PREFACE
At about 3 o’clock in the morning on January 16, 2012, I was awakened by a police officer banging on the door of my apartment and telling me to get out at once because the building was on fire. I threw on my clothes and ran out the door, taking nothing with me. Afterward the firefighters kindly permitted me to retrieve a few items. Later that day the building was razed and everything in it destroyed.
I owned a lot of books by 2012, but when I left my home for the last time I took only two with me. Beyond the importance of their texts for my work, I needed these particular books because they were filled with my marginalia. One was the first edition of my Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music, which I had been correcting and updating with an eye toward a revised and expanded second edition.[1] The other book was Jonathan Star’s Tao Te Ching: The Definitive Edition, in which Star’s translation of Laozi is accompanied by the complete text of all 81 poems in the original Chinese, with a range of English meanings given for every word; he also provided a concordance of the appearances of all the Chinese words in the Dao De Jing.
Star’s book became invaluable to me as soon as I obtained it, which was not long after its 2003 publication as a trade paperback. I wanted to understand Daoism better, and as I read different English translations and versions of the Dao De Jing, I would wonder what certain words or phrases were in the original Chinese and go back to my copy of Star. By the midpoint of the first month of 2012, I had scrawled onto its pages an array of notes: outlining rhyme schemes, indicating puns, cross-referencing repeated passages, even adding a few corrections as well as drafts of some phrases in English.
That copy of Star became the nucleus of my current collection of books on Daoism, which includes Ursula K. Le Guin’s thoughtful Lao Tzu Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, An English Version (1997). In it she described having worked from Paul Carus’ 1898 Lao-Tze’s Tao-Teh-King, which included a word-for-word breakdown of the entire Chinese text, and I decided that I could use Star’s book to write this version.
Permit me to digress here and clarify the distinction between a version and a translation. A translation is made by someone who is literate in two languages. I cannot translate the Dao De Jing because I am not literate in Chinese. But I can work from a translation of meanings for each word of the original text, such as Star has provided, and write an English-language version of these Chinese poems, as Le Guin and others have done.
I wrote this version during the spring and summer of 2020, responding to two pressures, one recent and the other long-standing. The recent pressure was my work on a book about Daoist themes in 20th-century Western music: I kept requiring quotes from Laozi, but it was too difficult to write English versions of isolated phrases and lines from the Dao De Jing. Whatever I came up with in English would be better if it emerged as part of the entire poem – and whatever poem I could come up with would be better if it emerged as part of the entire group of 81.
The second pressure had been building for many years, due to my dissatisfactions with the English versions and translations that I had been reading. I have to stop right here and proclaim explicitly that I feel nothing but respect and gratitude for the efforts of each and every one of these authors, both the translators and the version-writers; and I am especially awed by and indebted to the sinology scholars whose work on the Dao De Jing and other Daoist writings I have read over the years. Some names are cited in the Introduction; more can be found in the Bibliography. Because of their efforts, I am a different person. And I know there are many others who could say the same thing. Yet the fact remains that I never read an English version or translation of the Dao De Jing that I could recommend without adding warnings and caveats, usually because of confusions regarding what Laozi calls De.
These and related matters are examined in the Introduction. I’ll close here by stating the obvious: The information I provide in this book is far, far from the last word on any of these topics. If you have further questions, I urge you to do what I did and investigate it for yourself. It’ll be worth it.
***
This book is dedicated to the cherished memory of “Blue” Gene Tyranny.
FOOTNOTES – PREFACE
1. Nicole V. Gagné, Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music, Second Edition. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019.
INTRODUCTION
I. What is the Dao De Jing and who is Laozi?
The Dao De Jing is a group of 81 short poems thought to have been written during an era of civil unrest and conflict in China’s history, which has come to be known as the Warring States Period, lasting from 475 until 221 BCE. The earliest complete version yet recovered was found on silk rolls that predate 206 BCE. A text on strips of bamboo, retrieved from a tomb dating perhaps as far back as 332 BCE, consists of 31 poems, of which 17 are incomplete. Almost six hundred years later, the 23-year-old Wang Bi, already an accomplished scholar and philosopher, published an edition of the 81 poems along with his commentary; that was in 249 CE – also, tragically, the year of his death in a time of plague – and his edition became the standard text of the Dao De Jing.
The name Dao De Jing means The Classic of Dao and De; a jing is a special kind of book, a canon or scripture or classic, and this jing is about Dao and De. Although traditionally regarded as falling into two sections, with poems 1 through 37 about Dao, and 38 through 81 about De, these two interrelated themes are discussed throughout the book, along with issues of governance, militarism, education, gender, mortality, health, and longevity.
In China the Dao De Jing has been known more familiarly as the Laozi, after the man to whom it is attributed. As for who Laozi is, that seems to have always been a mystery. The venerated Chinese historian Sima Qian included a biography of Laozi in his monumental Records of the Grand Historian, completed around 94 BCE. Although he gave no birth date, Sima did detail where Laozi was born in the state of Chu and his birth name of Li Er, and noted that Laozi was supervising the royal archives at Zhou when he met Confucius. The Scottish sinologist James Legge, in his 1893 translation of the Confucian texts, dated this encounter at 518 BCE,[1] when Confucius was about 33 years old; it’s hard to imagine Laozi being younger and serving as supervisor of the royal archives – his very name means “old master” (or more affectionately, “old kid”). Legge also cited accounts that dated Laozi’s birth year as 604 BCE.[2] Other sources have differed, with some pitching dates decades later, in the early 6th century BCE. Sima insisted that these and further obscurities attending Laozi were deliberate:
Laozi cultivated the Way and its virtue [i.e., Dao and De]. In his studies he strove to conceal himself and be unknown. He lived in Zhou for a long time. But seeing the decline of the Zhou, he decided to leave. When he reached the checkpoint at the pass, Yin Xi, the official in charge of the pass, said to him, “Sir, you are about to retire. You must make an effort to write us a book.” So Laozi wrote a book in two sections, explaining the ideas of the Way and its virtue in something over five thousand words, and left. No one knows how he ended.[3]
II. What is Dao – or is it Tao?
Let me start by addressing the second question first. The method for transliterating Chinese which long dominated in the West was developed in the 19th century and is commonly known as the Wade-Giles system. It takes Chinese words that are pronounced with a D sound and writes them with a T (“Tao” = dao; “Te” = de), expecting you the reader to hear and say D. The Chinese words pronounced with a T sound are written in this system with a T’ (“t’ien” = tian, Heaven; “t’ung” = tong, unity). This t’iresome approach also holds with other consonants: P sounds like B unless it’s P’, and K like G unless it’s K’. There’s also CH, pronounced like J unless it’s CH’ – hence all the “Tao Te Chings” in English. (Even worse, italicized K can also sound like J, resulting in the “Tao Te Kings” that can still be found.)
In the 1950s the Chinese developed the transliteration system Hanyu Pinyin – more commonly, pinyin – which sounds the way it’s written. Simpler and more readable than the Wade-Giles system is, pinyin has been the international standard since the 1980s, and I have relied upon it in this version of the Dao De Jing.
As for the question what is Dao, I have to quote poem 56: The knowing don’t talk, the talkers don’t know. Following Laozi, I urge you to remain skeptical of anyone who tells you they can tell you what Dao is. That poem, however, is not attempting to enforce secrecy; rather, the point is that any attempt to objectify or otherwise limit Dao can only be misleading. I can objectify and delimit ideas and things because they are not absolute; Dao, being neither an idea nor a thing, is absolute. In other words, I can’t get there from here. All I can do on this page before you is manipulate language and conceptualizations, rearrange what we already have, and none of that is sufficient – in fact, it very rapidly becomes an obstacle, and there are several poems in the Dao De Jing which warn about naming and the limitations names impose. The delusion that you understand something because you can name it runs deep; that’s why Laozi writes in poem 25, I don’t know its name, so I call it Dao.
In that poem he also tells us that Dao existed before the Creation, and so some call it mother to Heaven and Earth. The poem further describes Dao with the adjectives silent, formless, unchanging, ceaseless, all-pervading, and great. Those qualities are summed up in poem 4, where we’re told that Dao seems to partake in eternity. Poem 4 also declares Dao to be void, and this voidness is implicit in poem 21 when Laozi tries to answer the question directly:
What is Dao?
Only elusiveness.
Only indistinction.
So indistinct!
So elusive!
Yet it contains form.
So elusive!
So indistinct!
Yet it contains substance.
So profound!
So mysterious!
Yet it contains Jing.
Attempting to answer the question leads Laozi not to descriptions or rationales but to effusions and paradoxes (also found in poems 4 and 25). Dao is formless, yet it gives rise to form; void, yet it engenders substance; unknowable, yet it has the vitality of life – for here, a serviceable-enough rendering of what’s meant by Jing (see section IV.2). Poem 34 plainly states that Dao produces life and disowns none; yet Dao goes back again into non-being, according to poem 14. It is creative yet it is also the non-being to which every created thing returns: All go back to their source, poem 16 insists.
But Dao is more than alpha and omega, creator and annihilator. When Laozi writes I call it Dao in poem 25, he’s calling it a word that literally means “way,” with the same dual meaning as in English: a physical path or road, or a methodology, a sensibility, a process. And the process of Dao is immediate and ongoing, available to everyone and everything, occurring everywhere, all the time.
Reflecting on the writings of Laozi and Zhuangzi, James Legge concluded that Dao “is a phenomenon; not a positive being, but a mode of being.”[4] He cited this passage from the Zhuangzi, which sums up the paradoxical nature of both Dao and our understanding of Dao:
Tâo cannot be regarded as having a positive existence; existences cannot be regarded as non-existent. The name Tâo is a metaphor used for the purpose of description. To say that it exercises some causation, or that it does nothing, is speaking of it from the phase of a thing; – how can such language serve as a designation of its greatness? If words were sufficient, we might in a day’s time exhaust the subject of the Tâo. Words not being sufficient, we may talk about it the whole day, and the subject of discourse will only have been a thing. Tâo is the extreme to which things conduct us. Neither speech nor silence is sufficient to convey the notion of it. When we neither speak nor refrain from speech, our speculations about it reach their highest point.[5]
As to the nature of the phenomenon we call Dao, Laozi writes in poem 77:
The Dao of Heaven
Takes from that which has too much
And gives to that which has too little.
The movement toward balance is something we see again and again in natural processes. Mounds get flattened, depressions get filled. After you take a shower, the bathroom is all hot and steamy; you leave the bathroom door open and it cools down as its excess heat migrates into a larger and cooler area. People hang their laundry on a clothesline so it can dry. That’s not because the sun is so blisteringly hot that it’s like being inside a clothes dryer; it’s because the laundry has more moisture in it than the surrounding air does, and so the excess moisture in the laundry migrates out into the dryer air. Here’s a biological example: There are men who take the male sex hormone testosterone in an attempt to become better athletes, yet some of them start developing female characteristics instead; the man’s body, being designed for a certain level of testosterone, takes the excess in his system and converts it into estrogen, the female sex hormone, for which his body has plenty more room.
I asked a friend of mine who teaches physics, “When I’m in a car and the driver accelerates, I feel myself pushed back in the seat; when the driver goes into reverse, I’m pushed forward; if there’s a sharp turn to the left, I’m pushed to the right, and a sharp turn to the right pushes me to the left – would that happen to me in outer space, in a weightless environment?” He assured me it would, which meant that the force pushing me around in the car is not gravity. When I asked him what was doing it, his answer was one of the fundamental principles of physics: “Forces are associated with acceleration.” And that’s all the answer we have. This most familiar of phenomena has been happening forever, throughout the universe, yet it remains a mystery, nobody knowing what it is. From my perspective it is the naked hand of Dao, immediately introducing some degree of balance into your accelerated trajectory.
In his 1920 book Hey Rub-A-Dub-Dub, Theodore Dreiser observed,
heat is balanced by cold in the universe; light by no light; matter by force; tenderness by savagery; lust by asceticism; love by hate; and so on ad infinitum. No thing is fixed. All tendencies are permitted apparently. Only a balance is maintained.[6]
While Dreiser saw in “religion, both as to its principles and its practitioners, a ghastly fiction,” he could not avoid regarding “this necessity for equation, some form of adjustment, reciprocity, balance […] as the only omnipresent evidence of so-called Divine Will.”[7] The ancient Sages came to a similar conclusion. They had of course embraced stillness through meditation, but they were also keen observers of the natural world, as can be seen from details in Laozi and the other essential early Daoist writings, the Zhuangzi and the Huainanzi. They recognized the operation of a transcendent process of balance, a process that could be followed, either deliberately through stillness or spontaneously through egoless action; and they saw that following this process provided guidance, support, and protection. And like Dreiser, the Sages stopped there – the early Daoist writings don’t involve religion or deities or rituals or codes of behavior, they don’t claim that anything has been revealed to them, and they don’t ask you to believe in anything or to worship anything or to pray to or for anything.
Keep in mind that the balance maintained by Dao is not an equivalency – nothing happens when forces are equivalent. Nature shows us an endless adjusting and readjusting of the energies the Chinese called Yin and Yang (see section IV.1), understood in the West as the forces of attraction and repulsion, respectively. Dao keeps these twin principles in appropriate proportions throughout all their interactions, and that ever-changing proportionality, at play throughout the macrocosm and the microcosm, is what makes a dynamic and self-sustaining Creation possible. The seemingly endless material diversity – the ten thousand things, a phrase Laozi uses repeatedly – arises as things continuously differentiate and become themselves, which is understood as the effect of a special power that Dao has, the power called De.
III. What is De – or is it virtue?
Again, to address the second question first: As I mentioned at the close of the Preface, my experience has been that English versions and translations of the Dao De Jing tend to run into problems when dealing with what Laozi means by De. In recent years I’ve seen it translated as “power,” as in Ursula K. Le Guin’s version. This approach makes sense, insofar as De is the power of Dao. However, calling it “power” only complicates other references to power in the text; worse, De does not mean “power” – no one asks if you have enough De to run a light bulb. The problems with “power,” however, are minor when compared to the disadvantages of what has been the far more common approach in English, which is to translate De as “virtue.” Despite Laozi explicitly distinguishing between Confucian and Daoist interpretations of De in poem 38, De in the Dao De Jing has been regularly translated as “virtue” because of the Confucian meaning of De: the power of the virtuous moral action, the clarity of character to have virtue and do good things and not do bad things. However, even a Confucianist such as Ezra Pound warned against boiling down De into “virtue.” In the Terminology accompanying his translation of the Confucian book The Great Digest, Pound explained the Chinese character for shen – meaning careful, cautious – as a depiction of “The eye […] looking straight into the heart.”[8] He then said that the character for de meant
What results, i.e., the action resultant from this straight gaze into the heart. The “know thyself” carried into action. Said action also serving to clarify the self knowledge. To translate this simply as “virtue” is on a par with translating rhinoceros, fox, and giraffe indifferently by “quadruped” or “animal.”[9]
Pound hit the nail on the head, in that he saw De not just as something active but as a form of self-definition and self-realization too. However, I can’t make an English version of Laozi’s Daoist poetry using Pound’s prose translation of the Confucian meaning of De: “the way wherein the intelligence increases through the process of looking straight into one’s own heart and acting on the results.”[10]
The irony is that “virtue” has, as a secondary meaning, the beneficial qualities that something possesses – the healing properties of penicillin are the virtue of the Penicillium mold, the blooming of a flower is the virtue of a seed. But while De is most certainly a beneficial quality possessed by Dao, the word “virtue” implies to contemporary Western ears an adherence to some ethical or moral code, which is not the Daoist way.
In one of the earliest English translations of Laozi, James Legge’s 1891 The Tâo Teh King, Legge noted of De, “to render it by ‘virtue’ […] only serves to hide the meaning.”[11] But to render it instead as the characteristics of the Dao or the attributes of the Dao, as Legge resorted to, is unwieldy and limiting. In making my English version, I therefore came to the same conclusion about De, which Legge came to regarding Dao: “[T]he best way of dealing with it in translating is to transfer it to the version, instead of trying to introduce an English equivalent for it.”[12]
At the end of section II, I said that De effects the differentiation of things and enables them to become themselves. Laozi writes in poem 51:
Dao produces them, De nurses them
Fosters them
Protects them
Matures them
Sustains them
Covers them.
Poem 54 tells us that when you practice Dao within yourself: Its De is real. […] That’s how you can be seen as yourself. This poem also describes the ripple effect of such practice upon your family, community, nation, and the world, so that all can be seen as themselves.
The Huainanzi, completed in 139 BCE – more than 200 years after the writing of the Dao De Jing – is considerably more influenced by the principles of Confucius than Laozi’s poetry is, and it tends to a more Confucian interpretation of De; hence its 2010 translators employing “Potency” and “Moral Potency” as English equivalents for de. Yet the Masters of Huainan also made plain the fundamental Daoist meaning of De. The beginning of Chapter 11 of the Huainanzi states:
Following nature and putting it into practice is called “the Way” [i.e., Dao]; attaining one’s Heaven(-born) nature is called “Potency” [i.e., De].[13]
The writings of the Zhuangzi, which predate the Huananzi – Zhuangzi himself is thought to have lived sometime in the late fourth and early third centuries BCE – are equally explicit about the meaning of De. In criticizing the Confucian ethics of benevolence, righteousness, ritual, and music, Chapter 9 asserts,
The people have a true nature, they weave their cloth, they farm to produce food. This is their basic Virtue. […] If the Tao and Te – Way and Virtue – had not been ignored, how could benevolence and righteousness have been preferred? If innate nature had not been left behind, how could rituals and music have been invented?[14]
The ancient Sages would seem to have come to their understanding of De as a result of following Dao. By embracing stillness and spontaneity and rejecting the illusions and projections and desires and aversions of their egos, they of course were brought to an understanding of their true selves, made clear not only to them but to the world as well, as they lived in it free of the interference of the conditioned mind and the blinders of fear and desire. The Sages must have also seen the opposite around themselves endlessly, just as we do today: People so lost in their delusions, so mechanical in their thoughts and feelings, so driven and closed in their behavior, that no one will ever know who they really are.
The Sages would also have observed that the natural world is always in accord with Dao, and so its self-realization and self-expression, its experience of De, is always perfect: The tree is truly a tree, the bird is truly a bird. Always unique too, with not even two snowflakes being alike. Human consciousness, however, interferes with our capacity to be natural and to follow Dao. That’s one reason why stillness is so important for self-realization: If you don’t quiet the mind’s chatter, then all you have to work with are your desires and aversions, your ego and its agendas, and the material ephemera on which they fixate. Which is what Laozi is saying in poem 1:
Constant and free of thought
Behold the wonder of its essence.
Constant and full of thought
Behold whatever it manifests.
And as we become increasingly over-educated and underdeveloped, more habitual in our self-interest and self-importance, more conditioned and automatic and rigid in our responsiveness, more closed and shut down, more dependent on the exercise of control – in short, as we turn increasingly away from Dao, our expression of De is stunted and deformed.
The great De reveals its face / Only when you follow Dao, poem 21 tells us. But those who attain De in its fullest measure, Laozi writes in poem 55, become like a baby in his cradle – the purest human example of the mind open and devoid of conditioning, and the comparison Laozi makes to himself in the first-person voice of poem 20.
IV. What else should I know?
1. Yin and Yang
In his 1848 book Eureka, Edgar Allan Poe discussed different forms of energy and came to this summation:
Discarding now the two equivocal terms, “gravitation” and “electricity,” let us adopt the more definite expressions, “attraction” and “repulsion.” The former is the body; the latter, the soul: the one is the material, the other the spiritual, principle of the Universe. No other principles exist. All phaenomena are referable to one, or to the other, or to both combined. So rigorously is this the case – so thoroughly demonstrable is it that attraction and repulsion are the sole properties through which we perceive the Universe – in other words, by which Matter is manifested to Mind – that, for all merely argumentative purposes, we are fully justified in assuming that matter exists only as attraction and repulsion – that attraction and repulsion are matter.[15]
More than a thousand years before Poe wrote Eureka, a Chinese book of Daoist wisdom known as the Hua Hu Jing made the same essential point: “The alternation of Yin and Yang is the inevitable truth of the universe.”[16]
Yin and Yang represent, respectively and respectfully, the female principle and the male principle; darkness and light; cold and heat; water and fire; negative and positive; body and soul; death and life; Earth and Heaven; material and spiritual; gravitation and electricity; attraction and repulsion. The terms Yin and Yang derive from the Chinese words for the shady and sunny sides of a mountain, and the implication is plain: Can’t have one without the other. This commonality with which Yin and Yang arise implies a single source, another principle beyond attraction and repulsion, Yin and Yang – the unity of Dao. And it is Dao that keeps Yin and Yang in the ongoing active balance that is the basis of the Creation.
In the traditional circular representation of Yin and Yang, there is a white drop in the black field and a black drop in the white field – Yin contains something of Yang, and Yang contains something of Yin. Thus they are capable of changing into each other and of advancing upon or yielding to each other.[17] In Daoism, this insight into the nature of Yin and Yang is extended to the Creation: Just as everything contains some degree of nothing – space exists in the densest of materials, epic distances of space on a molecular level – so too nothing must contain some degree of something. Hence the paradoxes of Dao, formless and void yet producing form and substance, described by Laozi in poem 21.
2. The Three Treasures: Jing, Qi, Shen
In poem 42 Laozi begins by outlining what is essentially a cosmology:
From Dao there is the One.
From the One there are the Two.
From the Two there are the Three.
From the Three there are the ten thousand things.
The One can be seen as unity, which exists in Dao, and that unity gives rise to the twin energies of Yin and Yang. From their interplay come the three life forces of Jing, Qi, and Shen, commonly known as the Three Treasures, and their interaction results in the plethora of material existences, the ten thousand things. By the same token, it is the depletion and dispersal of the Three Treasures that results in illness, death, and non-existence.
A simple explanation is to regard Jing as vitality, Qi as energy, and Shen as spirit. These three life forces are seen as existing in both higher, immaterial forms as well as on a physical level. Physically, Jing is the sexual fluids of semen and menses; Qi is the breath; and Shen is the mind. “Through purity the Jing is treasured; through tranquility the Qi is circulated; through emptiness the Shen is awakened,” observes Daoist author and translator Stuart Alve Olson.[18] We are also capable of damaging the Three Treasures: Jing is harmed through sexual excess and excessive eating and drinking; Qi is harmed by emotional excess and excessive talking; and Shen is harmed by a mind that refuses to quiet itself. But those life forces can be refined and transformed through a process of inner alchemy, repairing dissipations and extending life (see section IV.6). These physical processes are an essential subtext for Laozi; when the scholar Thomas Cleary published his translation of the 3rd century BCE silk-roll texts of the Dao De Jing (see section I), he included it in an anthology titled Sex, Health, and Long Life: Manuals of Taoist Practice.[19]
Laozi makes only two direct references to Jing in the 81 poems, and they parallel its physical and immaterial natures. Poem 55 exalts infancy and proclaims of the young male’s capacity for full erection – Jing in its perfection! Poem 21 tells us that Dao – elusive, indistinct, profound, mysterious – contains not just form and substance but Jing as well, not just materiality but a living essence, a fecund vitality that is endlessly passed through the Creation.
Qi is referenced three times in the Dao De Jing. When poem 10 advises, regulate Qi to engender softness, Laozi is recommending control of one’s breath in meditation as well as the inner circulation and transformation of Qi. The physical and spiritual benefits of these efforts are underscored in poem 55: To direct Qi with the mind is to be powerful. This is the uniting with Qi urged in poem 42.
Shen is also mentioned only three times in its meaning as a universal principle, the aspects of transcendent spirit inherent not just in people but in nature as well.[20] Yet unlike his treatment of Jing and Qi, Laozi makes no direct reference to Shen on a personal level at all, speaking of it instead solely as a natural phenomenon – the world is the vessel of Shen in poem 29, and poems 6 and 55 both connect the presence of Shen to valleys, in an acknowledgment of the female principle (see section IV.5). The personal aspect of Shen is referenced only metaphorically: Harmonize with light, he tells us in poem 56.
3. Non-action
The Dao De Jing contains repeated admonitions not to act but to use non-action instead – wei wu wei, literally “do not doing” or act without action, as Laozi tells us explicitly at the end of poem 3 and the start of poem 63. That’s how things get done properly: Dao always uses non-action / Yet nothing is left undone (poem 37). By the same token, the Sage relies on non-action to run affairs (poem 2); Sages do not presume to act (poem 64). One way you can spot people who have De is that they do not act and pursue no agenda (poem 38). This is why Laozi asks the reader, Can you act without action? (poem 10).
A clear distinction exists between non-action and inaction. Their nature is void, yet the processes of Dao and De are obviously understood as being active throughout the Creation. Furthermore, poem 33 acknowledges that to act with power takes resolve, while poem 77 points out that the Sage acts and seeks no recognition, indicating the kind of action prized by Laozi: egoless action, action rooted in a principle of non-interference, action without agenda – the appropriate spontaneous response to whatever situation is not just presenting itself but pressing itself on you. For the Sages, this very lack of self-interest, Laozi tells us in poem 7, enables their self-realization.
Gertrude Stein grasped the significance of non-action for both the intensification of personality and accessing the transcendental. In her 1937 book Everybody’s Autobiography she discussed her opera libretto Four Saints in Three Acts and observed, “A saint a real saint never does anything, a martyr does something but a really good saint does nothing, and so I wanted to have Four Saints who did nothing and I wrote the Four Saints In Three Acts and they did nothing and that was everything. Generally speaking anybody is more interesting doing nothing than doing something.”[21]
4. The uncarved block
The Chinese word pu literally means simple, pure, natural, genuine, honest, plain, original, unspoiled. Metaphorically, it references uncut jade or an uncarved block of wood, and it is the latter image I have relied upon in this version of the Dao De Jing. Laozi mentions pu repeatedly, always as a paradigm of the simplicity and naturalness that are needed to follow Dao – and which following Dao enhances, it being subtle as the uncarved block (poem 32). Thus the Sages have such simplicity, like uncarved wood (poem 15); they are free of thought, and people naturally are the uncarved block (poem 57). This is why Laozi advises us to be more like uncarved wood (poem 19), knowing that it will free you from your thoughts (poem 37). And as your self is refined and defined through De, you are brought back again to the uncarved block (poem 28).
With pu Laozi has an image of pure potentiality, unspoiled by the intentions and interferences of others – very much like the state of infancy, which he always praises. His reverence for this purity is summed up in the paradox that ends poem 28: The best carving does not cut up things.
5. Womanhood
In light of the sexist and patriarchal sensibilities of ancient China, it is all the more remarkable that the Dao De Jing, a classic for over two thousand years, consistently exalts women and the female principle. Laozi even takes a provocative tone, admonishing people to be more like women and less like men. Can you attain womanhood? he dares ask in poem 10. This can be read, like the hidden womanhood of poem 6, as a reference to the mystical technique whereby a follower of Dao, regardless of gender, creates within their own body an immortal fetus (see section IV.6). Nevertheless, his language in poem 10 is deliberately startling, just as it is in poem 28: Know manhood but keep to womanhood. With this balance, he goes on to assert, you are on the path to everlasting De. This same balance is also praised in poem 42:
Backed by Yin
Embracing Yang
Uniting with Qi
All attain harmony.
The social role thrust upon women in China – their lives of deference and service, of unconditional support, of love and selflessness – embodied qualities that Laozi praises throughout the Dao De Jing, and so his elevation of the female principle has psychological and social meaning as well as mystical implications. All these layers come together in Laozi’s sense of womanhood’s spirituality residing in closeness to Dao. Poem 61 specifically locates the source of the power of womanhood in stillness, which is the gateway to Dao – and here too, his choice of words is a provocation:
Womanhood always, through stillness
Overcomes manhood.
To be still is to make yourself lower.
When Laozi compares Dao to water in poem 8, he observes that water always seeks the lowest point, which he calls the point that everyone hates. He knows he lives in a world where people are always presuming to stand at the head of the line, even though this is death (poem 67). So in poem 28, which he begins by urging Know manhood but keep to womanhood, he also advises:
Know glory but keep to the shamed.
In this way you become a ravine to the world.
When you are a ravine to the world
You have everlasting De that will suffice
Bringing you back again to the uncarved block.
Multiple Daoist themes are woven into these powerful lines: To be shamed is to be made lower and thus more still and closer to Dao; also cited are the ravine and the female principle, the power of De, and the simplicity of the uncarved block (see section IV.4).
Laozi’s reverence for the female principle celebrates its maternal face as well, telling us Dao is mother to Heaven and Earth (poem 25), mother to the world (poem 52), the state’s mother (poem 59), the mother whose milk nourishes the Sage (poem 20). He also acknowledges the power of geography that manifests the female principle, connecting the presence of Shen to valleys in poems 6 and 55; praising ravines in poems 15, 28, and 41; and connecting deltas with womanhood in poem 61. Indeed, the Earth itself – understood as the feminine Yin counterpart to masculine Yang Heaven – is seen by Laozi as the vessel of Shen in poem 29.
6. Immortality
In his biography of Laozi, referenced in section I, Sima Qian wrote: “Laozi probably lived for more than 160 years – some say more than 200 – because he cultivated the Way [i.e., Dao] and nourished his life.”[22] Laozi’s legendary longevity is reflected in his repeated assurances that following Dao sustains and revitalizes you. In poem 28 he declares that, in attaining everlasting De, you are brought back again to the bloom of youth; in poem 50, that those who excel at sustaining life […] have no place in them for death. Poem 59 acknowledges the longevity and ongoing awareness of Dao and insists that attaining Dao means you can endure a long time.
These three lines appear at the end of two poems, 30 and 55:
Coming on strong and then aging away.
We call this not Dao.
What’s not Dao soon comes to an end.
In other words, what typically happens with people is not a natural process at all, it’s because they don’t follow Dao and instead squander the Three Treasures of Jing, Qi, and Shen (see section IV.2).
That an undepleted, selfless, and serene life would incline one to longevity seems too obvious to elaborate on. But the Sages were approaching a greater endurance, using the stillness of Dao to enhance the life-sustaining power of the Three Treasures. The inner alchemical process for refining Jing and circulating Qi opens the door to creating within the body a living spirit embryo, quickened by Shen into a fetus of immortality. This technique is available to all adepts, regardless of their gender – one more reason Laozi reverences the female principle throughout the Dao De Jing (see section IV.5).
The life spans of Daoist Sages became the stuff of legend, and the term “immortal” came to signify a person who had attained Dao. Because they loved and honored their bodies, as Laozi indicates in poem 13, the Sages did not confuse themselves with their bodies and so were not limited by their bodies. Ordinary people die when their bodies quit on them; immortals quit their bodies, eventually merging into a purer union with Dao while continuing to serve as a pattern and guide for others – or as poem 33 tells us, To die and still not end is to live the longest life.
7. The return
In section II, I quoted poem 16: All go back to their source. Laozi then goes on to say,
Going back to the source
Is the meaning of stillness.
We call this the destined return.
The destined return is constant.
Stillness turns the mind toward Dao, which is the source; and in that unity, all contradictions, including life and death, are resolved. Thus Dao’s movement is to return, as poem 40 insists: Coming back is how Dao goes. And that’s the direction it leads those who follow it, you go back again to clarity (poem 52). When you have everlasting De, you are brought back again to the bloom of youth, to being endless, to the uncarved block (poem 28). Hence not just the rejuvenating aspects of following Dao, but Laozi’s metaphor of becoming as empty and pure in mind as an infant, an image explicitly connected with attaining De in poem 55. De is also leading their way to the great return (poem 65), and this predestined reuniting with the source is essential: Returning, they become perfect (poem 22).
8. Unity
If asked to ascribe a common denominator to all genuine spiritual or mystical or religious experiences, I would suggest that it is the onset of recognition that everything is not just of equal importance, not just interconnected but the same, that reality is one thing. One precious perfect thing. References to unity occur throughout the Dao De Jing; the Sages, being based in an understanding of Yin-Yang balance (see section IV.1), were able to recognize the unity that counterbalances the astounding multiplicity of material reality. Unity is, if you like, the face of Dao, revealing character and self-definition – which is to say unity does what Dao does, it releases De. The perspective of unity frees you to behave in a genuinely humane and compassionate way because it does not involve you in morality or ethics or other forms of intellectual or spiritual coercion – a distinction Laozi is keen to make in poems 18, 19, and 38. The reason you don’t go around stabbing people isn’t because God commands you not to do it or the State commands you or Father commands you; it’s not because stabbing people flouts the Confucian concept of humaneness or the Buddhist belief in Right Action. It’s because, when you do stab someone, you’re doing it to yourself, not to someone else at all. To yourself.
The apprehension of unity also makes it harder for any single thing or person or situation or thought or feeling – for anything to become a fixation of attachment or aversion. Viewed within a framework of unity, you see more easily any individual thing for itself, what it actually is, because you’re no longer forcing it to serve as a prop in your monodrama. By embracing unity, you arrive at individuality in both the reality of things outside yourself – which is to say everything – and in the realization of your own character. The De of both is exalted.
FOOTNOTES – INTRODUCTION
1. “Prolegomena” in Confucian Analects, The Great Learning and The Doctrine of the Mean. James Legge, translation and notes. New York: Dover, 1971, pp. 63–65.
2. “Translator’s Introduction” in The Texts of Taoism. James Legge, translation and notes. New York: Julian Press, 1959, p. 48.
3. Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. Robert G. Henricks, translation and notes. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, p. 133.
4. “Translator’s Introduction,” p. 61.
5. “Translator’s Introduction,” p. 61.
6. Theodore Dreiser, Hey Rub-A-Dub-Dub. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920, p. 166.
7. Dreiser, pp. 255, 160 (emphasis Dreiser’s).
8. Ezra Pound, Poems and Translations. New York: Library of America, 2003, p. 616.
9. Pound, p. 616.
10. Pound, p. 618. Note Pound’s language: “the way wherein,” “the process of.” His own Terminology defines dao as “the process,” and of course one of the literal meanings of dao is “way” – even in a translation of its Confucian meaning, De is still being defined in terms of Dao.
11. The Tâo Teh King in The Texts of Taoism, p. 112.
12. “Translator’s Introduction,” p. 61.
13. The Huainanzi, John S. Major, Sarah A. Queen, Andrew Seth Meyer, and Harold Roth, translation and editors. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010, p. 397.
14. The Book of Chuang Tzu, Martin Palmer, translation (with Elizabeth Breuilly, Chang Wai Ming, and Jim Ramsay). London: Penguin, 2006, p. 73.
15. Edgar Allan Poe, Poetry and Tales. New York: Library of America, 1984, pp. 1282–1283 (emphases Poe’s).
16. The Complete Works of Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching & Hua Hu Ching. Hua-Ching Ni, translation and elucidation. Santa Monica: Seven Star Communications, 1979, p. 201.
17. This interplay of Yin and Yang is the basis of the ancient Chinese book The Classic of Changes, the Yi Jing or I Ching.
18. Stuart Alve Olson, The Jade Emperor’s Mind Seal Classic. Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2003, p. 132.
19. Sex, Health, and Long Life: Manuals of Taoist Practice. Thomas Cleary, translator. Boston: Shambhala, 1994.
20. The character for Shen also appears in poem 60, but not in its traditional meaning of the spirit; instead, it is used to denote the power possessed by a ghost.
21. Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography. New York: Cooper Square, 1971, p. 109.
22. Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, p. 134.
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 