Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching

by Laozi

  The three words tao te ching, put into English without syntactical connection, are "way power classic." The usual interpretation gives the meaning of this title as something on the order of "the classic [text] about the way and [its] power." The two books are titled (in some versions) Tao, "The Way," and Te, "The Power." (I personally find that the poems do not consistently reflect that division of subject-matter.) In the Ma wang tui, the Power comes before the Way. I keep the standard order, in which tao precedes te, and the famous stanza about the go-able way and the namable name is the first chapter, not the thirty-eighth. Where there are differences in wording, I follow sometimes the standard text, sometimes Robert G. Henricks’s translation of the Ma wang tui, whichever seemed more useful.

  Notes on the Chapters

  Chapter 1

  Here, for the words in the third verse that I render "what it wants," I use the Ma wang tui text. The words in the standard text mean boundaries, or limits, or outcomes. This version seems to follow more comprehensibly from the preceding lines.

  And yet the idea of what can be delimited or made manifest is relevant. In the last verse, the two "whose identity is mystery" may be understood to be the hidden, the unnameable, the limitless vision of the freed soul—and the manifest, the nameable, the field of vision limited by our wants. But the endlessness of all that is, and the limitation of mortal bodily life, are the same, and their sameness is the key to the door.

  Chapter 5

  As I said above, in a few of the poems I leave out lines which I find weaken the coherence of the text to the point that I believe them to be a long-ago reader's marginal notes which got incorporated in later copyings. My authority for these omissions is strictly personal and aesthetic. Here I omit the last two lines. Translations of them vary greatly; my version is:

  Mere talk runs dry.

  Best keep to the center.

  Chapter 12

  There are times Lao Tzu sounds very like Henry David Thoreau, but Lao Tzu was kinder. When Thoreau says to distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes, I distrust him. He is macho, flaunting his asceticism. Lao Tzu knows that getting all entangled with the external keeps us from the eternal, but (see chapter 80) he also understands that sometimes people like to get dressed up.

  Chapter 13

  T'ien hsia, "under heaven," i.e. the Empire, or the world: here I render it as "the public good," "the commonwealth," and "the body politic."

  J. P. Seaton comments: "When Lao Tzu mentions 'the Empire' or 'all under heaven,' he does so with the assumption that all his readers know that it is a commonwealth where only the ruler who rules by virtue of virtue alone is legitimate."

  Chapters 17, 18, and 19

  Henricks considers these three chapters to belong together.

  The last two lines of 19 are usually printed as the first two lines of 20, but Henricks thinks they belong here, and I follow him.

  In 18, line 6, the words hsiao tzu are traditionally translated as "filial piety and paternal affection," a Confucian ideal. In that chapter Lao Tzu cites these dutiful families as a symptom of social disorder. But in chapter 19, line 4, hsiao tzu appears as the good that will result when people cease being moralistic. Unable to reconcile these contradictory usages, and feeling that Lao Tzu was far more likely to use Confucian language satirically than straightforwardly, I fudged the translation in chapter 19, calling it "family feeling." Evidently we aren't the only society or generation to puzzle over what a family is and ought to be.

  Sometimes I translate the characters su and p'u with such words as simple, natural. Though the phrase "the uncarved block" has become familiar to many, yet metaphor may distance ideas and weaken a direct statement. But sometimes, as here, I use the traditional metaphors, because the context so clearly implies knowing something as an artist knows her materials, keeping hold on something solid.

  Chapter 20

  The standard texts ask what's the difference between wei and o, which might be translated "yes" and "yessir." The Ma wang tui has wei and ho: "yes" and "no." This is parallel with the next line ("good and bad" in the standard text, "beautiful and ugly" in the Ma wang tui) . Here's a case where the older text surely is correct, the later ones corrupt.

  In the first two lines of the second verse, the Ma wang tui text is perfectly clear: "A person whom everyone fears ought to be feared." The standard text is strange, obscure: "What the people fear must be feared." Yet the next lines follow from it as they don't from the Ma wang tui; and after much pondering I followed the standard text.

  Chapter 23

  In the second verse the word shih, "loss," gives trouble to all the translators. Waley calls it "the reverse of the power" and "inefficacy," and Waley's interpretations are never to be ignored. All the same, I decided to take it not as the opposite of the Way and the power, but as a kind of shadow-Way. Identify yourself with loss, failure, the obscure, the unpossessible, and you'll be at home even there.

  Chapter 24

  My version of the first four lines of the second verse doesn't follow any of the scholarly translations, and is quite unjustified, but at least, unlike them, it makes sense without horrible verbal contortions.

  Chapter 25

  In all the texts, the fourth verse reads:

  So they say: "The Way is great,

  heaven is great,

  earth is great,

  and the king is great.

  Four greatnesses in the world,

  and the king is one of them. "

  Yet in the next verse, which is the same series in reverse order, instead of "the king" it's "the people" or "humanity." I think a Confucian copyist slipped the king in. The king garbles the sense of the poem and goes against the spirit of the book. I dethroned him.

  The last words of the chapter, tzu jan, which I render "what is," bear many interpretations. Waley translates them as "the Self-So," glossing them as "the unconditioned" or "what is so of itself"; Henricks, "what is so on its own"; Lau, "that which is naturally so"; Gibbs-Cheng, "Nature"; Feng-English, "what is natural"; Lafargue, "things as they are." I came out closest to Lafargue in this case.

  Chapter 26

  I follow the Ma wang tui text for the third verse, which fits the theme much better than the non-sequitur standard text, "Amid fine sights they sit calm and aloof." The syntax of the Ma wang tui also clarifies the last verse, relating it to the last verse of chapter 13.

  Chapter 27

  The first two lines of the third verse say that the not-good are the t'zu: "the capital" (Carus), or "the charge" (Feng-English), or "the stock in trade" (Waley), or "the raw material" ( Henricks) of the good. Lafargue has "the less excellent are material for the excellent," and Gibbs-Cheng, "mediocre people have the potential to be good people." The latter two interpretations seemed the most useful to me. And so I call these makings, this raw material, "a student"—somebody learning to be or know better.

  The last lines of the second and third verses are translated in wildly various ways; my "hidden light" and "deep mystery" are justified if, as I believe, Lao Tzu is signaling that his apparently simple statements have complex implications and need thinking about. Of course, this is true of everything in the book.

  Chapter 28

  "The natural" and "natural wood" are the same word, p'u, which I talked about in the note to chapter 19. Given the amount of cutting up and carving that goes on in the last verse (which seems a kind of footnote to the first three), we really seem to be talking about wood.

  Chinese lends itself to puns, and this last verse is rife with them. Waley says that ch'i ("useful things") can mean "vessels" or "vassals," and chih can mean "carving" or "governing." A great government wouldn't chop and hack at human nature, trying to make leaders out of sow's ears. But the paradox of the last two lines surely exceeds any single interpretation.

  Chapter 29

  The phrase t'ien hsia occurs only in the first verse, where I translate it "the world." I begin the second verse with the literal translation of it,
"under heaven." I wanted the phrase in the poem as a reminder that the world of these extremes—of hot and cold, weakness and strength, gain and loss—is the sacred object, the place under heaven.

  Chapter 31

  I have omitted certain lines included by the translators who are my sources and guides. In all the texts, the second verse begins:

  A courteous person

  in peacetime honors the left,

  in wartime, the right.

  And the last verse begins:

  In celebrations the left is the place of honor,

  in mourning the right is the place of honor:

  so lesser officers stand on the left,

  the generalissimo on the right,

  just as they would at a funeral.

  I consider these passages to be commentaries or marginal glosses that got copied into the text. J. P. Seaton says, "What were once supports by analogy to common ceremonial practice are now relevant only to the historian." Here they confuse the clear, powerful statement that culminates in the last four lines. The confusion already existed when the Ma wang tui version was written, and there seems to be no way of sorting it out now except by radical surgery.

  Chapter 33

  This chapter sounds like Polonius, incontrovertible but banal, until the last verse, which is a doozer. Here are some other versions of the last six words, Sss erh pu wang che shou:

  Carus (word for word): "[Who] dies / yet / not / perishes, / the-one / is-long-lived [immortal]."

  Carns's free translation: "One who may die but does not perish has life everlasting."

  Waley: "When one dies one is not lost; there is no other longevity."

  Feng-English: "To die but not to perish is to be eternally present."

  Henricks: "To die but not be forgotten-that's [true] long life."

  Bynner: "Vitality cleaves to the marrow / Leaving death behind."

  Lafargue: "One who dies and does not perish is truly long-lived."

  Gibbs-Cheng: "One who dies yet still remains has longevity."

  Lau: "He who lives out his days has had a long life."

  Under J. P. Seaton's guidance I finally came to feel that I had a handle on the line, and that Lau's rendition was the most useful. One thing is certain, Lao Tzu is not saying that immortality or even longevity is desirable. The religion called Taoism has spent much imagination on ways to prolong life interminably or gain immortality, and the mythologized Lao Tzu was supposed to have run Methuselah a close race; but the Lao Tzu who wrote this had no truck with such notions.

  Chapter 36

  Wei ming—this phrase in the first line of the second verse (and the chapter title)—is tricky:

  Carus (word for word): "the secret's / explanation"

  Carus's free translation: "explanation [i.e., enlightenment] of the secret"

  Feng-English: "perception of the nature of things"

  Gibbs-Cheng: "wonderfully minute and obscure, yet brilliant"

  Lafargue: "subtle clarity"

  Henricks: "subtle light"

  Bynner: "a man with insight"

  Waley: "dimming one's light"

  Ming is "light" or "enlightenment." Waley explains that wei means obscure because very small, and also obscure because dark. I use this second meaning to make an oxymoron.

  Chapter 37

  The words in the first verse I translate as "the nameless, the natural" and in the next verse as "the unnamed, the unshapen" are the same four words: wu ming chih p'u; more literally, "the naturalness of the unnamed." "The unnamed" is a key phrase in the first chapter and elsewhere, as is "not wanting," "unwanting." P'u is the natural, the uncut wood, or, as Waley glosses it here, "uncarved-wood quality."

  Chapter 38

  The series here is of familiar Confucian principles: jen, li, i—"good, humane, human-hearted, altruistic"; "righteous, moral, ethical"; "laws, rites, rules, law and order." But Lao Tzu reverses and subverts the Confucian priorities.

  Chien shih in the fourth verse is "premature knowledge" in Carus and "foreknowledge" in Lau, Henricks, and Waley (who explains it as part of Confucian doctrine) . Henricks interprets it as having "one's mind made up before one enters a new situation about what is 'right' and 'wrong' and 'proper' and 'acceptable' and so on." Prejudice, that is, or opinion. Buddhists and Taoists agree in having a very low opinion of opinion.

  Chapter 39

  Yi, "one, the one, unity, singleness, integrity," is here translated as "whole, wholeness."

  Waley explains the last two verses as comments on the first three, but their relevance is pretty tenuous. The last verse is very difficult and the translations are various and ingenious. Henricks reads the Ma wang tui text of the first two lines of it as meaning "too many carriages is the same as no carriage," and I picked up on the idea of multiplicity as opposed to the singleness or wholeness spoken of in the first verses. The meaning of the lines about jade seems to be anybody's guess.

  Chapter 41

  I moved the line about perfect whiteness down to keep the three lines about power together, in parallel structure with the three lines about the Way. In the last line of the second verse (and in chapters 21 and 35) I translate hsiang as "thought." The word connotes "form, shape, image, idea." Waley explains it as the form which is formless, the Tao which can't be tao'd.

  Chapter 42

  In the sixth line, does the word fu mean "carry on one's back" or "tum one's back on"? Lafargue is the only translator I found that made the second choice. I don't follow him because I don't think the "ten thousand things" would or can make the mistake of turning their backs on the yin to embrace only yang. (But a great many of us do make that mistake, which is why Lao Tzu keeps reminding us to value yin, the soft, the dark, the weak, earth, water, the Mother, the Valley.)

  Lafargue's reading, however, lets the next stanza follow more coherently—orphans, the bereaved, the outcast are what we tum our backs on; winning is yang, losing is yin. Through loss we win. . . .

  The last stanza is uncharacteristic in its didactic tone and in assimilating the teaching to a tradition. Lao Tzu usually cites "what others teach" only to dissociate himself from it. I was inclined to dismiss it as a marginal note by someone who was teaching and annotating the text. But J. P. Seaton, who does teach the text, persuaded me to keep it in the body of the poem, saying, "It's a message that for all its flat moralism does connect Taoism to Confucianism and even to Buddhism with a single solid thread—averting a hundred holy wars, if nothing else."

  Chapter 44

  The intense, succinct, beautiful language of the first verses of a poem is sometimes followed by a verse or two in a more didactic tone, smaller in scope, and far more prosaic. I believe some of these verses are additions, comments, and examples, copied into the manuscripts so long ago that they became holy writ. They usually have their own charm and validity, but—as here, and in chapter 39 and other places—they bring a tremendous statement down to a rather commonplace ending. But then, Lao Tzu values the commonplace.

  Chapter 47

  The last line, literally "not do, yet accomplish," is a direct statement of one of the fundamental themes of the book. When I came up with a slightly mealy version of it ("doesn't do, but it's done") J. P. Seaton reminded me that "doing without doing is doing, not not doing."

  Chapter 48

  Shi (my "fuss," Carus's "diplomacy") is translated by Lafargue as "work," by Lau as "meddling," by Waley and Feng-English as "interference," by Henricks as "concern," by Gibbs-Cheng as "act for gain."

  Chapter 49

  Following some of Carus's interpretations, the first lines of the third verse might be read, "Wise souls live in the world carefully, handling it carefully, making their mind universal." I can't make much sense of any of the other versions except Henricks's beautiful reading:

  As for the Sage's presence in the world, he is one with it.

  And with the world he merges his mind.

  Chapter 50

  Those who read shih yu san as "thirteen," ra
ther than as "three out of ten," make better sense of the difficult first verse. The thirteen "companions of life" (Waley, Henricks), which I translate "organs," may be physical, the limbs and passages and cavities of the body—or physio/psychological, the emotions and sensations.

  My "mad bull" occurs variously as a rhinoceros and a wild buffalo. The idea seems to be a big irritable animal with horns.

  My "live in the right way" is literally "take care of your life," or "hold on to your life." The context indicates care without anxiety, holding without grasping. I read the poem as saying that if you can take life as it comes, it doesn't come at you as your enemy. Lao Tzu's "nowhere for death to enter" isn't a promise of invulnerability or immortality; his concern is how to live rightly, how to "live till you die."

  Chapter 52

  The last two lines of the first verse are the same as the last two lines of chapter 16. I wonder if some of these repetitions were insertions by people studying and copying the book, who were reminded of one poem by another and noted down the relevant lines. They are indeed relevant here, but they don't fit with perfect inevitability, as they do in chapter 16. This is of course a purely aesthetic judgment, subject to destruction by scholarship at any moment.