This project is my interpretation of the Western Zhou Bronze Inscription glyphs that are associated with each modern Chinese character in the first 37 chapters (“the Dào half”) of our traditional received version of Lâozî’s Dào Dé Jīng.
Lâozî
Lâozî is as close as a person can be to anonymous. Almost nothing is known for sure about the master’s life. Here’s one of the most widely accepted stories:
When eminent court clerk and historian Lâozî decided to leave the country, tired of the politics the Zhou Dynasty, border guard Yinxi recognized the sage. Yinxi asked the master to leave behind some wisdom before departing to the west, Lâozî granted Yinxi’s request, and the Dào Dé Jīng was born.
This common version was written by a court historian Sima Qian around 85 BC, during the Han dynasty. It places Lâozî in the 6th century BC (the 500’s BC) which means Lâozî lived during the Eastern Zhou Dynasty’s Spring and Autumn period (770 – 476 BC). Some stories specifically say Lâozî was born in 601 BC and departed Zhou in 531 BC. See the Dates, Dynasties, and Their Scripts tab for an outline of how all this fits together.
The book, its timeline, and its script
The Dào Dé Jīng is a classic text (Jīng) about The Way (Dào) and its Ethics system (Dé). The Dào is the main subject of chapters 1-37 in the traditional version of the book, and the Dé is the main subject of chapters 38-81. I remember the day I read somewhere that in ancient versions of the text— written in archaic scripts and unearthed in the 1950s and 1990s—these two basic sections are in reverse order. The Dé is described first, and it ends with Lâozî basically saying something like “you really don’t need to know everything I just said if you simply follow the Dào… here, let me tell you more about it.” And then it presents what is now known as chapters 1-37.
That was the day it occurred to me that most of the Dào Dé Jīng translations are based on modern Chinese characters in the received versions, whereas the original was not only in a different order but almost certainly written in an Old Chinese glyph script. I immediately wanted to see the old characters and learn about the pictures within those characters.
Here’s my thinking. Every language has synonyms. Each different version of a given concept—has a different flavor and subtleties that are hard to translate. Given this array of options, any good writer’s word choices matter. Poets’ choices matter even more. When, as with Old Chinese, each of those word choices is actually a different pictorial glyph—and we all know a picture is worth a thousand words—then it seems to me that the pictures inside Lâozî’s character choices are very important. They give us not only a more full and nuanced immersion into what Lâozî was writing but maybe an understanding of the master’s own life experience. I find that possibility fascinating.
Authorship and how to approach the book
There are many theories as to where, when, and even if Lâozî really lived or wrote the Dào Dé Jīng. I think it’s fair to say most scholars don’t agree with Sima Qian’s biography and in fact believe the Dào Dé Jīng wasn’t written by one single author at all. Devoted Taoists of course disagree.
Anthropologists have unearthed several ancient copies of the Dào Dé Jīng. Many, many scholars and devotees have compared the various texts with each other as well as with the established received versions. In doing so, they’ve generated theories as to chapter sequencing, correlations between ancient and modern characters, whether the original was oral or written, and the fundamental nature of the Dào Dé Jīng’s topic—is it about politics, mythology, mystical experience, socioeconomic realities, philosophy, how to live, science, ultimate reality, or some combination of these topics?
There are also a large number of opinions as to how to go about answering questions about the Dào Dé Jīng. Contextually? Personally? Traditionally? And if so, through which Taoist lineage?
And then there’s the real meat of the Dào Dé Jīng: what does it mean? In fact, what’s the meaning of any single chapter, line, or character?
By 1998 there were thought to be 250 translations or interpretations of this text, and more have been published since then. There’s quite a bit of variety in the translations, partly because the text is mysterious and partly because each translator brings their own lens and agenda to the project (some more consciously or determinedly than others). For a relatively short and very clear description of this academic history, I refer you to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/Lâozî/#AppLao.
My assumptions
When confronted with competing theories, none of which can be proven, I’ve found it best to ask three questions: which theory is most useful to you, which theory makes you deeply well/happy, and which theory feels like truth in your physical cells. I find these three tests almost always point me in the same direction when I’m making a choice.
In the case at hand, I find it helpful, fun, interesting, and solid yet exhilarating to believe that Lâozî existed and authored the Dào Dé Jīng. The visual beauty of the text convinces me it originally was written and not oral. I choose to believe Sima Qian’s origin story and dates. And I believe Lâozî wrote the text in a script very close to Western Zhou Bronze Inscription.
I respect and flat out love every Taoist scholar and devotee that has come before me, and, at the same time, my own engagement with this text is a different kind of animal. It’s very personal. I wanted to get as close to the most original text as possible and see what happened to me when I did so. That’s why, even though I pay little attention to the kind of context that scholars care about, I care about the text’s dates of origin. Because I care about what kind of script the author used. I want to see what Lâozî drew.
Chinese scripts
Chinese characters famously evolved from glyphs—pictorial representations of concrete things as well as abstract ideas. As in English or any other language, the meaning of individual words or characters evolved. A 21st century English reader’s definitions of certain words are very different than those of even a few hundred hundred years ago when, for example, quelling something or someone meant killing it, not just calming it down. Grammar and syntax also evolve. That’s why Old English texts like Beowulf are hard for the modern sensibility to decipher; something silmilar seems to be true of Old Chinese scripts.
The study of the evolution of the Chinese language is vastly more complex and sophisticated than even the study of Lâozî and the Dào Dé Jīng! What I don’t know I don’t know about the subject humbles me. For a short introduction, check out the Wikipedia entries for “Chinese language” and follow some of the links. It’s mind bogglingly fascinating and impressive.
For example, if you delve into Old Chinese and consider its written aspect, you’ll see that as the original glyphs evolved to convey an increasing number and complexity of words, compound characters were created. In compound characters, often one sub-component—one free-standing mage within the overall image—gives the word’s semantic meaning and another sub-component gives the word’s phonetic sound. The phonetic part of a character is still conveyed by a drawing of a pictorial glyph though. And since I can’t help but see that image, I find it at least subliminally contributes to and refines the meaning of the semantic part. This is another assumption incorporated into my interpretation of the Dào—my words for each glyph include descriptions of its phonetic component. My reasoning is that there is almost always more than one sub-character that can carry the phonetic component, so there may be a reason the author chose that particular image to do work in that particular place.
Another thing you learn immediately about Old Chinese is that there were regional differences, and, furthermore, several kinds of scripts were evolving simultaneously in each region for different uses and different socioeconomic classes. It’s hard for scholars to piece it all together because of the sporadic sampling of texts we’ve found. Many of the original writing samples that survived the Spring and Autumn period (as well as the Warring States period that followed) are bronze inscriptions. Though most of the writing actually took place on perishable bamboo and wooden slips bound together by silk thread or leather thongs, the bronze texts were of course more durable. Originals of the more common “slip” texts often did not last long, and most of those that did survive were burned later during the Qin dynasty. Some texts, however, were copied and handed down through the ages—re-written in each new era’s script and evolving into what we call the “received” classic texts we read today.
The oldest known such copy of the Dào Dé Jīng was unearthed in the village of Guodian in 1993 near what was the capital of the ancient State of Chu where (probably coincidentally?) Sima Qian claims Lâozî was born. The text was written in the local Chu form of Small Seal Script on bamboo, and experts date it to sometime in the hundred years prior to 300 BC.
It’s hard to know what kind of script a Lâozî of 531 BC would have used to write down an epic poem mid-departure at a border station. During this time, Small Seal script was organically developing from the earlier Western Zhou dynasty (1066 – 770 BC) script which was preserved on bronze inscriptions. As far as we can tell, the evolving seal script was not yet fully developed or codified, and it coexisted with a rougher, popular “vulgar” writing. Not only are the Western Zhou Bronze inscriptions the immediate etymological precursor of whatever script Lâozî used, but also they were most likely well known to Lâozî in his role as court clerk and historian. That’s why I look to those bronze inscription script characters for my interpretation. When no Western Zhou Bronze (WZB) inscription character is known for a compound character, I assemble the WZB versions of its various sub-components into one drawing.
Translating
I am not even a beginner in either Taoist or Chinese language studies, and yet I found I couldn’t not do this project. I’ve been interested in the Dào Dé Jīng ever since I met my husband 34 years ago and came upon his original copy of Gia Fu Feng and Jane English’s 1972 translation, beautifully amplified with Feng’s calligraphy and English’s photographs. My daily practice of reading this text began 25 years ago when a local writer friend introduced me to Stephen Mitchell’s translation, and it’s fundamentally shaped my life and spiritual practice ever since. In the last year and a half, baffled by the sometimes dramatic differences between translations, I became interested in the characters that make up the text, then in their etymology, and finally in the author. The closer you get, the more you’re awestruck by the elegance, humor, and craft of the Dào Dé Jīng… and puzzled by its mysteries.
When you’re translating a text and run into a word, sentence, paragraph, or chapter that seems to contradict a previous point or not compute at all, it’s tempting to try to “make it make sense.” I think this phenomenon is behind many of the big differences between translations. And it’s complicated not just by the Dào Dé Jīng’s abstruse language but by the complexity of the Chinese language and its syntactical differences from, say, English.
I know that the meaning of Chinese characters is contextual – the same is true in English. Consider a fork in the road, the fork you eat with, a forked tongue, or “that forking jerk.” But if a translation assigns very different meanings to a character in different parts of the book, then we the readers are deprived of seeing when and how Lâozî chose to repeat certain characters.
Likewise, if several different characters are translated in the exact same way, we might think Lâozî made the choice to use the same word in places where that’s not the case. Since I believe word choice matters, I mourn this inability to see Lâozî’s choices.
There are many other important differences between English and Chinese. In Chinese, you don’t necessarily have to choose past or present tense for a verb or know the number of the subject. You don’t have to choose a gender for pronouns. One word can be a noun, a verb, or an adjective. That’s why I so often use gerunds—add an “-ing” to most English words, and they too can be multi-functional.
Another big issue, maybe the biggest one you’ll find as you read my translation, is that to the English ear, Lâozî talks like Yoda. And the old manuscripts have almost no punctuation. Rather than “it’s good luck if an angry cat’s talking to you,” a passage might say: “cat angry talk luck good.” If you were hearing this in person and were a native speaker, then pauses and inflection upon delivery, as well as your ear for your own language, would serve as punctuation and context. Not only is the word-order different, but the little in-between words we rely on for connection and spaciousness are absent. It can be frustrating. But when we try to make it more comfortable or certain, we really overlay our own ideas onto the translation. For example, if it makes no sense to you that a cat could be talking or angry or that this would be good luck, you might translate that sentence as “when a cat’s angry, you should talk about good luck.” Or maybe that was even the original meaning! It can be hard to tell. Naturally, native Chinese speakers have a huge advantage in reading any modern language version of the Dào Dé Jīng. But Lâozî’s so obscure and puzzling even to Chinese translators—as evidenced by the differences between various versions—that I think something else is going on. It’s just a very mysterious text for some reason.
And then what?
I figured that once I had this bare bones, pictorial version, then I could stop, step back, look at the book in a form as close to how Lâozî wrote it as I personally can imagine, and then… then what? Then I could have an experience more like what Lâozî had or what Lâozî intended. I trusted something would happen in and to me, and it did. The pieces are still falling into places as I follow through on what’s occurred to me—carrying it into my life and into more projects (yes, if you know me then you know the screenplay’s underway!).
I want the same level of engagement for you. This website—still in the earliest stages of development—will give you a place to do that even more easily. Eventually you will be able to see my pictorial interpretation alongside others and choose the translation you prefer for each character. And then, best of all, you will be able to build your own translation! In doing so, you will have your own personal encounter with Lâozî and the images and ideas in the Dào, and interesting things will happen. That’s what I want for you, and for Lâozî, to whom I offer this project with great thanks.
1/1/2020
The Dào of Lâozî 