Category: Miào

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#10 dé 德 Miào Xuán

the Dé—an Ethics system that’s the straight-heart-core of the way

dé (德)

Right in the first chapter, we became aware of a hard-to-see dark structure—like a figure-eight skein of string-dyed-black (xuán). It underlies the true name of the matched pair of Being and Not-Being when they’re together… before stepping out of the cave and acquiring different personal childhood names. And then that hard-to-see dark structure of a figure-eight string dyed black, in turn, has a hard-to-see dark structure of a figure-eight string dyed black. And that—the whole arrangement?—is mysterious feminine essence’s (miào) double-winged gateway.

Now in Chapter 10, we learn more about this mysterious dark structure. And we learn about it in the context of our hero receiving an assignment to complete a task. The previous chapters have led up to this task nicely. Here’s what we learned before:

  • Chapter 7: Heaven-Earth is now long-lasting and “capable of lengthy birthing” and that means
    • the sage’s pregnant self, now bearded, is surviving and
    • the wings are broken off of Not-Being’s disastrous personal concerns, and therefore Not-Being’s capable of completing personal concerns [non-disastrous ones, I presume].
  • Chapter 8: Regarding higher-level ruling traditional virtue:
    • “Someone” says that now bearded, you’re not really competing. [I assume that’s continuing the explanation of how the sage is avoiding disastrous personal concerns.] And we learn that this is very close to The Way.
    • There’s a list of what I assume are the non-disastrous things that are of concern to you: abiding, heart core, speaking, being straight upright, one’s personal role, and laboring. And there’s a corresponding description of what each of these looks like to traditional virtue. In the end, our narrator re-emphasizes that this particular man who’s essentially and only not-competing is therefore, by logic, Not-Being in particular. And possibly this Not-Being has been made lame by resentment and blame. Resentment and blame on the part of themselves or of someone else, like traditional virtue? It’s delightfully ambiguous as usual.
  • Chapter 9:
    • If you, now bearded, are over-doing things, then it’s not really going to be helpful:
      • You’re not going to be finishing what’s in the womb, not long safeguarding a child, not capable of defending your place… you will leave behind you only calamity.
    • Alternately, if one’s pregnant self withdraws after real labor’s completed, then that’s Heaven’s Way of the loose-haired chieftain, walking awhile, stopping awhile, listening, and speaking of it all. That’s exactly The Way.

And now here, in Chapter 10 someone lists what I assume are the very real specific, almost paradoxical details of exactly following The Way. And then they challenge, “pah, can you?!“

  • Can you carry the physical soul and spiritual soul bundled up into one… with being separated from Not-Being?
  • Can you control chi or breath of life and cause softening… with an infant son?
  • Can you do the washing and arranging for moving me to a new mountain posting and have the hard-to-see dark structure that’s like a figure-eight skein of string-dyed-black reflecting like a vessel looking down—all eyes—overseeing… with Not-Being ill on a stretcher?
  • Can you love the civilians and regulate this nation by harnessing the river Happy and regulating yourself… with Not-Being very sure every day?
  • Can you unlatch Heaven’s double gateway and shut it—like a person with a mouth between their legs withdrawing and covering an empty chalice from within the double-winged gateway… with efforting femaleness?
  • Can you be as bright as dawn rising on a crescent moon—enlightened—and have hundreds arriving in all four directions like little lambs… with Not-Being very sure every day?

You can see the verbatim text here, and go here to read others’ traditional translations that leave out all the imagery from the old script. But you have to admit, it’s crazy how much that imagery has to do with having a baby, yes? And how it would fit exactly with my theory that our hero is a pregnant Not-Being—a shamanic woman—posing as a man? She’s trying to do all the impossible things involved in being a pregnant woman while also being a government official. It’s a lot.

The narrator concludes by saying there IS one example of doing all this stuff at once. It comes from nature:

Birthing—a bud sprouting from the ground

has this;

rearing animals—giving them feed from a bag tied with a rope

has this.

But for our hero to do it all? The narrator sums up that situation:

Birthing—a bud sprouting from the ground—

and yet now, bearded, you…

the husk of the initial protective bud casing but not really the true inner flower of

Flesh-and-blood, meat-holding Being;

efforting—like lifting up an elephant—

and yet now, bearded, you…

the husk of the initial protective bud casing but not really the true inner flower of

expecting that will be holding one’s heart-core like a mother;

lengthening like long hair, 

and yet now, bearded, you…

the husk of the initial protective bud casing but not really the true inner flower of

dominating—like the house of that chisel used to mark slaves and criminals.

Our narrator gives our hero, or maybe us, a hint as to how to simultaneously rule and birth while not really a Being:

The sun—walking across the sundial a while, stopping a while—sees indeed

what it’s called when speaking from the gut…

the hard-to-see dark structure—like a figure-eight skein of string-dyed-black…

the Dé—an Ethics system that’s the straight-heart-core of the way.

The Dé is the famous subject of the second half of the Dào Dé Jīng (Chapter 38 through 81). It’s considered to be a set of principles for application of the Dao, for living according to The Way. And it makes its first appearance here, where our hero is tasked with an almost impossible challenge.

~

The old Western Zhou era script shows a compound character. The left side is the symbol for a path, the same as that shown in the Dao. The right hand side show a heart on the bottom. And on the top is a drawing that means “in the center.”

I translate it as:

the Dé—an Ethics system that’s the straight-heart-core of the way

~

Here, in its first appearance, we learn that the Dé is tied to the mysterious structure that underlies the deep union [and yet surface separation] of Being and Not-Being. And based on its appearance in this chapter, it’s all tied to our hero’s challenge. How?

How does the Dé help our hero combine all the complex tasks necessary for this dual role? In the next chapter, we get more details on how this matched pair and its figure-eight structure loop together. Until then, please use the contact form to send me your comments. I look forward to each one. And thank you for being here.

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#1 Ér Dào Fēi 非 Jiâo Míng Miào Tiān Wú 無 Yôu

By way of introduction… Chapter 1 summary

Here’s how I see it. Please consider it a light fanciful daydream if it offends your sense of the Dào Dé Jīng!

Setting the stage: conflict!

Yinxi the border guard recognizes Lâozî as he’s departing the country, allegedly fed up with politics in Zhou. He asks the renowned wiseman to leave behind some helpful words, presumably about his philosophy and the way to go about things. Lâozî says… well you might want to click here to read Chapter 1 and then pop right back. But basically Lâozî says…

The Way that I can describe to you as definitively The Way breaks the little wings off our traditional version of The Way.

Wow. What a great first sentence. It’s very overt and rather patronizingly graphic in setting up all sorts of conflict and questions… especially with those actual Western Zhou Bronze Inscription characters that Lâozî used! (Yes, I’m making lots of assumptions here, as do all translators. Mine are described here.)

What follows sets up some idiosyncratic themes for the whole book.

Hair

Somehow hairstyle figures prominently in this first sentence and the entire text! Here’s my full version of the first sentence:

The Way of the loose-haired chieftain—walking a while, stopping a while, listening, and speaking of it all—about which you can purse your lips like a piece of cane and puff: “Yup, that’s it, definitely The Way of the loose-haired chieftain—walking a while, stopping a while, listening, and speaking of it all—” is breaking the little wings off the ever-present square fabric which our grown men wrap around the ‘little bird’ top knots on their heads after receiving their public courtesy-names—or what we know as the timeless, whole-cloth ‘jin’ version of The Way of the loose-haired chieftain—walking a while, stopping a while, listening, and speaking of it all.

So we have a roaming prophet-like chieftain with loose hair. And then we have a sort of opposite: the current tradition in which men wrap their hair in a top knot on their head and cover it with a cloth as part of their puberty ritual. We’ll encounter some other hair and headdress images later in the book, but that theme’s established right here in the initial line.

What’s in a name

Different types of names also figure prominently throughout this whole first chapter. I count four different namings.

1.Above we learned about how when boys turned to men in ancient China, they received a new formal name.

2. The next sentence talks about the childhood name the boys gave up, a name you can still use with intimates after you’re a grownup:

Its personal, childhood name—what it says to identify itself urself by moonlight—about which you can purse your lips like a piece of cane and puff: “Yup, that’s it, definitely personal, childhood naming—what you say to identify yourself by moonlight” is breaking the little wings off our traditional its personal, childhood name—what it says to identify itself urself by moonlight.

[Yes, I shortened the ever-present square fabric which our grown men wrap around the ‘little bird’ top knots on their heads after receiving their public courtesy-names—or what we know as the timeless, whole-cloth ‘jin’ version of (chàng) into “our traditional.” Yes, it’s both a big assumption on my part AND a useful space saver! That character’s described in detail here.]

So here’s yet another harsh difference between tradition and what Lâozi could say. This time it’s over personal naming in particular. Now we feel like names might be key in the conflict that’s been staged for us.

Lâozi goes on to differentiate two kinds of personal names: Being, its personal name, and Not-Being, its personal name. In this simple step, Lâozi introduces two of our most central and most baffling characters and puts them squarely into this naming conflict… but more on them later. Let’s see what other kinds of naming are discussed in the first chapter.

3. There’s also how things are spoken of altogether with one another—like all earthly, mortal, commonplace plates. Lâozi uses THAT title when talking about Being and Not-Being when they’re a yoked pair, just before they’re stepping out “of a cave” and into their two different, masked personal namings.

4. To really describe them altogether like that, Lâozi adds in yet another kind of naming: what it’s called when speaking from the gut—words, like slaves or criminals branded by a chisel emerging from a mouth.

Later in the book, we’ll see some significant permutations of these naming types, and we’ll really notice them too, since the basics are pointedly noted in the first chapter.

Being, Not-Being, their altogetherness, their differently masked names once they step out of the cave and get bearded, plus the crux of the mystery:

Most importantly, in this introductory chapter we meet and learn a little something about two of the book’s fundamental characters. The facts we get, in order of appearance:

  • Not-Being is shown by a pictogram of a mysterious, shaman-like dancer and is often taken to mean “null” or “nothingness.” Lâozi tell us its personal naming is the conception of Heaven-Earth (merged to be something like… the whole universe or “heaven and earth”).
  • Being is shown by a pictogram of a hand holding a piece of meat. Lâozi says its personal naming is the rearing, raising, or “suckling” of all the gazillion of material things in that universe, literally 10,000 Things—all matter external or cut off from you.
  • In the traditional version, Not-Being is “wanting.” It’s missing something that’s been eroded, and that is a mysterious feminine essence called miào.
  • In the traditional tradition, Being is “wanting.” It’s missing something that’s been eroded, and that is delineated surface—like a patrolled frontier border lightly hit with a sword tip from left to right (jiâo).
  • Whoa, though! Really they’re a matched pair and can be spoken of in this state where they’re altogether—as common as daily dishes—stepping out of their cave…
  • But. Once they step out, lots of “buts” apply. The first, main, and most unusual and specific “but” is a character that’s a pictogram of a beard (èr). The instant they step out, Lâozi starts describing them with a qualifier: and yet now, bearded…. Every time this èr character’s used, I can’t help but harken back to its intro here as a description of Not-Being and Being as they step out of the cave.
  • So they’re altogether stepping out of a cave and yet now, bearded…. they have differently masked personal names (presumably this refers back to the “Being” and “Not-Being” personal names described before).
  • What they’re called from the gut when they’re altogether has this hard-to-see darkness—the figure-eight structure of a skein of string-dyed-black (xuán). Based on how the text’s written, I think the entire set-up described beforehand—what I summarized in the above bullet points—constitutes that xuán. But I guess it could be something as yet unspecified, something that we discover later.
  • And here’s the kicker… that hidden structure has its own hard-to-see dark figure-eight structure of string-dyed-black.
  • And THIS, my friends, is the mysterious feminine essence’s double-winged gateway. Ending the first chapter here leaves us with miào feeling somehow central to the whole story.

What’s this have to do with our original conflict between The Way and our tradition?

I guess that’s the question Lâozî’s setting up for the suspenseful tale about to unfold to Yinxi, me, and you.

What stands out to you?

I’m going to give you some time to ponder this introduction and my question and send me your answers before I prejudice you with mine—because they’re doozies! And with that cliff-hanger… I thank you for being here with me and for sending me your comments. It means the world to me.

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#1 Jiâo Miào Xuán

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.*