by Laozi
Brave caution leads to life.
The choice can be the right one
or the wrong one.
Who will interpret
the judgment of heaven?
Even the wise soul
finds it hard.
The way of heaven
doesn’t compete
yet wins handily,
doesn’t speak
yet answers fully,
doesn’t summon
yet attracts.
It acts
perfectly easily.
The net of heaven
is vast, vast,
wide-meshed,
yet misses nothing.
74 – The Lord of Slaughter
When normal, decent people don’t fear death,
how can you use death to frighten them?
Even when they have a normal fear of death,
who of us dare take and kill the one who doesn’t?
When people are normal and decent and death-fearing,
there’s always an executioner.
To take the place of that executioner
is to take the place of the great carpenter.
People who cut the great carpenter’s wood
seldom get off with their hands unhurt.
* * *
To Lao Tzu, not to fear dying and not to fear killing are equally unnatural and antisocial. Who are we to forestall the judgment of heaven or nature, to usurp the role of “the executioner”? “The Lord of Slaughter” is Waley’s grand translation.
75 – Greed
People are starving.
The rich gobble taxes,
that’s why people are starving.
People rebel.
The rich oppress them,
that’s why people rebel.
People hold life cheap.
The rich make it too costly,
that’s why people hold it cheap.
But those who don’t live for the sake of living
are worth more than the wealth-seekers.
* * *
How many hundreds of years ago was this book written? And yet still this chapter must be written in the present tense.
76 – Hardness
Living people
are soft and tender.
Corpses are hard and stiff.
The ten thousand things,
the living grass, the trees,
are soft, pliant.
Dead, they’re dry and brittle.
So hardness and stiffness
go with death;
tenderness, softness,
go with life.
And the hard sword fails,
the stiff tree’s felled.
The hard and great go under.
The soft and weak stay up.
* * *
In an age when hardness is supposed to be the essence of strength, and even the beauty of women is reduced nearly to the bone, l welcome this reminder that tanks and tombstones are not very adequate role models, and that to be alive is to be vulnerable.
77 – The bow
The Way of heaven
is like a bow bent to shoot:
its top end brought down,
its lower end raised up.
It brings the high down,
lifts the low,
takes from those who have,
gives to those who have not.
Such is the Way of heaven,
taking from people who have,
giving to people who have not.
Not so the human way:
it takes from those who have not
to fill up those who have.
Who has enough to fill up everybody?
Only those who have the Way.
So the wise
do without claiming,
achieve without asserting,
wishing not to show their worth.
78 – Paradoxes
Nothing in the world
is as soft, as weak, as water;
nothing else can wear away
the hard, the strong,
and remain unaltered.
Soft overcomes hard,
weak overcomes strong.
Everybody knows it,
nobody uses the knowledge.
So the wise say:
By bearing common defilements
you become a sacrificer at the altar of earth;
by bearing common evils
you become a lord of the world.
Right words sound wrong.
79 – Keeping the contract
After a great enmity is settled
some enmity always remains.
How to make peace?
Wise souls keep their part of the contract
and don’t make demands on others.
People whose power is real fulfill their obligations;
people whose power is hollow insist on their claims.
The Way of heaven plays no favorites.
It stays with the good.
* * *
This chapter is equally relevant to private relationships and to political treaties. Its realistic morality is based on a mystical perception of the fullness of the Way.
80 – Freedom
Let there be a little country without many people.
Let them have tools that do the work of ten or a hundred,
and never use them.
Let them be mindful of death
and disinclined to long journeys.
They’d have ships and carriages,
but no place to go.
They’d have armor and weapons,
but no parades.
Instead of writing,
they might go back to using knotted cords.
They’d enjoy eating,
take pleasure in clothes,
be happy with their houses,
devoted to their customs.
The next little country might be so close
the people could hear cocks crowing
and dogs barking there,
but they’d get old and die
without ever having been there.
* * *
Waley says this endearing and enduring vision "can be understood in the past, present, or future tense, as the reader desires." This is always true of the vision of the golden age, the humane society.
Christian or Cartesian dualism, the division of spirit or mind from the material body and world, existed long before Christianity or Descartes and was never limited to Western thought (though it is the "craziness" or "sickness" that many people under Western domination see in Western civilization) . Lao Tzu thinks the materialistic dualist, who tries to ignore the body and live in the head, and the religious dualist, who despises the body and lives for a reward in heaven, are both dangerous and in danger. So, enjoy your life, he says; live in your body, you are your body; where else is there to go? Heaven and earth are one. As you walk the streets of your town you walk on the Way of heaven.
81 – Telling it true
True words aren’t charming,
charming words aren’t true.
Good people aren’t contentious,
contentious people aren’t good.
People who know aren’t learned,
learned people don’t know.
Wise souls don’t hoard;
the more they do for others the more they have,
the more they give the richer they are.
The Way of heaven profits without destroying.
Doing without outdoing
is the Way of the wise.
Notes
Concerning This Version
This is a rendition, not a translation. I do not know any Chinese. I could approach the text at all only because Paul Carus, in his 1898 translation of the Tao Te Ching, printed the Chinese text with each character followed by a transliteration and a translation. My gratitude to him is unending.
To have the text thus made accessible was not only to have a Rosetta Stone for the book itself, but also to have a touchston
e for comparing other English translations one with another. If I could focus on which word the translators were interpreting, I could begin to understand why they made the choice they did. I could compare various interpretations and see why they varied so tremendously; could see how much explanation, sometimes how much bias, was included in the translation; could discover for myself that several English meanings might lead me back to the same Chinese word. And, finally, for all my ignorance of the language, I could gain an intuition of the style, the gait and cadence, of the original, necessary to my ear and conscience if I was to try to reproduce it in English.
Without the access to the text that the Carus edition gave me, I would have been defeated by the differences among the translations, and could never have thought of following them as guides towards a version of my own. As it was, working from Carus’s text, I learned how to let them lead me into it, always using their knowledge, their scholarship, their decisions, as my light in darkness.
When you try to follow the Way, even if you wander off it all the time, good things happen though you do not deserve them. My work on the Tao Te Ching was very wandering indeed. I started in my twenties with a few chapters. Every decade or so I’d do another bit, and tell myself I’d sit down and really get to it, some day. The undeserved good thing that happened was that a true and genuine scholar of ancient Chinese and of lao Tzu, Dr. J. P. Seaton of the University of North Carolina, saw some of my versions of bits of the Tao Te Ching (scurvily quoted without attribution by myself) . He reprinted them with honor, and asked me for more. I do not think he knew what he was getting into. Of his invaluable teaching, his encouragement, his generosity, I can say only what Lao Tzu says at the end of the book:
Wise souls don’t hoard;
The more they do for others the more they have,
The more they give the richer they are.
Sources
Though the Tao Te Ching has been translated into English very much more often than any other Chinese classic, indeed almost overwhelmingly often, it wasn’t easy to get hold of more than a few of these versions until quite recently.
Carus’s word-for-word Chinese-to-English was endlessly valuable to me, but his actual translation wasn’t very satisfactory. "Reason" as a translation of Tao did not ring true. I always looked at any translation of the book I found and had a go at it. The language of some was so obscure as to make me feel the book must be beyond Western comprehension. (James Legge’s version was one of these, though I did find the title for a book of mine, The Lathe of Heaven, in Legge. Years later, Joseph Needham, the great scholar of Chinese science and technology, wrote to tell me in the kindest, most unreproachful fashion that Legge was a bit off on that one; when Chuang Tzu was written the lathe hadn’t been invented.)
Listed roughly in the order of their usefulness to me, these are the translations that I collected over the years and came to trust in one way or another and to use as my exemplars and guides:
Paul Carus. Lao-Tze’s Tao-The-King. Open Court Publishing Company, 1898. The book has recently been republished, but the editors chose to omit its unique and most valuable element, the character-by-character romanization and translation.
Arthur Waley. The Way and Its Power: A Study of the Tao Tê Ching and Its Place in Chinese Thought. First published in 1958; I have the Grove edition of 1968. Though Waley’s translation is political where mine is poetical, his broad and profound knowledge of Chinese thought and his acutely sensitive tact as a translator were what I always turned to when in doubt, always finding secure guidance and illumination.
Robert G. Henricks. Te-Tao Ching: Lao-Tzu, translated from the Ma-wang-tui texts. Modem Library, 1993. It was exciting to find that new texts had been discovered; it was exciting to find their first English translation an outstanding work of scholarship, written in plain, elegant language, as transparent to the original as it could be.
Gia,Fu Feng and Jane English. Tao Te Ching. First published 1972; I have the Vintage edition of 1989. Arising from a sympathetic and informed understanding, this is literarily the most satisfying recent translation I have found, terse, clear, and simple.
D. C. Lau. Lao Tzu Tao Te Ching. First published 1963; I have the Penguin edition of 1971. A clear, deeply thoughtful translation, a most valuable reference.
Lau has also translated the Ma wang tui text for Everyman’s Library (Knopf, 1994).
Michael Lafargue. The Tao of the Tao Te Ching. State University of New York Press, 1992.
Tam C. Gibbs and Man-jan Cheng. Lao-Tzu: "My words are very easy to understand." North Atlantic Books, 1981.
These books, though somewhat quirky, each proved useful in casting a different light on knotty bits and obscure places in the text and suggesting alternative readings or word choices.
Witter Bynner. The Way of Life According to Lao Tzu. Capricorn Books, 1944. In the dedication to his friend Kiang Kang-hu, Bynner quotes him: "It is impossible to translate it without an interpretation. Most of the translations were based on the interpretations of commentators, but you chiefly took its interpretation from your own insight . . . so the translation could be very close to the original text even without knowledge of the words." This is true of Bynner’s very free, poetic "American Version," and its truth helped give me the courage to work on my own American Version fifty years later. I did not refer often to Bynner while I worked, because his style is very different from mine and his vivid language might have controlled my own rather than freeing it. But I am most grateful to him.
I started out using translations by Stephen Mitchell and Chang Chung-yuan, but found them not useful. Since I began working seriously on this version so many Tao Te Chings have appeared or reappeared that one begins to wonder if Lao Tzu has more translators than he has readers. I have looked hopefully into many, but none of the new versions seems to improve in any way on Waley, Henricks, Lau, or Feng-English, and many of them blur the language into dullness and vagueness. Lao Tzu is tough-minded. He is tender-minded. He is never, under any circumstances, squashy-minded. By confusing mysticism with imprecision, such versions betray the spirit of the book and its marvelously pungent, laconic, beautiful language.*
*If you want to know more about Taoism, or would like some help and guidance in reading the Tao Te Ching, the best, soundest, clearest introduction and guide is still Holmes Welch's Taoism: The Parting of the Way (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957).
Notes on Some Choices of Wording
For tao, I mostly use "Way," sometimes "way," depending on context. "Way" in my text always represents the character tao.
I consistently render the character te as "power." "Virtue" (virtus, vertú) in its old sense of the inherent quality and strength of a thing or person is far closer to the mark, but that sense is pretty well lost. Applied obsessively to the virginity or monogamy of women, the word lost its own virtue. When used of persons it now almost always has a smirk or a sneer in it. This is a shame. Lao Tzu’s "Power is goodness" makes precisely the identification we used to make in the word "virtue." "Power," on the other hand, is a powerful word, almost a mana-word for us. It is also a very slippery one, with many connotations. To identify it with goodness takes a special, Taoistic definition of it as a property of—the virtue of—the Way.
The phrase t’ien hsia, literally "under heaven," occurs many times throughout the text. More often than not I render it as "the world." It is often translatable as "the Empire"—which after all meant the world, to Lao Tzu’s contemporaries. I avoid this, in order to avoid historical specificity; but often t’ien hsia indubitably means one’s country, one’s land, as in chapter 26. Elsewhere I call it the public good, the commonwealth, or the common good, and sometimes I render it literally.
The phrase wan wuh, occurring very frequently, means the material world, all beings, everything. I often use the traditional literal translation, "the ten thousand things," because it’s lively and concrete, but at times I say "everything" or "the things of this world."
I use "wise so
ul" or "the wise" for the several words and phrases usually rendered as Sage, Wise Man, Saint, Great Man, and so on, and I avoid the pronoun usually associated with these terms. I wanted to make a version that doesn’t limit wisdom to males, and doesn’t give the impression that a follower of the Tao has to be a professional, full-time Holier-than-Thou who lives up above snowline. Unimportant, uneducated, untrained men and women can be wise souls. (I thought of using mensch.)
With the same intention, I often use the plural pronoun where other translations use the singular, to avoid unnecessary gendering and to keep from suggesting the idea of uniqueness, singularity. I appreciate the Chinese language for making such choices available.
Certain obscure passages and verses that change or obstruct the sense of the poems may be seen as errors or interpolations by copyists. I decided to eject some of them. My authority for doing so is nil—a poet’s judgment that "this doesn’t belong here." It takes nerve to drop a line that Waley has left in. My version is openly dependent on the judgment of the scholars. But my aim was to make aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sense, and I felt that efforts to treat material extraneous to the text as integral to it weaken its integrity. Anyhow, rejects are discussed and printed in the commentary on the page with the poem, or in the Notes.
The Titles of the Poems: Carus is one of the few translators to use titles; they are in both his Chinese text and his translation. I follow his version sometimes, and sometimes invent my own.
The Two Texts of the Tao Te Ching
We now have two versions of the Tao Te Ching: the texts that have been standard since the third century CE, and the Ma wang tui texts of the mid-first century CE, not discovered till 1973 . They differ in many details, but in only one major respect: the order of the two books that constitute the text.