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Underground > Temple >

Dao De Jing

  
  

Page: 1(2)

 
 
osymandus
17:09 / 05.03.07
From what you guys are saying about the literal translations , its seems very similar (to say naming the Tao ) . As say the idea of being able to say YHVH , correct or right way remakes the universe .

Also ideas and tenants of Thelema (Crowleys ) also seem very rooted in this , you can intellectualize a thing to pieces , however it will still retain what its is.

What was your true face before your parents we're born.
I personally favor Taoism over most over forms of philosophy , simple for the fact its so empty and has no problem in saying weather it is or not the true way (and being a Taoist seems a mite like an oxymoron )

Also as im reading Chuang Tzu at the moment , the emphasis they place on the NOT aquiring of knowledge or intellectualism is to my mind amazing. It almost syas the more we define it the less we' will understand it.
Be empty and let the Tao flow through you.
 
 
grant
19:14 / 05.03.07
I like the idea of a "border" being an "outer form."
 
 
EmberLeo
17:56 / 07.03.07
grant: As opposed to what? I think I'm missing something.

--Ember--
 
 
grant
18:02 / 07.03.07
Well, in English, a "border" in the sense of "frontier" can be an end-point, or even a kind of wild and formless area. Something to be tamed, you know? Something that exists between two defined spaces, as opposed to being something defined and specific and formal itself. So that's interesting to me.
 
 
EvskiG
19:16 / 07.03.07
To clarify a bit, I believe that by saying:

I like the idea of a "border" being an "outer form."

Grant was saying that he liked Star's translation of "chiao" as "outer forms" even though Zhongwen.com translated the same term as "frontier, inspect, patrol."
 
 
grant
16:03 / 08.03.07
Exactly, yes.

Like I've said above, I'm not a translator of Chinese, I'm just a beginning student -- but I do like looking up this stuff in the dictionary and seeing where it leads. One of my favorite things about Chinese is the visual etymology of the characters, which I think has a lot to do with connotations & hidden meanings (it certainly does with the I Ching).

Anyway, what's the next line?
 
 
grant
16:42 / 08.03.07
word - dictionary translation (visual etymology)

Ci - This (stop & turn)
liang - two/both (a scale)
zhe - person/thing (clear stalks of sugarcane or grain)
,
tong - same/together (things under one cover - I think this is related to "tong" as in secret society)
chu - exit/happening/put forward/exceed/run out/move out (a seedling pushing out and up)
er - and/yet/means/work for money (a beard ?!)
yi - differing/opposing (hands making an offering)
ming - name/fame/people measure-word (mouthed in nighttime to identify)
,
tong - same/together
wei - to name/call/meaning (words with stomach)
zhi - go/of/it (plant rising from ground)
xuan - obscure/dark/distant/abstruse (cover over something tiny/obscure)
.

These two things,
together push outward yet differing name,
together are called going from darkness.

Mitchell translates this as:
Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.
 
 
EvskiG
17:12 / 08.03.07
Tao and this world seem different
but in truth they are one and the same
The only difference is in what we call them

How deep and mysterious is this unity
How profound, how great!
It is the truth beyond the truth,
the hidden within the hidden
It is the path to all wonder,
the gate to the essence of everything!

(Star)

Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.

(Mitchell)

Tao and This World in one translation, Mystery and Manifestations in the other. One says they are the same thing with different names, and the fact of their unity is the "hidden within the hidden." The other says they arise from the "same source" - darkness within darkness. Both suggest that grasping the relationship between the two is the gateway to understanding everything.

Seems to me that this part of the verse says that it's critical to understand that the part of the world that we consciously perceive and name is not the only aspect of existence -- or even the only aspect we can perceive. That we have to step beyond this naive perception to appreciate or grasp the Tao, the Path, or the Way.
 
 
grant
18:05 / 08.03.07
Here's the last bit of Chapter 1 from zhongwen.com. It's poetically interesting in that it reflects the previous line:

Xuan - obscure/dark/distant/abstruse
zhi - go/of/it
you - again/both..and/emphasis for negative statements/also (the right hand)
xuan - obscure/dark/distant/abstruse
,
zhong - crowd/masses (eye seeing a crowd)
miao - wonderful/subtle (young woman)
zhi - go/of/it
men - gate/school of thought/class or course (a double doorway, like saloon doors)

"Darkness go again/also darkness,
Crowd wonders of school-of-thought/gate."

Interesting that this "many things" (zhong) isn't the same as the scorpion "many things" -- so many of the other words are repeated.
 
 
grant
18:50 / 11.03.07
I dug up a Sam Hamill translation someone gave me recently; it has calligraphy in it from Kazuaki Tanahashi with these long explanations of what certain characters mean.

Hamill is both a poet (in English) and a translator from Chinese, Japanese, Greek, Latin and Estonian, which seems like just too many languages to be doing this stuff with.

Here's what he says about the character for "tao" (instead of trying to paste in the actual characters, I've just put the pinyin words in parentheses):

Even the character for tao is simultaneously simple and complex. For centuries, the character (tao) has been defined as containing two parts: (shou) a "head" (actually an "eye in a head"), and (chuo) a "walking foot" meaning "to go." Together they mean "the way" (both physically and philosophically/metaphorically) or "the path or road." If one removes the eyebrow over the eye, one gets the elements of the character "to see" (jian) (an "eye with legs").

The Taoist scholar/translator Red Pine, however, quotes a Taiwanese scholar who presents a persuasive case for the "head" in the character actually being "the moon" (yue). He suggests, therefore, that the "way" of the Tao Te Ching is centered in coming into harmony with the tides, with the phases of the moon that bring light in darkness. Even the universal symbol for Taoism represents waxing and waning moons: in darkness, light; in light, darkness.

He also says: ...[I]t is simply impossible to translate [the Tao Te Ching] into a Western language in a strictly literal way. Too many words and phrases convey plurisignations, multiple meanings.

So there's that.

His translation of chapter 1:
Tao defined is not the constant Tao.
No name names its eternal name.

The unnameable is the origin of heaven and earth;
named, it is the mother of ten thousand things.

Emptied of desire, we see the mystery;
Filled with desire, we see the manifestation of things.

Two names emerge from a single origin,
and both are called mysterious,

and the mystery itself is the gateway to perception.
 
 
grant
15:03 / 21.03.07
If I move onto a dictionary translation of the second verse, will I be writing into a vacuum?
 
 
electric monk
15:19 / 21.03.07
Way-ull, I've got some catching up to do on this thread but I wouldn't mind seeing more of the dictionary translations when you have time. I doubt there's any rush tho.
 
 
Closed for Business Time
16:10 / 21.03.07
What El Monk said. Plus, apologies for not posting here for a while. That said, I've printed out the two translations I was referring to up-thread, and have repeatedly kicked my own ass for not getting down with the program. Tonight, I'll be back tonight.
 
 
Princess
07:23 / 22.03.07
I will be here, full of vip, vim and vimto.
 
 
grant
14:34 / 22.03.07
Cool!

Here's the word-by-word version of Chapter 2, first two lines:

word - dictionary translation (visual etymology)

Tian - Heaven (the space above people)*
xia - below, lower, next (basically, above put upside down)
jie - all, every (noses/selves together)**
zhi - know, knowledge (arrow-like mouth)
mei - pretty/beautiful, delicious (a plump sheep)***
zhi - go/of/it/"summary of thing said" (a plant rising from the ground)
wei - do/act/be/become/for (monkey, sometimes with claws)****
mei - pretty/beautiful, delicious
,
si - cut, here, thus, refined (axe next to basket)
e or wu - evil/be disgusted/hate (deformed heart)
yi - finish, stop/already (snake or fetus, as used in the zodiac)
.

-----------

"Heaven below everyone's pretty knowledge to pretty action, Thus/refined hate/evil is stopped."

-----------

Jie - all, every
zhi - knowledge
shan - friendly/good/skilled (words with sheep, thus, gentle words)*****
zhi - go/of/it/"summary of thing said" (a plant rising from the ground)
wei - do/act/be/become/for (monkey, sometimes with claws)
shan - friendly/good/skilled
,
si - cut, here, thus, refined
bu - no, not/soar away (a bird flying away, looks a bit like tian)
shan - friendly/good/skilled
yi - finish, stop/already
.

-------------

"All friendly knowledge of friendly action, thus (the) not-friendly (is) stopped."

--------
--------
*Tian is the same word in "Tiananmen", the Heavenly Gates that open onto the big square in front of the imperial Forbidden City in Beijing. It's often associated with emperors and imperial stuff, so probably has more of a connotation of "power" than the English word "heaven."

** The picture of a nose means "self".

*** "Meiguo" is America, the "pretty country." This is used in beauty salons and as an element of pretty girls' names, so I think it might have a connotation of superficiality (like "Buffy").

**** Same "wei" as "wu wei," the big important concept of non-action.

***** Yep, it's the same sheep.

Final note: the two zhis are different characters, but the same pronunciation, so there's some punning going on here.
 
 
EvskiG
17:27 / 22.03.07
Here are a few other translations of the first two lines of Chapter 2:

Everyone recognizes beauty
only because of ugliness
Everyone recognizes virtue
only because of sin

(Star)

When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.

(Mitchell)

A bit different.

To me, this seems to say that aspiring to the good and beautiful ultimately is self-defeating, because to do so one has to create artificial (and to at least some extent arbitrary and potentially inaccurate) distinctions between good and bad, beautiful and ugly. In pursuit of the good and beautiful, you end up sacrificing a whole-systems perspective.
 
 
grant
17:34 / 22.03.07
I get a totally different sense of the second line from the dictionary -- more of a "by cultivating friendly thought and friendly action, thus the non-friendly is ended."

I'll have to root around to see what others have translated....
 
 
grant
19:56 / 22.03.07
I think zhongwen.com has misled me with that snaky yi -- Wengu (using the Waley translation) gives the same sense: "It is because every one under Heaven recognizes beauty as beauty, that the idea of ugliness exists."

Although there's a twist with their next one, from Lau: "The whole world recognizes the beautiful as the beautiful, yet this is only the ugly;
the whole world recognizes the good as the good, yet this is only the bad."

That yi must have some meaning of is-ness or existence, rather than just stopping or completion.
 
 
EvskiG
20:14 / 22.03.07
You need to get the Star book! (Searchable online at Amazon.)

It translates "yi" in verse 2 as only/alone/comes into being.
 
 
grant
20:27 / 22.03.07
The snake character yi is based on, though, is pronounced si (descending tone), which is a pun for "death" and considered a bad luck sound. (Also a pun for "four," which is an unlucky number.)

Weird language.

Anyway, reptiles and sprouting plants are a recurrent theme in this verse, as the next line will reveal....
 
 
grant
20:28 / 22.03.07
(The fetus thing makes "comes into being" make a lot more sense, though.)
 
 
grant
15:02 / 23.03.07
OK, so. (If anyone else is interested, yi looks like this and comes from si, which looks like this. You can kind of see the snake and the fetus in the squiggle.)

Here's the next line in Chapter 2:

------------

You - To have, exist, as (in comparisons) (right hand grasping the moon)*
wu - without, not (person dancing, or forest-destroy-multitude-person)
xiang - minister (official)/ appear/examine/mutually (eye behind tree)**
sheng - grow/produce/give birth to/fresh,raw (a plant rising from the ground)***
,
nan - bird with golden wings/difficult/disaster (bird plus yellow clay)
yi - easy/change/exchange (lizard, shown as sun-like head over banner-like legs)****
xiang - minister (official)/ appear/examine/mutually
cheng - become/complete/tenth (a lance with a nail )
,
chang/zhang - duration/long/strength (competence) OR grow, senior (high table, person and death)*****
duan - short, brief (arrow with dish)
xiang - minister (official)/ appear/examine/mutually
xing - shape, form (lines or feathers equalling reality)
,
gao - tall, a high level (room under pavilion roof in countryside)
xia - below, next ("above" upside down)
xiang - minister (official)/ appear/examine/mutually
qing - lean, bend (leaning person)******
,
yin - sound (crime+mouth+sound)
sheng - sound, tone, fame (percussion instrument next to ear)
xiang - minister (official)/ appear/examine/mutually
he/huo/han - harmony, peace/ Japanese/ and (mouth with grain)
,
qian - float forward/front/walk forward/before/former (feet on boat with knife)
hou - fall behind/back/afterward (small steps with shackled feet)
xiang - minister (official)/ appear/examine/mutually
sui - follow/accompany/comply with (halting movement ((step+stop)) with bad meat ((meat+ destroyed [ramparts+left hand])))

-----------

"Exist without examine birth, the difficult and easy examination become/completes, long and short examine appearances, high and low bend to examine, the tones of sound examine harmonies, forward and behind examine together/accompaniment."

Or something like that.
-----------
* They say "moon" here might really be the sign for "meat," since both are graphically similar and the meaning is "abundance."

** This is the first Chinese character I learned. It's the root of my daughter's name. In China, it seems to appear a lot in safety notices and official documents -- things from a ministry, or things advising you to watch out. Xiang also gives its name to xiangqi, which was one of the strategy games in which a perfected person should be skilled (along with calligraphy, music & martial arts).

*** Unlike zhi, this sprout is based on the character for earth. Thus, it's sort of an opposite for tian. Visually, it actually resembles the characters for "jade" and "emperor" -- two figures that, mythologically, unite or stand between earth and heaven.

**** Not the snake/fetus yi, but another reptile. The tone is different, but there still mmmight be a pun there. This *is* the same yi as in Yijing, the I Ching, Book of Changes.

***** Chang Cheng is the Great Wall, Chang Jiang is the Yangtze River. Think "landmark."

****** This is a homonym for "please," as in, "Please, come this way."
 
 
grant
17:12 / 23.03.07
Waley translates xiang in the sense of "mutually":

For truly, Being and Not-being grow out of one another;
Difficult and easy complete one another.
Long and short test one another;
High and low determine one another.
Pitch and mode give harmony to one another.
Front and back give sequence to one another.

Lau seems to do the same:
Thus Something and Nothing produce each other;
The difficult and the easy complement each other;
The long and the short off-set each other;
The high and the low incline towards each other;
Note and sound harmonize with each other;
Before and after follow each other.

As does Frederick Balfour (1884), and D.T. Suzuki and, more subtly, Lok Sang Ho (pdf):

Existence and Emptiness are concepts
that make sense by comparison.
Similarly, long lends meaning to short, and high to low.
Harmony is produced when sounds combine in unison.
Because the fore goes, so the back follows.

Check that last if you'd like to see the actual characters. Check Suzuki for commentary on mutuality and medieval conceptions of the devil (who wanted to be God, see, so each one had a mutual relation with the other).

So no examining, no government ministers. Mutuality.
 
 
Closed for Business Time
17:40 / 25.03.07
Addis/Lombardo

Recognize beauty and ugliness is born.
Recognize good and evil is born.
Is and Isn't produce each other. Hard depends on easy, Long is tested by short,
High is determined by low, Sound is harmonized by voice, After is followed by before.

...

I was just reading and thinking a bit about the supposed anarchism in Daodejing (M. Rothbard I think is the one most responsible for popularising that notion) - how the ideas about spontaneous moral and political order correspond with ideas of libertarianist and anarchist social theories.
I read this text primarily as mystical, tinted in a intuitionist/shamanist colour, speaking mostly to persons of "elevation", people with good de, in Dao; although this might ignore the political and moral didactic qualities of the text.

To illustrate, a quotation from Zhuang Zi from here:
A fully achieved person is like a spirit! The great marshes could be set on fire, but she wouldn't feel hot. The rivers in China could all freeze over, but she wouldn't feel cold. Thunder could suddenly echo through the mountains, wind could cause a tsunami in the ocean, but she wouldn't be startled. A person like that could ride through the sky on the floating clouds, straddle the sun and moon, and travel beyond the four seas. Neither death nor life can cause changes within her, and there's little reason for her to even consider benefit or harm.

This ideal hardly seems to bear any resemblance to economic-politic wo/man of anarchist and libertarian thought. This is a person freed from the "tyranny" of sign, signifier and signified, a unitary, direct embodiment and expression of Dao+De. As such, an unlikely candidate for a libertarian at least, though certain forms of utopian anarchism seem more resonant with this stance of no-mind, non-attachment and non-judgment.

So, I read the lines in question as being primarily about how to personally achieve this ultimate mystical sumting-rutha. A manual in practical epistemology more than a sociopolitical manifesto.
 
 
grant
16:17 / 26.03.07
If you're interested in practical epistemology, you might dig Lieh Tzu (or Liezi), the "pragmatic Taoist" who once wrote*:

There was once a man in Sung who carved a mulberry leaf out of jade for his prince. It took three years to complete, and it imitated Nature so exquisitely in its down, its glossiness, and its general configuration from tip to stem, that, if placed in a heap of real mulberry leaves, it could not be distinguished from them. This man was subsequently pensioned by the Sung State as a reward for his skill. Lieh Tzu, hearing of it, said: 'If it took the Creator three years to make a single leaf, there would be very few trees with leaves on them. The Sage will rely not so much on human science and skill as on the operations of Tao.'

* Or was credited with writing -- some folks aren't sure he ever actually existed. He may have predated Chuang Tzu, or the bulk of his writings may have come hundreds of years after Chuang Tzu died. It seems like Lieh Tzu would probably just tell people to stop worrying about who wrote what and just look at the words themselves.
 
 
Closed for Business Time
16:27 / 26.03.07
Thanks for the tip, grant. Seems very interesting. Anyone got thoughts on the Daodejing's roles as "mystical manual"/ethical tract/political manifesto?
 
 
grant
17:38 / 26.03.07
I really don't want to monopolize this thread (believe it or not), but I think it's probably important to realize that a fair amount of the Jing has to do with political (and martial) conduct, like advice to generals and kings.

I think the "anarchist" tag gets hung on it because 1/ wu wei can easily be read as the ultimate laissez-faire ideology, and 2/ because of the legend surrounding Laozi as someone who left a decent government job and went into self-imposed exile as an act of protest.
 
 
Closed for Business Time
20:47 / 26.03.07
I really don't want to monopolize this thread

Oh but you simply must.

Some more of my half-baked ruminations on the subject -

Yes. The Jing was and is to varying degrees (mainly?) read as a ritualist/legalist text, as is, I guess, many other post-DDJ Taoist and Confucianist texts - written as advice for rulers, often by authors who were themselves in positions of power.
(Would it perhaps be interesting to compare Il principe with the Daodejing in this light?)

One interesting difference, with regards to anarchist tendencies in Daodejing contrasted with historically modern political anarchism, is the vast difference in their conceptualisations of the basic entities that constitute cosmos. In Daoism and Confucianism - an image of society that is holistic and deeply interdependent, almost holographic. The emperor has only to be seated the correct way for the empire to be ruled properly. There is a micro=macro relationship, a basic similarity between individual and society, Dao and de, the elements and wo-man, wo-man and the soul.

In antiquity Fu Hsi ruled the world we live in.
He looked up and saw the symbols hanging down from Heaven.
He looked down and saw the patterns on the Earth.
He saw markings on birds and animals
and the places where they lived on the Earth.
He drew on what was near within his body.
He drew on what was far.
He spontaneously brought forth the Eight Diagrams
to connect with the bright spirits
and to categorize the natures of the myriad things.
He was the first to use Change to help the people.

The Ta Chuan, translated by Stephen Karcher


... He spontaneously brought forth.. The DDJ uses paradox, a staple in meditative work (and moral philosophy, but that's for elsewhere) in order to cultivate an ambiguous and transcendental state of readiness*spontaneity*synchrony-nonawareness (pardon my wordsalad), of Dao, de, the changes.
Fu Hsi aligned himself with and/or created the natural order of what I here very imprecisely call ancient Chinese culture, its cosmology, psychology and morality. Laozi borrows from these earlier founding myths in crafting the central wei wu wei paradox, action without action, diminishing the will to interfere while at the same time being at the center of being, Dao. To skip ahead (using Waley via Wikipedia )this time -

The man of highest "power" does not reveal himself as a possessor of "power"; Therefore he keeps his "power". The man of inferior "power" cannot rid it of the appearance of "power"; Therefore he is in truth without "power".

..Shit. Running out of time. Gotta continue this later.
 
 
grant
02:31 / 27.03.07
I don't think I've heard of the Ta Chuan. What is it? Fu Hsi (or Fuxi) I know. Legendary discoverer of the trigrams. The Yijing, by the way, is often considered a Daoist text. Depends on what you mean by Daoism, though.

The oldest copies of the Yijing and the Daodejing were found together in a place called Mawangdui.

The Jing was and is to varying degrees (mainly?) read as a ritualist/legalist text

Language note: the Legalists were a specific school of Chinese philosophy -- a rather nasty bunch of book burners, as far as I can tell.

I get what you mean, though.

written as advice for rulers, often by authors who were themselves in positions of power.
(Would it perhaps be interesting to compare Il principe with the Daodejing in this light?)

Sun Tzu is generally considered to be a Daoist (although as I referred to just now, "Daoist" can be a pretty broad category).

But yeah, I think philosophers in general were expected to say something about rulership, and wouldn't be considered "real" if they didn't.

I wouldn't be surprised if Machiavelli and Laozi had a few things to say that were pretty similar.

In Daoism and Confucianism - an image of society that is holistic and deeply interdependent, almost holographic.

Yes. It's possible to read Laozi as a critique of Confucius*, since he privileges natural processes over the kind of transcendent human ethic that Confucius upheld -- but really, they're more complementary texts.

*These different forms of names are beginning to confuse me. He should really be Kongfuzi, except that's even more confusing.
 
 
grant
02:36 / 27.03.07
Oh, and on "ritualist": Confucius and Laozi don't really have much to say about how rituals are conducted -- it's not like Leviticus, where there are exhaustive descriptions of purification rites and sacrificial preparations. I think Confucius mentions a few things about how music used to be so useful and good (i.e., for ritual purposes), but now it's just used to appeal to baser instincts (for entertainment), and a couple sideways references to the ethics of ritual. Laozi gives us even less of a clue about mechanics. Plenty on the thoughts behind the process, but not so much on the ritual-as-ritual.
 
 
grant
16:29 / 29.03.07
So, the next bit of Ch. 2.

word - dictionary translation (visual etymology)
-------------------------------------------------------

Heng - Constant/Permanent (heart beside boat crossing river)
ye - also (a funnel)
.

Shi - correct/yes/be/alright (as concession) (foot on line ((stop)) by sun)
yi - continue/use/by means of, according to (the snaky,fetal "stop" yi upside down and altered)
sheng - sage/sacred (ear beside reports ((mouth speaking to person on earth)))
ren - person,people (legs, representing a human)
chu - place,office, point, feature/handle, manage, get along with, dwell (person finding a stool beside tiger)
wu - without, not (person dancing, or forest-destroy-multitude((40))-people)
wei - act,do,serve as,become/for (female monkey with claws)
zhi - go/of/it (plant rising from ground)
shi - job, occupation, business (scribe ((hand holding pen, looks like "central")) and zhi, rising plant)
,

---------

"Also the permanent. Correct according to sage people is the place of (or management of) the business of non-action,"

(I think the first two-word sentence probably refers to the prior sentence.)

----------
xin/hang - walk, do, o.k./line, company, profession (step and stop ((two feet, maybe left and right, doing things)))
bu - no, not/soar away (bird rising into heavens)
yan - word/speak (crime of mouth)
zhi - go/of/it (plant rising from ground)
jiao - teach/advise/religion (hand with stick and child supporting interactive movement as if a parent, thus discipline for education)
;

-----

"...a profession not to speak of religion...."

-----
wan - scorpion/myriad/10,000 (animal's butt under head under two claws)
wu - thing, object (ox with military banner)
zuo - do, make, act or regard as/product, work (n.) (person suddenly active)
er - and, yet/effect, means (a beard)
fu - not (rods bound together)
shi - begin, start/beginning (woman and joy ((mouth exhaling -- the exhalation is yi, the fetal snake)))
,

------

"...100,000 things and not beginning,..."

------
sheng - give birth to, produce/grow/fresh (plant rising from earth)
er - and, yet/effect, means (a beard)
fu - not (rods bound together)
you - possess, exist/as (comparison) (right hand grasping moon's abundance or meat)
,
wei - act,do,serve as,become/for (female monkey with claws)
er - and, yet/effect, means (a beard)
fu - not (rods bound together)
shi - rely or depend on (heart with court or temple)
,
------------

"...giving birth and not possessing, acting without depending on,..."

-----------

gong - achievement, work, deeds, time (work ((carpenter's square)) with strength ((tendon)))*
cheng - become/finish/accomplish/10th (lance with nail)
er - and, yet/effect, means (a beard)
bu - no, not/soar away (bird rising into heavens)
ju - reside, live (sitting person/torso beside 10 mouths)
.
-------

"...work accomplished yet not residing."

------

Fu - man, husband (standing person with hairpin ((symbol of adulthood)), resembles tian, "heaven")
wei - only/promise (mouth with pigeon)**
fu - not (rods bound together)
ju - reside, live (sitting person/torso beside 10 mouths)
,
shi - correct/yes/be/alright (as concession) (foot on line ((stop)) by sun) - yi - continue/use/by means of, according to (the snaky,fetal "stop" yi upside down and altered)
bu - no, not/soar away (bird rising into heavens)
qu - go/remove (person ((resembling ground, rising from earth)) over bending line, "selfish")
.

----------

"A man's promise doesn't reside, correct means don't go (create motion)."

------------

In sum:

"Also the permanent. Correct according to sage people is the place of (or management of) the business of non-action, a profession not to speak of religion; 100,000 things and not beginning, giving birth and not possessing, acting without depending on, work accomplished yet not residing. A man's promise doesn't reside, correct means don't go (create motion)."


-----------
* This is the same gong in gongfu, or kung fu.

**Shows up in the name of a few ideologies, like materialism, wei-wu-lun, only-object-theory.

Note:
I'm really curious why there are three negatives in this: wu, bu, and fu.
 
 
grant
16:32 / 29.03.07
Frederic Balfour translation of the same section:

Wherefore the Sage pursues a policy of inaction, and teaches men in silence; [i.e., he conforms to the TAO or Course of Nature, which proceeds silently and spontaneously, and thus the people learn to govern themselves by his example without needing the interferences of legislation and instruction].

He forms all things without shrinking [from the labour]; produces them without claiming the possession [of virtue]; acts without presuming on [his ability]; and completes his achievements without taking any credit to himself. It is only he who thus does not stand upon his merit; and therefore his merit does not depart from him.
 
 
grant
18:32 / 29.03.07
Coincidentally, I just went to write this blog thing I do on the I Ching. The hexagram today was the 32nd -- Heng, constancy or duration.
 
 
electric monk
15:07 / 04.04.07
Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness.
All can know good as good only because there is evil.

Therefore having and not having arise together.
Difficult and easy complement each other.
Long and short contrast each other:
High and low rest upon each other;
Voice and sound harmonize each other;
Front and back follow one another.

Therefore the sage goes about doing nothing, teaching no-talking.
The ten thousand things rise and fall without cease,
Creating, yet not.
Working, yet not taking credit.
Work is done, then forgotten.
Therefore it lasts forever.

(Feng & English)

I'm having a bit of a time with the "Voice and sound" line. I keep wanting to read it as "Silence and sound" or thinking that that should be the line. Actually, could it be read as "the tones of sound harmonize"? Because that puts me in mind of the ten thousand things rising and falling without cease, an aural shape rising from cacophany.

Anyone got thoughts on the Daodejing's roles as "mystical manual"/ethical tract/political manifesto?

I've got one or two. TBH, the political aspect of the Tao is one of the things I find troubling about it. I think we'll get into this more when we cover the next section, so I'll hold my comments till then. Besides, I need to look at the other translations to round out my perspective.
 
 
grant
16:42 / 04.04.07
I'm having a bit of a time with the "Voice and sound" line. I keep wanting to read it as "Silence and sound" or thinking that that should be the line. Actually, could it be read as "the tones of sound harmonize"?

Well, the characters show a person speaking, and then a percussion instrument, so maybe "voice and music"?
It's interesting to think of them as opposites in some way -- although there *may* be something with yin being based on "crime+mouth" (which is "word" or "spoken word"), and "crime" being in turn based on "offense against heaven" which may get into an idea of spoken word being dissonant, or singing being godless, while instrumental music (especially drums and gongs -- the sheng character literally shows hollow stones being struck to create sound) is used ritually, properly and as a general social good.

Along those lines, Confucius was a guitar wank.
 
  

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