Category: Wú 毋

wú

What does this drawing look like to you? Linguists say it was a pictogram of a person with something long dangling from each hand—maybe long tails or sleeves—dancing. It must be a fancy dance or maybe a shamanic one, judging by those tails/sleeves.

That drawing is the Western Zhou Bronze Inscription character, close to the kind of script I believe Lâozî would have used. Later—maybe toward the end of Lâozî’s era—this character evolved into a Seal Script form in which the horizontal and vertical bits got exaggerated:

From there, maybe we can see how it turned into the modern character:

無

But here’s the thing: I have a hard time understanding why a beautiful, powerful, evocative drawing of a dancer holding long flowing objects turned into a word that’s now translated as not, without, not having, free from, no, un-, nil, -less, non-, or some other negating concept. How did it go from portraying a person engaging in celebration/ritual to conveying a complete lack/undoing of something? And, more importantly to me, when did it undergo this change? Because, of course, you and I want to know how Lâozî actually experienced this character’s meaning.

Chinese has several “negation particles”—little words placed before or after other words to indicate the opposite or lack of that base word. English does too as evidenced by that list of translations in the previous paragraph. When this wú character was ‘borrowed” away from its original meaning and turned into a negation particle, a new character was created for the word dancing by modifying the original pictogram with some extra marks near the person’s feet to show they’re taking steps.

This change seem to have happened in or just before the Western Zhou Bronze (WZB) era. We know this because 1) Oracle Bone script didn’t use this negating form of wú, and 2) this new character for dancing appeared in the WZB era:

Later, by the time it turned into Seal Script, it looked like this:

And now it’s written as 舞. My point here is that some linguistic effort was made to change the original character just to retain its own original meaning because somehow this person dancing with long things flowing from their wrists was turned into… nothing. Literally. Or worse, it was turned into something that undoes or negates every kind of stuff or abstract idea that it’s attached to. Puzzling. Especially because there are others way to “undo” things.

Negation

And now we are going to go down a rabbit hole into nothingness. Literally. It’s an important part of the Dào, so it’s good to go there right up front. Bonus: contemplating it elicits a not-unpleasant sort of spaciousness.

As you remember, Oracle Bone (OB) script was the version of written Chinese immediately preceding Lâozî’s time, though he certainly was familiar with it since he was a court scribe. There were five negation particles found in Oracle Bone script, and our word-of-the-day wú (無) was not one of them because back then it still meant dancing. We see documentation that this word was indeed used quite often as a negator in Classical Chinese which was the main writing beginning in the 5th century BC—well after Lâozî’s time. But what was happening with this word in between, during Lâozî’s lifetime? This wú appears 43 times in the first 37 chapters of the Dào Dé Jīng. Why and how did Lâozî use it? Did Lâozî use it with the earlier OB meaning of dancing or with the later Classical meaning of negation… or both/neither? Conventional translators make it out to be a negation particle. I like to read through the text and substitute that dancing being for wú. It’s kind of wild that way. I am starting to wonder if, like Shakespeare, Lâozî hybridized and made up words and, indeed, changed the language of that time. It’s something to keep in mind as we move through the Dào.

What makes things even more tricky in translating—if you’re trying to use unique translations for each character—is that Lâozî uses other negators as well. The most common negation particle in OB was bù (不). And bù appears 113 times in the first 37 chapters of Lâozî’s Dào. It’s the most common negator in the book, so in this way, Lâozî is using a typical Oracle Bone style. The bù glyph which Lâozî would have used depicts a sepal—those outer, guard petals on a flower. I translate it as the husk of the initial protective bud casing—the sepal—but not really the true inner flower of… [whatever word follows it]. It looks like this:

Bù is what’s called a p-type negative, and wú is an m-type negative. No one’s sure why there are two parallel series of negative particles. Some linguists hypothesize they represent a very old, possibly prehistoric fusing of two different peoples and dialects—maybe each group of people had a different sound they commonly used to mean “uh uh.”

It’s also not clear how the particles or their uses evolved, and furthermore there are different theories among linguists as to when and why a particular negation particle is used. Some say the the p–types modified actions beyond the control of living people and the m–types attached to words describing actions over which people thought they had control. Interesting. Since bù was most commonly used, I wonder if the people that used the bbbb/fffff sound to mean “nope” were more dominant than those that used the wú sound? Or did OB-era conversations tend to negate a lot more uncontrollable actions than controllable ones? Did Lâozî?

Now, brace yourself for what lies ahead. Chinese has a lot of homophones—words that are pronounced exactly the same as each other but mean something altogether different or, as in this case, they mean something similar but uniquely flavored and with a different written Chinese character. And it turns out that a separate m-type negation particle, also pronounced wú, was most commonly used as a negation particle during the Oracle Bone years: 毋. It derived from the character that meant mother. By the time of Western Zhou Bronze inscriptions, this other wú looked like this:

Lâozî doesn’t use this character at all in the Dào. So in this case Lâozî’s deviating from OB negation style completely. And yet… and yet using a word that sounds like the typical negator but looks like this fancy dancing person. Linguists have noted that in Zhou time, this character “was already phonetically confused with and read like 無.” So again we see these big changes in the negation particles happening during Lâozî’s era. Indeed there were all these different drawings to make this one sound and general meaning, but, I would say, each drawing has a different effect. I doubt scribes like Lâozî were just confused or careless with their spelling.

There’s also a THIRD (!) m-type negative pronounced wú: 勿. It’s an obsolete character whose pictogram was a bloody knife:

Wow. Hardcore. Lâozî uses this other wú character four times in Chapter 30, and that’s the only place in the Dào that it appears. I translate it as not—seriously like blood on a blade, just don’t… [Dramatic yet again, I know, but I’m only trying to keep it accurate!]

So far we’ve found that when it comes to the m-type negators, Lâozî prefers our word-of-the-day version of wú even though that hadn’t been the norm up until then. That being the case, all the m-types are still way out-numbered in the Dào by the p-type negator bù.

And Lâozî uses one other p-type negation particle: fú (弗). Its Western Zhou glyph is considered to depict either 1) two arrows leaning against each other and wrapped up to be straightened or 2) a bundle of sticks tied together to start a fire. (In English, the latter was called a faggot which shows really horrible things about our culture and language.) Lâozî uses this fú twice in Chapter 2 and nowhere else in the Dào.

Finally… there’s one more negator in the Dào, fēi (非). It doesn’t seem to be classified as either one of the older two types of negation particles—it came on the scene after the Oracle Bone years:

Some say this is a pictogram of a pair of broken wings on a baby bird. Others say it’s a combination of bù with a compound character that shows a heart and a short-tailed bird. I translate it as: is breaking the little wings off…

Okay, that also sounds a little dramatic, but, dang. Either one of those possible etymologies is pretty harsh. Happily Lâozî only used this word fēi four times. Of course, two of those are right in the first chapter, which, by the way, is where we are, or were, before this side trip into negation…

Back to wú 無

I read somewhere that to write this wú character you begin with three horizontal lines and add eight kind of slashing or negating marks on top of it—four vertical ones downward through the three-line structure then four short diagonals spraying out from the bottom. It may just be the power of suggestion, but I do experience this repeated-negation sensation when writing out the character. Try it and see how it feels.

Because of the completely annihilating tone of all modern definitions as well as these eight “no no no no” kind of marks and the fact that I want a translation that will work in any setting, I decided to translate this wú character as noone-noway-no-never-nothing-nowhere-nohow-not-Being. You saw that phrase in the complete Chapter 1 translation I put in yesterday’s post.

Why did I include the word being? It allows me to use this phrase everywhere, including in places where other translators have felt the need for a noun and translated this term as nothing, nothingness, or non-being. Plus at least I’m throwing in a reference to the actual being that appears in the original pictogram.

But writing this post to you today has made me realize that I broke my own rules with this translation. I was so swayed by the singular modern focus on the negating aspect of this character that I completely left out the actual original image and its meaning. And my whole goal is to include those drawings for the reader to experience! So I’m officially changing my translation right here.

Then the question becomes: how can I keep the the extreme “nil” effect, the ability to be a noun as well as a modifier, and our dancer? I don’t think the dancing part can be the first or last thing without throwing off the negation. After many arrangements, I come up with:

no way—no one dancing with long tails flowing from their wrists—no, never, nothing, nowhere, nohow Not-Being.

It gives me goose bumps, and that’s my favorite kind of “yes.”

~

You can see how and why my translations are not short and catchy and why they’ve gone through so many iterations. It’s hard to have it any other way, given my goals and intentions. You can see why some people prefer to find a short-hand translation (like, in this case, Not-Being), and I fully support whatever they—or you—decide works. In fact I myself often silently shorten my own translations in my mind when looking through my book or thinking about a chapter. But for me, these longer historical written versions carry a fullness and a mysterious, evocative sense—even if they don’t look like regular, clear-cut writing. It feels like they constellate into something bigger… eventually.

Meanwhile, I stay open to what occurs. I’ve changed my translation for wú in the Chapter 1 tab and throughout my whole Dào document, so now I’ll be reading through and see if it works everywhere. And I’ll be getting ready for the next post when we’ll delve into something that may (or may not!) be the opposite of Not-Being: a timeless eternal piece of fabric.

Thank you for joining me on this journey! I hope you’ll use the comment section below or contact form to send me your thoughts and feelings. I’d love to hear them.

Betsy