daode jing

          to follow the dao means being unfulfilled
          never done never starting all over again

The following is Thomas Meyer's Afterword to his wonderful translation of the daode jing. I quote it for the beauty of the prose as much anything.

Throughout this translation, I cite only four Chinese words (dao, de, lao, and zi). These I preferred to transliterate using the pinyin system which shies away from capital letters. The author of the daode jing (or more commonly in English, Tao-Te Ching) is someone called laozi (or Lao-Tzu). The character lao means “old”. And zi literally means “new born,” but is used to refer in general to a person, any person. So, in English laozi might be “old boy,” “old one,” or “old guy.” But just how dao or de would be rendered is, in many ways, the subject of this book. Throughout the unbroken text, for the sake of orientation and comparison, marginal numerals appear quietly to indicate the beginning of each section.

Although I am no speaker of Mandarin (nor reader, nor writer either), I learned many years ago how to use a Chinese dictionary. So when I found a couple of translations of the daode jing that had the original on facing pages, I decided to take a shot at reading the work first hand. Eventually, a database was set up on my laptop, and everywhere I went I carried it, the text, and a couple of dictionaries with me like a bag of needlepoint. A year or so later, I had myself a rough translation, concordance, and literal mapping of laozi's book. So, for ten years, each spring I have read the daode jing, character by character, one chapter a day, eighty-one days, five thousand characters. All the while, a translation seemed obvious. Though I tried, I didn't press too hard, heeding the old man's advice to look for and follow that inherent, natural course of things themselves. Nonetheless I wondered, how would you say dao in English; what would de be?

Out of the blue, it dawned on me that there was no need to find a phrase or phrases for dao. It was something almost everyone had heard of. In fact, it's in Microsoft Word's dictionary. Nor did I really have to English the term de. These days no one even bothers with rendering the title – though I had come up with How Come? Or, even more appropriate, despite being a bit frivolous, Wha' Happened?

Both these terms (dao and de), while being evident, are never really to be seen as agencies. Therefore, it was meet and right to let them remain in their pristine, uncapitalized, bauhaus (slash) pinyin purity. Just so upon the page. All at once, the text itself seemed to me like a rippling out upon the pool where these two ideas were being plopped over and over.

I had leapt over a big hurdle. While an even bigger one was overcome almost instantaneously. The fear and trembling every translator of the daode jing faces is the opening section or chapter. It seems nothing can go forward until that is set. A plan came to me. I would not begin at the beginning nor stop when I got to the end. Rather, I would use chance operations to dictate the order in which I translated each section. When I was finished, I would shuffle them back into their original sequence.

But upon reassembling the book, I realized that chopping it up into chapters didn't make sense. It worked entirely against the way my translation had turned out. The “clear pointing” (no commas, no periods), the lack of capital letters, the frequent right-angle turns the syntax took, the unbroken flow of couplets all called out for a text that cascaded from page to page. Not one that had put itself forward in a series of short, pithy vignettes. Besides, these divisions do not occur in the earliest manuscripts, and might, in fact, be somewhat accidental – the copyists having to work with pages that were actually strips of bamboo tied, untied, and tied back up into bundles. Even bolder on my part was not indicating where the text divides itself into two major segments: the dao and the de. Again, earlier manuscripts often set the de before the dao, so it seemed to me flux was more important that framing, that any parsing would impede momentum. That was what laozi was talking about, I thought. Flexibility. Things getting from here to there. Liberties like these, and the many others I have taken, are justified, I think, by the plethora of daode jing translations already out there. Each of which, then, becomes commentary by virtue of its reworking the original using different strategies of tone, approach, or view; in short, by virtue of the translators chosen “rhetorical pitch.”

Then, to my astonishment, I began to see something had been hidden yet present in the project all along: the daode jing is table talk. An old man, not holding forth really, but just telling someone what he knows. After dinner, the dishes pushed aside, a glass of whiskey, a cigarette. Or a pub and a pint of beer, even. All throughout the Seventies, the poet Basil Bunting would visit Jonathan Williams and myself where we were living in the Yorkshire Dales. This was like that. The tone was conversational, not canonical. Honesty and simplicity foremost, rather than piety or complication. There were no themes, ideas per se. Following one upon another, things circled, darted away, appeared again, or vanished altogether, with the natural ease and bonhomie of good talk.

Of course, I now remembered the traditional story of the daode jing's coming into being.

Many years ago an old man lived in the capital of a place called China. He was the emperor's librarian and renowned for having read everything there was to read. When the philosopher Confucius paid him his respects, he came away saying:

Birds fly. Fish swim. Animals run.
They can be caught, shot or trapped.
But this old man is like an air-borne dragon.
He can't be snared.

Then as now, things could not get worse but did. Big troubles were afoot. Those with power abused it. Those without grew cunning and two-faced. The old man could finally stomach no more greed, dishonesty, or corruption. The time had come, he told himself, to get out of China.

He climbed upon an ox, and leaving behind what little he owned, headed west toward the high mountains of another country. When he reached a gate that led up a steep pass, the border guard stopped him and said:

I recognize you and cannot let you go until you tell me everything you know. Otherwise we will see all that is worthwhile swallowed up by all that is not.

The old man welcomed a rest. The sun almost down, a bottle of wine opened, the two sat in the little station hut. The guard listened as the old man told him what he knew, which he said was not much. In fact, the moon was still in the middle of the sky when he got up to leave.

He was never heard of or seen again. The five thousand words spoken that night are all that is left of him. And that, in the mind of their speaker, was five thousand too many.

Thomas Meyer, Afterword to daode jing, Flood Editions, Chicago, 2005, ISBN 0974690279

          in matters of the heart
          the important thing is depth