Mitchell's translation of part 50, in particular, has long resonated with me:
The Master gives himself upto whatever the moment brings.He knows that he is going to die,and he has nothing left to hold on to:no illusions in his mind,no resistances in his body.He doesn't think about his actions;they flow from the core of his being.He holds nothing back from life;therefore he is ready for death,as a man is ready for sleepafter a good day's work.
He admits (in the end notes, If I remember correctly) that this is not a literal translation; but comparing it to translations that do stick more closely to the original text I find that there's a lot here I prefer.
So I have Mitchell's version and like it as well. But he notably did not call his piece a new translation, only a new version. He doesn't speak or read any Chinese[1], so to begin with he was studying from secondary sources. He also generally just rephrased and reworded liberally. It's his version of Tao Te Ching, and to be fair this is the case for many translations.
But for example, Mitchell begins #3:
If you overesteem great men,
people become powerless.
If you overvalue possessions,
people begin to steal.
While American sinologist Robert Henricks[2] translated it as:
By not elevating the worthy, you bring it about that people will not compete.
By not valuing goods that are hard to obtain, you bring it about that people will not act like thieves.
By not displaying the desirable you bring it about that people will not be confused.
And from Chinese jurist John C. H. Wu[3]:
By not exalting the talented you will cause the people to cease from rivalry and contention.
By not prizing goods hard to get, you will cause the people to cease from robbing and stealing.
By not displaying what is desirable, you will cause the people's hearts to remain undisturbed.
Some of his changes are like this, Mitchell's version was more readable and accessible compared to the genuine translations, but compressed the message (sometimes to the point of being a bit reductive).
In other cases his edits were more substantial. In #9 for example:
Fill your bowl to the brim
and it will spill.
Keep sharpening your knife
and it will blunt.
Chase after money and security
and your heart will never unclench.
Care about people's approval
and you will be their prisoner.
Do your work, then step back.
The only path to serenity.
Compare to Henricks:
To hold it upright and fill it,
Is not so good as stopping [in time].
When you pound it out and give it a point,
It won't be preserved very long.
When gold and jade fill your rooms,
You'll never be able to protect them.
Arrogance and pride with wealth and rank,
On their own bring on disaster.
When the deed is accomplished you retire;
Such is Heaven's Way!
And Wu:
As for holding to fullness,
Far better were it to stop in time!
Keep on beating and sharpening a sword,
And the edge cannot be preserved for long.
Fill your house with gold and jade,
And it can no longer be guarded.
Set store by your riches and honour,
And you will only reap a crop of calamities.
Here is the Way of Heaven:
When you have done your work, retire!
Mitchell's version differs significantly from Henricks, in meaning. He interprets Tao as the way to serenity (vs the Way of Heaven), and gold and jade like money (risk of consumerism, individual peril) instead of a gratuitous display of wealth (risk of burglary, social peril).
Very happy to see this as the top comment. His translation isn't word for word, he tried to translate the mind of Lao tzu after having been trained in Zen for 14 years.
Lao Tzu has almost nothing to do with Zen. Zen is influenced by Daoism, but it's a school of Buddhism. The core teachings and conclusions are different, and the religious aspect is completely separate from Daoism.
To me, this version sounds way too casual. I can see why that would be appealing to some, but it just makes it sound like a hippie on acid trying to be profound.
Given the Tao idea that the truth that can be spoken is not the truth, is it not possible for both the "hippie on acid trying to be profound" and the articulate scholar-poet to give voice to the same truth through different lenses?
He lowers their aspirations
and makes them suck in their guts.
He shows people how to forget
what they know and what they want,
so nobody can push them around.
If you think you've got the answers,
he'll mess with your head.
Versus the dystopian authoritarian version on this page:
Thus the governance of the sage:
Empties their hearts
Fills their bellies
Weakens their ambitions
Strengthens their bones
I think you came away with the wrong idea based on these examples. The messaging of the Tao Te Ching is very much not straightforward, but it's clear that the weakest governors are authoritarians, and the most effective barely intervene at all.
Chapter 42 starts out
with some cosmic mumbo-jumbo
about Tao making one,
one making two,
two making three,
and three making everything else.
I don't know what it means,
and, frankly,
I wouldn't worry about it too much.
What a disservice. Hogan's writing is, let's say, informal, but it's not really meaningfully lighter on "woo" except in cases where it just refuses to address the text.
For someone looking to connect to Western metaphysical traditions I'd recommend rather the Ames & Hall translation; of chapter 42 it says:
Way-making (dao) gives rise to continuity,
Continuity gives rise to difference,
Difference gives rise to plurality,
And plurality gives rise to the manifold everything that is happening
I don't know the DDC very well, but this is a beautiful translation.
The pattern of 3 comes up often. For example, a "classical" approach to something puts the flag in the ground. A reactionary "modern" approach takes a radical differentiating tack to the classical way. And a "postmodern" tries to reconcile what each camp got right broadly, while acknowledging that no one-size-fits-all objective approach exists.
Perhaps the alchemical axiom was influenced by Taoism? The east and west both had roughly contemporaneous periods of alchemical development and lots of known knowledge transfer so it's certainly possible that religious texts associated with a group known for alchemy in the east would end up in some way in the hands of western alchemists.
That's the standard core idea in nearly every religion. For example, a more familiar version of it is: one becomes two (spirit and matter), the two create the third (all things in reality), and the three create everything else. The idea of trinity is the same in principle. There is, in fact, a direct analogy in science: the laws of nature are unreal and immutable (the "spirit"), the essense of matter is hardly real, and when the two meet, all the real things and effects are created (the "third"), but if we look close enough, all three are same law of nature, that appears in different forms.
"The above is the most accurate translation of the ancient classic available anywhere at any price."
I have read a few different translations in different languages, and the interpretations are often quite different. So I think this description is a bit too overconfident.
I have to think back to a pet project that I never realized in which I wanted to build a platform for people to provide their own interpretation/commentary on this Classic - something like a genius.com for Daoism and the Daodejing. This was specifically because I had noticed so many different translations and interpretations.
Nevertheless I appreciate the website, and anything to do with Daoism, and will be reading this translation as well.
A crowdsourced interpretation platform for spiritual texts is actually a really cool idea. It seems like people have already 'abused' genius.com for that purpose:
For those who want to compare a translation alongside the original (with pop-up boxes explaining the meanings of the original Chinese) look no further than Yellowbridge:
This website has helped me appreciate the imagery and structure of Mandarin, having never studied it before. I also appreciate the difficulty of translating such a poetic, ambiguous text as the Tao Te Ching or the related I Ching. Helps me understand how to "triangulate" the original meaning using multiple translations of the same source material.
The Tao Te Ching is not written in Mandarin but in Old Chinese. The two are as different, and stand in roughly the same relationship, as Latin and French. These differences include all levels of the language: phonology, syntax, lexicon, and what morphology the Sinitic languages have. In commentaries, the characters of Old Chinese words are sonetimes glossed with their modern Mandarin sound values, but this is ahistorical and often misleading.
The Chinese classics are not accessible to ordinary Chinese without special training. That is why the early 20th century campaign to write in the spoken language instead of fossilized literary languages, made such a huge impact on literacy in China.
Mandarin was just as inaccessible to speakers of other Sinitic languages without special training, but they do not appear to have been left behind in the literacy push, suggesting to me that it was pushing for mass literacy in the first place that did it (effectively providing the necessary special training), rather than the specific choice of language to push.
From the Middle Chinese stage on, the Sinitic languages have more in common with each other than any of them does with Old Chinese, inasmuch as they have all lost the Old Chinese inflections, with all the consequences for syntax that that entails.
AFAIK, Old Chinese is not generally considered to have been an inflected language. Maybe you're thinking about derivational affixes like nominalizing -s, that were not indicated in writing (giving two different pronunciations for the same character) and subsequently disappeared due to sound changes (but still leaving different pronunciations behind, which is how the existence of the affix was reconstructed).
I do agree that all modern Sinitic languages have changed greatly compared to the Old Chinese period, but that doesn't mean they have more in common as a result; on the contrary, different changes in different regions made all of them more dissimilar from each other.
There are some commonalities that spread through contact between neighboring varieties, but there are also commonalities resulting from the continued study of classic texts.
“The above is the most accurate translation of the ancient classic available anywhere at any price.”
Quite a bold statement that immediately makes me very sceptical. When reading ancient classics in translation, the wisest approach is comparing multiple translations. Only then a more complete picture will emerge.
With this said, the Tao Te Ching is one of the most astonishing texts to ever be written. It hovers around what I see as an essential truth, pointing at it while intentionally avoiding defining it. Any translation and any form is worth being read.
I have recently been reading a new Italian translation of it, by Luigi Maggio and published by Bompiani, and I have been really appreciating its care for the mystic, shamanic origin of the text, and the deep discussions of each translation choice, together with the presence of the original text.
FWIW, I've wrote a tool to help translate from Chinese on a per-word basis using open ressources (dictionaries, decomposition table, etc.). In particular, it helps to recover some of the information lost when translating from Chinese.
It's a personal project for now, so some things are still rough (e.g. no way to add new books, and I haven't bothered with the Tao Te Ching yet). You can see how it works on the San Zi Jing here[0].
If some of you are interested or have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out; my email should be on the "about" page.
If you haven't read it yet I can highly recommend the Italian collection of translations by Augusto Shandena Sabbadini (curator), which also provides translations to each individual Chinese character in the book.
(btw looks like we commented almost the same thing at the same time.)
The problem of language is a common thread in eastern philosophies, and Western Idealist.
Language can't express the idea, but Language is the only way to pass the idea to others, but then what others hear is something not quite right and can be misinterpreted, which can lead to problems.
To me, this is one of the most interesting differentiations between western philosophy and eastern philosophy.
Western philosophy tries to get around the language problems by writing thick volumes with excruciating detail and pedantry to help their idea get across as accurately as possible.
Eastern philosophy tries to get around the language problems with allusion and metaphor, leaning on the reader/listeners own experiences as foundation and trying to help them extrapolate from those experiences.
It's a fascinating contrast to me. I can't say with any certainty which delivers better, but I lean towards the eastern approach.
To be fair, it's far easier in written Chinese[1] to have allusion and metaphor because of the multifaceted nature of meaning in the characters. For instance, 行 (pronounced xing or haeng in Mandarin) has an absolute laundry list[2] of meanings even though originally it meant an intersection of roads. It's also possible (but to my knowledge less common) to play with the actual character shapes to induce other meanings, or to use replacement characters that are direct (or close) homophones to construct a play on words. The example that immediately pops to mind is the use of "river crabs" (河蟹 or héxiè) to replace "harmonized" (和谐 or héxié) in order to evade censorship.
I'd honestly be willing to say that there is no real accurate translation of the Dao de Jing into English. Ancient Chinese commentators (including Confucius) note the difficulty of understanding the Dao de Jing, and they could read and speak the language! Not to say that it's impossible, but it's just extremely difficult to replicate. I look at it as being akin to translating Shakespeare into Mandarin. Even English speakers struggle with Shakespeare and when translated it loses the lyricism and a lot of the underlying meaning.
My experience reading ancient Greek philosophy has been indeed that many philosophers use allusion and metaphor and are focused on leading a good life.
This is a common stereotype, but wholly inaccurate on both sides. We in the West are coming out of a long cultural period several centuries where that sort of analytic, rational style has been particularly popular, so it's easy to mistakenly assume that it is representative of the entirety of Western philosophy. It's not.
Likewise, we in the west are in a period when certain specific Eastern philosophies, notably Buddhism and Taoism, have become widely known and popular for the first time in the West. It's easy to mistakenly assume that they are representative of the entirety of Eastern philosophy. They're not.
Western philosophy has a deep and broad mystical and esoteric tradition that routinely does what you describe as an essentially "eastern" practice. More recently, postmodernism discards all that analytic precision in favor of vague impressionistic primacy for one's personal experience, and has become by far the dominant philosophy in many parts of the west. Postmodernism was (according to its progenitor Martin Heidegger, who was incidentally a Nazi) explicitly and profoundly influenced by Taoism.
Eastern philosophy, on the other hand, has its own well-developed "excruciating pedantic detail" traditions such as Legalism[1] (among others) that routinely do what you describe as an essentially "western" practice. They have been profoundly influential in Asian thought, yet they are not currently popular in the West, so we just don't think about them.
I want to upvote this for its good points about the relationship between Eastern thought and "Eastern thought" in the "West", but man, what is this?
> Postmodernism was (according to its progenitor Martin Heidegger...) explicitly and profoundly influenced by Taoism.
- Heidegger as the "progenitor of postmodernism" is... contentious, at best.
- Even if he was, he never defined "postmodernism" himself; mostly his critics associated him with it.
- As far as I know he never explicitly said any particular program was influenced by Taoism (although he definitely was). I would even say this is a specific case of what you're criticizing, as that influence came from his dialogue with the Kyoto school, a syncretic form of Buddhism that itself (IMO somewhat tenuously) claimed it represented also Taoism.
Maybe just a German influence? The zeitgeist of the time?
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were both influenced by Buddhism.
Think so was Kant, and Hume (Scottish).
In general, during that time period, a lot of philosophers were discussing Buddhist ideas, don't think it is stretch that Heidegger had been 'influenced'.
I'm explicitly not contesting that Heidegger was influenced by Taoism! I said "he definitely was". I'm contesting that you'll find a statement by Heidegger like "my work, as extended by postmodernism to which I also lay some intellectual claim, grows out of Taoism," which doesn't check out for at least those three major reasons.
I think we are agreeing on Tao.
And on postmodernism. I don't know enough to have an opinion.
I asked GPT 4 and it seemed GPT 4 also agrees Heidegger was NOT a postmodernist.
"No, Martin Heidegger was not considered a postmodernist. He was a German philosopher who is generally associated with phenomenology and existentialism, and he is best known for his work "Being and Time" ("Sein und Zeit"), published in 1927. His philosophical work laid some of the groundwork for postmodern thought, but he himself belonged to an earlier philosophical period.
Postmodernism as a philosophical movement didn’t emerge until after World War II, and it is characterized by skepticism toward grand narratives, doubt about objective reality, and a focus on the relative and the subjective. Heidegger's work, particularly his exploration of "being," language, and hermeneutics, influenced many postmodern thinkers, such as Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard, but he was not himself a postmodernist.
Heidegger’s own philosophy is complex and cannot be easily categorized. It includes elements of existentialism, hermeneutics (the theory and methodology of interpretation), and phenomenology (the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view)."
That is correct. You are very correct with this. I was using the 'common' understanding.
I was really surprised how much of Descartes and Leibniz were really about religious arguments. Completely about mystical metaphysical ideas. Surprised because I thought Western Philosophy would be all 'sciencey' and about logic. But really it all had a lot of religious reasoning in it.
And then also surprised that in India, with Buddhism, with Nagarjuna, extreme analytical logical arguments. There were centuries of extreme logical arguments.
So guess, if you try to make a quick summary on the internet, it will be wrong. Because if you go back over the centuries, at some point in time everything was done before by everyone else. Everyone went through similar phases at some point.
"Marrying" the eastern and the western mindsets is a big, maybe even the biggest, goal of this age. There is a saying that, freely translated, means "the east is where the wisdom was born, the west is where it will assume a definite shape."
> It hovers around what I see as an essential truth
Yeah, and it opens with basically saying "look, we know that we're going to talk about things ill suited to be captured by language, so keep that it mind"
The fish trap exists because of the fish. Once you’ve gotten the fish you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit. Once you’ve gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning. Once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words.
Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can talk with him?
Words are placeholders for meaning. Once you lose the words, you lose the ability to retain the thought with any reliable accuracy due to how our brains work.
It is also worth noting that as of time of writing, the idea of whether or not Laozi was a single person that ever existed is less clear than originally interpreted.
One of the translations I've read more recently takes note of how it, and Zhuangzi were likely penned within the same century, and that Chinese culture of the time did not frown upon "borrowing" or "building" upon knowledge bases and presenting them as "yours".
Actually kind of an interesting attitude towards communal wells of knowledge compared to many modern attitudes, I think. The Tao Te Ching may technically be the ultimate work of textual "sampling" if there's any truth to it.
It also has to do with how legitimization works within the Chinese culture. Things with lineages and ancestors are more seen as more legitimate, and the Chinese (historically at least) are not above borrowing it.
Related is the complex and rich history of Chinese martial arts. If you ask for the oral tradition for any modern school claiming a lineage, it is often founded by a mythical founder — maybe some Shaolin monk, or a Taoist monk. There is a good case that martial art lineages are much more likely to have evolved out of military skills. It does not help that most practitioners were illiterate, and often not well-educated.
What I don’t know is if the literate class also borrowed legitimacy. I don’t think they did, because I don’t think they had to.
Most of those are not translations from Chinese, they are interpretations from already translated Chinese texts.
> With this said, the Tao Te Ching is one of the most astonishing texts to ever be written. It hovers around what I see as an essential truth, pointing at it while intentionally avoiding defining it. Any translation and any form is worth being read.
There is a lot missing in any translation of the Dao De Jing, because nothing really captures the various layers of meanings from the original. There are also some meanings that are made clear with realizations and gnosis (for the lack of a better term).
One of my favorite is Ursula K Le Guin’s rendering. Her version captures some of the poetry that I rarely find in more straightforward translation.
>When reading ancient classics in translation, the wisest approach is comparing multiple translations. Only then a more complete picture will emerge.
But if I can't read the original ancient Chinese, what good does comparing the translations do? I can tell which ones read better to me, but I have no idea if any of them are actually accurate.
So right at the beginning it says this -- you can talk about Tao, but not the eternal Tao[1].
From a philosophy perspective, it is a good idea to read different versions because there isn't really a "right way to put it". This kind of Taoism is meant to make you think and relate to the universe in a certain way.
If you're more interested in studying an authentic version of the text though, almost all of the English "translations" are inadequate and misleading. This was a book about dynastic China.
The oldest sources appear to have been compiled from multiple sources themselves, and then underwent further revision, eg the order of Tao and Te was probably reversed at some point, the text became less regionally specific as it traveled across China, acquired different vocabulary and grammar, was appropriated by Confucians, separated into chapters, etc. So in this sense it's interesting to read multiple translations and analysis. To get the full picture you have to consider the sinology around the text too.
Not to make it sound hopeless, but Old Chinese is lossy because it tended to favor conciseness at the expense of unambiguous clarity. There is no total truth and a bit of subjective interpretation is required.
持而盈之 for instance is "持=hold 而=yet 盈=overflow 之=[implied subject or this]" while the translator decided to add a cup, writing "Holding a cup and overfilling it." It's a great assumption as 盈 has the etymology of a vessel being filled, but still an assumption nonetheless.
I think the idea is that "the real content" will be nearest where all the translations have consensus. Aberrational translations are quickly discounted this way.
Even the single best translation will probably be worse than reading the top three best translations since translation is as much an art as a science.
Not any different from a potato chip brand claiming themsleves as the best tasting.
They do this because consumers fall for this crap, collectively encouraging the behavior.
If they said "we think it's the best translation but you should read multiple and decide for yourselves", they wouldn't make it to the top of news sites.
Can you recommend something similar to tao the ching?
I don't mean anything like tao of pooh/new age stuff/alan watts, but similar in the spirit of tao.
The obvious second book to read after Laozi is Zhuangzi (Chuang-Tzu). His book is a joy to read, full of humor and anecdotes, where Laozi's reads like cryptic poetry. Both books describe a common worldview of harmonious living with the natural world, from complementary perspectives.
I personally recommend Burton Watson's translation of Zhuangzi.
Trying Not To Try by Slingerland is a great accessible introduction to the different modes of Chinese philosophy, and the two approaches to Daoism by Laozi and Zhuangzi are discussed.
For more depth I highly recommend Van Norden's Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy. I took a course that used this book as its text and it was really life changing and made me hopeful that there are some more practical philosophies out there for us.
I personally like Angus Graham's translation, Chuang-tzu: The Seven Inner Chapters and Other Writings from the Book Chuang-tzu, as well as his essays on it, A Companion to Angus C. Graham’s Chuang Tzu.
For one thing, it gave me some significant sympathy for analytic philosophy for the first time.
An interesting contrast is the later work of Xunzi (aka Hsun Tzu; not to be confused with Sun Tzu), which is a sort of synthesis of Taoism and Confucianism. He tempers the idealism of Laozi (Lao Tzu), finding "freedom from obsession" also in the perfection of the social contract.
A similar transformation occurred around the same time in the West, as the idealism of Cynicism was refined in Stoicism.
It is a bit more concrete and has no reference to Taoism unlike the other shared recomendations, but I also enjoyed Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet. To me it is in the spirit of the Tao. Finding the balance and harmony and not declaring dogmatic truths.
(but it is a imaginary prophet sharing wisdom, so there is maybe a association of dogmatism, but I did not perceive it like that)
A recent "Hermetic Theory of Everything [Evolution, Morality, Structures, Simulation, Alchemy]", by a programmer IIRC. However, I haven't had a chance to watch it yet.
The Heart Sutra, an extremely condensed version of core Buddhist teaching. But, in my opinion, such texts are useless without explanations. Bernie Glassman explains it in the book "Infinite Circle: Teachings in Zen".
I love the I Ching for divination. Not in the "tell me my fate!" sense, but as a way to use randomness as a means to look at things differently. It's like Oblique Strategies but even obliquer.
personally, i can only extract so much meaning from the text itself without rely on experts and explanations. i find it helpful to have it interpretted as well by people like Jason gregory.
I currently learn from a master in a living lineage of Shifu and you get so much context from that than “just” reading the text. You also get the living reality of the text which is beneficial.
agree 100%. I had to read it, and to be honest I found little wisdom in it. To add on to your list, you could tell they had distain for people who travel or wanted to do new things.
no, it only states that you shouldn't be greedy or envious of other people's things. That's a far cry from 'you shouldn't have any things at all'. ambition is fine, so long as it doesn't distract you from god - and god is in everything including yourself, so what its really saying is dont let anything distract you from yourself. don't do anything that is against 'you'.
I've thought about this for quite a bit and here is my relatively legible explanation of what the 'Dao' and synonymous concepts in other religions/cultures is
The "Path" is the arc from a state of anti-entropy(negentropy) to entropy. Negentropy is synonymous with "God" or goodness while entropy is the "Devil" or badness.
A life that is in "flow" is one that is on the path moving away from God's light while bravely facing death with eyes forward.
Courage is the first of all virtues b/c when facing forward, you are more thankful for each and every fleeting moment.
"False idols" are like perpetual motion machines, they seem like sources of negentropy and can reverse the arrow of time like a fountain of youth.
As someone with interest in Zen and Buddhism, I find that line of thought very interesting, but feel like it needs some tweaking somehow. I feel like they want to perhaps equalize anti-entropy and entropy...like, say, between plants and animals, O2 represents a waste product for the plant, and a vital input for the animal, and the CO2 a waste product for the animal, and an important input for the plant. When you don't take the perspective of either of them, you see entropy from one angle, and anti-entropy from another angle.
Below I put a bit from Zen master Huang Po on 'the fundamental principle'. The glorious Buddhas would represent anti-entropy, which you do not go toward. The horrific forms entropy, from which you do not move away. Equalized.
Anyway, interesting line of thought, only offering another perspective!
"If an ordinary man, when he is about to die, could only see the five elements of consciousness as void; the four physical elements as not constituting an 'I'; the real Mind as formless and neither coming nor going; his nature as something neither commencing at his birth nor perishing at his death, but as whole and motionless in its very depths; his Mind and environmental objects as one - if he could really accomplish this, he would receive Enlightenment in a flash. He would no longer be entangled by the Triple World; he would be a World-Transcendor. He would be without even the faintest tendency towards rebirth. If he should behold the glorious sight of all the Buddhas coming to welcome him, surrounded by every kind of gorgeous manifestation, he would feel no desire to approach them. If he should behold all sorts of horrific forms surrounding him, he would experience no terror. He would just be himself, oblivious of conceptual thought and one with the Absolute. He would have attained the state of unconditioned being. This, then, is the fundamental principle. [This paragraph is, perhaps, one of the finest exposition of Zen teaching, for it encompasses in a few words almost the entire scope of that vast and penetrating wisdom.]" - Huang Po
'At the time, I was newly infatuated with the writing of Quentin Tarantino and David Mamet, so my dream version of a TTC reflected the simplicity and grit of their dialogue.'
Here is how Hogan translates the first lines of the Tao Te Ching:
Personally, as someone who has read (and often rereads) the Tao in the original Chinese (with a lot of assistance and references!). I actually really like Hogan's translation. I don't think it holds as the only translation you need, but I feel a lot of translators become fixated on trying to capture the mystic poetic-ness of the Tao, but it is impossible to render this in English without loosing one of its most important stylistic elements: it's extreme terseness.
Hogan's translation misses a lot of "meaning", but you're missing the point if you want the specificity of the word choice translated for you.
These ideas are very much reflected in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
What enters your mind and goes through a function of complete rational cognition- cannot be the ultimate truth.
And we repeatedly see in Zen koans, also mentioned in GEB, and life and teachings of Buddha that all questions cannot be purely answered with mere words.
Tractatus, Godel's Incompleteness, Halting problem, and these all somehow talk about the same unknowability- or at least intellectually.
To really "get" the Tao Te Ching, I think you have to study Zen and Buddhism. Without getting an intuitive understanding of abstract phrases, talking about things with metaphors, stuff like emptyness and "the way" you're really not going to get anything out of it. You also need to have worked to master some craft or art form.
But once you do understand those things, the ideas in the Tao Te Ching are almost common sense. Stuff any somewhat wise person would understand immediately. You can pick any random line out of it and apply to almost any discipline or situation.
Its all really just a collection of basic worldly wisdom, that you would encounter doing anything if you put genuine effort into it.
Hell, take any art composition class and you can see most ideas in the Tao Te Ching applied literally. This is because in art, things like form, balance and emptyness are all basic building blocks to design
> To really "get" the Tao Te Ching, I think you have to study Zen and Buddhism.
TTC doesn't really require a particular framework to understand. It is however difficult to grok from with a Western/Christian philosophical framework. So studying Eastern philosophy could indeed help break down those preconceptions if one suffers from them.
Zen evolved from Chinese Chan Buddhism which was influenced by Daoism. Zen is not Daoism though, it is Buddhism. Therefore, to study Daoist texts as a beginner I don't think Zen Buddhism is going to help. It's just going to muddy concepts whatever overlap there may be.
The word "Zen" may have Chinese roots which in turn might have Indian root (dhyan - meditation -> chen/chan -> Zen) - but it doesn't mean whole of Zen evolved from Taoism.
And you cannot really learn Tao by just reading a book- no matter how much of a "beginner's mind" you have. Tao practitioners in China, Buddhists in India/China, and Zen practitioners in China/Japan led very different lifestyles from the rest of the populace.
Teachings of Zen/Taoism/Buddhism are nice to hear, and quotable- but you can't learn them by merely reading a book. Practice, and inclusion in lifestyle is necessary.
Zen IS Buddhism, it's not influenced by it. It's one of the most important schools within Mahayana Buddhism. It has Daoist influences via Chan from which it originated. It absolutely is categorically not Daoism though. It is Buddhism with a somewhat Daoist sensibility.
The “most accurate translation” of the first line of the Tao Te Ching (The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao) would be “Tao that is Tao is not Tao”. The original Chinese leaves a lot of room for interpretation, and the best translation (in my opinion) is by Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English.
IIRC Smullyan "literally" translates a modern "literal" Chinese translation as "The Tao that can be Taoed is not the true Tao" which I think is a little more accessible without meaningful compromise.
(I cribbed that for my personal rendering as "Tao that is 'tao' is not really tao" and it's one of the few lines I don't think I changed in many years. Maybe it's something other programmers will appreciate.)
Some identify Tao (道) with Ṛta (ऋत) and with Logos (λόγος). And perhaps most interesting is the first chapter of the Gospel of John, which identifies Christ with the Logos (Incarnate) (though one can be forgiven for missing this because translations into most languages result in seemingly inscrutable constructions like "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."; "Word" is horribly anemic in comparison to "Logos"). Given this equivalence, this could result in interesting dialogue between, say, Catholics, Hindus, and Taoists. (The pagan Greeks were already in dialogue with early Christians, of course, hence the use of the extremely Greek word in question in the New Testament.)
Section 1 can be understood in terms of the incomprehensible "Logos" which is before both the "logoi" (in Latin, "ratio"; that is, "reasons") in things, as well as before the human "logos"; the rational mind by which we can understand those things.
Section 4 has parallels to many Biblical passages (Isaiah 40:4, John 4:14, etc) and speaks of the Tao as being like an "offspring" or "preface" to God.
Likewise, Sections 7-9, 13 & 14, 16, 22, 27, and many others have strong parallels to Biblical passages.
Section 42 speaks of the Tao begetting One, the One begetting Two, the Two begetting Three, and the Three begetting all else. This is definitely not exactly the Trinity, but the cosmology here (and see the Taijitu Shuo) is suggestive...
Section 78 says that only one who takes up the shame and sins of the world is fit to be its ruler.
Anywhere one can find concepts or themes that "rhyme", I find there to be something real and weighty.
The only time I've ever read the Tao Te Ching, I had just hitchhiked 350 miles in the name of love and hadn't slept in about 48 hours. I think that's the ideal state to read it.
The book of ancient wisdom about Taoism from an isolated nation with a completely different language sounding vaguely like "Tao Teaching" really stressed me out when I first learned about it. It's no wonder paranoid schizophrenics get so wild, coincidences are sometimes alarmingly weird.
It's interesting to me how Daoism from China and Hermeticism from Greco-Egyptian culture erose from very separate places with very similar themes. Both traditions emphasize the idea of a universal force or principle governing the cosmos (the Tao in Daoism and the All or the 0ne in Hermeticism).
This is probably due to a built-in preference in our minds for something we later started calling Occam's razor.
Obviously there must have been something that started it all, and if there were n+1 things at some time, there might have been n things before, leading to the conclusion that there must once have been 1 thing.
These philosophies arise multiple times per evening in any pub where alcohol is served. It's just that most don't stick around for long enough, possibly due to bad marketing.
Is it an in-built preference? I think a robust monism is still a fairly radical position, especially among religious views. For example even the branches of Christianity which tack more materially tend to draw a rigid boundary between creator/created, God/the universe, etc. (and if you interrogate lay views they tend to skew even more dualistically).
The thinking starts with the beer, then progresses towards one entity, then backpedals because one needs a second to offset against, and from two comes three, and we have come full circle.
I see a similar pattern in the advent of abstract art. People have independently settled upon primary colors, primary shapes, and primary compositions, only to then get stuck in a rather limited playing field, from which people started again to create the total utter chaos that is called post-modernism.
My personal conviction is that neither religion not abstract art have found the key to understanding the universe. They merely reflect our limited way of thinking.
> Is it an in-built preference? I think a robust monism is still a fairly radical position, especially among religious views. For example even the branches of Christianity which tack more materially tend to draw a rigid boundary between creator/created, God/the universe, etc. (and if you interrogate lay views they tend to skew even more dualistically).
Can you expand on this a bit? I have an intuition about what you're saying, but I confess that the definitions can be a little slippery.
Hermeticism was influenced by Daoism and Daoism was around way before Hermeticism as a folk religion and shamanistic practice. Daosim was centrifuged as early as 500BCE, a good 200 years before Hermeticism.
It is most likely there was some cultural interactions, ie, the Dayuan
Fair question. I think it’s similar to the art of war by Sun Tzu, very abstract principles that one can still use for strategic guidance on conflict situations. The main value of Sun Tzu’s book was the realization that deception is one of the top strategies, but it only has limited applicability.
As for the Tao Te Ching, many interesting ideas can be extracted on how to deal with contemporary challenges.
Another interesting aspect is that it was created as a manual for rulers during the Spring and Autumn periods of China. A time where the country was divided in many little states fighting for consolidate their power. Many philosophies arose on how to achieve this, and only a handful survived. So not only has it passed the test of time, but it could be said it was produced empirically in an age with intense adaptive pressures.
That's not quite what happened (or it is a overly simplified version of the historical accounts...)
First, it wasn't clear when the Tao Te Ching was written. Anyway, the political philosophy that survived and emerged "victorious" during the turbulent periods was the legalist school of thought, which was like Lao Tzu and Confucius married and had a child together. The Taoist ideas of Wuwei (non-action) morphed into the idea of automation via laws and regulations. Their logic was that rulers are not supposed to do the work themselves because it would not "scale". In the end, Qin, who went all in on legalism, having made the whole kingdom a terrifying economic and military machine governed by strict regulation (incidentally, informed by "behavioral economics"), conquered all the other states.
The Taoist ideas we know from Tao Te Ching only gained prominence after the legalist school was dealt a deadly blow due to the quick dissolution of the Qin empire. The new elite (that of early Han) thought that the harshness of strict laws and cutthroat competition were the cause of the empire's collapse. It was only then that the "take it easy", "small government" kind of Taoist ideas took hold.
The first TTC manuscripts date to around 300 b.c. and there’s evidence that some of the poems have a rhythmic structure, which could mean some verses were transmitted orally prior to that. So there’s a good chance that it was known prior to 300 b.c. between that time and when legalism crumbled, there were other renowned Taoist sages, such as zhuangzi. So while legalism was still in full force, Taoist ideas were still evolving, granted with less vigor.
I would suspect the “take it easy” part took root due to the strictness of legalism. Indeed, there’s verses in the TTC that I see as a criticism to legalism, for example, 74.
University of British Columbia: Chinese Thought: Ancient Wisdom Meets Modern Science - Part 1
Part 1 introduces the basic philosophical, religious and scientific concepts that will be drawn upon throughout the course, and then goes on to cover early Shang and Zhou religious thought, the Analects of Confucius, the Daodejing (a Daoist text attributed to Laozi), the utilitarian thinker Mozi, the newly discovered and very exciting Guodian texts, and the momentous philosophical changes that occurred in the mid Warring States period.
Would probably stand up to the test of time, say a little better than if we put the bible under some testing for "verified via some kind of socioeconomic data analysis".
Really, it says right at the beginning, that the ideas can't be communicated by language, these are some pretty aloof descriptions. Not sure testing is how we should value ancient texts.
The Art of War is held up as some great text, but it has a lot of contradictions, and bad advice. (Not sure on this) Wish I had link, but apparently it was not used by generals in ancient times, it was more of a puff piece by a non-military writer.
That is the irony of the whole thing, it starts out: The Dao that can be talked about is not the Real/Eternal Dao - then proceeds to talk about it for 81 chapters. He was just funny like that.
How do you describe the taste of 'saltiness' to convey the sense of saltiness, if who you're writing to has no understanding of it?
That's the problem with written word. We can write all around, and try to help someone identify the moment the sense happens, but words are incapable of sharing the sense.
The writings about the Dao are so that those looking for it in real life can identify it when they think they find it. Just reading with no doing will never show you the Dao. They describe emotions and senses that writings can never convey.
If you can't describe a thing, then you have to talk around it and hope you given the listener enough contextual clues that they figure it out for themselves.
Given that, 81 chapters seems appropriate for an amorphous subject that we can't yet define in language.
“Stop eating salt. Take a piece of chocolate. Eat it.”
You can use language to guide and point. Talking about chocolate is difficult. Pointing to chocolate is not.
Ceasing the consumption of “salt” may be difficult and the “chocolate” in question may be subtle so you may need many intermediate steps.
Nothing we experience can be transcribed into words. Literally nothing. There is not one thing you can experience that’s possible to pin down into script. It’s pointers all the way down.
Almost everything in the world comes with warning labels.
Does that mean you just sit down and don't move?
There are dozens of branches of religions and philosophy and SCIENCE, that questions the ability of language to pass information, its 'fidelity'.
That doesn't mean you just sit at home and stair at the wall. Thought that is one very valid solution. Actually, just staring at a wall is the way some interpret as the best way to deal with the situation.
It's like courting a woman. If you're too direct in your communication, you will lose. When trying to make your philosophy expand, if you're too direct in your communication, there won't be anything to speculate about, making its discussion short-lived.
I recently created my own translation with annotations based on chatgpt. It’s hard to state what is the “most accurate” translation, as there’s several ancient versions of the Tao Te Ching. The most popular one is from a guy named Wang Bi. He was actually a Confucian and sought to integrate both philosophical currents, which had been in opposition in the past centuries. Who’s to say what is “accurate” in this context.
If anyone’s interested, send me a DM and I’ll send you the PDF, or if not, you can check it out on Amazon, it’s called “Tao Te Ching: Reinterpreted”.
Such conclusions aren't teaching you anything, though. It's a form of smugness that alludes to some magical knowledge you'll gain by doing X thing, when that's not how the world works.
When people are telling others to "touch grass", it's usually in reference to a specific social thing or attitude they think the other should adopt, but refuse to spell out. It's a pejorative command meant to ridicule. It has no constructive applications, and its use in conversation indicates hostility on behalf of the speaker.
If the opening line of the TTC was sufficient, the book wouldn't have been written. The reason the book leads with that is because words are a limiting medium. Much like one's hand pointing to the moon is not the moon, our words point to concepts, they are not the concept themselves. It also continues because, it's unhelpful to tell someone to "touch grass" or "go live it yourself", without any guidance. That's just being a dick.
The TTC guides you with concepts and behaviors found in nature. Things you can go outside and observe if you look closely enough. There's no mysticism to it.
Find patterns in nature, or pay attention to the "currents" in your life, and you'll find the Tao. Touching grass helps but it's not required. :)
> Grass and trees are tender and soft at birth, and are dry and brittle at death. Therefore, The hard and strong belong to the company of death; The soft and weak belong to the company of life.
> I just don't get what westerners get out of reading the Tao Te Ching.
I really don't understand how ethnicity or provenance has anything to do with this. This is a philosophy book from more than 2000 years ago, the person(s) that wrote it is as different to today's Chinese as to westerners or anyone else. It just talks about the human condition and as such anyone can relate to it.
And about the appeal of Daoism versus, for example, Buddhism I would refer to this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinegar_tasters. Laozi just smiles, Daoist writings have a kind of humor and lightheartedness to them that make them much more appealing to me. I don't concern myself with enlightenment, I just want to smile.
The Tao Te Ching(or at least parts of it) speaks from the place of truth, independent of doctrine or creed. Independent of Taoism, ultimately. As such it will always find appeal across cultures.
I found it to be extremely woo until I sat down for many weeks with an advaita Vedanta tutor. Revisiting the Tao after spending some time with the crest jewel of discrimination and some other texts convinced me it could be mediated on. What it holds I could not understand before some guidance, but I have to accept others may be more ready to discover the truth hidden in there. To me still the Tao merits meditation though my approach is taking short passages at a time (perhaps like Buddhists mediating on Koans? I don't know the practice so perhaps I'm way off base here)
Totally agree. Speaking from the western perspective, it's short and poetic, and it introduces concepts that people aren't familiar with in a brief and accessible way. I don't think anyone in the west is becoming a Taoist in any meaningful sense because of it.
It loosens the grip of the Western narrative re: destiny, individualism, control, rat race, etc. Similar to Stoicism in its initial incarnations but with another perspective that IMO has more universality.
Your dismissive tone is curious because the same kind of dismissal can be made of the absurd and outlandish belief systems and mythologies of Mahayana. "Perfected wisdom" is hard to imagine when basing it on stories of stories of myths of god-like beings.
Why don't you try it out for yourself and let us know. You seem to worry about other people's interests more than usual.
I get the pragmatism coming from a Buddhist, but not everything can or indeed needs to be brought down into a "path". I'm sure you are fully aware of this.
Now I am fascinated by your consternations. Whatever the answer, whatever people get out of it. What's it to you?
I'm pretty curious what got deleted. This thread seems to be some argument between Tao and Buddhism? That seems like a silly argument to have. There are a lot of branches of Buddhism, some are similar to Tao, some far apart. Just like any religions. If you zoom in too close they seem very different, if you zoom far out they start to look similar.
They were asking, as a Mahayana Buddhist, what westerners get out of reading the daodeing. Implying that it is a a somewhat pointless philosophy that does not provide a path to follow (comparing it to nihilism). Also pointing out the different currents (philosophical daoism vs religious/magical daoism) as you mentioned, which most westerners are not aware of.
A somewhat out of place critique coming from a lack of understanding IMO.
Ah got it.
Was pretty curious, since as religious conflicts go (or disagreements), I thought buddhism and taoism were pretty far down the list of groups that were antagonistic.
This isn't a wrong view in an absolute sense (Taoism and Buddhism I suppose "agree more" than say, Taoism and Baha'i - though as soon as you have diverging metaphysics "distance" becomes very hard to characterize). But, it's heavily colored by the fact that one of the earlier popularizers of Buddhism in the English language was also an advocate of Zen as an ideological evolution of Taoism; so he is often selective in how he portrays both leaving many in the West with a view that these ideologies are much closer than have been historically or are in practice today.
Then go back and reread The Dispossessed and you'll see a lot of the Tao in it.