mysterious feminine essence—a few drops of that womanly mist

miào

Welcome back! I’m grateful you’re here. Let me get straight to the point: you probably returned because of the confounding puzzle in yesterday’s post… namely the Dáo Dé Jīng’s first chapter! And more specifically, I bet (or hope!) you were particularly struck by the character that I translated as: mysterious feminine essence–a few drops of that womanly mist.

The name of that character is miào:

妙

Yup — I couldn’t make this stuff up!

This intriguing term appears TWICE in Chapter 1. And it does so in sort of a baffling Russian doll fashion. When you try to follow the logical layout of Chapter 1 (which we’ll do together in a minute), you find it’s as if miào is a small interior doll BUT ALSO somehow comprised of or entered via the complete make-up of a Russian nesting doll itself. It’s like the over-arching structure of how things work is the entryway into this substance that makes up one tiny part of it? Hmmm… sort of like a fractal but not exactly. Let’s see if the pictogram version of this word illuminates things for us.

~

As is always the case when I can’t find a Western Zhou Bronze (WZB) Inscription character for a modern character that’s made up of multiple images, I looked into each of the two components of this word. The left sub-component is a drawing of a woman. The old WZB glyph shows a kneeling person with breasts (that sort of curly-queue around her torso):

The even older Oracle Bone Script glyph—the most ancient version of every Chinese character—is almost identical:

That similarity’s important to me because when I started looking into the right-hand sub-component, I couldn’t find a WZB inscription version. But I did find an Oracle Bone Script glyph of this character, and I figure Lâozî, an accomplished court scribe, and his peers were familiar with it too. This pictogram of four dots means few or little in number:

This sub-component is considered to be the phonetic part of the word—in other words it carries the sound of the word. This character on its own is pronounced shǎo, so presumably when combined with the first sub-component, we see that the new word, in this case, ends with that “ao” sound.

Together, the two components might look like this:

You can see how the modern Chinese character, 妙, incorporates the updated symbol for woman on the left and re-arranges the four dots in the right-hand component.

When the two components were combined into one, that compound character miào came to mean mysterious, subtle; fine, glorious; ingenious; exquisite. What a gorgeous word. And when it comes to interpreting Lâozî’s use of it, things get even more interesting. Stephen Mitchell translates it variously as mystery and all understanding in Chapter 1 ,wisdom in Chapter 15, and the great secret in Chapter 27. Gia-fu Feng and Jane English stuck with mystery both times the character appears in Chapters 1 and 27, but in Chapter 15 they called it unfathomable. Yi Wu used myriad subtleties or essential subtlety. Thomas Cleary follows his lead in some places, but in this first chapter calls it marvels.

So now you can see how I came up with my translation by combining the abstract meanings as well as the actual images. Even though the four little drops are supposedly “only” the phonetic part of this word, that sense of a little bit of something seems crucial to the word’s meaning, so I included them in the one phrase I decided to use everywhere this character appears:

mysterious feminine essence–a few drops of that womanly mist

It’s quite a word. And somehow a keystone in The Way that Lâozî’s describing. As you remember from yesterday, Chapter 1 lays it out like this:

• Lâozî first describes for us this yoked, matching pair of core concepts (Not-Being and Being) then
• outlines how each of those core concepts lies at the beginning of an important part of our universe (Not-Being is Sky-Earth’s conception, and Being is the suckling of all the material stuff or what is known in Chinese as “The 10,000 Things”), and then
• tells us what each of those “holds a basket of” (miào and jiâo, respectively). Miào is associated with Not-Being, and that’s what we’re exploring here today. As for Being’s jiâo (徼), its WZB character shows four sub-components: left, white/acorn/or skull, sword tip, and right.While its modern translations is frontier, border, patrol, or inspect, other Dào translators have called it manifestations, outward, or the surface. I translate it as delineated surface because the sword is said to be drawing a line from left to right.
• We then find out that these two core concepts actually started out altogether but that when they stepped out into the world, they became known by different titles. When they’re together though… what they’re REALLY called? Well that possesses something that may be my favorite word of all: xuán (玄). It deserves its own post on here for sure! Suffice for now to say that while others translate it as darkness or mystery, I absolutely want you to know that its glyph is a picture of a mysterious infinity-loop of string dyed black: Seriously. It is. I imagine you can see where my physics-happy mind goes!
• Furthermore it turns out that this mysterious infinity-loop of string dyed black ITSELF also possesses, has, or is somehow made of… yes: mysterious infinity-loop of string dyed black.
• Mind=boggled.
• But here’s the grand finale, the last line of Chapter 1 and what seems at this point to be the outermost Russian nesting doll:

The sun shining down like an eye on the people sees all this, sees mysterious feminine essence—a few drops of that womanly mist—has this double-winged gateway.

~

So there you have it. We now know that today’s featured heroine, the mysterious feminine essence—a few drops of that womanly mist—known as miào, is what’s held by Not-Being and that it may be entered via a double-winged gateway that seems to be the entire Not-Being/Being situation outlined above in which Not-Being/Being are really the same thing and, though differently masked/named once they step out into the world where one of them is the origin of heaven-and-earth and the other is the origin of all of its material inhabitants, in fact what they’re really called when they’re together has this mysterious infinity-loop of string dyed black. And this is the mysterious-infinity-loop-of-string dyed black’s own mysterious infinity loop of string dyed black.

I couldn’t love it more.

~

Thank you so much for sticking with me on this big trip. I hope you’re feeling a little disoriented. I am, and I think that’s key. We’re just at the beginning, after all. Tomorrow let’s double-back and look at pictures of Not-Being and Being. I bet that’s not an invitation you get everyday! I can’t wait.

*Updated 1/5/20 to include the specifics of the jiâo and xuán translations.*