Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching (7 page)

The phrase
wan
wuh
, occurring very frequently, means the material
world, all beings, everything. I often use the traditional literal translation,
"the ten thousand things," because it’s lively and concrete, but at
times I say "everything" or "the things of this world."

I use "wise soul" or "the wise" for the
several words and phrases usually rendered as Sage, Wise Man, Saint, Great Man,
and so on, and I avoid the pronoun usually associated with these terms. I wanted
to make a version that doesn’t limit wisdom to males, and doesn’t give the
impression that a follower of the Tao has to be a professional, full-time
Holier-than-Thou who lives up above snowline. Unimportant, uneducated,
untrained men and women can be wise souls. (I thought of using mensch.)

With the same intention, I often use the plural pronoun
where other translations use the singular, to avoid unnecessary gendering and to
keep from suggesting the idea of uniqueness, singularity. I appreciate the
Chinese language for making such choices available.

Certain obscure passages and verses that change or obstruct
the sense of the poems may be seen as errors or interpolations by copyists. I
decided to eject some of them.
My authority for doing so is nil—a
poet’s judgment that "this doesn’t belong here."
It takes nerve
to drop a line that
Waley
has left in. My version is
openly dependent on the judgment of the scholars. But my aim was to make aesthetic,
intellectual, and spiritual sense, and I felt that efforts to treat material
extraneous to the text as integral to it weaken its integrity. Anyhow, rejects
are discussed and printed in the commentary on the page with the poem, or in the
Notes.

The Titles of the
Poems:
Carus
is one of the few translators to use
titles; they are in both his Chinese text and his translation. I follow his
version sometimes, and sometimes invent my own.

We now have two versions of the
Tao
Te
Ching
: the
texts that have been standard since the third century CE, and the
Ma
wang
tui
texts of the mid-first century CE, not discovered
till
1973 .
They differ in many details, but in only
one major respect: the order of the two books that constitute the text.

The three words
tao
te
ching
,
put into English without syntactical connection, are "way power
classic." The usual interpretation gives the meaning of this title as
something on the order of "the classic [text] about the way and [its]
power." The two books are titled (in some versions)
Tao
, "The Way," and
Te
, "The Power." (I
personally find that the poems do not consistently reflect that division of
subject-matter.) In the
Ma
wang
tui
, the Power comes
before the Way. I keep the standard order, in which
tao
precedes
te
, and the
famous stanza about the go-able way and the namable name is the first chapter,
not the thirty-eighth. Where there are differences in wording, I follow
sometimes the standard text, sometimes Robert G.
Henricks’s
translation of the
Ma
wang
tui
, whichever seemed more useful.

Here, for the words in the third verse that I render
"what it wants," I use the
Ma
wang
tui
text. The words in
the standard text mean boundaries, or limits, or outcomes. This version seems
to follow more comprehensibly from the preceding lines.

And yet the idea of what can be delimited or made manifest
is relevant. In the last verse, the two "whose identity is mystery"
may be understood to be the hidden, the
unnameable
,
the limitless vision of the freed soul—and the manifest, the nameable, the
field of vision limited by our wants. But the endlessness of all that is, and the
limitation of mortal bodily life, are the same, and their sameness is the key
to the door.

As I said above, in a few of the poems I leave out lines
which I find weaken the coherence of the text to the point that I believe them to
be a long-ago reader's marginal notes which got incorporated in later
copyings
. My authority for these omissions is strictly
personal and aesthetic. Here I omit the last two lines. Translations of them vary
greatly; my version is:

Mere talk runs dry.
Best keep to the center.

There are times Lao Tzu sounds very like Henry David
Thoreau, but Lao Tzu was kinder. When Thoreau says to distrust any enterprise that
requires new clothes, I distrust him. He is macho, flaunting his asceticism.
Lao Tzu knows that getting all entangled with the external keeps us from the
eternal, but (see chapter 80) he also understands that sometimes people like to
get dressed up.

T'ien
hsia
,
"under heaven," i.e. the Empire, or the world: here I render it as
"the public good," "the commonwealth," and "the body politic."

J. P. Seaton comments: "When Lao Tzu mentions 'the
Empire' or 'all under heaven,' he does so with the assumption that all his
readers know that it is a commonwealth where only the ruler who rules by virtue
of virtue alone is legitimate."

Henricks
considers these three
chapters to belong together.

The last two lines of 19 are usually printed as the first
two lines of 20, but
Henricks
thinks they belong
here, and I follow him.

In 18, line 6, the words
hsiao
tzu
are traditionally translated as "filial
piety and paternal affection," a Confucian ideal. In that chapter Lao Tzu
cites these dutiful families as a symptom of social disorder. But in chapter 19,
line 4,
hsiao
tzu
appears
as the good that will result when people cease being moralistic. Unable to
reconcile these contradictory usages, and feeling that Lao Tzu was far more
likely to use Confucian language satirically than straightforwardly, I fudged the
translation in chapter 19, calling it "family feeling." Evidently we
aren't the only society or generation to puzzle over what a family is and ought
to be.

Sometimes I translate the characters
su
and
p'u
with such words as
simple
,
natural
. Though the phrase "the
uncarved
block" has become familiar to many, yet metaphor may distance ideas and
weaken a direct statement. But sometimes, as here, I use the traditional metaphors,
because the context so clearly implies knowing something as an artist knows her
materials, keeping hold on something solid.

The standard texts ask what's the difference between
wei
and
o
, which might be translated
"yes" and "
yessir
." The
Ma
wang
tui
has
wei
and
ho
: "yes" and "no."
This is parallel with the next line ("good and bad" in the standard
text, "beautiful and ugly" in the
Ma
wang
tui
) .
Here's a case where the older text surely is correct,
the later ones corrupt.

In the first two lines of the second verse, the
Ma
wang
tui
text is perfectly clear: "A person whom everyone
fears ought to be feared." The standard text is strange, obscure:
"What the people fear must be feared." Yet the next lines follow from
it as they don't from the
Ma
wang
tui
; and after much
pondering I followed the standard text.

In the second verse the word
shih
, "loss," gives trouble to all the translators.
Waley
calls it "the reverse of the power" and
"inefficacy," and
Waley's
interpretations are
never to be ignored. All the same, I decided to take it not as the opposite of
the Way and the power, but as a kind of shadow-Way. Identify yourself with
loss, failure, the obscure, the
unpossessible
, and
you'll be at home even there.

My version of the first four lines of the second verse
doesn't follow any of the scholarly translations, and is quite unjustified, but
at least, unlike them, it makes sense without horrible verbal contortions.

In all the texts, the fourth verse reads:

So they say: "The Way is great
,
heaven is great,
earth is great,
and the king is great.
Four
greatnesses
in the world
,
and the king is one of them. "

Yet in the next verse, which is the same series in reverse
order, instead of "the king" it's "the people" or
"humanity." I think a Confucian copyist slipped the king in. The king
garbles the sense of the poem and goes against the spirit of the book. I
dethroned him.

The last words of the chapter,
tzu
jan
, which I
render "what is," bear many interpretations.
Waley
translates them as "the Self-So," glossing them as "the
unconditioned" or "what is so of itself";
Henricks
,
"what is so on its own"; Lau, "that which is naturally so";
Gibbs-Cheng, "Nature";
Feng
-English,
"what is natural";
Lafargue
, "things
as they are." I came out closest to
Lafargue
in
this case.

I follow the
Ma
wang
tui
text for the third
verse, which fits the theme much better than the non-sequitur standard text,
"Amid fine sights they sit calm and aloof." The syntax of the
Ma
wang
tui
also clarifies the last verse, relating it to the last
verse of chapter 13.

The first two lines of the third verse say that the not-good
are the
t'zu
:
"the capital" (
Carus
), or "the charge"
(
Feng
-English), or "the stock in trade" (
Waley
), or "the raw material"
(
Henricks
) of the good.
Lafargue
has "the less excellent are material for the excellent," and
Gibbs-Cheng, "mediocre people have the potential to be good people."
The latter two interpretations seemed the most useful to me. And so I call
these makings, this raw material, "a student"—somebody learning to be
or know better.

The last lines of the second and third verses are translated
in wildly various ways; my "hidden light" and "deep
mystery" are justified if, as I believe, Lao Tzu is signaling that his
apparently simple statements have complex implications and need thinking about.
Of course, this is true of everything in the book.

"The natural" and "natural wood"
are
the same word,
p'u
, which I talked about in the note to chapter 19. Given
the amount of cutting up and carving that goes on in the last verse (which
seems a kind of footnote to the first three)
,
we
really seem to be talking about wood.

Chinese lends itself to puns, and this last verse is rife with
them.
Waley
says that
ch'i
("useful things")
can mean "vessels" or "vassals," and
chih
can mean "carving"
or "governing." A great government wouldn't chop and hack at human
nature, trying to make leaders out of sow's ears. But the paradox of the last two
lines surely exceeds any single interpretation.

The phrase
t'ien
hsia
occurs only in the first
verse, where I translate it "the world." I begin the second verse
with the literal translation of it, "under heaven." I wanted the phrase
in the poem as a reminder that the world of these extremes—of hot and cold,
weakness and strength, gain and loss—is the sacred object, the place under heaven.

I have omitted certain lines included by the translators who
are my sources and guides. In all the texts, the second verse begins:

A courteous person
in peacetime honors the left
,
in wartime, the right.

And the last verse begins:

In celebrations the left is the
place of honor
,
in mourning the right is the place of honor:
so lesser officers stand on the left,
the generalissimo on the right,
just as they would at a funeral.

I consider these passages to be commentaries or marginal
glosses that got copied into the text. J. P. Seaton says, "What were once supports
by analogy to common ceremonial practice are now relevant only to the
historian." Here they confuse the clear, powerful statement that
culminates in the last four lines. The confusion already existed when the
Ma
wang
tui
version was written, and there seems to be no way
of sorting it out now except by radical surgery.