Category: Qín 勤

wéi

I love the modern character, 為, and the old compound character of wéi is equally descriptive:

When you pull it apart you see it shows a hand (albeit upside down as if doing biceps crunches)…

…lifting up an elephant:

Wéi‘s modern meaning is to do or to make. It can also mean govern, construct, transform or turn something into, act as, be, and more. Dào translators call it so many different things: act/action, act upon, improve, try to change, do what you want with, tamper with, grab after, contrive, do work, make, achieve things, accomplish tasks, perform deeds, strive for, interfere, guided by, play the role of, merge, join together, fuse, capable of doing, can be, set, become, the nouns form, model, or action, and quite often simply, has, is, be or do. I would say they’re all trying to capture this sense of a human applying a hardcore sort of force to something big, heavy, or significant in nature in order to get something done. My translation is:

efforting—like lifting an elephant

~

Wéi figures prominently into a couple of my favorite chapters where Lâozî explains the way of the world by comparing it to what it’s not. For example, in Chapter 11, Lâozî specifies that wéi is what we do to clay or wood when we are efforting those physical things into the shape of a pot or a living space. And then Lâozî contrasts this efforting with Not-Being’s yòng (用):

doing truly useful work—like a water bucket—by means of carrying capacity

I found a Spring and Autumn Bronze Inscription image for this character which always makes me happy since that’s the script I believe to be the closest to Lâozî’s own hand (as described in the tab Dates, dynasties, their scripts, and my preferences). It’s a pictogram of a water bucket:

What a perfect illustration of how negative, receptive space is useful. Modern translations of the character are use, employ, operate; utility, usefulness, use [nouns]; to eat or to drink [in an honorific way]; expenses, outlay; with, by, using. Dáo translators most commonly call it useful, usefulness, and use. You can see this is a classic example of how one word can be noun, verb, or adjective in Chinese thus setting up the potential translation inconsistencies I like to avoid by using gerunds (“___ing”). In a few places, translators also call it potential, put into practice, draw upon, plus other non-related things that infer actions based on the nouns in the sentence.

In Chapter 6, yòng is part of a paradox describing our old friend, xuán, the hard-to-see darkness of a figure-eight of string dyed black. That short chapter concludes its description of xuán by saying:

Doing of truly useful work—like a water bucket—by means of carrying capacity (yòng)

has this…

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

exerting with force—with the strength of an arm, a bladed tool, or a plough on the soil (qín).

So here yòng‘s contrasted with yet another type of “doing,” qín (勤). In fact, with Lâozî’s use of bù, we get the specific sense that yòng may look like this other kind of work and be related to it in some way, especially at the beginning, but it’s not really that at all. Qín translates in modern times to industrious, diligent, and attentive, but traditionally it specifically meant laboring. This compound character’s right-hand component, lì (力), is considered to be the semantic part that imparts meaning. In Bronze Inscription script it looked like this:

This is considered to be either an image of an arm bending out from the body (those bicep crunches again) or a plough. It means physical strength. In physics, it’s the technical term for Force where it has the particular meaning of a quantity calculated by multiplying mass times acceleration. This sub-component shows up in a lot of words and also occurs on its own as a character once in the Dào in Chapter 33 where I translate it as:

forceful—strong like an arm, a bladed tool, or a plough

The left sub-component of qín is considered to be the phonetic part that tells us how to pronounce the word. It is indeed pronounced qín, and on its own now means clay. The etymology of this word thus far eludes me… I will keep after it. However, until then, you can see I incorporated its meaning into my translation of qín as is my want:

exerting with force—with the strength of an arm, a bladed tool, or a plough on the soil

This character looks very much like one we will see in our next post about the latter half of Chapter 2, gōng (功). Just looking at gōng‘s modern character, you recognize the strong-arm/plough sub-component on the right meaning force. The left sub-component, its phonetic element gông (工), is a bladed tool:

On its own, gông has the modern meaning of labour or work, laborer or worker, industry. When combined with the strong-arm/plough character, it’s taken on the meaning of achievement. And it’s used in physics as the technical term for Work, calculated as Force times distance. In other words, work is done when a force accelerates a mass through a distance. A force on its own isn’t “going anywhere.” Only when it exerts that effort to move something somewhere is it officially Work. I translate this character as:

really working—laboring with the force from a bladed tool, one’s arm, or a plough—

~

As you can tell, I’m gathering a list of the various and subtly different ways Lâozî talks about “doing stuff.” Partly I’m super interested in this because my original career was an engineer (!), and so not only am I used to being precise about these words but also I love considering the physics of the Dào Dé Jīng. In fact, that was one of the original three motivators for this whole Dào project. So here’s what we have so far under the category of “ways to do things”:

• wéi, 為: efforting like lifting an elephant (occurs 51 times in the first 37 chapters of the Dào)
• yòng, 用: doing truly useful work—like a water bucket—by means of carrying capacity (occurs 11 times, 4 of those are in Chapter 11)
• qín, 勤: exerting with force—with the strength of an arm, a bladed tool, or a plough on the soil (occurs only once, in Chapter 6)
• gōng, 功: real work—laboring with the force from a bladed tool, one’s arm, or a plough— (occurs in 6 spots in 6 different chapters)
• lì, 力: forceful—strong like an arm, a bladed tool, or a plough (1 occurence)

Sometimes, I’m pretty sure a particular one of these characters is used for a poetic reason like rhyme and alliteration. But also, in general, you’ll see as we work our way through the book that yòng, the negative-space “bucket” way of doing things, mostly is associated with Non-Being, The Way of the loose-haired chieftain (Dào), and the grounded sage that Lâozî so often describes for us. The other four more effortful ways of doing things mostly are associated with Being, The Ten Thousand Things, a grown man, civilians, “one’s pregnant self” (traditionally translated as oneself), traditional virtue, and other such concrete players. That said, there will be exceptions to this rule, and it is there that we may gain the most insight into what’s really going on in Lâozî’s schema.

But I say we trust Lâozî to lead us into and through all this in the natural layout of the book, so for now we are firmly in Chapter 2. As we saw in the last post, that’s where Lâozî told us that public opinion firing arrows of certainty about a particular admired “beauty” or traditional “virtue” is really an “efforting” of those traits. It’s like lifting an elephant… i.e., not easy. And not only can we viscerally feel that’s hard and hard to sustain, but also this approach lops off and defines the opposites of those traits before they’re even fully born. With this introduction to “wéi,” it’s safe to say that whenever we see that word from here on out, we’ll remember these consequences that Lâozî’s laid out for us. And furthermore we’ll be noticing and remembering that there is more than one way to go about doing things in the world. We can be feeling which ways seem more appealing and effective. We can be thinking about how we want to feel when we do stuff.

Thank you for joining me here today. Next time, we’ll see what the rest of Chapter 2 has to hold for us. Until then, please keep sending me your comments—they’re super helpful to me.