/let] [people] [not] [contend/compete/strive];

(2) 不貴難得之貨，使民不為盜；

bù guì nán dé zhī huò, shǐ mín bù wéi dào;

[not] [prize/value] [difficult] [acquire] [’s] [goods/possessions], [cause] [people] [not] [do/act] [thief/steal];

(3) 不見可欲，使心不亂。

bù jiàn kě yù, shǐ xīn bù luàn.

[not] [see/show] [can/approve] [desire/want/intend], [cause] [heart-mind] [not] [disorder/confusion/disturb].

These three lines share a single “do not X, and the people will not Y” structure, and their sense is largely agreed upon. Here is Paul Fischer’s rendering:

Do not celebrate worthies (contrivedly), and people will thereby not become contentious. Do not value difficult-to-obtain goods (contrivedly), and people will thereby not become thieves. Do not display that which is desirable (contrivedly), and people’s minds will thereby not become disordered.

The “(contrivedly)” that Fischer threads through each line is a tic of his translation — his way of keeping the general Daoist posture of “naturalness” in view. The injunction, he therefore suggests, is not against celebrating or valuing as such, but against doing so in the forced, artificial manner the text opposes throughout. It is a fair gloss, but a heavy-handed one: nothing in these opening lines actually marks the exalting or prizing as contrived, and most translators feel no need to spell it out. Fischer is reading the whole text’s posture back into its first lines — a fine move, and one we will return to in the final line — but it is stretching things.

The first line is also not speaking into a vacuum. Shang xian 尚賢, “elevating the worthy,” was a named doctrine of the Mohists — it titles a set of chapters in the Mozi — and the impulse behind it, promoting men by merit rather than birth, was congenial to the Confucians as well. So line 1 opens the chapter by responding to rival schools of the age, and the Daodejing’s reply is that the exalting is itself the trouble.

This is the same move we saw at the start of Chapter 2, and Fischer flags the connection in his notes: “rather than saying that such distinctions are ‘ugly’ or ‘incompetent’ … the problem is developed as leading to disharmonious social ‘contentiousness.’”

Recall that in Chapter 2, the majority read the opening line to mean that knowing the beautiful mints the ugly, the two arising as a matched set — but a minority heard something sharper: that the universal knowing is itself the trouble. I showed Thomas Cleary’s version — “When everyone knows beauty is beauty, this is bad” — and Fischer reads it the same way: “When everyone in the world ‘knows’ the beautiful as beautiful, this is just ugly.”

In Chapter 2 alone, that looked like the less natural reading, and it is definitely the minority interpretation. But Chapter 3 says almost exactly what Cleary and Fischer heard — that everyone’s agreeing to exalt the worthy is what breeds the contention. Set the two chapters together and the minority rendering stops looking eccentric; one even wonders whether Chapter 3 was already in view when they made their renderings.

This is a nice example of what I described in the previous essay on translation: the utterance one has to understand is not the line, or even the chapter, but ultimately the whole text. A rendering of Chapter 2 that looked strained in isolation is steadied by Chapter 3.

The remaining two lines extend the pattern: prize hard-to-get goods and you produce thieves; let the desirable be seen and you produce disordered minds. Each names a valuing, and each valuing generates the very disturbance a ruler would most want to prevent. Lee & Wang catch the last of the three nicely:

With no objects of desire in sight, / the heart lives beyond confusion.

Note that they take the “see” side of jian 見 rather than the “show” side that Fischer used above and that most translators favor. They also render xin 心 (”heart-mind”) as “heart” instead of the more common “mind.”

Line 4

(4) 是以聖人之治，

shì yǐ shèng rén zhī zhì,

[[this/it][by means of]=therefore] [[sage, holy][person]=Sage] [’s] [govern/regulate/treat],

Line 4 is the chapter’s “thus the Sage” turn, just as we saw in Chapter 2, but it comes with a bit more specificity: it is about the Sage’s zhi 治. The most common rendering is “govern,” and most translators use it — but it also carries the senses organize, regulate, and, notably, treat or heal. Brook Ziporyn keeps two of these in play at once — “Just so does the governing, the treatment, administered by a sage” — noting that zhi 治 “can mean both to govern, in a political sense, and to treat or heal, in a medical sense.”

The medical sense is not as far from the political as it might sound. The image of the state as a “body politic” is an old and cross-cultural one, and it sits easily here: the social ills of lines 1-3 read as symptoms, and the Sage’s response as the cure. Whether we hear zhi 治 as governing/regulating or treating/healing, this is the character that frames everything the Sage does in the lines that follow.~

Lines 5 & 6-7

These lines now provide the Sage’s prescription.

(5) 虛其心，實其腹，弱其志，強其骨。

xū qí xīn, shí qí fù, ruò qí zhì, qiáng qí gǔ.

[empty/hollow] [his/her/their] [heart-mind], [fill/substantial] [their] [belly/abdomen], [weak/soft] [their] [will/intent/ambition], [strong/strengthen/power] [their] [bone].

Line 5 gives the sage-ruler’s program as four terse three-character phrases, each built on qi 其 [his/her/their]:

Empty ___ heart-mind, fill ___ belly, weaken ___ will, strengthen ___ bones.

I have left the possessive blank because that little qi 其 is where the interpreting begins. The Chinese does not say whom these things are happening to. English cannot avoid saying it, and translators split.

Most fill the blank with the people. Here is DC Lau, whose rendering runs on into the next lines as well:

Therefore in governing the people, the sage empties their minds but fills their bellies, weakens their wills but strengthens their bones. He always keeps them innocent of knowledge and free from desire...

On this reading the Sage is conditioning the populace, and it makes many modern readers uneasy: emptied minds and weakened wills sound like a recipe for a docile, biddable herd, kept fed and stupid.

But we should be careful about attributing that reaction to the text’s original audience, since it rests on assumptions a Warring States reader need not have shared. And others fill the blank with the Sage himself, which makes clear that for a Daoist empty minds and weak wills are ideals. Edmund Ryden has:

he [the Sage] empties his mind, fills his belly

and early commentary reads it similarly. Here is Wang Bi, via Red Pine: “Bones don’t know how to make trouble. It’s the will that creates disorder. When the mind is empty, the will is weak.”

This shifts the whole passage: the four phrases are not crowd control but a description of where disorder comes from and how it quiets. The will is the seat of scheming and contention; the belly and bones are the uncomplaining body that makes no trouble. Empty the calculating mind and the restless will loses its fuel.

Read this way, the lines are closer to self-cultivation than statecraft — and notice how this also leans on the fork we met in line 4: if zhi 治 is “govern,” qi 其 pulls toward the people; if it shades toward “treat,” the door opens more readily to the Sage ordering himself.

It is worth dwelling on the two verbs applied to the mind and will, xu 虛 (”empty”) and ruo 弱 (”weaken”), because they are the ones that might sound alarming. Both name values the Daodejing returns to again and again — emptiness that is a capacity rather than a lack, and weakness that outlasts strength. We will have whole chapters to sit with each. For now it is enough to say that neither is the defect it sounds like, and that the discomfort they provoke is largely ours to bring.

(6) 常使民無知無欲。

cháng shǐ mín wú zhī wú yù.

[real/constant/always] [cause] [people] [without/lack/absence] [know/understand] [without/lack/absence] [desire/want/intend].

(7) 使夫知者不敢為也。

shǐ fū zhī zhě bù gǎn wéi yě.

[cause] [that/those] [know/understand] [those who/that which] [not] [dare/venture] [do/act] [(affirmation particle)].

Lines 6 and 7 take these imperatives and set them to always — chang 常, “constantly” — turning the four momentary acts into a standing condition:

Constantly keep the people without knowing and without desiring, so that the clever do not dare to act.

Two things happen here. First, watch the character zhi 知 (”know”): the people are to be kept wu zhi 無知, “without knowing,” and in the very next breath it is the fu zhi 知者, the “knowing ones” — the clever, the cunning — who are to be restrained. The same graph names the innocence the ruler cultivates and the cleverness he curbs, one word doing opposite work in adjacent clauses — precisely the kind of doubling the bare Chinese leaves for the reader to notice.

The doubling also tells us what kind of knowing is at issue. It cannot be knowledge as such — the bare capacity to know things — that the text wants abolished, or the Sage himself, who understands all of this, would be the first indicted. What wu zhi 無知 names is instead a particular posture of the knower: the mind that arrives already sorting, already holding its categories and preconceptions up against the world, already scheming toward what it wants. This is knowing as a kind of contrivance — the imposition of a prior grid rather than a clear meeting of what is there. Here Fischer’s parenthetical, which felt heavy-handed back in line 1, works well:

They abidingly cause the people to be without (contrived) knowledge and without (contrived) desire, and cause those (contrivedly) “knowledgeable people” to not be presumptuous and not be contrived.

So the target is not intelligence but a specific way of holding it — knowledge wielded as a tool of grasping and manipulation, the clever man’s advantage over his neighbor. Modern readers, who tend to file knowledge itself among the unqualified goods, may resist this. But the Daodejing is suspicious of exactly the acquisitive, categorizing, advantage-seeking cast of mind that “knowledge” so often travels with — the same cast of mind that, back in line 1, could not see a worthy man without wanting to rank him.

The desire being curbed is likewise not only for goods and rank. Wu zhi wu yu 無知無欲 pairs the absence of knowing with the absence of wanting, and Hans-Georg Moeller draws out what that pairing implies: “the yearning that the Daoist sage ruler is supposed to prevent explicitly includes the desire for intellectual ‘properties’ such as knowledge. Addiction is not limited to material goods and social power.”

Knowledge, in other words, can be one more thing to acquire and hoard, and the craving for it is of a piece with the craving for rare goods in line 2. This reframes the “keep them ignorant” charge: the target is acquisitiveness as such, with knowledge named as one of its objects, not knowledge singled out for suppression. With nothing exalted and nothing dangled, there is simply nothing left to strive for and no reason to venture. The whole passage has been describing a state — or a self — that does not contend, does not grasp, does not initiate.

This is exactly the condition the chapter’s final line will mark out.

Line 8

(8) 為無為，則無不治。

wéi wú wéi, zé wú bù zhì.

[do/act] [without/lack] [acting/doing], [then] [without/lack] [not] [govern/regulate].

The chapter ends on a paradox: wei wuwei 為無為 — “do without doing,” “act without acting.”

Wuwei 無為 is one of the central ideas of Daoism, and I have given it a fuller treatment in the Lexicon; here is the short version. Its plain sense is “non-action,” which makes it sound like passivity or doing literally nothing. That is not quite right, but it is not entirely wrong either.

The scholarly consensus reads it as a quality of action rather than its absence — acting without forcing, striving, or imposing; the unforced, ego-quiet doing you may have tasted in a “flow state,” where the action seems to happen on its own. I would add that when this becomes a way of living rather than a passing moment, one often finds oneself simply doing far less — because so much of our doing is only the ego keeping busy, changing what needs no changing. Wuwei 無為 is not literally “do nothing,” but it leans closer to “do almost nothing” than many modern readings suggests.

That already makes wuwei 無為 paradoxical. But line 8 sharpens it into wei wuwei 為無為: it makes the non-doing something you do, an object of the very verb it negates. Do the not-doing. And then it promises a paradoxical payoff to match: 則無不治 — “then nothing will be ungoverned.” Act by not-acting, and nothing is left undone.

Translators handle the paradox in strikingly different ways, and it is worth seeing a range:

Yet through his actionless activity all things are duly regulated. (Waley)

Sages enact nonaction and everything becomes well ordered. (Ivanhoe)

If you’re nothing doing what you do all things will be governed well. (Hinton)

Do Not Doing / And nothing will be left ungoverned. (LaFargue)

Be uncontrived, then nothing will be disorganized. (Fischer)

Do nothing extraneous, and peace shall rule. (Lee & Wang)

Notice the spread. Arthur Waley and Philip Ivanhoe keep the paradox on the surface — “actionless activity,” “enact nonaction” — and leave the reader to sit with it. Hinton pushes it into near-incoherence on purpose (”nothing doing what you do”), refusing to smooth it. Michael LaFargue keeps the bare shape and lets the capitals and italics do the pointing.

Fischer keeps his “contrivance” tic, but here it pays off, and Lee & Wang similarly resolve the paradox rather than preserve it: “be uncontrived” and “do nothing extraneous” quietly convert wuwei 無為 from acting-without-acting into acting-in-a-certain-way.

And note the last character, zhi 治 — the same “govern/treat/order” we met in line 4. It ties the ending back to the introduction of the Sage. The chapter opened by describing the disorders a ruler produces by exalting, prizing, and displaying, and it closes by promising that the ruler who does none of this — who acts by not-acting — will find nothing left disordered at all. The cure for the contention of lines 1-3 turns out to be the near-absence of the physician.

Sidebar on Textual Variants

Throughout this project I take the received text as my base, noting tomb-text variants only where they change something that really matters. Chapter 3 has one such variant, and it lands on the line we just finished.

The received text ends 為無為，則無不治 — “do without doing, and nothing will be ungoverned.” But the Mawangdui silk manuscripts have no wei wuwei 為無為 here at all. Where the received text caps the chapter with that famous formulation, the Mawangdui text runs lines 7 & 8 together:

使夫知不敢弗為而已，則無不治矣。

shǐ fū zhī bù gǎn fú wéi ér yǐ, zé wú bù zhì yǐ.

[cause] [that/those] [know/understand] [not] [dare/venture] [not] [do/act] [and] [stop/already], [then] [without/lack] [not] [govern/regulate] [(affirmation particle)].

The wei wuwei 為無為 — the sharpest statement of the chapter’s central paradox, and one of the more quoted phrases in the whole Daodejing — simply is not there.

It’s worth noting how translators respond to the difference. Some who work from the Mawangdui texts as their base — Ames and Hall, for instance — quietly restore the wei wuwei 為無為 anyway, supplying from the received tradition a phrase their own base text lacks. That is a measure of how canonical the line has become: it feels missing even when it was never there.

And there’s one further wrinkle. The Mawangdui line is itself grammatically knotty, reading bu gan fu wei 不敢弗為 — “not dare to not-act,” a double negative that seems to reverse the received text’s “not dare to act.” Translators working with the Mawangdui texts seem to smooth it out.

Here’s Ryden:

If you can make it so that the astute dare not act,

Then you will discover there is nothing you cannot govern.

And Victor Mair:

He ensures that / the knowledgeable dare not be hostile, / and that is all.

Sitting With It

Let’s go back to the opening epigraph by Moeller: “Daoists cherished neither political competition nor an economy based on demand. Politically and economically, they envisioned a state of contentment rather than one of contention.”

Moeller is describing statecraft, but contention and contentment are states you know personally more than politically. And the chapter’s lines, which read on their surface as advice to a ruler, can turn inward with almost no adjustment — as we saw when translators split over whether the Sage empties the people’s minds or his own.

So choose a couple to try out personally this week. Here are two, each of which can apply in more than one situation, perhaps with a difference in how you answer depending on the specifics:

不尚賢使民不爭

Does a refusal to personally elevate others, even those that seem to merit it, lead to less felt contention?

弱其志強其骨

Can you “weaken your will” about something specific? If so, does it produce any sense of “inner strength” (strengthening the bones)?

Much of this chapter is, in the end, about the difference between contention and contentment — and it suggests that the second is nearer than we think, waiting on the other side of everything we could stop doing.

Another View

As it happens, I began reading a biography of Calvin Coolidge while writing this essay and came across a very apt passage. So now let’s return to the political and economic.

Coolidge is one of the more ignored US Presidents — in part because of his taciturn personal style, and in part because he wasn’t an activist leader. He was certainly no Daoist, but both his temperament and political leanings can be seen as wei wuwei 為無為-adjacent.

From Amity Shlaes’s biography Coolidge:

“Most presidents place faith in action; the modern presidency is perpetual motion. Coolidge made virtue of inaction… Whereas other presidents made themselves omnipresent, Coolidge held back. At the time, and subsequently, many have deemed the Coolidge method laziness. Upon examination, however, the inaction reflects strength. In politics as in business, it is often harder, after all, not to do, to delegate, than to do. Coolidge is our great refrainer.”

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This Substack assumes a basic standard of human decency. Those who are purposefully cruel, dehumanize others, show contempt for the law, or celebrate violence — or those who impose such people on the rest of us through political support — should not be here.

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At some point in this project I hope you’ll be tempted to try your own hand at translating the Daodejing based on our chapter readings. To take a chapter’s characters and wrestle them into your own tongue is one of the best ways to think deeply about the ideas within it.

To help with such an endeavor — and to clarify what I am doing with this series — this essay is an account of how I think about translation.

I stated in my second essay that I am not producing a translation of the Daodejing. That’s true in one sense, but misleading in another. I’m not handing you finished English lines — but the work of these essays, looking at what each character can mean, weighing what the grammar leaves open, listening for what the lines are responding to, is careful reading of the closest kind. And careful reading of that kind is most of what translation is. I’m just leaving the last step — fixing a single English line for the Chinese — undone, and allowing the ambiguities in the original to hang.

Before we get started, let me offer a provisional definition of translation, which we will refine as we go. Translation is the attempt to carry over meaning from one language to another — the word itself comes from the Latin trānslātus — trāns (across) + lātus (borne/carried).

Words Are Fuzzy

Naive realism is the conviction that our senses show us the world as it truly is. This is false, as very little investigation reveals; but it works so reliably minute to minute that we all fall back into it, living as though the world is indeed exactly what we see and nothing more.

In the world of language, there is a similar idea: naive referentialism. This is the conviction that words describe that world exactly as it is — a word is a label fixed to a definite thing, and translation is therefore a matter of swapping one label for another, Chinese to English. This too seems reasonable enough until you look closely. But, of course, the very first two lines of the Daodejing are there to disabuse us of this notion — the name is not the “real name.”

Words are not singular tags on pre-sorted things. They are fuzzy. Much of what I do in my interlinear, with my bracketed clusters of English words, might make it look like the Chinese is vague compared to the precision of the English. But this is untrue: English is every bit as loose, and only feels precise because you are fluent in it.

Take “blue” for example. Look at an actual spectrum and try to say where blue ends and green begins, or where it turns into purple. There is no line out in the world; there is only the line your language happens to draw, and languages draw it differently. Russian has words for both dark blue and light blue but not one that covers both, and Homer’s stock phrase “wine-dark sea” suggests he was at a loss for the word we would call blue. And of course blue can leave the domain of sight entirely — there are blue moods, blue jokes, blue blood, true blue. One simple word, and already a wide constellation of meanings.

In Chapter 2, I glossed sheng 生 as [birth/grow/life] — one character fanning out into three English words. But three is already a pruning. Had I emptied the whole warehouse of potential meanings, those brackets could have also held raw, unripe, fresh, unfamiliar, estranged, inborn nature, even student (as a courtesy title). I purposefully stopped at three for readability, as well as because the neighboring words and grammar exclude most of the options in any given line. My brackets are not the character’s full cloud of potential; they are what survives an initial pruning as to the relevant meanings in each instance.

But even a cluster of three might suggest the Chinese is less exact than English. It is not. Run the experiment the other way: take the English word “life” and carry it into Spanish. Most obviously vida — but the life of a party is alma, to bring something to life is animar, a life sentence is cadena perpetua. The English “life” turns out to be exactly the kind of constellation sheng 生 is, fanning out in Spanish into soul (alma), animate (animar), chain (cadena).

So if words are this open, can a translator just reach into the cluster and pull out whatever sense suits them? No — and seeing why is critical to any proper translation effort.

“The Sky is Blue”

Consider the sentence “the sky is blue.” Suppose someone sets out to render it in Spanish, working word by word, imagining all the meanings sky and blue can carry.

Sky: the sky is the heavens, and the heavens are where the divine resides — sky really does run, at its far edge, toward God. (Recall that Chinese folds both sky and a “deity-like” Heaven into the single character tian 天.) And blue, as we just saw, can mean sadness — to feel blue.

So a translation that would normally be “El cielo está azul” (“The sky is blue”) gets creatively re-imagined — with individual substitutions that in isolation do not seem unreasonable — as “Dios está triste” (“God is sad”).

Both swaps can be justified from a broad enough dictionary, but the result is a fantasy — a sentence with no honest relation to the one we started with. It is worth naming the trap: fidelity to the words one at a time can be infidelity to what they say together. One cannot translate word-by-word.

Why? Because the meaning is never sitting in the individual words. It emerges only when they constrain one another. We can watch this happen with another short sentence.

“Hard Water is Natural”

Alone, the word “hard” is wide open — difficult, stiff, harsh, unfeeling. But set it beside “water” and almost all of that dies at once; the two words together produce a sense — mineral content — that neither carried on its own. “Natural” is even fuzzier than “hard” in some ways, at home in painting, philosophy, psychology. In this sentence it has two possible senses: hard water occurs in nature — a fact of geology; or hard water is to be expected — unforced, unsurprising.

And here is the thing to note: even with all three words leaning on each other, that last ambiguity doesn’t resolve. Is it “geology” or is it “of course”? The sentence has done everything a sentence can do — and it still can’t tell you. To settle it you have to look past the sentence: to the paragraph around it, the kind of writing it is, who set it down and why. The word is narrowed by the sentence — but the sentence is narrowed by larger things still.

Meaning Lives in the Utterance

So the sentence narrows the words. But it still cannot finish the job. “Hard water is natural” leaves us with a fork the sentence itself won’t close. To settle it, we have to shift to a larger scale.

Meaning lives at the scale of the utterance: the whole meaningful unit, whatever size that happens to be. Often the workable unit is something like the sentence — big enough that the words have narrowed one another, small enough to hold in the mind at once. But “the sentence” is only a rule of thumb, because a sentence’s meaning almost certainly hangs on the paragraph around it, and the paragraph on the chapter, and the chapter on the book.

So which is the real unit of utterance — sentence, paragraph, chapter, whole text?

Yes. All of them. At once.

The scales do not compete for the title of “most important”; they nest. And they nest the way the words did inside the sentence — by mutual constraint. Just as hard and water narrowed each other, a sentence and its paragraph narrow each other, a passage and its chapter, a chapter and the whole. It is all one operation — context conditioning meaning — running back and forth at once.

In practice you work locally: the phrase or line in front of you is where the labor happens, and you cannot hold every detail of a book in mind while weighing a single character. But you can hold the whole book in a different way — not detail by detail but as a gestalt, a felt sense of the entire text’s meaning and where this line sits inside it. That holistic understanding actively shapes the local reading, the way your grasp of a whole conversation shapes how you hear the next sentence.

And because the gestalt sharpens as you go — every later chapter teaching you something about the earlier ones — a reading that looked settled early can come loose once you know more. The larger scale does not merely refine the smaller one, it can even overturn it — as happens in the twist ending that makes you want to go back and reread the entire book.

This is why the Daodejing demands to be held in mind at every scale at once, and why it rewards a slow reading.

No, there is not a twist ending. But two features do make rereading worthwhile. First, compression: Classical Chinese already leaves more open per line than English does, and the Daodejing intensifies things, so that more of the meaning than usual is carried not by the individual lines but by the layers of context around them. Second, the text echoes itself. Lines recur across distant chapters; fixed formulae like 是以聖人 (“therefore the Sage…”) thread through seventeen of them. A character thought through in Chapter 2 keeps being reweighed by its use in Chapter 40 and beyond.

For any given line in the Daodejing, the relevant utterance ultimately runs to the whole book. In a real sense you cannot grasp Chapter 1, 2, or 3 until you have read to Chapter 81 and come back.

But there is one more layer, and it is the biggest.

An utterance is not only nested in more text; it is a response to a situation. As the translator Damion Searls puts it, an utterance “is always in response to something, and also prompts responses in turn… [it is] always in a living bond with whoever will respond to it.”

One Turn in a Conversation

The widest context is not the rest of the book — it is the world the book was answering, as well as the world’s responses to it in the millennia since. To read the text only against itself is to keep it hermetically sealed.

The lines of the Daodejing were responses — to rival teachers, to competing claims about the dao 道, to a world coming apart in a particular way at a particular time. Terse, compressed, assuming a background the first audience simply had. And the modern reader is worse off than that audience, who stood inside the world the lines were answering.

This is why I wrote a primer on the Warring States, and will write more essays on the thinkers and texts that surround this one. These are not appendices; they are the situation the Daodejing was responding to. Knowing a little about Zhuangzi tells you where Laozi was coming from; knowing a little about the Confucians and Legalists tells you what he was pushing against. This context doesn’t decorate the reading, it produces it.

And as Searls mentioned, responses attach to an utterance after it is made as well. For two thousand years, readers have been answering back — and their answers now sit between us and the lines, conditioning what we see. We’ll take up the commentarial tradition in the next context essay (after Chapter 3), but it has already shaped our readings of Chapters 1 and 2. The metaphysical reading of you 有 and wu 無 as Being and Non-Being, which I flagged in Chapter 1 and will take up properly at Chapter 40, is the clearest case: it is largely initiated by Wang Bi in the third century CE, read back into a text written centuries earlier.

This matters even if all you want is the “original” sense, because you cannot see past an inherited reading until you know it is one. Knowing something of how the received text hardened, and of the commentators who shaped how it has been read, is what lets you tell a fourth-century-BCE meaning from a third-century-CE one. Without it, you mistake the commentary for the text.

Now, given how much of Warring States history is unknown and how vast the commentarial tradition has grown over two millennia, the search for more context has, in practice, no end. Combine that fact with everything else we have discussed, and a conclusion becomes unavoidable.

The words are fuzzy; the utterances nest in fractal complexity; the context that would resolve them is larger than any single mind can hold. There can be no single, final, correct English rendering of the Daodejing.

But “no single correct translation” does not mean “anything goes.”

Like all words, translation is itself fuzzy. Its center for our purposes is something like “carrying meaning from the Classical Chinese into English.” But where are its edges? At what point is an English version no longer a translation at all, but something else, deserving a different name?

Translation and Its Edges

The zone of legitimate translation is wide. Michael LaFargue and Julian Pas, surveying English Daodejings in their essay “On Translating the Tao-te-ching,” sort them into three categories, by aim: (1) some “stick as closely as possible to a literal translation” (their examples in my corpus include Mair, Chen, and (obliquely) Addiss & Lombardo); (2) some “compose a translation that offers the reader the results of his or her own research into ancient Chinese thought” (Waley & LaFargue); and (3) some just “offer the reader intellectual stimulation or spiritual stimulation” (Mitchell). The core of the word translation is crowded and full of honest disagreement. The question is where, at the margins, a version stops being a legitimate translation.

There is one key test, so far as I am concerned: a translation must allow the original to prove you wrong. The Chinese must retain its veto. Interpret, choose, render boldly — but the text has to be able to rule your choice out. When the answer arrives before the reading and nothing in the original utterance suggests the resulting rendition, one has crossed the line.

Take Stephen Mitchell’s version of the Daodejing, said to be the best-selling ever made. He didn’t read the Classical Chinese — he worked from a crib and other translations. And his “most essential preparation,” he tells us in his foreword, was a course of Zen training — this meant that he did not need to see the original text because the training “brought me face to face with Lao-tzu and his true disciples and heirs.” Set aside the inaccurate historical claim; the arrogance is outrageous (as well as very unDaoist and very unZen). And yet he calls this a translation — “if I haven’t always translated Lao-tzu’s words, my intention has always been to translate his mind.” I call bullshit.

On the other hand, if one is honest about not using the original text and doesn’t call their work a translation, I have no issue with it. Ursula K Le Guin didn’t read Chinese either, and worked from a similar crib. But she opens the discussion of her method with: “This is a rendition, not a translation.” She made the same kind of thing Mitchell did, but told the truth about it. That is the whole difference between them, and it is not a small one.

A second failure comes not from setting the text aside but from arriving already knowing what it must say. The Christian missionaries who produced the first English Daodejings are good examples of this. James Legge, Chalmers, and the others were learned men, but they insisted that Daoism and the Daodejing must relate somehow to the divine Word they had found in their Bible. Christian “truth,” not the text, held the veto for them and they were accordingly making themselves deaf to what the Chinese might be saying.

But a distinct lens is not disqualifying by itself; if it were, the whole commentarial tradition would be suspect. Yang Jwing-Ming’s translation reads the Daodejing through qigong and surely finds more in it than was originally intended, yet he stays inside the border. Firstly, his subtitle says so outright: “A Qigong Interpretation.” And just as importantly, the inner-cultivation reading is no foreign imposition; it is an ancient current in the tradition itself, running through figures like Liu Yiming, whom we heard from in the epigraph to Chapter 2. Yang isn’t forcing the text to fit an outside system; he’s continuing a conversation it was arguably part of from the start (as we’ll discuss in the essay on the Neiye). Reading forward along a living tradition is legitimate; reading a foreign system backward into the text is not.

One last case, and it’s the one to watch for if you translate yourself, because it is the easiest for an amateur to slip into. Picture someone earnest and unbiased, with no agenda at all — just a word-by-word crib, reaching into each character’s cloud for whatever they find most evocative. Out comes something fluid, mysterious, maybe even profound.

But with no context brought to bear, nothing rules any sense out, and the line drifts wherever the prettiest words lead. This is “the sky is blue” wandering into “God is sad” — simply from from letting each word float free.

Your Turn

So: try your hand at it. Take a chapter and put it into your own words.

I mean this as the real invitation of the project, not a flourish to end on. Everything in these essays is arranged to make it possible: the bracketed clusters that show a character’s range, the line-by-line parsing and examples from other translators, the framing essays that rebuild the world the text was answering. That apparatus isn’t there so you can check my reading. It’s there so you can make your own — so that the Chinese has enough around it to push back on you.

A few things I’ve learned doing it myself.

Treat every rendering as a rough draft. The full utterance here is all 81 chapters, and you can’t hold that whole in view until you’ve been through it. A line you settle confidently on for Chapter 3 might look different once Chapter 19 has expressed similar themes differently or Chapter 63 has repeated the phrase “wei wuwei 為無為.” Revising isn’t failure, it’s the work.

And let lines stay unfinished where needed. A line that won’t come clear doesn’t have to be forced to a resolution the Chinese won’t support — you can leave the hole, mark it, and move on. A translation with a few honest gaps in it is worth more than one smoothed shut by guessing, and the gap may close on its own ten chapters later, or stay open for years. Either is fine. You are not producing a finished object; you are coming to terms with a text — the point isn’t the product, it’s the process.

And don’t wait to feel qualified. As Damion Searls puts it, “no one translates a text — they translate their reading of the text.” There is no privileged reading held in reserve behind the words that yours falls short of; there is only reading, done more or less attentively, with more or less brought to bear. You already have what the task asks — a text with its senses left open, and enough context around it to close them honestly. What you produce will be provisional and amateur, and that is exactly the right posture: the humility the whole text asks for, and the one Mitchell forgot. You find out what it says by wrestling with what it says, not by arriving with the answer in advance.

If you want company in this, the suggested reading list below has a few books on translation itself, not only on the Daodejing. The shortest and perhaps most useful is Eliot Weinberger’s Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei — a nice little book that lays out and critiques different translations of a single four-line Tang poem side by side and, in doing so, teaches more about what translation is than any theoretical analysis.

A translation you pull off a shelf is someone else’s finished reading, closed and inert. The version you work out yourself — character by character, revised and revised again, argued with and lived alongside — is something else entirely. That is what turns the Daodejing from a dead object on a page into a living thing: not reading a translation of it, but making one. Which is, after all, why you’re here.

Suggested Reading

Bellos, David. Is That a Fish in Your Ear: Translation and the Meaning of Everything. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011.

LaFargue, Michael. “Recovering the Tao-te-ching’s Original Meaning: Some Remarks on Historical Hermeneutics.” In Kohn, Livia & Michael LaFargue (eds), Lao-Tzu and the Tao-te-ching. State University of New York Press, 1998.

LaFargue, Michael & Julian Pas. “On Translating the Tao-te-ching.” In Kohn, Livia & Michael LaFargue (eds), Lao-Tzu and the Tao-te-ching. State University of New York Press, 1998.

Searls, Damion. The Philosophy of Translation. Yale University Press, 2024.

Weinberger, Eliot. Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei (with more ways). New Directions, 1987.

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(Read more here.)

天下皆知美之為美, 斯惡已

皆知善之為善, 斯不善已

故:

有無相生, 難易相成

長短相較, 高下相傾

音聲相和, 前後相隨

是以聖人:

處無為之事, 行不言之教

萬物作 焉而不辭,

生而不有, 為而不恃, 功成而弗居

夫唯弗居, 是以不去

Mandarin & English

Here is the chapter with the pinyin and a character-by-character glossing interleaved between lines:

(1) 天下皆知美之為美，斯惡已。

tiān xià jiē zhī měi zhī wéi měi, sī è yǐ.

[Heaven][under]=world] [all] [know/understand] [beautiful] [’s] [do/act] [beautiful], [this/thus] [ugly/foul/bad] [already/stop].

(2) 皆知善之為善，斯不善已。

jiē zhī shàn zhī wéi shàn, sī bù shàn yǐ.

[all] [know/understand] [good/benevolent] [’s] [do/act] [good], [this/thus] [not] [good/benevolent] [already/stop].

(3) 故有無相生，難易相成，

gù yǒu wú xiāng shēng, nán yì xiāng chéng,

[thus] [have/there is/presence] [without/lack/absence] [each other/mutually] [birth/grow/life]; [difficult] [easy] [each other/mutually] [complete/accomplish];

(4) 長短相較，高下相傾，

cháng duǎn xiāng jiào, gāo xià xiāng qīng,

[long] [short] [each other/mutually] [compare]; [high] [low] [each other/mutually] [incline/lean];

(5) 音聲相和，前後相隨。

yīn shēng xiāng hé, qián hòu xiāng suí.

[tone/note] [noise/sound] [each other/mutually] [harmonize, blend]; [before/front] [after/behind] [each other/mutually] [follow].

(6) 是以聖人處無為之事，行不言之教；

shì yǐ shèng rén chǔ wú wéi zhī shì, xíng bù yán zhī jiào;

[[this/it][by means of]=therefore] [[sage, holy][person]=Sage] [dwell/occupy/handle] [without/lack] [act/do] [’s] [affair/matter/work]; [walk/perform/conduct] [not] [speak/words] [’s] [teaching/instruction].

(7) 萬物作焉而不辭，生而不有。

wàn wù zuò yān ér bù cí, shēng ér bù yǒu.

[[ten thousand][things/creatures]=all creatures] [arise/spring up/be made] [there/in this] [and/yet] [not] [decline, refuse, take leave of/speak of], [birth/produce] [and/yet] [not] [have/posses].

(8) 為而不恃，功成而弗居。

wéi ér bù shì, gōng chéng ér fú jū.

[do/act] [and/yet] [not] [rely on/presume/claim to], [achievement, merit] [complete/accomplish] [and/yet] [not] [dwell/occupy/residence].

(9) 夫唯弗居，是以不去。

fū wéi fú jū, shì yǐ bù qù.

[now/indeed, (man)] [only/precisely] [not] [dwell /occupy]; [[therefore]] [not] [depart/leave/remove].

The Shape (Seeing the Whole)

“Whosoever goes beyond False Knowledge is freed from ‘opposites’ such as Beautiful and Ugly, High and Low. From this Higher Knowledge flows a Life without Possession or Attachment.” — Liu Yiming (1734–1821) (via Minford)

Chapter 2 breaks cleanly into two parts. Very generally: lines 1-5 are about the mutual arising of opposites, and lines 6-9 are about how the wise don’t allow themselves to get caught up in valuing one side of an opposition over the other.

Each part breaks down further.

In the first part, lines 1-2 are a rough parallel structure and describe the process by which opposites mutually arise in human terms (and with the opportunity for two distinct readings, as we’ll discuss below) — once everyone knows the beautiful as beautiful, ugliness is already there; and once everyone knows the good as good, there is the not-good. Naming one half calls up the other.

Then in lines 3-5, six tightly parallel tetrasyllabic phrases — each sharing a third character, xiang 相 (“mutually”) — drive the point home with six examples. Having and lacking, difficult and easy, long and short, high and low, note and noise, before and after — each pair arises together.

The second part is more complex, with line 6 introducing “the Sage” (more about this character in the next section) and lines 7-9 describing how such a person behaves. Line 6 gives the principle — acting without doing, teaching without speaking — and 7-8 spell it out as a series of does-yet-doesn’t examples: produces but doesn’t possess, acts but doesn’t presume, finishes the work but doesn’t dwell in it.

The connection back to 1-5 is tighter than it might seem at first. If fixing on one side of a pair summons the other — if claiming “beauty” mints “ugliness” — then to grasp anything is to implicitly bind yourself to its opposite. So the Sage’s non-claiming isn’t an escape from the fact of opposites; it’s an escape from getting bound to one. And line 9 brings things back to the mutual oppositions of lines 1-5 by becoming an opposite-pair itself: 弗居 / 不去, “not dwell” / “not depart.”

Line by Line

The above is the shape of the chapter as I see it. But let’s take a closer look at the exact words and phrasings, as well as how others have interpreted and translated them.

Lines 1-2

(1) 天下皆知美之為美，斯惡已。

tiān xià jiē zhī měi zhī wéi měi, sī è yǐ.

[Heaven][under]=world] [all] [know/understand] [beautiful] [’s] [do/act] [beautiful], [this/thus] [ugly/foul/bad] [already/stop].

(2) 皆知善之為善，斯不善已。

jiē zhī shàn zhī wéi shàn, sī bù shàn yǐ.

[all] [know/understand] [good/benevolent] [’s] [do/act] [good], [this/thus] [not] [good/benevolent] [already/stop].

As I mentioned above, these lines show how once one defines something as beautiful or good, the opposite notion inevitably follows. Here’s Brook Ziporyn’s translation, which is in line with the majority of interpretations:

When all in the world know the beautiful to be beautiful, there already is the ugly.

When all know the good to be good, there already is the bad.

But there is an alternate reading, hinging on the absent verb in the last clause. Thomas Cleary provides a clean example:

When everyone knows beauty is beauty, this is bad.

When everyone knows good is good, this is not good.

The difference is where the stress falls. On the majority (and my) reading, to know the beautiful is to have minted the ugly — they arise as a matched set. On Cleary’s reading, it is the universal recognition of beauty-as-beauty that is the problem.

But these are less two rival readings than two faces of one thought, as Ziporyn points out in his notes. He says that “three related ideas suggested here: (1) By understanding a particular concept, the opposite concept is also necessarily understood, as a contrast. (2) Knowledge of a value... undermines the value of that value, makes it bad… (3) What generates the problem is not just a single individual’s awareness of the ideal, but the fact that all under heaven agree about these ideals.”

The three fold together: the collective knowing (3) mints the opposite (1), and in doing so spoils the value itself (2). Hold onto the idea that fixing a value is what corrupts it, because it is what the second half of the chapter will describe.

Red Pine keeps the ambiguity well, with his “if that… this becomes” allowing either reading:

All the world knows beauty

but if that becomes beautiful

this becomes ugly

all the world knows good

but if that becomes good

this becomes bad

Lines 3-5

(3) 故有無相生，難易相成，

gù yǒu wú xiāng shēng, nán yì xiāng chéng,

[thus] [have/there is/presence] [without/lack/absence] [each other/mutually] [birth/grow/life]; [difficult] [easy] [each other/mutually] [complete/accomplish];

(4) 長短相較，高下相傾，

cháng duǎn xiāng jiào, gāo xià xiāng qīng,

[long] [short] [each other/mutually] [compare]; [high] [low] [each other/mutually] [incline/lean];

(5) 音聲相和，前後相隨。

yīn shēng xiāng hé, qián hòu xiāng suí.

[tone/note] [noise/sound] [each other/mutually] [harmonize, blend]; [before/front] [after/behind] [each other/mutually] [follow].

Lines 3-5 are more clearly about the mutual arising of opposites, and we can stay with Red Pine for a translation:

have and have not create each other / hard and easy produce each other

long and short shape each other / high and low complete each other

note and noise accompany each other / first and last follow each other

Most translators render these similarly. It’s worth noting that five of the six pairs are plain opposites, but yin 音 and shang 聲 (“tone/note” and “noise/sound”) is the odd one — it doesn’t read as a simple contrast. My guess is it’s doing something closer to line 1: an aesthetic judgment, the ear’s version of beautiful vs ugly, rather than a neutral opposite like long vs short. If so, it’s a reminder that our valuations work the same way the plain opposites do. (But it’s also possible the characters simply carried a meaning or contrast in the Warring States that has since worn away.)

Two wrinkles in these lines are worth flagging. One concerns the tomb texts and will wait for the sidebar below. The other concerns the first pair: you 有 and wu 無.

As we saw in Chapter 1, these terms took on more metaphysical weight over the centuries, and while I think Red Pine’s “have and have not” are truer to the Warring States sense, the majority of translators go metaphysical here — “Being and Non-Being,” “Presence and Absence,” the capitalization doing serious work.

What’s striking is that even translators who avoid the metaphysical reading in Chapter 1 take it here. John Minford is a good example, though he has plenty of company. In Chapter 1 he renders you 有 and wu 無 plainly — “The Origin of Heaven and Earth / Has no Name / The Mother of the Myriad Things / Has a Name” — but in Chapter 2, line 3 becomes:

Being and Non-Being

Engender one another.

The metaphysical reading, in other words, seems to come more from the translator than the words themselves.

Line 6

(6) 是以聖人處無為之事，行不言之教；

shì yǐ shèng rén chǔ wú wéi zhī shì, xíng bù yán zhī jiào;

[[this/it][by means of]=therefore] [[sage, holy][person]=Sage] [dwell/occupy/handle] [without/lack] [act/do] [’s] [affair/matter/work]; [walk/perform/conduct] [not] [speak/words] [’s] [teaching/instruction].

The second part of the chapter begins with line 6, and there is enough happening here to look at it by itself.

It opens with the stock phrase I mentioned in my previous essay: 是以聖人 (“thus the Sage…”), introducing 聖人 (“the Sage”) as a character and defining the Sage’s two most essential attributes — acting, but wuwei 無為 (“without doing”), and teaching, but bu yan 不言 (“not speaking”).

Wuwei 無為 is a key term in Daoism, and a complicated one — I’ll discuss it more fully in two weeks, when it returns at the end of Chapter 3 (and I may eventually write a full context essay on it). The second attribute, “teaching without words,” harkens back to a theme from Chapter 1: that the dao 道 is beyond description.

“The Sage” also needs explanation. The characters are sheng ren 聖人 — literally “sage person” or “holy person” — and translators have a range of options. A lowercase “sage,” or its plural “sages,” is most common — the plural conveniently sidesteps the need to assign a gender in English — and Le Guin’s “wise soul” works nicely. In the Warring States the figure would have been assumed male, though nothing in the text forces that, and a translator today can reasonably default to “she.”

Many translators, though, use a capitalized “the Sage,” and I prefer this myself. I read “the Sage” as a character — an ideal the audience (recall that this text seems pitched at rulers) is meant to aspire to, a role model. This is a common device across ancient philosophical and religious traditions: one way of describing virtue ethics — perhaps the most common ethical framework before the modern era — is that it centers on the “question of “what the Sage would do.” The Roman Stoics discuss their Sage almost incessantly, for example, though theirs is very different from the Daoist one.

Notice that the Sage’s two defining attributes — acting without forcing, teaching without words — are both refusals: ways of not-asserting, not-imposing. This is no accident. The 是以 (“thus”) that opens the line marks the Sage as a response to what came before, and as the explication half of an aphorism-and-explication structure (a recurring shape in the Daodejing, as we discussed last week). Lines 7-9 show us what that response looks like.

Lines 7-9

(7) 萬物作焉而不辭，生而不有。

wàn wù zuò yān ér bù cí, shēng ér bù yǒu.

[[ten thousand][things/creatures]=all creatures] [arise/spring up/be made] [there/in this] [and/yet] [not] [decline, refuse, take leave of/speak of], [birth/produce] [and/yet] [not] [have/posses].

(8) 為而不恃，功成而弗居。

wéi ér bù shì, gōng chéng ér fú jū.

[do/act] [and/yet] [not] [rely on/presume/claim to], [achievement, merit] [complete/accomplish] [and/yet] [not] [dwell/occupy/residence].

(9) 夫唯弗居，是以不去。

fū wéi fú jū, shì yǐ bù qù.

[now/indeed, (man)] [only/precisely] [not] [dwell /occupy]; [[therefore]] [not] [depart/leave/remove].

Lines 7-8 consist of four parallel clauses of the same shape: something happens, and yet something is withheld — the ten thousand things arise, yet are not refused; they are given life, yet not possessed; there is action, yet no presuming; the work is completed, yet no dwelling in it. Line 9 then closes the chapter on the last of these: precisely because there is no dwelling, there is no departing.

But the clauses here are all built on a grammatical gap — Classical Chinese does not require a stated subject, and these lines supply none. So who does the not-refusing, not-possessing, not-dwelling?

Line 6 has just given us the Sage, and the natural move is to carry him forward: it is the Sage who acts without grasping. Most translators do this. But the gap is there, the English needs to fill it, and translators have several choices for how to do so.

First let’s look at those who keep the Sage. Even among them, a fork opens over how the Sage relates to the ten thousand things. Edmund Ryden has the myriad things as the actors, with the Sage standing back:

The myriad things act, yet he does not initiate them,

They generate, yet he does not possess them,

They act, yet he does not rely on them;

Tasks come to fruition, yet he does not dwell on them.

Here the world does the work — the things act, generate, come to fruition — and the Sage’s part is a series of withholdings, non-interference. But Hans-Georg Moeller reads the agency the other way:

The ten thousand things—

he makes them work, but does not initiate them,

he makes them act, but does not depend on them,

he makes them complete their tasks and does not reside with them.

This time the Sage is the cause — he makes the things work and act and complete, but he does so without initiating, depending, or residing.

The grammar permits both of the above: Classical Chinese does not mark the causation overtly, so wanwu zuo 萬物作 can be “the things arise” (Ryden) or “he makes them arise” (Moeller).

Then there are translators who do not carry the Sage forward at all into these lines. Ziporyn and DC Lau both read lines 7-8 impersonally — the subject is not the Sage but the generative source itself, the dao 道 under one of its many pointers. Here is Ziporyn:

through this the ten thousand things arise,

none declining it and none declined;

through this all get their birth and have their life,

none possessing it and none possessed;

through this all move and act and become,

none counting on it and none it counts on:

for, its achievements complete, it claims no credit,

never dwelling on its finished works—

There is no “he” here. The arising and the non-possession are mutual and impersonal — how things come to be, not what a person does with them. That both Lau and Ziporyn arrive at this independently is worth noting: while uncommon, this impersonal reading is not one translator’s eccentricity but a real option that the grammar leaves open. (We’ll look at Ziporyn’s reasoning in the sidebar.)

I lean toward keeping the Sage — line 6 has just introduced him, and the “thus” that opens it seems to point forward — but the text does not force the choice, and part of what these lines do is let the Sage’s non-grasping and the Way’s non-grasping blur into one. The Sage acts as the Way acts; the missing subject lets the two be the same.

Line 9 draws the chapter to a close. 夫唯弗居，是以不去 — “Indeed: precisely not dwelling, therefore not departing.”

Notice that this final line is itself an opposite-pair (and a rhyming one): ju 居 and qu 去 (“dwelling” and “departing”). This is the same structure as in lines 1-5, but now it is turned to advantage — where the earlier pairs showed opposites trapping each other, here the Sage, by refusing the first pole, escapes the second.

Let’s look at Moeller’s rendering of the whole chapter, to see everything at once. He’s working from the Mawangdui texts, so there are slight variations from the glossed lines above — we’ll address those in the sidebar.

Everybody in the world knows the beautiful as being beautiful.

Thus there is already ugliness.

Everybody knows what is good.

Thus there is that which is not good.

That presence and nonpresence generate each other,

difficult and easy complement each other,

long and short give each other shape,

above and below fill each other,

tones and voices harmonize with each other,

before and after follow each other,

is permanent.

Therefore the sage

resides with the task of nonaction,

practices the teaching of nonspeaking.

The ten thousand things—

he makes them work, but does not initiate them,

he makes them act, but does not depend on them,

he makes them complete their tasks and does not reside with them.

Well,

only because he does not reside with them,

they do not depart.

Sidebar on Textual Variants

Moeller worked from the Mawangdui silk texts, and two of the variations in them bear on how we read the chapter.

The first is small. In line 7, the received text has 不辭 “does not refuse” but the Mawangdui texts read 弗始, “does not initiate.” This is why Ryden and Moeller wrote “initiate” while Ziporyn, following the received text, wrote of refusing.

The second is more consequential, and it accounts for the odd hanging line in Moeller’s version after the six pairs of my lines 3-5 — “is permanent.” In the received text, lines 3-5 are six independent statements: hard and easy complete each other, long and short shape each other, and so on. But the Mawangdui texts insert zhi 之 before each xiang 相 (“mutually”), and then they close the set with heng 恆 (“constant” or “permanent”).

So, for example, where the received text has:

長短相較 [long] [short] [each other/mutually] [compare]

Mawangdui shows :

長短之相較 [[long][short]] [’s] [each other/mutually] [compare]

The zhi 之 marks a modifier, as it so often does — but slipped between each pair and its verb, it turns “before and after mutually follow” into “the mutual following of before and after” — a noun phrase rather than a statement.

With all six nominalized this way, they no longer stand as six sentences but wait together for a single predicate, which heng 恆 then supplies at the end: their mutual arising is constant/permanent.

And this is where Ziporyn’s impersonal reading of lines 7-9 comes from. On the Mawangdui text, that constancy is named outright, and Ziporyn takes it as the antecedent buried in the little word yan 焉 in line 7. In his words, yan 焉 makes “‘the constant’ a strong candidate for the antecedent for the pronoun embedded in the pronoun-preposition contraction yan two lines down. The meaning would then be not ‘It is through this work of nondoing, this teaching of noninstruction, that all things arise’ and so on, but rather ‘It is through this constancy — the reason also for the sage’s abiding in the work of nondoing — that all things arise…’ and so on. But ‘the work of nondoing’ and ‘the constancy of the mutual generation of opposites’ are obviously closely related in this text. Here we hang them together on the little word ‘this.’”

One last note connects back to Chapter 1. Heng 恆 is the same character we met in the tomb texts replacing of the received text’s chang 常 — the swap forced by a naming taboo on Emperor Wen’s given name, Liu Heng. But regardless of whether the character is chang 常 or heng 恆, its appearance here ties back to the role it played in Chapter 1, where 恆 / 常 marked the real/constant Way that language can’t pin down — “way can say, not real Way.”

Here it does something similar, but note where it lands: it is not beauty or ugliness that is real/permanent, but their mutual arising. The opposites themselves are relative, fleeting, defined only against each other; what’s “real” is the pattern by which they arise together — not the oppositions themselves.

Sitting With It

Here’s a small experiment you can carry into the coming week, following on the mutual arising of opposites.

The next time you catch yourself judging something — that meeting was a disaster, this view is beautiful, this was a good day — pause and try to build the opposite case with equal conviction. Find the ways the disaster could be useful, the beautiful view also unremarkable, the good day also a waste. Not to convince yourself that either of the opposite statements are the real truth, but to hold both at once and feel the grip of the first one loosen. Notice, too, how badly you wanted one side to win — that pull is the judgment reifying itself, dressing up a preference as a fact.

Such a balancing of opposing views was a central practice of the ancient Greek and Roman Skeptics — Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus, active at roughly the same time as the Stoics mentioned above — so it is hardly the property of Eastern philosophy alone.

Zhuangzi — the second most important Daoist after Laozi, and one we’ll discuss often in this series — describes the mind of the Sage adept in this exercise, and the state he or she reaches:

“[The Sage] recognizes a ‘this’ but a ‘this’ that is also ‘that,’ a ‘that’ that is also ‘this.’ His ‘that’ has both a right and a wrong in it; his ‘this,’ too, has both a right and a wrong in it. So, in fact, does he still have a ‘this’ and ‘that’? Or does he, in fact, no longer have a ‘this’ and ‘that’? A state in which ‘this’ and ‘that’ no longer find their opposites is called the Hinge of the Way.” (Watson translation; emphasis mine)

Another View

Here’s a few snippets of a story you likely know well:

“And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, ‘You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.’ …

“But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’ So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons.” (Genesis 2:16-17 & 3:4-7, Ignatius Bible translation).

Read as history, the Garden of Eden was a place that existed some 6000 years ago, and it has nothing to do with Chinese philosophy. But more properly read symbolically, psychologically… it starts to sound a great deal like Zhuangzi’s “Hinge of the Way.”

The Garden is a condition without division: no shame, no covering, no sorting of the world into good and evil. What ends it is less a crime than an acquisition — the knowledge of good and evil, the evaluating eye. And notice how it arrives: the woman sees that the tree is good for food, a delight to the eyes, desirable for wisdom. Desire and conceptualization, carving the world — the very forces we met back in Chapter 1. The moment that knowledge lands, discrimination-and-judgment switches on and the undivided state is gone.

You cannot know good and evil and remain in the Garden, just as you cannot pass judgment and remain at Zhuangzi’s Hinge of the Way. To discriminate and to judge is to be cast out — this is not punishment imposed from outside, but a condition entailed by the knowing itself.

The “fall” from an ancient state of “grace” is something the Daodejing addresses repeatedly, and we will meet it again before we are through.

Figure & Ground

Many modern optical illusions illustrate something like the “mutual arising of opposites” with images that allow two readings at once (vases and faces, ducks and rabbits), and not unlike MC Escher’s work above. But one can also see a more subtle version of the effect in the Chinese ritual bronzes that predate the Daodejing by up to a millennium and were still being made in the Warring States period.

The 11th C BCE example below showcases how the intricate designs on the sides of these vessels often create a similar ambiguity between figure and ground, itself a mutual arising in the visual cortex whenever we look at images.

New here? Check out the introduction, language primer, and historical context to get quickly up to speed. Chapter and text formatting is explained here.

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In the time of the Warring States there lived a sage from the state of Chu, Lao Dan by name, who became keeper of the Zhou royal archives. He was a man so steeped in the Dao that even Confucius once came to question him.

Confucius left the encounter so impressed that when his students asked what his estimation of the man was, he exclaimed, “At last I may say that I have seen a dragon — a dragon that coils to show his body at its best, that sprawls out to display his patterns at their best, riding on the breath of the clouds, feeding on the yin and yang. My mouth fell open and I couldn’t close it; my tongue flew up and I couldn’t even stammer. How could I possibly make any estimation of Lao Dan!”1

Lao Dan — also known as Laozi — quietly cultivated the Dao and its De, and when he saw at last that the dynasty was past saving, he left. He mounted an ox and rode west toward the mountains, planning to vanish into the wild country beyond.

But the keeper of the mountain pass, Yin Xi, stopped him. You are leaving the world, he said. At least write down your teaching first.

And so the old master set down the five thousand characters that came to be known as the Daodejing (“Classic of the Way and its Virtue”) before riding into the misty mountain pass and disappearing forever.

Before the Text

Such is the legend of Laozi, the man known for thousands of years to have authored the book we are carefully reading. But if Lao Dan — or any other individual identified as Laozi — ever existed it is almost certain he did not write the Daodejing.

It is almost certain, in fact, that no one wrote the Daodejing, at least not in the way we think of authorship today. The Daodejing is what is called a composite text; furthermore, it preserves a far older oral tradition — likely handed down from memory in a teacher-student lineage that stretched back generations, perhaps centuries, before anyone wrote the words down.

This does not make it unique, however. Many of the world’s most ancient classics share both characteristics. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are the classic Western case: their stock epithets (“rosy-fingered dawn,” “swift-footed Achilles”) are the very machinery of oral composition, phrases shaped to be held in memory and recombined in performance.

The Torah (the first five books in the Bible, also known as the Pentateuch) was traditionally ascribed to Moses, but on close reading betrays the seams of multiple sources woven together by later editors. This is a case of one traditional author standing in for many hands, much as Laozi for the Daodejing and Homer for his epics.

Closer to China are the Vedic hymns and early Upanishads of India — the philosophical dialogues of the Upanishads being composed, like the Daodejing, in the great Axial ferment of the first millennium BCE. The earliest Vedic hymns go back another millennium and were shown to have been transmitted with astonishing fidelity long before they were written down.

If we step back from these particular examples and also look more widely at texts created from oral traditions, some general patterns come into view.

The first is that statements carried by voice are shaped by the ear and memory. Rhythm, rhyme, parallelism, repetition, formulaic phrasing — these are what allow thoughts to travel with fidelity in a world without writing.

Because they do not outsource memory to written words, oral traditions favor certain shapes of thought over others. Compression travels well: the aphorism, the proverb, the tight parallel couplet are all easy to carry. But sustained linear argument does not survive the journey from mouth to mouth — this is part of why so much ancient wisdom arrives gnomic rather than systematic. China’s own Book of Songs (Shijing 詩經), the fountainhead of its poetic tradition, is built from exactly this kind of material, as are the Bible’s “Psalms” and “Proverbs” and the early Buddhist suttas.

A second principle follows: there is no single author in the modern sense. The authority of such a text is communal and ancestral rather than personal — the words carry the accumulated weight of a lineage, not the opinion of whoever happens to be voicing them now. This is why they feel as though they come from a “higher source” — in a very real sense they do.

Benjamin Schwartz, surveying the texts that became the Chinese classics, put it well: “One first of all notes that they all enjoy a kind of public status. They may not be revelations of God, but they spring from a higher source than the minds of ‘private’ individuals.”2 This is not a mystical revelation per se, but instead simply what happens when a text is pooled from many voices and carried by a tradition across generations.

This brings us to compositeness, the near-inevitable companion of oral formation. If the unit that gets memorized is the saying, the hymn, or the chapter — smaller than what we would call a book — then the book, when it finally coheres, is an assembly of such units, gathered and arranged by hands other than those that first spoke them. Multiple periods and voices coexist in one document, and the seams inevitably show: doublets, shifts in vocabulary or tone, tensions and contradictions between passages. To a modern editor these are problems to be solved, but it is better to read them as the texture of creation.

This describes not just the Daodejing but the whole shelf we’ve been discussing, and the Chinese classics as a group. Every one of the Five Classics in China are composite in just this sense — anthologies and edited compilations rather than single-author works, with their attributions (often to Confucius) standing in for the labor of many.

Importantly, when canonization arrives it freezes a fluid thing at a single moment in time. The “received text” that reaches us with the authority of scripture is a snapshot of what was an ongoing process.

The Composite Daodejing

Now let’s see how both properties — orality and compositeness — surface in the Daodejing itself.

Start with form. The most basic unit of the Daodejing is the aphorism: the compressed, self-standing saying, short enough to be held whole in memory and turned over in the mind. And these sayings are patterned in ways to make them stick.

For starters, the Daodejing was originally rhymed far more heavily than a modern reader can hear, the sounds having drifted over two millennia (recall that Old Chinese was voiced nothing like modern Mandarin). But even now the fingerprints remain, and now and then a rhyme still sounds through — like the Mandarin miao 妙 and jiao 徼 that closed lines 5 and 6 of Chapter 1 last week.

Alongside rhyme run two other mnemonic devices we’ll meet constantly: tight parallel couplets (the first three line-pairs of Chapter 1 were exactly this) and sorites chains, where the end of one line becomes the start of the next (Chapters 25 and 42 are two well-known examples).

And then there are the formulae. Just as “rosy-fingered dawn” recurs some twenty-odd times in Homer, fixed phrases recur across the Daodejing — perhaps none is more visible than 是以聖人 (“therefore the Sage…”), which opens sections in seventeen different chapters. Entire lines, too, sometimes reappear nearly verbatim in chapters far apart.

These are the joints of oral-formulaic building, and they become plain to anyone who reads the whole carefully.

Compositeness comes into view at the level of the chapter. Many chapters read as “aphorism plus explication” — a kernel proverb now fused with what looks like accreted commentary. DC Lau and Michael LaFargue both found this pattern pervasive enough to subdivide the chapters into their apparent source-elements. And the modularity runs deeper still: reach inside a chapter and you often find smaller independent units, sayings that could once have circulated alone before being gathered here. (This is also why each chapter stands on its own — and why, as I say in the About Page, you can begin anywhere.)

Once you notice the seams, you’ll start to hear the different voices — and they don’t all speak in perfect harmony. Some chapters are mystical, some coldly strategic; some practical, some cosmological. That heterogeneity is just what an assembled text predicts: different materials, from different hands and settings, pooled into one book. Brook Ziporyn’s recent translation treats the text as exactly this kind of composite, each part carrying its own style; LaFargue reorders the chapters under seven themes.

All of this we observe by reading. But the Daodejing is unusual — we need not infer its history from internal evidence alone. We can check the received text, the one almost everyone read and commented on down the centuries, against the oldest physical copies: three sets of manuscripts pulled from tombs and discovered only in the 1970s and 90s.

Digging Beneath the Text

The version nearly everyone has read for two thousand years is what scholars call the “received text” — the one transmitted, copied, and commented upon down the centuries, and the base text for this project.

It reaches us chiefly through two early commentaries, each carrying a slightly different version of the text: Wang Bi’s (3rd century CE) and Heshang Gong’s (traditionally Han dynasty, though the dating is contested). We will give both men their due in an essay after Chapter 3. For now it’s enough to know that even the received text is not perfectly singular: copyists diverged, punctuation shifted, commentators preferred different graphs, and scholars have argued over exact wording and chapter divisions almost from the start — though in ways minor enough that non-specialists can set them aside.

The familiar shape is likewise an editorial achievement rather than an original design. The 81 chapters, divided into a Dao section (1–37) and a De section (38–81) — the split that gives the text its name — were imposed on the material by later hands. Even the number 81, redolent of 9×9, has the whiff of numerological tidying rather than authorial intent. The “book,” in other words, is a frame laid over material that once floated free of it.

And we know the frame is late, because we can now see beyond it. Manuscripts pulled from tombs sealed centuries before Wang Bi let us watch the text assemble itself.

The oldest, found in 1993 at Guodian (bamboo slips; tomb sealed c300 BCE), holds only about a third of the received text, grouped in three bundles that follow neither the received order nor the Dao/De division. This is a snapshot of a text which is still coming together as a whole.

The two Mawangdui manuscripts (silk; tomb sealed 168 BCE) are both nearly complete. In contradiction to the received text they both seem to place the De section before the Dao — which is why Robert Henricks titled his translation of them Te-Tao Ching.

These tomb texts differ from the received version at every scale: individual characters and grammatical particles, sometimes whole lines present in one version but not another or phrased differently enough to shift the sense. We looked at a couple of such changes in Chapter 1 last week, and I will continue to flag the consequential ones as we go.

When and how the received arrangement settled, we simply cannot see. Between these silk manuscripts of 168 BCE and the earliest commentary-bearing texts of the (perhaps) 2nd and (certainly) 3rd centuries CE — Heshang Gong’s and Wang Bi’s, both now in the Dao-then-De order — we have essentially nothing. There are no witnesses to whether and when the sections were flipped, the chapters fixed at 81, the whole given its familiar shape. The received text is a snapshot of a long process, accepted ever after as a fixed object.

So how does one read something like this? As I noted in the Chapter 1 sidebar, I take the received (Wang Bi) text as our base and flag important variants chapter by chapter. I don’t treat the tomb texts as a court of correction, or as a truer “original” to be restored — they are earlier witnesses, not better ones.

It is worth stating clearly that the text we are reading is a snapshot of a process. The choice of this text is far from arbitrary — it is the version history actually read and argued with — but we should keep in mind that it is not a single, unified, sacred whole delivered intact from one hand. It is a gathering, fixed at a moment.

And yet — having taken the book apart, shown it to be pooled from many voices and frozen in time — we will spend the next two years reading it as though a single voice speaks it, chapter by chapter. To see why that doesn’t contradict everything I’ve just written, picture a scene.

Setting A Scene

Imagine we wanted to dramatize the Daodejing — accounting for all the complexities discussed above, yet still presenting the received text as a singular, unified whole coming from one sage’s mouth.

I would set the scene at a ruler’s court in the late Warring States: perhaps the Qin court around 240-30 BCE, as it was it enacting its strict Legalist program at home and beginning to swallow up the weaker states around it.

King Zheng (政) of Qin sits on his throne, surrounded by Confucian, Legalist, and other advisors, as well as a scribe. Before him is brought a Daoist recluse famed for his wisdom — not a prisoner exactly, but certainly induced to the court by both hook and crook. He does not seek prominence, has no particular wish to advise the king, and has little choice in the matter.

We don’t know his name, so let’s just call him “Old Master” (which, incidentally, is what Laozi 老子 literally means). Knowing the danger in the task — advisors were executed regularly in these days — he resolves to say as little as possible: mostly gnomic proverbs and aphorisms handed down in lineage stretching back further than anyone can remember, with a little explanation here and there. And he draws it out over many evenings with the king.

So, across 81 nights, he plays a kind of Daoist Scheherazade — not spinning fairy tales to stay alive, but planting ideas he hopes will shape how the ruler sees the world and his place in it.

In this hypothetical play, we no longer have the exact conversations between the king and all his advisors. But each time the Old Master was drawn out — answering a question, or responding to something another advisor had said — the dutiful scribe took down his words exactly. It is this record we are working to understand.

I am not claiming this happened, of course. Certain structures and passages in the Guodian and Mawangdui texts are very strong evidence against the exact time and place I’ve sketched. But such nitpicking is beside the point: this is a deliberately imaginative staging, meant to make the essence of the Daodejing’s composition visible — and for that, the scene serves well.

Because ultimately, that is what the Daodejing is: a collection of diverse sayings handed down over centuries, collective wisdom now voiced by a single person — a reclusive sage holding to a dao 道 that “everyone in the world says is great” (as we’ll hear on the 67th night), and which a ruler seeks to understand.

~

Suggested Reading

Kohn, Livia & Michael LaFargue (eds). Lao-Tzu and the Tao-te-ching. State University of New York Press, 1998.

Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (30th Anniversary Edition). Routledge, 2012.

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~

道可道非常道

名可名非常名

無名天地之始

有名萬物之母

故:

常無欲以觀其妙

常有欲以觀其徼

此兩者, 同出而異名, 同謂之玄

玄之又玄衆妙之門

Mandarin & English

Here is the chapter with the pinyin and a character-by-character glossing interleaved between lines:

(1) 道可道，非常道。

dào kě dào, fēi cháng dào.

[way/path/method] [can] [way/speak/teach] [not] [real/constant/enduring] [Way/path].

(2) 名可名，非常名。

míng kě míng, fēi cháng míng.

[name/title/rank] [can] [name/title/rank] [not] [real/constant/enduring] [name/title/rank].

(3) 無名天地之始；

wú míng tiān dì zhī shǐ;

[without/lack/absence] [name] [[heaven][earth]=cosmos] [’s] [beginning, origin];

(4) 有名萬物之母。

yǒu míng wàn wù zhī mǔ.

[have/presence] [name] [[ten thousand][things/creatures]=all things] [’s] [mother].

(5) 故常無欲，以觀其妙；

gù cháng wú yù, yǐ guān qí miào;

[thus] [real/constant/enduring] [without/lack/absence] [desire/intention], [thereby] [observe/contemplate] [its] [subtlety/wonder/mystery];

(6) 常有欲，以觀其徼。

cháng yǒu yù, yǐ guān qí jiào.

[real/constant/enduring] [have/presence] [desire/intention], [thereby] [observe/contemplate] [its] [boundary, limit, manifestation].

(7) 此兩者，同出而異名，同謂之玄。

cǐ liǎng zhě, tóng chū ér yì míng, tóng wèi zhī xuán.

[this] [pair/couple] [those who], [same/together] [emerge] [and/yet/but] [different] [name/title/rank], [same/together] [call] [it] [profound/dark/obscure].

(8) 玄之又玄，衆妙之門。

xuán zhī yòu xuán, zhòng miào zhī mén.

[profound/dark/obscure] [’s] [again/and] [profound/dark/obscure], [multitude/all] [subtlety/wonder/mystery] [’s] [gate].

The Shape

“It contains the book. I think of it as the Aleph, in Borges’s story: if you see it rightly, it contains everything.” — Ursula K Le Guin

“Lao-tzu’s philosophy is all here. The remaining five thousand words only expand on this first verse.” — Hanshan Deqing (c1546–1623) (via Red Pine)

Chapter 1 has drawn more commentary than any other in the Daodejing, along with a recurring conviction that it holds the whole text in miniature. It is the chapter readers linger over most, and it introduces themes we will return to again and again.

This makes for a long essay — the longest, I suspect, of the whole project. Partly this is due to the chapter’s philosophical density, and partly it is that we are meeting many of these characters and ideas for the first time. Later chapters will reuse much of this vocabulary, so they should generally run shorter and easier. Here, we are building the foundation.

Two habits of the project are worth flagging up front.

First, I won’t chase down every potential reading and correspondence packed into a chapter — that would regularly run to ten or twenty thousand words. So when I pass lightly over something, take it as a deferral, not an omission; it may well return in a later chapter (and feel free to ask about anything in the comments).

Second, I will often lay out several possible readings of a line and decline to resolve them into a single meaning or choice. This restraint is deliberate: the text itself holds multiple possibilities open, and part of reading it well is learning to hold open what it does.

With that in mind, let’s look broadly at what the chapter is doing before diving into the details.

Chapter 1 is composed of three pairs of parallel phrases (lines 1-6) followed by a fourth, non-parallel pair (7-8).

Lines 1-2 take two words that permeated Warring States philosophical debate — dao 道 (“way”) and ming 名 (“name”) — and say, in essence, “none of this talk gets to the heart of things.”

Lines 3-4 turn to ming 名 and its role in “origination.” In short, “having” (you 有) or “being without” (wu 無) ming 名 changes matters radically. (More on this below.)

Lines 5-6 play off the same formal structure as 3-4, making yu 欲 (“desire”) the key to what one observes (guan 觀).

The final two lines brings things back together. Line 7 says the two originations — and/or the two observings — emerge from a single source, and that this shared source is xuan 玄 (“profound”). The final line then expands on that xuan 玄, closing by saying it is the “Gate of All Mysteries” — the phrase I’ve taken for this project’s title.

Now step back, and you’ll notice something that turns out to be how much of the Daodejing works. Dao 道, the title term, appears only in the first line. After that it vanishes, and the chapter turns instead around things like: the nameless origin, the mother of all things, the single source, profound darkness, subtle mystery.

So: name dao 道 once, say it is beyond words, then talk around it for seven lines without naming it again — circling and pointing rather than fixing. The withdrawal of the word enacts the first line’s claim.

In addition, the chapter’s essential movement is from the parochial to the cosmic. It opens inside the intellectual marketplace of the age, where every school hawks its own dao 道, and says: all of those are speakable, and so not deep enough. And it ends not on a definition or proposition of its own, but rather on a gate that opens toward something mysterious, in much the same sense as the Greek μυστικός (mystikos) — hidden, secret, not to be spoken.

Line by Line

The above is the shape of the chapter as I see it. But let’s take a closer look at the exact words and phrasings, as well as how others have interpreted and translated them.

Lines 1-2

(1) 道可道，非常道。

dào kě dào, fēi cháng dào.

[way/path/method] [can] [way/speak/teach] [not] [real/constant/enduring] [Way/path].

(2) 名可名，非常名。

míng kě míng, fēi cháng míng.

[name/title/rank] [can] [name/title/rank] [not] [real/constant/enduring] [name/title/rank].

I provided six expert translations (and one of my own) of these lines in the project introduction. Between those and the glosses above, you can see that the words that matter here are dao 道, ming 名, and chang 常. (Ke 可 and fei 非 can be safely rendered as “can” and “not.”) The lexicon entries cover each in full; here are a few notes on this particular context.

The word dao 道 has become so pre-loaded for a modern reader that one has to “unlearn” what one already “knows” to encounter these lines like someone would have when they were written. Its earliest sense was concrete — a path, a road — and by the Warring States it would most readily have suggested a method, a teaching, a course (Ziporyn’s choice of “course” for dao 道 has much to recommend it). A 21st-century reader sees the opening line as already charged with quasi-theological weight. But a 4th-century BCE reader would likely have taken it to be about the ways and methods that people teach and follow.

Most translators either leave dao 道 untranslated or use “Way” — itself nearly as loaded, especially capitalized. As a single consistent rendering, one that keeps the word’s full range (including the eventual cosmic and mystical senses) in play, that is fine — I typically do it myself. But it is worth remembering how much more prosaic the word once was.

The word ming 名 — typically well-translated as “name” — is less fraught, but it has two live senses here: something like “word” and something like “title.” Heshang Gong takes the latter, glossing it as “wealth, rank, honor, glory” — worldly names of high standing. But Wang Bi reads the couplet differently, as being about that which “points to affairs and fashions forms” — not unlike (though not quite the same as) the School of Names’ concern with how words correspond to actualities, which I mentioned in the previous essay. (We’ll discuss both of these early commentators in a context essay after Chapter 3.)

Finally, chang 常 modifies the last word of each line — the daos 道 and mings 名 that people discuss are not the chang 常 ones. In my deliberately primitive rendering — “way can say, not real Way / name can name, not real Name” — I chose “real” for chang 常, wanting a single syllable to keep the lines’ mantra-like rhythm. Ames & Hall use “really,” so “real” is not an unreasonable choice, though most translators reach for “invariant,” “eternal,” “enduring,” or “constant.”

Regardless of how we render these three terms, however, the essence of the couplet is the same: there are limits to what language and concepts can do for us.

Lines 3-4

(3) 無名天地之始；

wú míng tiān dì zhī shǐ;

[without/lack/absence] [name] [[heaven][earth]=cosmos] [’s] [beginning, origin];

(4) 有名萬物之母。

yǒu míng wàn wù zhī mǔ.

[have/presence] [name] [[ten thousand][things/creatures]=all things] [’s] [mother].

Lines 3-4 are another parallel pair with many repeating words. The philosophically key characters are the first in each line: wu 無 and you 有. They are discussed more fully in the lexicon, but their common meanings are roughly “without” and “with” respectively, and if we read them as modifying ming 名, the lines are telling us what changes with the introduction of names. (There is also a second reading, on which wu 無 and you 有 carry their later metaphysical sense — “Absence/Non-Being” and “Presence/Being”; more on that below.)

The final characters are near-synonyms: shi 始, “beginning,” and mu 母, “mother,” which is often used in the sense of an origin — it’s not hard to see why a mother would be an image for the source of things. Both characters return multiple times in later chapters, and I’ll give mu 母, with all its attendant symbolism, fuller treatment later.

The middle terms — tiandi 天地 and wanwu 萬物 — are compounds (or binomes). Each character is its own word, but paired they mean something more than the sum.

Tian 天 (”sky, weather, natural order,” usually “Heaven”) and di 地 (“Earth”) together are most often rendered “Heaven and Earth,” but what they point to is closer to the cosmos, reality as a whole. (Much like the term in Hamlet’s “there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”)

Wan 萬 technically means ten-thousand but also means innumerable or beyond counting. Wu 物 most often refers to living things or creatures but can also mean things more generally. As a combination they appear in 16 chapters; more traditional translations are “myriad things/creatures” or the literal “ten thousand things/creatures,” but “all things/creatures” is what is being pointed at and “everything” is sometimes used by translators as well.

Putting this all together, the lines say something like: without names, the origin of the cosmos; with names, the mother of distinct, individual things. Naming, in other words, is bound up with differentiation — the undivided whole of the universe resolving into the countless separate things we pick out and label.

Of the two dozen-plus translators in my quiver, Addiss & Lombardo stay closest to the bare Chinese:

Nameless: the origin of heaven and earth. / Naming: the mother of ten thousand things.

Others commit further. Lau reaches for the past tense — “The nameless was the beginning… The named was the mother” — tilting the lines toward a cosmogonic story: first a nameless beginning, then naming and the world of things. Others supply a pronoun the Chinese lacks: for example, Ivanhoe’s “Nameless, it is the beginning… Named, it is the mother” quietly reinserts the dao 道 in two aspects. Which raises a question the pair leaves genuinely open: are the nameless and the named two things, or one thing twice-named?

And there is also the metaphysical reading I flagged above — that wu 無 and you 有 are not “without” and “with” but the poles Absence and Presence, with ming 名 turning into a verb. Something like:

Absence names the cosmos / Presence names the things.

This depends on a sense of wu 無 and you 有 that developed centuries later than the original text, and though it might seem a stretch here — few translators take it — such an idea is made more explicit in a later chapter, where we’ll take it up properly.

Lines 5-6

(5) 故常無欲，以觀其妙；

gù cháng wú yù, yǐ guān qí miào;

[thus] [real/constant/enduring] [without/lack/absence] [desire/intention], [thereby] [observe/contemplate] [its] [subtlety/wonder/mystery];

(6) 常有欲，以觀其徼。

cháng yǒu yù, yǐ guān qí jiào.

[real/constant/enduring] [have/presence] [desire/intention], [thereby] [observe/contemplate] [its] [boundary, limit, manifestation].

Lines 5-6 have a structure similar to 3-4: ignore the opening “thus” and the structure echoes the previous pair — without X, then Y; with X, then Z.

This time, though, wu 無 and you 有 are preceded by chang 常 and (generally) taken to modify yu 欲. Yu 欲 is most commonly translated “desire,” but it shades into less intense states than the English word implies: wanting, wishing, intending are all fair renderings in certain contexts.

And here the presence or absence of yu 欲 is the difference between observing (guan 觀) its (qi 其) miao 妙 or its jiao 徼 — miao 妙 I render “mystery” (though “subtle,” “wonder,” even “small” are all available), and jiao 徼 means an outline, edge, or boundary.

Putting things together, and stating it broadly: attitude shapes what one observes. Without desire — “really without desire” — the world shows up as wondrous, mysterious, subtle. With desire, one sees edges and boundaries — the world sorts into specific things. Desire is doing here what naming did in lines 3-4: it carves.

Of my translations, I think Ames & Hall capture 5-6 best:

Thus, to be really objectless in one’s desires (wuyu) is how one observes the mysteries of all things,

While really having desires is how one observes their boundaries.

Addiss & Lombardo strip it to the bone — “Empty of desire, perceive mystery. Filled with desire, perceive manifestations.” — but the move is the same: desire determines what comes into view.

This is an insight twentieth-century phenomenologists arrived at as well. We do not simply find a world of ready-made objects sitting out there; things come into focus as objects through our intentions and purposes, through what the world affords us. A doorknob shows up as a doorknob to a hand that means to turn it. Desire and intention are part of how the bounded, separate thing gets constituted at all.

But the phenomenologists were describing ordinary perception — the everyday world of work and play, movement and action. In pointing to being “really without desire,” the Daodejing gestures at a different state of mind altogether. This isn’t just “without strong desire” but is an uncommon state of mind, one usually cultivated deliberately with specific practices — something we’ll come to in later chapters and context essays.

Chan parses the couplet differently, and describes why in his notes. He reads wu 無 and you 有 as “Non-Being” and “Being” — with yu 欲 carried into the next clause:

Let there always be non-being so we may see their subtlety, and let there always be being so we may see their outcome.

On this reading the contrast is not desireless-versus-desiring but the metaphysical pair we set aside at lines 3-4: Absence and Presence. The same fork, one couplet later.

Lines 7-8

(7) 此兩者，同出而異名，同謂之玄。

cǐ liǎng zhě, tóng chū ér yì míng, tóng wèi zhī xuán.

[this] [pair/couple] [those who], [same/together] [emerge] [and/yet/but] [different] [name/title/rank], [same/together] [call] [it] [profound/dark/obscure].

(8) 玄之又玄，衆妙之門。

xuán zhī yòu xuán, zhòng miào zhī mén.

[profound/dark/obscure] [’s] [again/and] [profound/dark/obscure], [multitude/all] [subtlety/wonder/mystery] [’s] [gate].

The one philosophically loaded term in 7-8 we haven’t yet met is xuan 玄 (in the lexicon, I render it “profound,” though “dark” is more common). It would later give its name to Xuanxue 玄學 — “Profound/Dark Learning,” a current of Wei-Jin metaphysical thought that began with Wang Bi and in which the metaphysical readings of wu 無 and you 有 we touched on above take shape.

Tong 同 and chu 出 also do real work in line 7. Tong means “same” or “together;” chu ranges from “emerge” or “arise” to “produce” or “go out.”

Unlike the first three line pairs, 7-8 are not parallel — but they are linked: that final key word of line 7, xuan 玄, is picked up and drawn out at the start of line 8.

Line 7 is grammatically tricky. It is not obvious what “the pair” refers to — the nameless and named of lines 3-4, or the two observings of lines 5-6? Commentators tend to commit (Wang Bi says outright it is the origin and mother of 3-4); translators are more divided and often keep the ambiguity.

I am inclined to hear both — partly because the grammar is open, but mostly because in my reading the two pairs are not really two: naming carving the whole into parts (3-4) and desire carving it into parts (5-6) are the same movement. So “the pair” can gather all of it.

Here is Addiss & Lombardo again, with an example of translators keeping it open:

These have the same source, but different names. Call them both deep —

Others pick a side. Ames & Hall tie line 7 back to 3-4: “These two—the nameless and what is named—emerge from the same source yet are referred to differently. Together they are called obscure.”

But David Hinton groups his stanzas so that line 7 attaches to lines 5-6. Here is his Chapter 1 in its entirety (note the poetic license in stanza creation and line breaks — he even reverses lines 3-4):

A Way called Way isn’t the perennial Way.

A name that names isn’t the perennial name:

~

the named is mother to the ten thousand things,

but the unnamed is origin to all heaven and earth.

~

In perennial Absence you see mystery,

and in perennial Presence you see appearance.

Though the two are one and the same,

once they arise, they differ in name.

~

One and the same they’re called dark-enigma,

dark-enigma deep within dark-enigma,

~

gateway of all mystery.

I’m partial to Hinton’s “dark-enigma” for xuan 玄, and his “gateway of all mystery” is close to my own “Gate of All Mysteries.”

But translators make a range of legitimate choices; here are several versions of the final line, all choosing very different words to render xuan 玄, miao 妙, and men 門:

The obscurest of the obscure, they are the swinging gateway of the manifold mysteries. (Ames & Hall)

Abstruse on abstruse, the gate to all obscurity. (Ryden)

Deeper and more profound, the door of all subtleties! (Chan)

Mystery of Mysteries, Gateway to All Marvels. (Minford)

So, in summary, lines 7-8 take the dichotomies (whichever they are) and fold them back together, uniting them in a darkness that deepens past naming — profound, and then profound again. This is that Dao 道 that cannot be dao’d: the gateway to all subtle, obscure mysteries.

I also like to read that final line as an invitation — a threshold beyond which is the rest of the text.

Before we step through it, though, there is a question worth asking: what kind of a text is the Daodejing in the first place? That is the subject of next week’s post, and where we’ll head before Chapter 2 (to be published in two weeks).

Speaking of the text qua text — and for the very curious — a short sidebar on a couple of this chapter’s manuscript variants follows below. It is entirely skippable; we’ve covered more than enough already. But if you do skip it, know that this essay is not quite finished: do scroll on to “Sitting With It” and “Another View.”

Sidebar on Textual Variants:

The oldest copies of the Daodejing we possess come not from the transmitted tradition but from tombs excavated in the last fifty years. The most important are two silk manuscripts found at Mawangdui (sealed 168 BCE). They differ from the “received text” — the version read, copied, and commented on for two thousand years — in many small ways, and I’ll flag the consequential differences chapter by chapter as we go. (The story of these manuscripts and their relation to the “received text” will be discussed in next week’s essay.)

Two variants in the Mawangdui texts have important bearings on Chapter 1.

Heng 恆 for chang 常:

Throughout the chapter, where the received text has chang 常 (“real/constant”), the Mawangdui texts have heng 恆. The two words are slightly different — heng 恆 leans toward “perpetual, enduring, constant,” chang 常 toward “conventional, ordinary, common” — but both the CTP and Kroll dictionaries give definitions that cross between them.

The likely reason for the swap is a naming taboo: chang 常 appears only in copies made after the reign of Emperor Wen of Han (r180-157 BCE), whose personal name was Liu Heng (劉恆). Writing an emperor’s given name was forbidden, so heng 恆 was replaced with the near-synonym chang 常 — and the substitution stuck.

Wanwu 萬物 in both lines 3 and 4:

The received text reads 天地之始 (the origin of “Heaven and Earth”) at the end of line 3 and 萬物之母 (the mother of the “ten thousand things”) at the end of line 4 — the cosmos in one line, the myriad things in the other. But the Mawangdui texts instead read wanwu 萬物 in both lines. This flattens the distinction: on the tomb reading, the difference between the two lines is simply origin (shi 始) versus mother (mu 母), not cosmos versus individual things.

This matters, because the whole-and-parts reading I offered above leans on the received text’s split — the nameless tied to the undivided cosmos, the named to the differentiated many. On the Mawangdui text, that contrast isn’t there.

I’m not bothered by this. The Mawangdui texts are just two early witnesses — the shared variant doesn’t establish an “original.” Moreover, even if the received text were proven to be a later change from all copies before the Han dynasty that would not make it wrong — nor make a reading grounded in it invalid. The received text is the one that was actually studied for two millennia, and it is the one we are reading. Where the tomb texts open a genuinely different sense, I’ll say so, as here; but I won’t treat them as a court of correction or as a clearly “better” or “more original” version.

There are other Chapter 1 variants — a different graph for miao 妙, an extra word in line 6, and more — but they don’t radically change anything we have discussed. In future chapters, I’ll raise variants when they matter, and let the rest rest.

Sitting With It

A major theme of this chapter is the role desire and names play in creating the world we inhabit — at least psychologically and phenomenologically. So one way of “sitting with” this chapter might be to try and catch yourself a few times over the next two weeks and notice whether, and how, desires and names shape what you perceive and how you interpret things.

Imagine you’re in line at a cafe, waiting to order a coffee. On the way to the barista you pass a tray of baked goods.

Notice how differently they land depending on whether it’s late morning and you skipped breakfast, or just after you finished a filling lunch. On an empty stomach, that cupcake in the corner calls out to you — at the very least you register that it’s there. On a full one, it may not enter your awareness at all; instead it might be the music, the light, the cute barista that fills your experience. That’s desire deciding what you even see.

And the same cupcake makes a second point, about names.

The line between a cupcake and a muffin is often little more than a word. In nutrition and flavor, a crumb-topped blueberry confection could be called either a muffin — in which case it’s a “wholesome breakfast” — or a cupcake — in which case it’s a “dessert.” Same object, different name: different experience. Or, as line 7 put it: “these have the same source, but different names” (Addiss & Lombardo translation).

So this one pastry shows both of the chapter’s carving-forces at work: desire decided whether you noticed it, and a name decided what kind of thing it is.

How else do your desires — even your faintest intentions — shape what enters your awareness? And how do the names you or others give things shape how you think and feel about them?

Another View

“A map is not the territory… If we reflect upon our languages, we find that at best they must be considered only as maps. A word is not the object it represents.”

— Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity (1933)

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The Daodejing can read like timeless wisdom: short, floating aphorisms that seem to arrive from outside history. And much of it does indeed arrive from deep, even mystical, insights into the universal human condition. But it is not from outside history: no text — no expression of any sort, actually — is “outside history.”

In fact, the Daodejing is in constant argument with the world that produced it: its opening lines are a shot at a live debate over over others’ philosophical “ways,” and its constant praise of the small, the soft, and the overlooked is a pointed reply to an age of relentless warfare and predatory states.

Read without that world in view, the Daodejing gives you detached aphorisms — yes, there is much deep wisdom here that is applicable to all times and places. But reading it only that way is partial, and makes it all too easy to insert our own uninformed ideas into the text — which would be a very unDaoist approach. We are going to spend two years with this text, and for a reading that slow and careful it is worth understanding it in multiple registers: not only as archetypal wisdom, but also as a response to a particular (and broken) world.

So before we get to Chapter 1, it’s worth setting the scene.

This essay is a very short history of pre-Imperial China — the long stretch from the Neolithic to the unification of “China” under the Qin, its first imperial dynasty, in 221 BCE — with particular attention to the philosophical ferment of the Warring States period (c480–221 BCE), the centuries during which the Daodejing took shape.

Later “Framing” essays will go go into more detail on many of the subjects we touch here, but this one contains the most essential things you need to know about the world in which the Daodejing was written.

Xia, Shang, & Zhou — the Birth of China

By the third millennium BCE, many Neolithic cultures were scattered across the land we now call China — but tradition remembers one line above the rest. A succession of five sage-rulers, beginning with Huangdi 黃帝 (the Yellow Emperor), introduced culture to the people and governed by sheer virtue. The last of them, Shun, passed the throne to Yu the Great, tamer of the floods, who around 2070 BCE founded China’s first dynasty: the Xia.

The above is legendary myth, of course, though with the Xia we do approach archeological fact — it likely corresponds to the Bronze Age culture archaeologists call Erlitou, which seems to have achieved state-level organization. But what matters for us is less whether the Five Emperors actually existed than that later Chinese believed in them, and would come to measure their own broken age against that remembered ideal.

With the Shang dynasty (c1600–1046 BCE) we reach firmer ground, as well as approach the essential roots of Chinese society. The Shang state was organized around divination: kings, in a role that was essentially “high shaman,” put questions to their ancestors and to the high god Shangdi 上帝 by scorching ox bones and turtle shells and reading the cracks, then carving the exchange into the bone itself. These “oracle bones” (figure 4) carry the earliest Chinese writing we have. This is a script that begins, strikingly, in talk with the dead — not in the stock-taking and tallying that first put writing to use in Mesopotamia and Egypt.

And the Shang’s magnificent bronze ritual vessels for feeding the ancestors in sacrifice would inform bronzes throughout the period we are discussing, as well as archaizing art of all types through the end of the imperial period over three millennia later.

When China’s third dynasty — the Zhou — overthrew the Shang around 1046 BCE, they needed to explain how a lesser people could topple a greater, and their answer shaped all political thinking afterward. Heaven (tian 天), they said, confers a Mandate (tianming 天命, “Heaven’s Mandate”) to rule on whoever has the de 德 — the charismatic moral force of a true king, later and more simply “virtue” or “power” — to make the will of Heaven manifest in the world.

Under early Kings Wen and Wu and the Duke of Zhou, the Zhou built the framework every later thinker would work from or against: a vast realm parceled out to kin and allies in a “feudalistic” order bound by ritual, and the first enduring vision of a single, unified China. From this world come both the Book of Songs (Shijing 詩經), the fountainhead of Chinese poetry, and the divinatory Book of Changes (Yijing 易經) — two key texts that shaped the formal and conceptual vocabulary within which the Daodejing’s own words would later take shape.

The ordered world of the early Zhou did not hold. The Mandate cut both ways, of course — the same logic that had raised the Zhou up could just as easily bring them down: let de 德 lapse, and Heaven’s favor could be withdrawn. The social order frayed early and continued for centuries, the centrifugal forces of regionalism and extended kin structures overpowering the king’s powers of unification.

In 771 BCE invaders sacked the western capital; the court fled east the next year, and the same forces of fragmentation continued. The king slowly dwindled into a figurehead — Son of Heaven in name only, presiding in fact over multiplying states that increasingly ignored him. The sacred order — Heaven’s Mandate, the king as its one intermediary, ritual binding the whole — was visibly coming apart.

Confucius & the Birth of Chinese Philosophy

Into this unraveling world came a man from the minor state of Lu, born around 551 BCE into the class of shi 士 — a lower level aristocratic class that was in the process of shifting from warrior to administrative roles — who became convinced the age could be repaired. We know him by his Latinized name, Confucius; in Chinese he is Kongzi 孔子(“Master Kong”).

Like Socrates, he wrote nothing; we know him through the Analects (Lunyu 論語), the sayings his disciples gathered after his death. And like Socrates’ pupil Plato, he stands at the head of his tradition — much of Chinese philosophy can be read as a series of footnotes to Confucius, everyone after him forced to respond in one way or another to his ideas.

Kongzi 孔子 was also the first of a new kind of figure — the wandering shi 士, the educated man with no fixed place, moving from state to state, court to court, to offer counsel and gathering students as he went. He spent his life seeking a ruler who would enact his program.

That program was restoration. The disorder around him, he believed, was at bottom a collapse of ritual propriety (li 禮) and of right relationship — names and titles had drifted loose from realities, so that a ruler no longer truly ruled and a father no longer truly fathered. Bringing name and reality back into alignment is what he called zhengming 正名, the “rectification of names.”

From it the rest of the cure followed: revive the traditional rites, cultivate ren 仁 (a deep humaneness toward others), and through long and devoted learning become a junzi 君子 — literally a “lord’s son;” once a marker of aristocratic birth, but redefined to mean something nearer “gentleman” or “superior man” — the kind of person fit to serve and to set the world right by his own example.

His models lay in the past — men of virtue like the Duke of Zhou and the sage-kings — and he insisted he was only transmitting the old ways, not inventing new ones. Recover those ways and the realm coming apart around him could be made whole again.

All of this is hopeful and effortful. The world can be repaired; and the way to repair it is through deliberate self-cultivation, diligent study, and a supremely virtuous person actively ordering the realm. These are exactly the assumptions the next centuries of thinkers would take up and argue over, as we will discuss shortly.

First, however, let’s set the sociopolitical stage in which those thinkers lived, because in his lifetime Confucius failed: he could never find a ruler to implement his ideas. And the already unraveling world would grow ever more fragmented, uncertain, and violent.

Life (& Death) in The Warring States

The next two and a half centuries bear a fittingly grim name: the Warring States, running from around 475 BCE until 221, when the state of Qin at last devoured the others and forged the first unified empire. This is the world in which the Daodejing took shape. The old patchwork of Zhou domains had hardened into seven great, predatory states — Qin, Chu, Qi, Yan, Zhao, Wei, and Han — each swallowing its smaller neighbors through warfare that almost never stopped. There were over 300 interstate wars across the late Zhou centuries: nearly 1.4 a year (Feng), with rarely a year passing without a major battle between two or more states. No one alive could remember peace.

And these were no longer the courtly chariot-duels of the old aristocracy during the early Zhou. They were fought by mass infantry armies — sometimes hundreds of thousands of conscripted farmers — and the killing scaled with them. In the great battles of the fourth and third centuries tens of thousands were regularly slaughtered, and overall the defeated sides alone are reckoned to have suffered some 1.8 million casualties in this period (Feng).

Behind each of those numbers stood a man taken from a field. Conscription became the baseline expectation of a peasant’s life: you would be called up, marched off, and might or might not return. In your absence the crops thinned and the household frayed. Each state, meanwhile, was burrowing ever deeper into the village — registering families, binding neighbors into mutual-responsibility groups answerable for one another’s conduct, extracting taxes in grain, labor, and bodies. It wanted to know who you were, what you owed, and when it could come for you.

There were advancements, to be sure. Iron, for example, was introduced in the 7th century BCE and widespread by the 5th. But the same technology for making better plows was also making better blades. This was not the bustle of cheerful progress; it was expansion under permanent military pressure and a tightening bureaucratic grip. To many who lived through it, the sacred Zhou political order had not merely lapsed — it was giving way to something colder and more extractive; catastrophic and even apocalyptic suspicions took hold, even among the period’s most hopeful thinkers (Schwartz).

Ironically, perhaps, it is in this violent age of dread that China’s “golden age of philosophy” flourished.

The Wandering Shi & The Hundred Schools

By now the wandering shi 士 were common, and rulers had every reason to want them. In a contest of all against all, any advantage might decide a state’s survival, so kings threw open their courts to talent of every kind — some gathering scholars by the hundreds.

Much of what rulers wanted was technical: military strategists who could win battles, diplomats who could broker or break alliances, and masters of the cosmic arts — astrologers, calendar-makers, diviners — who could read Heaven’s intentions. But among the shi 士 were also thinkers of a deeper sort, and the period became one of the most fertile philosophical epochs in human history.

We call their intellectual groupings the “Hundred Schools,” but that phrase is a retrospective label for something much messier. Most never thought of themselves as schools in the sense we typically mean it today (the great exception is the Mohists, who genuinely were an organized movement). And the term “hundred” is loose in both directions — far fewer, if we count distinct bodies of thought; far more, if we count the teacher-to-student lineages along which ideas actually traveled.

The word behind “school” is jia 家 — literally “household” or “family” — a hint that what bound most of these movements was less a fixed doctrine than a lineage: a master and his disciples, handing teachings down. What each jia transmitted was a dao 道 — still an everyday word then: a road, and so a way of doing, a path of thought and conduct offered as a route through the chaos.

The tradition Confucius founded splintered after him into many rival lineages — later tradition counted eight — of which two mattered the most, both historically and philosophically. Mengzi 孟子 (commonly known by his Latinized name, Mencius), who held that human nature is innately “good” (shan 善) and need only be drawn out, was one. And Xunzi 荀子, who held innate human nature to be “bad” (e 惡) — crooked and in need of straightening by ritual and effort. We will return to the Confucians in their own essay.

Their great rival was Mozi 墨子, active soon after Confucius, whose followers — the Mohists — formed the most disciplined movement of the age, with an organization ready to march in defense of a besieged city. They preached impartial care/love (jian’ai 兼愛) against the Confucian insistence on graded, family-first love. They were strict utilitarians who judged all things by practical benefit and condemned as sheer waste the lavish rites, music, and funerals the Confucians cherished. For a time they were Confucianism’s fiercest competitor; after the Warring States, however, they all but vanished.

Out of the same culture of disputation — the later Mohists themselves turned to rigorous logic — came the “School of Names” (Mingjia 名家): thinkers like Hui Shi 惠施 and Gongsun Long 公孫龍, who pressed on the gap between names and actualities and delighted in paradoxes (“a white horse is not a horse”) exposing how slippery the bond between language and the world could be.

The Legalists answered the social chaos differently again. Order was to come not from virtue or care but from impersonal law, reward and punishment, and the bare machinery of state power. Theirs was the doctrine Qin would use to swallow everyone else — and it, too, will eventually get its own essay here.

There was also Yang Zhu 楊朱, a rugged individualist who taught that one’s own life and nature count for far more than wealth, fame, or service to the state. He would not, Mencius claimed, give up a single hair to benefit the whole world. While not often considered directly related to Daoism per se, Yangism’s refusal to spend the self on political abstractions is at least adjacent to many of its currents, and points to many ideas the Daoists (and the Daodejing) held.

The Daoists & the Daodejing

This brings us, at last, to the Daoists. Here too, “Daoism” is a retrospective label for a “school” that gathered many similar ideas, thinkers, and teacher-student lineages.

There is, for example, the playful, world-relativizing philosophy of the Zhuangzi 莊子 and the quiet inward discipline of the Neiye 內業, with its meditative training — both of which we will eventually discuss in their own “framing” essays. And of course the Daodejing (道德經) itself. What they share, along with a handful of other texts that belong to this family, is a similar set of beliefs and concerns — dao 道 as a universal principle of life, naturalness, acting without forcing, even withdrawl from the public realm. And all of them are also far removed from the organized Daoist religion that would begin to take shape a few centuries later.

The Daodejing has its own angle within this family. It shares the Zhuangzi’s suspicions and the Neiye’s turn inward. Unlike either of those, however, it is largely pitched to a ruler. This quietly allies it — in function though certainly not in spirit — with the Confucians and Legalists and others who provided advice about the best way to govern a realm.

It enters that conversation only to invert it — turning on its head the very thing every school of the age was selling. Each had a dao 道 to offer. But the Daodejing opens by denying that the real one can be spoken at all, as we will see in our next installment — a close reading of the first chapter.

Suggested Reading

Feng, Li. Early China: A Social and Cultural History. Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Graham, AC. Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China. Open Court Publishing, 1989.

Loewe, Michael & Edward Shaughnessy, eds. The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 BC. Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Schwartz, Benjamin. The World of Thought in Ancient China. Belknap Press, 1985.

Van Norden, Bryan. Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy. Hackett Publishing, 2011.

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Classical Chinese

Classical Chinese is among the most important languages in world history, on par with Latin, Sanskrit, and Classical Arabic in binding diverse populations who spoke different languages into a pan-cultural community.

Unlike the others, though, Classical Chinese (and Chinese writing in general) is based on characters, not a phonetic alphabet. This makes it incredibly stable, as well as giving it the ability to cross borders in a way phonetic languages cannot. The written languages of Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese were all originally founded on Chinese characters, and Classical Chinese was the shared written language across all of East Asia for over a millennium.

This is the form of writing we are engaging with in studying the Daodejing in its original language, and it is quite different from modern Chinese.1

The differences between modern and Classical Chinese do not really reside in the characters. In both cases, each character is a single syllable and is made up of one or more components. One of these components — usually the one that hints at its meaning — is called the radical, and it’s the part used to organize characters in dictionaries. Many characters also include a component that hints at pronunciation. As we move through the text, I’ll mention such components when they help illuminate a particular word.

But the real differences between Classical and Modern Chinese lie in the structure of the languages. Most importantly, Classical Chinese is grammatically sparser. It is genuinely telegraphic in its simplicity and generally leaves unmarked many things that modern Chinese, and modern languages in general, make explicit — tense, number, definiteness, subject, object, etc.

This compactness, along with a fluidity in what type of word a character can be in any given context — verb, noun, adjective — is part of what gives Classical Chinese its density and what makes ancient texts so radically open to interpretation. A six-character line might support up to a dozen genuinely distinct readings, each of which requires grammatical commitments when rendered into English that the Chinese itself does not make.

As mentioned above, the characters of the Daodejing have remained remarkably stable for over two thousand years — most characters in the text would be recognizable to literate readers of modern Chinese. However, the sounds associated with them have drifted considerably. The pronunciation of Chinese when it was first written down was substantially different from any modern variety — and though modern scholars have worked to reconstruct what is now called Old Chinese, these reconstructions are partial, contested in their details, and not the way anyone actually voices the text today.

So, just as English readers don’t attempt to voice Shakespeare in Elizabethan phonology, Modern Chinese readers typically read the Daodejing in their own contemporary pronunciation. In mainland China and Taiwan, that means Mandarin; readers in Hong Kong might read the characters in Cantonese, and other regional varieties have their own pronunciations.

For our project, we’ll be using modern Mandarin, the standard for nearly all contemporary scholarship and teaching. And this means we need a way to render those sounds in English letters. For that, we turn to “romanization” — and pinyin.

Romanization & Pinyin

Romanization is a system of representing the sounds of another language in the Latin (ie, “Roman”) alphabet. It’s used for any language that uses a different alphabet from English: Greek, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit, etc.

For example, you likely have no idea how to say ἀρετή, but you can likely guess aretē. We can even leave the diacritical marks off: arete (this Greek example turns out to be useful when we discuss the definition of de 德).

And, of course, romanization can also help us pronounce Chinese characters. The wrinkle is that there are two common systems you might encounter, and since many sounds are very close — slight changes in tongue position and aspiration are all it takes — these systems don’t always match up exactly.

For example, the sounds for “d” and “t” are very similar — as are “b” and “p,” “k” and “g,” and “o” and “u.” Thus, you might see 道 rendered as either “dao” or “tao.” And “Kung Pao” chicken could also be rendered on a restaurant menu as “Gong Bao.”

Kung Pao and Tao Te Ching are romanizations using the Wade-Giles system, which was invented in the 19th century and used throughout most of the 20th. The reason “Tao” looks like it should start with a hard-T sound rather than the D of “Dao” is that Wade-Giles uses apostrophes to mark a Chinese sound distinction that pinyin handles differently. The details of Wade-Giles aren’t important for our purposes, however — suffice it to say that the apostrophes often got dropped in popular usage, collapsing distinctions the system was designed to preserve.

Pinyin sidesteps these problems by using different letters for the sounds Wade-Giles distinguishes with apostrophes — “d” and “t,” “b” and “p,” “g” and “k,” among others. And over the past 70 years, pinyin has been gradually taking over. In 1958 the People’s Republic of China made it the official system; it was adopted by the UN in 1986, and by Taiwan in 2009.

We will use pinyin in this project — not only has it become the standard, I am also convinced it is more intuitive. Just be aware that Wade-Giles continued to be used by scholars and translators well into the 1990s and even early 2000s. So if you read books from the 20th century, you are likely to see Lao Tzu as the author of the Tao Te Ching, not Laozi having written the Daodejing; and the first dynasty of imperial China will be the Ch’in (or Chin) not the Qin. (The Han are still the Han, though — many words don’t change at all when moving from one system to the other.)

Pinyin is easier to learn than you might think, and it is worth spending ten minutes doing so. Helpfully, several organizations and websites have charts that can help. Here’s a screenshot of the one at yabla, a page worth bookmarking:

Each pinyin syllable corresponds to a character, and is built from an initial (the consonant sound at the start, shown in the leftmost column) and a final (the vowel or vowel-plus-consonant ending, shown in the top row). If you go to the website, you can hover over any cell in the top row or leftmost column for a description of how that part of the word is pronounced (“ao” is like “ow” in cow; “zh” is like “j” in joke, but with the tongue curled upwards). You can also hover over any example in the array of words and press a button to hear the pronunciation.

My recommendation — because there is already enough to learn — is to ignore all the subtleties they mention: just remember that “zh” is like “j” and “q” is like “ch” and leave it at that. The trickiest individual letters are “q” (like “ch”), “x” (like “sh”), and “c” (like “ts”).

I also recommend that you ignore the four tones which you will notice when you hover over the words in the chart. Each tone has a different diacritical mark above the vowel section and sounds slightly different, as you can hear if you click the audio for each.

Modern Chinese is a tonal language (though, interestingly, Old Chinese was probably not). This means that in Mandarin every “dao” can be pronounced with four different tones and each is a different word. But, like the subtleties associated with exact pronunciation, trying to get a handle on this just to read the Daodejing is not necessary. What is important is that when you see a character you have a sound in mind that is close to the Mandarin and legible to yourself.

For the record, I will show the diacritical marks that indicate tones in the interlinear glossing of the text, like this:

名可名，非常名。

Míng kě míng, fēi cháng míng.

But when not glossing the text — such as in a normal paragraph like this one — I will ignore the diacritical marks and just insert the Chinese character afterwards: ming 名, for example. Over the course of this project, this will make you familiar with the characters — which is much more important than learning the tones — while still allowing me to separate distinct words that sound the same when tones are dropped: for example, ming 名 (“name”) from ming 明 (“bright”).

Chapter Formatting

While context essays such as this one will have different sections and formats depending on the subject, all of the essays which involve reading a chapter of the Daodejing will follow the same format, and it is worth spelling it out here so that when you encounter it you understand the logic behind it.

Each chapter will have six sections:

First, the chapter text by itself, in Chinese characters

These will be arranged by me based on the structures I want you to notice.

It’s worth noting that early manuscripts had little to no punctuation as we know it — the punctuation in modern editions of the received text reflects much more recent editorial decisions.

It’s also worth noting that Classical Chinese was originally written and read vertically, and from right to left, as shown in figure 1 above; modern Chinese — and many modern renditions of Classical Chinese — is now written horizontally and left to right (figure 2).

For example, the middle part of Chapter 2 will look like this:

故

有無相生 難易相成

長短相較 高下相傾

音聲相和 前後相隨

I have written it this way to show that a “thus” (gu 故) is introducing six parallel phrases of four characters each; you can see that they are parallel because each has xiang 相 (“mutually”) in the third position.

Parallel phrasings, sorites chains (A to B, B to C, C to D, etc), and aphorism-plus-explication structures are all key elements in the Daodejing, and this kind of breakdown will help you see the overall structure of a chapter before even beginning to look at the individual words.

Mandarin & English

This section interleaves the Chinese characters with pinyin and, in brackets, the English word or words that best map onto the character’s meaning.

For these lines — each of which is numbered for easy reference later — I follow the punctuation at Chinese Text Project, which will sometimes divide the lines slightly differently than in my first presentation.

For example, the four lines above will become three, with gu 故 included in the first line:

(3) 故有無相生，難易相成，

gù yǒu wú xiāng shēng, nán yì xiāng chéng,

[thus] [have/there is/presence] [without/lack/absence] [each other/mutually] [birth/grow/life]; [difficult] [easy] [each other/mutually] [complete/accomplish];

(4) 長短相較，高下相傾，

cháng duǎn xiāng jiào, gāo xià xiāng qīng,

[long] [short] [each other/mutually] [compare]; [high] [low] [each other/mutually] [incline/lean];

(5) 音聲相和，前後相隨。

yīn shēng xiāng hé, qián hòu xiāng suí.

[tone/note] [noise/sound] [each other/mutually] [harmonize, blend]; [before/front] [after/behind] [each other/mutually] [follow].

By scanning these lines, you’ll get a sense of what is being discussed, though the grammar may sometimes look odd and the telegraphic style may create many ambiguities. The lines above are fairly straightforward: the text is pointing to the “mutual arising of opposites” with six examples. But often the grammar and style will create so much ambiguity that you can’t make out what meaning is intended without further help.

The Shape

After reviewing all the lines with English glossing, we will pull back and look at the whole again. Not as pure structure this time, but in terms of themes and ideas.

I will provide my own thoughts, but I’ll also bring in the commentaries of both ancient Chinese thinkers and modern English translators to help us make sense of the overall shape of the utterance. What is this chapter saying, or pointing at?

NB: I highly recommend reading these essays with two browser windows open if you are at a laptop or desktop, or with two apps between which you can quickly flip back and forth if you are on a phone or tablet. Keep one window/app on the “Mandarin & English” section and use the other to read the remainder of the essay. I don’t want to bog things down by continually re-introducing all of the information in the interlinear apparatus, so being able to flip back to it easily when I write, for example, “…in lines 3-4…” will prove helpful.

Line by Line

Once we have a sense of the whole, we will go back to the individual lines — sometimes one at a time, sometimes in groups — and parse ambiguities: in words chosen, words left out, and grammatical commitments the Chinese either makes or declines to make. We will sometimes draw from ancient commentaries for this, but more often we will look at English translations — what choices did they make to resolve inherent ambiguities in the text, and how does that affect the meaning? Often, “constellating” between two or three translations for any given set of lines will help us better understand what might be meant, as well as what is seriously open to interpretation.

Sitting With It

With the above sections complete, we will have thoroughly analyzed the Chapter’s text. This section will invite you to ponder some tentative conclusions or open questions. The Daodejing is a text well worth “sitting with” for extended periods of time. If you are inclined to meditate on a chapter or line quietly for a few minutes, or just let it work its way around in the back of your mind for a week until we look at the next chapter, this section will provide some fodder.

Another View

We will end each chapter with a piece of art that I think represents the theme, usually — but not exclusively — East Asian in nature.

I will also often use this section to point out another thinker, or another philosophical or religious tradition, which explores similar ideas. For example, some fragments by the enigmatic pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus will be an interesting comparison for Chapter 2.

~

Note that I will not myself be providing a translation for any of the chapters. I may render a few lines in my own words here and there, but I do not consider this a translation project per se.

If this seems odd to you — “why is he skipping the final step and leaving me hanging?” — I’d like you to consider the opening line of Chapter 11:

三十輻，共一轂，當其無，有車之用。

It is nicely translated by Red Pine thusly:

Thirty spokes converge on a hub

but it’s the emptiness

that makes a wheel work

Suggested Reading

This book is not remotely necessary, but if you decide to get really serious:

Vogelsang, Kai. Introduction to Classical Chinese. Oxford University Press, 2021.

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Here is the opening of the Daodejing (aka the Tao Te Ching), a foundational text of Chinese philosophy first written down over 2300 years ago:

道可道非常道

名可名非常名

You may well have come across this already, even if you have read or heard only a tiny bit of Chinese philosophy. Well, you almost certainly didn’t encounter the above exactly; rather, you came across some translation of it — after all, the Daodejing has been translated into English more times than any other text in the world, including the Bible.

But take a close look at the twelve characters above. Each represents a one-syllable word. Each line uses only four different characters, and the two lines share the same structure, with just one word — repeated three times — changing between them.

In Mandarin, the lines sound something like this:

Dow kuh dow fay chawng dow.

Meeng kuh meeng fay chawng meeng.

It’s a beautiful, mantra-like rhythm.

Now let’s take a look at what happens when you need to put the ideas behind these words into English. Here are six expert translations of those same two lines into English, all from the past sixty years:

The Tao (Way) that can be told of is not the eternal Tao;

The name that can be named is not the eternal name. (Wing-Tsit Chan, 1963)

A way can be a guide, but not a fixed path;

names can be given, but not permanent labels. (Thomas Cleary, 1991)

TAO called TAO is not TAO.

Names can name no lasting name. (Addiss & Lombardo, 1993)

Way-making (dao) that can be put into words is not really way-making,

And naming (ming) that can assign fixed reference to things is not really naming. (Ames & Hall, 2003)

Of ways you may speak, / but not the Perennial Way;

By names you may name, / but not the Perennial Name. (Edmund Ryden, 2008)

Any course can be taken as the right course to take, but no course like that can be the course taken always.

Any name can be named to determine what is or should be, but no name like that can be what determines them always. (Brook Ziporyn, 2023)

These are all translations by experts, and all highly regarded. None of them is wrong. And yet they are saying noticeably different things — different enough that a reader relying on any one of them is, in a real sense, reading a different text than a reader relying on another.

This is why I am inviting you to a slow, two-year reading of the Daodejing in its original Classical Chinese. One chapter at a time, every Friday.

No knowledge of Chinese is required. Seriously.

The text is only 81 short chapters (about 5300 words total), and I’ll walk you through every one of them — what each character means, how the grammar works, what the philosophical issues are, and what trade-offs translators are forced to make.

By the end, you won’t just have read about the Daodejing or read a translation of the Daodejing. You will have read the Daodejing in the original language.

You will be able to look at the Classical Chinese text yourself, recognize patterns, and form your own informed sense of what it is doing — even if you never study another word of Chinese again. Six translations like the ones above will stop being a confusion and start being a conversation you can join. You will also, if you are so inclined, be in a position to make an informed, if amateur, translation yourself — to take the Daodejing’s words and make them your own.

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Here is a seventh option for translating those opening lines. We can refuse to smooth the Chinese into ordinary English at all — keep the strange compression and the mantra-like repetition — and see what that gives us:

Way can say, not real Way.

Name can name, not real Name.

It’s not proper English. But it is also the rendering that most faithfully preserves what the Chinese actually does: the six characters per line, the way the key character repeats in each line (道 can mean “way” or “say”), how the structure repeats across both lines, the rhythmic refusal to resolve into a pat bit of prose philosophy.

You couldn’t translate the entire Daodejing this way — most of the grammar is too far removed from how English works — but the fact that this is even a possibility tells us something important about what translation is, and about what every smoother or more explicative version is choosing to lose, change, and/or add.

The above translation is my own, but it is not the only way I have rendered those lines. I have already worked through the entire 81 chapters for my own use, first character-by-character and then typically into one or more English renderings for each line.

Here’s a hint of what the above lines will look like when we read all of Chapter 1, along with the next two (just to whet your appetite):

(1) 道可道，非常道。

dào kě dào, fēi cháng dào.

[way/path/method] [can] [way/speak/teach] [not] [real/constant/enduring] [Way/method].

(2) 名可名，非常名。

míng kě míng, fēi cháng míng.

[name/title/rank] [can] [name/title/rank] [not] [real/constant/enduring] [name/title/rank].

(3) 無名天地之始；

wú míng tiān dì zhī shǐ;

[without/lack/absence] [name] [[heaven][earth]=cosmos] [’s] [beginning, origin];

(4) 有名萬物之母。

yǒu míng wàn wù zhī mǔ.

[have/presence] [name] [[ten thousand][things]=all creatures] [’s] [mother].

Reading things this closely is clearly a serious undertaking, but the Daodejing is one of very few pieces of ancient wisdom literature where this kind of reading is even possible across the entire text — and also one of the very few where the payoff of doing so is immense.

It is possible because it is short. At just over 5300 characters, the entire text is something most of us can sustain reading over two years of ten-minute weekly sessions. Other ancient wisdom texts that have shaped the world’s thought — like the Psalms or Gospels, the Bhagavad Gita, Plato’s dialogues, etc — are substantially longer. None are impossibly long, but very few are short enough to be read this slowly, character by character, in a way that any committed reader could sustain.

And the payoff is immense, because the Daodejing is unusual among such texts in just how much is “lost in translation” — and thus how much is gained by going back to the original.

Some of this is a feature of Classical Chinese itself, which is telegraphically compressed: a four-character line can carry what English needs a full sentence of ten or twelve words to say. And the gaps between the characters, the ambiguities and “left unsaids,” are also part of the meaning. Any proper English rendering has to commit to grammatical choices which the Chinese leaves open — and those commitments are interpretations.

But the Daodejing also intensifies the inherent compression of Classical Chinese. The text is written in dense aphorisms that read as much like poetry as philosophy: short lines, internal rhyme, parallel structures, deliberate wordplay, ideas that echo across chapters.

And on top of that, the philosophy itself is unusually resistant to translation — or to linguistic exposition of any sort, as the first two lines make clear. The Daodejing is not making arguments that can easily be clarified by using different words; it is making moves that depend on paradox, negation, and the deliberate refusal of the categories its own words seem to invoke.

Finally, the worldview the Daodejing arises from is genuinely alien to readers shaped by post-Enlightenment Western assumptions — built on different ideas about how society and reality are organized, and about the ontological separations (between humans and nature, mind and body, describing and acting) that we take for granted. A translation can render the words; it cannot easily render the world the words assume.

The Gospels, Plato’s Symposium, the Gita — you can read them in good English translations, take deep dives with a few sections and a dozen or so words, and come to a real understanding of the original. But the Daodejing is different. To truly engage it on its own terms, you have to wrestle with it in Classical Chinese.

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So consider this an invitation to a slow, close reading of philosophical poetry. We will read one chapter a week (occasionally pausing for an essay that provides cultural or historical context). Each of the Daodejing’s 81 lapidary chapters is short — most are under 80 words, none more than 160 — and each is a kind of jewel, worth turning slowly in the light to see what different facets reveal.

You do not need to “keep up.” The text originally had no canonical order — early in its history the chapters circulated in different sequences, and readers over the millennia have all found their own paths through it. If you fall behind, or skip ahead, or read out of order, you are doing nothing others have not already done.

A few practical notes:

The first three posts will appear every other Friday. This is the first. The second is a short language primer on Classical Chinese and Pinyin — just enough to orient you, no memorization required. The third sets the historical and philosophical scene: the Warring States period of ancient China and the so-called “Hundred Schools” of philosophical thought with which the Daodejing engaged.

Then on Friday, 3-July, we begin with Chapter 1. From this point on a new essay will post every Friday. Around twenty more context essays will appear between some of the chapters when they help interpretation — on the philosophy of translation, on Confucius and Zhuangzi, on early Daoist self-cultivation — but the chapters themselves are the spine of the project. The Table of Contents shows the schedule through this summer.

If you are eager to get started — the Lexicon and Sources & Bibliography pages are already up. The lexicon is a working glossary that will grow as we go but which already has a dozen entries. The sources page includes two dozen translations of the Daodejing with short summaries of the style/approach of each, in case you are looking for one or two to read alongside.

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By the way: if this sounds like something you want to read with others, please share it. Send this email to friends, share the publication on social media, restack this post on Substack Notes.

Part of the reason for the biweekly “slow reveal” before Chapter 1 is to gather a community of readers — people who comment, who notice things I don’t, who bring their own associations and questions to the text. That kind of conversation only happens if there are enough of us reading together.

So if you know someone — a friend who reads poetry, a philosophy-minded colleague, a person who’s curious about Chinese art or culture, anyone who might want to spend two years with a strange and beautiful text full of wisdom — send them this post and invite them to subscribe.

PS: About the Title

The title for this project, “Gate of All Mysteries,” comes from the final four characters of Chapter 1:

衆妙之門

zhòng miào zhī mén.

[multitude/all] [subtlety/wonder/mystery] [’s] [gate].

The words zhong 衆 and zhi 之 are straightforward enough, but in the lexicon I discuss men 門 and miao 妙 in some detail.

This Table of Contents is divided into two sections: “Framing the Daodejing” and “Reading the Daodejing.”

I publish context posts (“Framing the Daodejing”) between some chapter readings (“Reading the Daodejing”), based on when I think they will be most beneficial to readers. If you are new to this project and want to read things in the original order, note that the context essays have parentheses after the titles, with the chapters they appeared between.

Note that this is a work in progress and only shows the context essays I have written or scheduled; ultimately I expect to have up to two dozen context essays. There are a total of 81 chapter essays; that section similarly does not yet include the entire list.

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Framing the Daodejing

Introduction (before Ch 1)

Classical Chinese & Pinyin Romanization (before Ch 1)

Historical & Philosophical Context (before Ch 1)

A Book No One Wrote — the Daodejing as a Text (before Ch 2)

Carrying It Across — Notes on Translation (before Ch 3)

The Commentators (coming in August or September)

The Neiye & Early Daoist Practice (between 10 & 11) (coming 2-October)

etc

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Reading the Daodejing

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4 (coming 14-August)

Chapter 5 (coming 21-August)

Chapter 6 (coming 28-August)

etc