You look but don’t see it.
It gets called unseen.
You listen but don’t hear it.
It gets called silent.
You reach but don’t hold it. 5
It gets called formless.
Of these, nothing more is knowable
Because they merge into each other.
Its height isn’t bright, its floor isn’t obscure.
It unspools on and on, remaining unnamable. 10
It goes back again into non-being.
We call this form without form, non-being’s image.
We call this the elusive illusion.
Go before it, you won’t find its front.
Go behind it, you won’t find its back. 15
If you keep to the ancients’ Dao
You can handle the here and now
Because you start to understand
The ancient ways that they began
We call this the thread of Dao. 20
***
NOTES
lines 1–4: A modified version of these lines appears in poem 35.
line 17: the here and now: More literally, “the realities of the present.”
COMMENTARY
Evidence of Dao as a process may be all around us, as discussed in section II of the Introduction, but as for Dao itself, there is no sensory evidence: nothing to see, hear, feel, as poem 14 points out right at the start – nothing to smell or taste for that matter, nothing that can be quantified. Even Dao’s own being, which poem 4 asserts is void, is also non-being, and to that state, we’re told here, it goes back again. The language used is the same wording as in other references to the return: how all things go back again into the non-being from which they came (see Introduction section IV.7). But after giving an elaborate breakdown of the many ways you cannot know Dao, Laozi concludes with a reminder of Dao’s realness as process, an ongoing current in human development, shaping our activities and environment, the thread of Dao.
Links To:
The Classic of Dao and De by Laozi: Contents
For more on Daoism, see:
Film Dreams: Frank Capra
Music: KALW Radio Show #3, Ancient China in 20th-Century Music
Music: SFCR Radio Show #8, Daoism in Western Music, part 1
Music: SFCR Radio Show #9, Daoism in Western Music, part 2
NICOLE V. GAGNÉ 