Category: Yôu

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#3 Cháng Mín 民 Qí 其 Wú 無 Yî Yôu zhì 治

civilians—like the Mín people enslaved by blinding with a dagger—

Mín

An eye pierced by a dagger. That’s the pictogram for today’s word, 民, which is modernly translated as people, citizens, folk, popular, and civilian.

Wow. This is why the images within the characters matter to me. The above picture of an eye and dagger is what Lâozî most likely would have drawn while writing down the 37 chapters we now call The Dào. Eye-piercing was an historic method for enslaving people. I’ve read that this practice was associated with enslaving the Mín people, hence this word and their name. Words from the Mín dialect make their way into the Dào in several places that I’ll note as we go along. We saw our first one in the last post, and—possibly not coincidentally?— that word (shî) occurs directly before today’s word (Mín) the first four times we see either one used.

As you recall, Chapter 3 opens with a list of three attitudes to avoid. If you avoid these, then you have a populace that doesn’t do three corresponding bad things. –>Not really elevating the elite rich means people don’t really compete (like with two hands clawing over a plow). –>Not really treasuring hard-earned transformation of riches means people don’t really “effort” thievery. –>And not really seeing something as definitely wanting or missing means peoples’ hearts aren’t really in a confused anxiety where their tongues are like twisted threads with one remnant string hanging out.

But, to be specific, each of those three prohibitions is spelled out according to this formula:

Not really doing [fill in the blank]

is breeding (like a gentleman holding a fountain pen)

civilians (like the Mín people enslaved by blinding with a dagger)

who don’t really do [fill in the blank].

I found this to be a nice time to re-read our last post and really reflect on that image of a government official holding in his hand a “fountain pen” that resembles “a flagpole sticking out of a drum.” Remember too: this image possibly shows that tool superimposed over a mouth. And of course there was the charming information that its meaning—to make someone do something—means to f*@# in the Mín dialect. So is it just me or does it sound like “breeding civilians” is another way of saying f*@#-ing the lowly masses who were enslaved by blinding their eyes with a dagger.

Does my heart suddenly seem rather dark to you?! Okay before I get all carried away seeing something horrible where it doesn’t exist, let’s find out what happens in the rest of the chapter and how these two words (shî mín) are used there. After all, this chapter is actually the only place that this shî character’s used at all.

~

What immediately follows is another instance of Lâozî telling us the suns sees indeed that this means something about the grounded sage. In this case, that description of what breeds civilians to be a certain way means the grounded sage has a particular style for governing (zhì, 治).

If you look at this modern character for zhì, you see it has two sub-components. The left side evolved from the pictogram from water:

The right-hand sub-character (台), when it’s by itself, is pronounced yí in Mandarin and was the original form of the word for happy or pleased. It depicts a mouth (the square) below another character. Most often that arrangement of a mouth means speaking about though sometimes it actually does seem to carry the meaning of a mouth, a cave, or a similar type opening.

In this case the mouth is drawn below a character that’s sometimes thought to be a plow or a symbol for turned or revolving. More often, and more specifically, it’s thought to be a variation of yî (以) which we investigated in a previous post. There I translated it as already… finishing it in the womb based on its typical translations and the original pictogram which is said to be either a snake or a fetus. Nowadays, when this character’s combined with the mouth character to make yí, it seems to refer to some aspect of talking about oneself. The result’s translated as I or me or sometimes as what. It no longer carries the original meaning of happy/pleased, harmony, or joy unless it’s combined with a character showing a heart to the left of it: 怡.

When that same happy character was combined with the pictogram of water to form 治, the resulting meaning was often an ancient river name (pronounced either yí and chí). In modern usage, though, it’s pronounced zhî and translated as to govern, regulate, or administer. Historically it was used to describe a seat of local government. Dáo translators generally prefer the terms govern, governing, and government, but sometimes you’ll also see them translate it as rules or leads. Here’s how I translate it to include all the imagery:

governing—regulating by harnessing the river named Happy or speaking of turning yourself—

I know it gets kind of wild when I translate this way, but I do so love the results. I love how it associates harnessing the River Happy with regulating or turning yourself around…. and with governing.

UPDATE: I look into this character a little more in a later post here.

~

So, to continue on, Lâozî says that in light of that list of what kinds of attitudes do or don’t breed what kinds of civilians, a sage’s governing looks like this:

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

this means…

the grounded sage—listening and speaking, standing connected to earth as well as the heavens,

that person

has this

governing—regulating by harnessing the river named Happy or speaking of turning yourself:

~ emptying—like lifted land…

what it holds a basket of…

heart-core…

~ really filling—like a building with strings of solid cowry-like riches…

what it holds a basket of…

inside—the gut, the meat belly;

~ being as fragile as a matching pair of decorative bows or little wings…

what it holds a basket of…

having heart-core determination and aspiration

~ strengthening like an insect—turning yourself as a venomous snake-like bow…

what it holds a basket of…

that bony will that comes from a skeleton framework.

What “it” is referred to in the phrase “what it holds a basket of?” This character, qí (其) puzzles me. We first looked at this little connecting word back in one of our earliest posts. But when translating Chapter 3, I decided to go back and review all 61 times it occurs in the first 37 chapters of the Dào Dé Jīng and compare how it’s handled by different translators (especially Chinese translators). I ultimately decided it’s safe to say that this phrase doesn’t necessarily refer back to the word right in front of it. Rather it points the reader back to the most recent “subject.”

In other words, Lâozî probably isn’t saying that “emptying has heart-core.” More likely this phrase says that the sage’s governing empties the sage’s heart-core, fills the sage’s inside/gut, is fragile in the sage’s heart-core determination, and strengthens the sage’s bony will. However only Chia-Hsu Chen translates it this way.

Most translators say the sage’s govern empties the people’s hearts, fills their bellies, weakens their ambition, and strengthens their will. They think “it” refers back to Lâozî’s previous “paragraph.” Other translators leave out the whole question of whose basket is in question! They say the sage’s governing empties the heart, fills the belly, weakens ambition, strengthens will.

What bothers me is that these approaches aren’t consistent in how they decide what the connecting word qí is pointing to. And when you read the different options I pose here, this subtlety really makes a difference, doesn’t it? Maybe this is another example of Lâozî the poet being intentionally ambiguous. Maybe “it” could be any of those things. “It” could be the sage, the governing itself, the people, or it could even be the word right in front of “it.” Maybe it COULD mean “emptying has heart.” (I like that last version a lot. I translated it that way myself until I more thoroughly analyzed qí.)

So why do I belabor this?

Because it makes a difference on a very important point: does the sage’s way of governing have anything to do with making the civilians be a certain way? It’s easy to assume so. After all we usually do think of governing as controlling others. And in the first part of this chapter, we just saw some gentleman a fountain pen was making them do stuff. But it seems to me that the point of this next section here is that the sage doesn’t do that. Maybe the sage is just over here minding the sage’s own heart, gut, ambition, and will. The very particular way that Lâozî drew the “governing” character could support that—governing could be about turning yourself, harnessing your own Happy river.

Let’s see where else Lâozî goes with these topics in this chapter. It’s pretty interesting.

~

As you remember, in the very first sentence of Chapter 1, Lâozî set up a conflict between the definitive “kê” version of things and the cháng version—the ever-present traditional, timeless, constant version of things as symbolized by the head cloth that men donned upon becoming official adults. Now we learn more about the cháng (常) version. We’re going to learn about what happens with that traditional version of breeding civilians:

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—what we know as the timeless, whole head-cloth ‘ji’ version of

breeding—like a gentleman holding a fountain pen making something happen—

civilians—like the Mín people enslaved by blinding with a dagger:

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

firing arrows from the mouth—sure;

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

wanting what’s been eroded from this ravine

We know two things about the traditional version of breeding civilians:

  • Not-Being… sure
  • Not-Being… wanting what’s missing

Does this mean the traditional version of breeding civilians breeds civilians that aren’t sure and aren’t wanting or missing anything? OR that in the traditional version of breeding civilians, someone who is a Not-Being is sure and is wanting something that’s missing? It’s our old familiar debate about the nature of the shamanic dancer Not-Being character, wú, and the meat-holding character we call Being, yôu. Are they people or are they negative and affirmative parties? Does it depend on context? Let’s keep reading with an open mind.

When we do so, we see in the very next sentence Lâozî tells us a third thing about the traditional version of breeding, and this is for sure about this particular man with a hairpin and public courtesy name (fú). We met this character in Chapter 2. There we learned he was absent and therefore not really leaving. Here we learn that he’s a person who, in the traditional version of breeding, is sure:

breeding—like a gentleman holding a fountain pen making something happen—

that is to say, this particular grown man with a hairpin and public courtesy name…

“firing arrows from the mouth—sure” as the sun, daily

—now this is cooking!—

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

daring—lightly hitting ears on both sides of the head—

efforting—like lifting up an elephant,

—yes, that too, vagina!

~

All right, all right. Before I continue, I want to address the elephant in the room—and no, I don’t mean the actual elephant we once again see inside the image for “efforting!” I mean that last exclamation and its reference to female genitalia. Is this gratuitous sensationalism on my part? You tell me. I will give you the facts… in our next post. Because this one’s getting soooo long, and I want to tell you about all of Lâozî’s colorful interjections at one time.

Until next time, be sure to use the contact form to send me your questions and comments. Thank you for being here!

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#2 Shèng 聖 Shēng 生 Wú 無 Yôu

birthing—a bud sprouting from the ground

shēng

Birthing (生, shēng) sounds familiar to you because in the first half of Chapter 2 this word linked Being and Not-Being in a list of “opposites.” Lâozî told us that Being and Not-Being are mutually birthing.

~

In Western Zhou Bronze inscription script, familiar to and possibly most similar to the script used in Lâozî’s time, shēng looks like this:

This image is a compound of a sprouting new plant:

And the ground:

I especially like the added bulge. To me, it really augments the meaning of this character because the modern translations of shēng are to live, subsist, exist; grow, develop, bud; bear, give birth, bring up, rear; and be born, come into existence. It also can be a noun: offspring, descendant; disciple, student; Confucian scholar; or life, existence, being, living. And it can be an adjective/adverb like fresh, not stale; unripe; raw, uncooked; uncultured, uncivilized; strange, unfamiliar; vivid, strong; innate, and natural. In Buddhism, it can mean to go into society or be reincarnated.

Here are some of the different ways translators of the Dào, in particular, interpret shēng: arise, creating, give birth, rears, produces, and lives. And that’s just in this chapter. Elsewhere you find those same translations as well as be born, and foster. Most translators use more than one definition, many use more than one even within this chapter. You can see why—the possible meanings vary so significantly in nuance. Is the thing in question being birthed or giving birth or raising something up? Those are all very different, and it’s tempting to want to clarify.

Because this word is so often interpreted as birthing, I originally had a baby in my definition, but as I wrote this post, I realized that’s an addition on my part. The image only shows the plant, the ground, and that added bulge (which does put me in mind of a baby, but it could also be a meristem from which new leaves are going to grow). My translation is hereby corrected to:

birthing—a bud sprouting from the ground

I like it because it has that poetic multi-usefulness. It could refer to doing the birthing, being birthed, growing, or even being raised.

~

In the first part of Chapter 2, we learned that Being (yôu) and Not-Being (wú) are mutually birthing—a bud sprouting from the ground. Based on the lesson in the previous few lines of that chapter, this first seemed to me to mean that if you work hard to “effort” Being, then you’ll cut off and define Not-Being while it’s still developing on its own.

And vice versa? Possibly. Though it’s not definitely clarified for us, that word “mutually” could be seen to imply that. Maybe it even means that you can’t have Being without Not-Being and vice versa. That’s a very common interpretation of this lesson and goes with the pictogram for “mutually” (xiāng, 相) which shows a seen tree and the eye seeing it.

Maybe Being and Not-Being are two aspects of one phenomenon—maybe Not-Being is the life force that makes sprouts sprout, and Being is the actual physical sprout? Or maybe one is the ground and the other the sprout? Maybe their union creates life. I like that one.

One thing is for sure, we are definitely wandering once more in the uncertainty of the Being-Not-Being mystery. Again I wonder…

What exactly are these Not-Being and Being characters, anyway?!

  • As we’ve seen, they are often used as negative- and positive-particles.
  • But also as adjectives.
  • And in some places—like the previous paragraph—they’re standing on their own.

There are other negative particles in the Chinese languages—ways to negate a concept, i.e., to say “not__.” And other ways to say something positively IS happening. These two characters were decidedly not the common way to do either in Lâozî’s time.

Using these very human-tinged characters in so many different ways gives the characters their own sense of being actual characters. And always with a twist. Every time Lâozî uses them, it’s sort of a pun… a double entendre.

  • Are they actually separate people?
  • Are they two sides of every person, situation, and thing?

Thus far, it remains shockingly, beautifully unclear.

Further down in the chapter, we started to learn about the ideal grounded sage and were told that when it comes to “staying,” the sage’s personal role was Not-Being efforting. What does that mean?

  • Of course this could just mean the sage “remains not forceful.” That’s the most common interpretation, and a lovely and useful one at that.
  • But given the lesson in the lines immediately preceding these, I assume it also is telling us that when it comes to “staying,” the Not-Being aspect of the sage is efforting—trying hard.
    • And that when the sage’s Not-Being aspect tries to force something—to “effort”—the sage shifts from the shamanic, dancing Not-Being mode into a more concrete, outer-oriented Being. The sage has both aspects.
  • Or maybe the sage is that dancer—that Not-Being—and when it comes to “staying,” well… that is the sage making an effort.

Now even later in the same chapter, we’re told that when it comes to “birthing—a bud sprouting from the ground,” the sage is just the husk of but not really the true inner flower of Being, i.e., bù-Being. This other negative particle, bù, is a pictogram of a flower’s sepal or guard petals and in every way a completely different character than Not-Being’s image of a mysterious dancer. So this new information isn’t saying that when it comes to birthing, the sage is definitely in some sort of Not-Being role. It just says that when it comes to birthing, the sage isn’t really Being, even if it may look like it initially.

~

It sounds confusing, doesn’t it! It helps me to diagram it like a flow chart. To summarize what we’ve learned in Chapter 2 about birthing/sprouting and our favorite characters: Being, Not-Being, and the sage.

  • Being and Not-Being are the type of duo with a mutual relationship wherein defining one means you define the other by default. In their case, they are in fact mutually birthing/sprouting.
  • When it comes to staying, the sage‘s personal role is Not-Being efforting.
  • When it comes to birthing/sprouting, the sage is just the husk of but not really Being.

Every which way I re-arrange and re-phrase that to myself, it does seem the sage’s more identified with the Not-Being aspect.

It’s a lovely message in keeping with what most people make of the Dào: the wise person has a certain hard-to-describe, beautiful, mysterious, intuitive, flexible, unattached way commonly associated with mystics from the Buddha and Jesus to Rabia, Rumi, and Hafiz.

It’s interesting to consider what it might mean in our own lives to de-emphasize Being and feel our way into more Not-Being. It’s a hard thing to describe, but it feels spacious and restful and energizing. Experimenting with this sensation in the odd moment here and there—that’s my wish for you. And please, write to me with any feedback, questions, ideas that come from those moments. I love hearing people’s experiences with this concept.

~

Meanwhile… if this is one of the points of the text, why does Lâozî say it so obscurely? Is Lâozî making it intentionally hard so that by the time the reader finally figures it out, it’s fully integrated? Or maybe so it can mean many different things and therefore be useful to many different people in many different circumstances? Is it because this is the way to make words go together to fit a rhyme, alliteration, and meter scheme? I do think all of these are reasons the text has captivated people for millenia.

Or is it because the concept of Not-Being as the sage’s true creative essence was so hard to accept that it needed some disguising? We’ve seen that Lâozî does, after all, draw characters that are masked, hidden in caves, bearded, a husk and not the real thing, or a hard-to-see mystery within a hard-to-see mystery. Next time we’ll summarize Chapter 2 the way we did Chapter 1, and maybe more ideas—or questions—about this story will come into focus.

Thank you for joining me once again! As always, please use the Contact form to write to me until then—I really look forward to hearing from you.

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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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#2 Chù 處 Wéi 為 Wú 無 Yôu

Not-Being efforting

wú wéi

“Not-Being efforting.” This phrase is in some ways the most obscure phrase in the Dào Dé Jīng. I posit it’s also the clearest.

We first encounter this phrase in the second half of Chapter 2 where, just a paragraph beforehand, Lâozî painstakingly lays out two examples illustrating the essential nature of “efforting.” As we saw in our last post:

When public opinion defines something with great certainty, that constitutes a forceful “efforting” of that thing. Such “efforting” results in cutting off and defining the very opposite of that original something before it’s actually developed in its own right.

Lâozî then lists a series of opposite conditions linked to one another in mutual interaction (like a seen tree and the eye seeing it… both are required for the interaction to happen):

The first such pair of opposites listed is Not-Being vs Being. Lâozî says they are mutually birthing.

Because of Lâozî’s careful set-up, I think it’s safe and indeed important to assume that this linking of opposites happens because of someone “efforting” one of the pair. I think we can conclude that the mutual birthing of Not-Being and Being has its roots in these two options:

  • Not-Being is efforting and therefore peremptorily defining Being, and/or
  • Being is efforting and therefore peremptorily defining Not-Being.

Let’s look at this in the context in which it’s first used. If you read the second half of Chapter 2, you see a list of things that a grounded sage person does in certain circumstances. Here’s the first such situation:

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

this means:

the grounded sage—speaking and listening with both feet on the ground,

this person…

staying-remaining at home at the tea table, chaste and unmarried, following something slowly from behind with tiger fur-

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

efforting—like holding up an elephant…

has this

personal, manual role—what one does with a weapon, a flag, or a pen;

So first we are going to learn about what the grounded sage does when they are chù (處) or staying. It’s usually translated as remains, but the Western Zhou Bronze Inscription character is, as usual, a lot more evocative and complex than that:

The top component (虍) shows tiger fur:

which is usually considered the phonetic sub-component (hū). Below that there are two semantic components considered to give the word its meaning. First is:

which shows two legs followed by something from behind and in modern times (夂) is translated to mean exactly that. Also shown is:

which shows a stool, and again the modern translation (几) matches the old pictogram.

The modern translation of the overall character chù, however, includes not just stay, remain, reside, live, and dwell, but also “staying at home, not assuming a government position or not married.” It also includes virginity and chastity as well as manage, deal with, punish, discipline, and get along with. This reads to me like a laundry list of what it meant to be an unmarried woman in most parts of the world in “the old days!” At any rate, as you can see above, I included all these elements in as neutral a way as possible.

And what does a grounded sage do when staying—remaining at home at the tea table, chaste and unmarried, following something slowly from behind with tiger fur? Well, then their personal role is Not-Being efforting.

And that, we suspect, means it lops off and defines Being (yôu 有).

Fascinating. We’ll delve more into the grounded sage next time, as we continue to feel our way into what it means that their role when “staying” is cleverly lopping off a basket of and therefore defining Being.

Thank you for joining me here again. I hope you’ll re-read Chapter 2 again and enjoy letting all these ideas percolate in your unconscious as well as conscious mind. Meanwhile please use the contact form to send me your comments, ideas. and questions. Until next time!

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#2 Bù 不 Mêi Shàn Sī Wú 無 Yì Yî Yôu

thus cleverly lopping off a basket of and thereby defining something already… finishing it in the womb

sī yî

Lâozi starts Chapter 2 talking to us about how people here on earth talk about beauty:

“Heaven-down below (lower level) public opinion—that clear, plain back and forth between people: firing arrows from the mouth sure of admired beauty—picture someone wearing a ram’s horn headdress…”

Mêi (美), “beauty,” is a picture of just what I’ve described: someone wearing a ram’s horn headdress. Then Lâozi describes this approach to beauty with a particular character, saying it results in:

“efforting—like lifting up an elephant—beauty

Oh, Wéi (為). I love this word, it’s pivotal in the rest of the Dào (occurring in 51 crucial spots, in these first 37 chapters), AND it took me awhile to land on this translation of “efforting.” It will have its own blog post very soon!

Meanwhile… Lâozî tells us that effortfully defining beauty in this strong-arming way has a side effect. It is:

“thus cleverly lopping off a basket of, and thereby defining, a disdained ‘ugliness’—an inferior-hearted evil right outside, touching the house—already… finishing it in the womb.”

Lâozî seems to be saying that when we work hard to forcefully set some very certain kind of beauty, we are insinuating that everything else is ‘not beauty.’ Or is Lâozî saying that approaching beauty in that way is itself ugly? Probably it’s both and either, as is so often the case in good poetry.

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Sī (斯) shows a basket on the left and an axe on the right:

Writing this for you, I realized that I didn’t have the basket in my old translation in the first post, so I’ve revised it as you see here:

thus cleverly lopping off a basket of and thereby defining…

This symbol was used to depict a traditional unit of weight (about 1/2 kg or a “catty” which is a little more than one pound), but also means axe, and keen or shrewd. This chapter is the only place this word’s used in the Dào.

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Yî (已) now means stop, finish, already, or have done [something]. In the Dâo, translators call it as arisen, become, stopping in time, be done, get it, succeed, attained success, and achieve results. Often it’s hard to tell for sure how they translate this word because it gets buried as some simple word like is. In fact, this word seems to occur in especially convoluted obscure sentences, and as you’ve seen, that’s saying something when it comes to this document!

The first etymological reference I read said yî comes from the symbol for fetus or snake (pronounced sì and now meaning snake and written as 巳):

So my translation combined that with the abstract meanings:

already… finishing it in the womb

But since then I’ve seen others say this version of yî absolutely should not be confused with that symbol. Nor, they added, should it be confused with this other old symbol that looked similar and is pronounced jî (己). This image is considered to be a silk cord used to bind things; it now means see, oneself, personal, or private. Those words combined with the suggestive images of a fetus put me in mind of an umbilical cord:

I’m not sure why our yî (已) should never be associated with these other two similar sounding and looking images nor why there’s no alternative interpretation for our image’s origins. It’s confusing. My first thought was that I could see why a person wouldn’t want to think a fetus is the original symbol for “stop, finish, already, or have done something” as it could put us in mind of sad and oft-hidden events like miscarriage or abortion. But then again it doesn’t necessarily have to mean those things either. It could also represent the later evolutions of this word: achieved, results etc. It does show something that developed inside, privately. All these layers filter together in that evocative uncertain way we are getting used to Lâozî creating in us, so I will leave it at that.

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So to review: Lâozi used today’s two words sī and yî together in a particular construction to say that when public opinion’s firing arrows sure of a particular beauty, it by default “lops off” and thus defines the opposite “already, finishing it in the womb.” Next, Lâozi uses this same construction to tell us what happens when public opinion’s firing arrows sure of traditional virtue (shàn, 善). The old bronze inscription version of this character shows a sacrificial offering of a goat together with a mouth emanating words that are branded by a chisel, in the same way that slaves or criminals were marked. This image gives me the feeling that Lâozi didn’t admire this kind of virtue. I wonder if the beautiful person wearing the ram’s horn headdress carries that same tone of hypocrisy for Lâozi. Anyway, being sure of this kind of virtue has the same hard-core effect of efforting, in this second case it’s efforting traditional virtue…

“…thus cleverly lopping off a basket of, and thereby defining, the husk of the initial protective bud casing—the sepal—but not really the true inner flower of traditional virtue already… finishing it in the womb.”

Being certain of that particular kind of virtue means everything else is automatically, privately, successfully defined as “not really virtuous.”

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Here Lâozî uses one very specific way of saying “not____.” Bù (不) shows us what biologists call a sepal—that little husk around the outside of a flower. The Bronze Inscription character shows those dried up little petals hanging off below a bloom:

The sepal starts out looking like a bud’s outermost petals, but ends up peeling back and drying up once the true blossom is open. This husk is made up off former “guard petals”—it played a crucial role!—but it’s not really the true flower of the thing we’re talking about.

We talked about different negative particles in this post. As with this sepal husk, most of the negative particles’ images show something where outer appearance doesn’t match reality. Èr uses the beard image for but now or and yet. Yì uses a masked person for the word different:

Other images in Chapter 1 also showed us hidden or obscured versions reality. The pictogram for mìng (personal naming) shows a mouth speaking under the cover of night by moonlight. Chàng (the ever-present, constant, timeless version of something) shows the jìn head-cloth covering the hair of an adult man. Xuàn—the very structure of the miáo stuff that is the conception of Heaven-and-Earth—is a hard-to-see darkness… a figure-eight of string dyed black. And of course wù gives us a Not-Being—a mysterious dancer swinging tails from each wrist—as a symbol of something so different than normal reality that we don’t even know what to call it other than just “not.” Lâozî is a true poet, weaving an entire spell for us using even the smallest words as part of the overall tone.

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So what does Lâozî do in Chapter 2 after setting up this construction for us in which public opinion’s sure-fire efforting a set definition of anything cuts off and defines its opposite? The next long and quite famous part of Chapter 2 begins by saying:

“anciently, for ten generations, this therefore lightly hits and leaves a mark of reason…”

What follows is a list of opposites that define each other, presumably, based on Lâozî’s set-up, because of public opinion’s strong-arming, effortful certainty of one of the pair of traits:

  • Not-Being vs Being
  • solidly hard vs changeable
  • lengthy vs short
  • high above vs down below
  • one tone vs many sounds
  • forward vs behind

Ahem: did you notice that Not-Being and Being are set out on their own here and not used as positive or negative particles simply modifying other words?! It’s as we suspected. They are almost beyond adjective, adverb, or status. As one reader put it: “ohhhh… the characters ARE characters!” And being effortfully certain about one gives birth to the other.

What does this mean? We’ll see in the second half of Chapter 2. Meanwhile, you can read the full text of that chapter here and ponder it. Please use the comment icon at the top of this post or the comment form to send me your thoughts, feelings, experiences, and questions—I love receiving them and they impact me and this project.

Thank you for joining me here today! I apologize for the little lapse that just happened in my posting. I really got off track trying to make a video summarizing all of Chapter 1 for you! Every one of the many many attempts I’ve made has been too clunky, long, simplistic, awkward, or otherwise difficult. My conclusion is that it’s not yet time for that to happen. I so wanted a tidy package for you, but it’s too early. I will continue coming up with a nice verbal way to deliver this information to you, but, meanwhile, I’m going to carry on with flowing the written translation process to you in as organic a way as possible. It means you will be floating in uncertainty longer… and I think Lâozî and other sages would approve. As I’m typing this, my daughter texted me a quote from Dolly Parton:

“There are just some things in life you don’t explaint it, you just live it, and know it, and be it.”

Categories
#1 Wú 毋 Yôu

flesh-and-blood meat-holding-Being

yôu1

What you see above is a hand () holding a piece of meat (). The modern character 有 means to have, possess, or there are.

Yôu occurs 42 times in the first 37 chapters of the Dào Dé Jīng. (Remember, I’m looking at those chapters first because together they constitute the “Dào part” of Lâozî’s classic text.) Quite often, especially when it’s sort of the subject of a sentence, translators call it Being. But many times they also use it as what I would call an “affirmation particle.” For example, when yoû is in front of a word like “name,” they translate this combination as “is named” or “with a name” or some such equivalent to “being named.”

Yôu plays a big role in Chapter 1 where Lâozî sets it up in juxtaposition to our old friend wú (無), no way—no one dancing with long tails flowing from their wrists—no, never, nothing, nowhere, nohow Not-Being.

Being and Not-Being. These are either really big cosmic ideas OR simple things you can put in front of other words to indicate that other word’s either happening or not happening. Or both. Most translators use them both ways, depending on the context. Of course that means we can’t tell when these words are being used, and of course I’m not having any of that.

So, here’s my all-inclusive solution:

flesh-and-blood meat-holding-Being

Much shorter than my usual, yes?! And I’m very pleased with it because I think it gives the reader a sense of the human holding that meat. It’s very incarnate, all the way around. Very real and solid unlike our mysterious dancing not-being. Being and Not-Being. Can you picture them— and . After spending so much time with those two characters, at times I think of them like two different “characters”, that is people, personas, or ways of inhabiting the world. Re-reading Chapter 1 yet again with those images is, once again and in a different way, rather dreamy.

That’s a lot to chew on for one day. I’ll meet you back here tomorrow. Meanwhile, let me know how you experience this. I finally figured out that you can access the comment form by clicking on the “comment counter” up in the heading this post! So please send me your notes there, or use the contact form if you prefer a more private exchange. Thank you for joining me once again.

PS I’ve updated the Pinyin tab with notes about the vowel marks that indicate the tone sounds of words (… and it explains which one of those marks I make incorrectly and why).