Religion Of The Month Club: Tao Tao Ching

Welcome to the Religion of the Month Club,

Where we discuss texts from the world's scriptural traditions.

In this episode,

We will be discussing the first chapter of the Tao Te Ching.

As for the way,

The way that can be spoken of is not the constant way.

As for names,

The name that can be named is not the constant name.

The nameless is the beginning of the ten thousand things.

The named is the mother of the ten thousand things.

Therefore,

Those constantly without desires,

By this means,

Will perceive its subtlety.

Those constantly with desires,

By this means,

Will see only that which they yearn for and seek.

These two together emerge.

They have different names,

Yet they're called the same.

That which is even more profound than the profound,

The gateway of all subtleties.

This is the first chapter of the Tao Te Ching.

It is incredibly short,

And yet incredibly deep and complicated.

The whole text is about fifty some-odd characters in Chinese long.

Each character being approximately one word.

The reason I say approximately fifty characters is that there are different versions of this text.

So they vary slightly in length.

And because the original Chinese is so dense,

There are,

Even a single character change can make a profound difference.

So for example,

When I was trying to figure out which translation to use,

I struggled a little bit because of a piece in verse three.

So the translation I have is,

The nameless is the beginning of the ten thousand things.

Another version,

The version by James Leggi,

Who is one of the earliest translations and one of the most standard,

I want to say.

Not necessarily the best,

But because it was one of the more scholastic and more literal,

And one of the earliest,

It's had a profound effect on all subsequent translations.

Well,

I want to say kind of like the King James Version of the Bible,

But different.

Anyway,

Leggi has this passage translated as,

Conceived of having no name,

It is the original heaven and earth.

Conceived of having a name,

It is the mother of all things.

So in this case,

In Leggi's case,

The parallelism is between the originator of heaven and earth,

And the mother of all things.

So heaven and earth versus all things.

Whereas in the translation I just read,

It is the beginning of the ten thousand things and the mother of the ten thousand things.

So the ten thousand things appears in both halves of the verse.

There's only four sections here.

So there's a difference,

Really,

Between heaven and earth and all things.

Now,

All things in Chinese is actually ten thousand things.

That is,

And I'm going to get the tone wrong,

So forgive me,

But wanwu is ten thousand things,

Which is often translated as all things.

And then tian di is heaven and earth.

You might think of those as synonyms,

And in many ways they are,

But there is obviously a nuance of difference between them.

And so when I was first approaching this text,

Looking at Leggi's translation and comparing it to other translations,

One of the things that I struggled with is this passage.

The nameless is the beginning of the ten thousand things,

The named is the mother of the ten thousand things.

So the problem that I had with this is that it's clearly trying to set up a difference between nameless and named.

And I was thinking of beginning and mother as essentially synonymous,

And so therefore trying to find difference in the other part.

So I thought,

Well,

Okay,

As nameless,

It's the beginning of heaven and earth,

And as named,

It is the mother of the ten thousand things.

In that version,

The difference between the two is more apparent.

You could think of the nameless as being kind of more primordial,

Kind of like chapter one of Genesis,

Where it's just creating the heaven and the earth.

And then the named,

Once it's named,

Then it becomes the mother of the ten thousand things,

The myriad things that exist in the created universe.

But when I found that actually it seems that more,

There seems to be more emphasis on the versions that have the ten thousand things being the same in both parts of the verse.

And the only difference being between beginning and mother.

So this is the version that Wang Bi prefers.

He says,

The way he translates it is,

Therefore,

While they,

That is,

The ten thousand kinds of entities,

Are still constantly without desire,

One has something by means of which to perceive its,

That is,

The ultimate principle,

Subtlety.

While they,

That is,

The ten thousand kinds of entities,

Are constantly with desires,

One has something by means of which to perceive its,

That is,

The ultimate principle,

Limiting.

So he's kind of going in a different direction.

He's saying that the first part is about subtlety,

The second part is about limiting.

But actually the version,

The explanation that I found the most interesting is to think of mother not as progenitor,

Not in her role as progenitor,

But as her role as nurturer.

So I think that this is actually what is happening in this verse.

So the nameless is the beginning of the ten thousand things.

So nameless is the,

Is how the ten thousand things come into existence.

The named is the mother of the ten thousand things.

The mother,

Not as the source of life per se,

But as the nurturer,

And the one that sort of shapes the being into adulthood.

And so it makes sense here that the named is what forms things,

What shapes things.

Think of this in terms of the mind,

Right?

The source of consciousness,

Or the source of being,

Is somewhat ineffable.

This is a mystery that we are nowhere near being able to solve.

The philosophy of mind is still trying to grapple with what's referred to as the explanatory gap,

Or the hard problem as David Chalmers puts it,

The origin of consciousness is entirely mysterious.

However,

The contents of consciousness are not so mysterious,

Right?

This is the realm of psychology.

And we have words for this,

And words shape thought.

So we can understand how words shape thought without necessarily understanding how thought exists in the first place.

Going back to the first verse,

This is of course the very first verse in the Tao Te Ching in nearly every translation,

Or nearly every edition I should say.

The one exception I'll call out quickly,

Actually the translation I just read is by Robert G.

Henrichs,

Who cleverly titles his translation the Te Tao Ching,

Not the Tao Te Ching.

The reason why he does this is because he is basing his translation on two texts that I guess were lost until fairly recently,

And they put the Te Ching first and the Tao Ching afterwards.

So the Tao Ching is chapters 1 through 37 of this 81 chapter book,

And the Te Ching is chapters 38 through 81.

So most versions of course put the Tao Ching first,

And this is the first chapter of that.

And a lot of ink has been spilled on just explaining this one chapter,

Because it is so dense.

And it has an interesting symmetry to it.

So you might have noticed that as I was reading.

The first verse,

Or the first part of the first verse is,

As for the way,

The way that can be spoken of is not the constant way.

As for names,

The name that can be named is not the constant name.

And there's actually a hidden symmetry that is impossible to translate into English because of the way in which the Chinese is,

Each character has multiple meanings.

So the first part of the first verse is,

And again I apologize for my pronunciation,

Is Tao Ke Tao,

Fei Chang Tao,

Ming Ke Ming,

Fei Chang Ming.

So those are six characters,

Six words that are doubled,

And the only difference between them is the word Tao in the first place and the word Ming in the second place.

Tao is often not translated when it appears as a noun,

So that's why we have the Tao that can be trodden,

Or the Tao that can be spoken of.

And whereas Ming is translated as name.

So name in English is both a noun and a verb,

So it's a lot easier to translate that as the name,

What it would really be is name can name,

Not eternal name.

That's almost a grammatical English sentence,

And you just have to put in some extra words there to make it grammatical.

So the name that can be named is not the eternal name.

Pretty straightforward.

Well,

Not really,

But it at least translates well.

The first part,

However,

Tao can Tao,

Not eternal Tao,

Or if we translate Tao literally as Wei,

That doesn't really help,

Right?

Wei can Wei,

Not eternal Wei.

Kind of sounds meaningless.

But basically the reason for that is because we don't have a word that works both as a noun and as a verb,

So you don't get that symmetry the way that you can with noun can noun,

Sorry,

Name can name,

Not eternal name.

So the second occurrence of Tao in this sentence where it appears as a verb can be translated as trodden,

Or walked,

Or spoken of,

Or conceived of.

Of course the fact that the word Tao is such a key word in the Tao Te Ching makes it even more mysterious.

But what we have here is this bifurcation into what you might call the ineffable on the one hand and the ineffable on the one hand and the effable,

I guess,

The part that can be spoken,

Or that has a name or has no name.

And then in verse three we have,

Here's Lege's translation,

And I apologize,

For some reason Lege decided to add some kind of whimsical rhyming scheme here,

Which isn't anywhere else so I don't know why it's here.

Always without desire we must be found.

If it's deep mystery we would be sound.

But if desire always within us be,

Its outer fringe is all that we shall see.

So I'll repeat Henrik's translation.

Therefore those constantly without desires by this means will perceive its subtlety.

Those constantly with desires by this means will see only that which they yearn for and seek.

So this is getting a little bit more practical,

Right?

So in the first two verses,

We're defining our terms in a way.

We're saying the Tao that can be trodden is not the eternal Tao.

The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

So we're basically saying,

Okay,

We're going to try to talk about something that we can't really talk about.

The second verse,

Conceived of having no name,

It is the originator of heaven and earth,

Conceived of having a name,

It is the mother of all things.

So the nameless,

The ineffable,

Is the source of all being.

The named,

Having a name is what shapes us,

What nurtures us,

Or what nurtures everything,

Shapes everything.

Now we're moving into the things themselves.

Always without desire we must.

.

.

I'll not use that translation.

Therefore those constantly without desires by this means will perceive its subtlety.

And then those constantly with desires by this means will seek only that which they yearn for and seek.

So this is the first place where we actually have some kind of.

.

.

Maybe an ethic,

Or not so much an ethic,

But like a statement that says that if you have desire,

You're only going to see what you're looking for.

And only by releasing desire or being without desire can we see reality as it truly is.

And this predates the Buddha,

Most likely.

The origin of this text is a little bit debatable,

Or debated I should say.

But we think that it's probably written,

Or at least around the 6th century BCE.

So the Buddha comes a few centuries later,

Right?

We think that Siddhartha was probably around 350 BCE.

So this predates Buddhism by about 250 years or so.

And it has a big effect on Mahayana Buddhism once Buddhism reaches China.

But even so,

Even in the early sutras,

Even with the first turning over the wheel,

With the explanation of the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path,

We see some similarities to what's being espoused here with regard to desire.

However,

There's also a significant difference here,

Right?

In the Fourfold Path,

The Buddha says that the source of suffering is desire,

And the way that you get away from suffering is to eliminate desire.

This is saying something a little bit different.

It's saying that without desire you can perceive true reality,

And with desire you'll only see what you're seeking.

And in a way I actually think this is arguably more profound.

And it does segue into the Heart Sutra,

Which comes many centuries later,

I think around the 661 CE.

So that would be 1100 years later or so.

So finally we get to the fourth part of this chapter,

Which Henrichs translates as,

These two together emerge.

They have different names,

Yet they're called the same.

That which is even more profound than the profound,

The gateway of all subtleties.

Under these two aspects,

It is really the same.

But as development takes place,

It receives the different names.

Together we call them the mystery.

Where the mystery is the deepest is the gate of all that is subtle and wonderful.

Finally,

In Rudolf Wagner's translation of Wang Bi's version,

Both emerge from a common origin,

But they have different names.

Their common origin I designate as the dark and the dark and dark again.

It is the door from which the many and the subtle emerge.

In Wang Bi's commentary,

He says,

Both refers to the beginning and the mother.

So refer back to what I was saying earlier about the second section,

Where it refers to the nameless being the beginning,

The source,

And the named being the mother.

That they emerge from a common origin means that they equally emerge from the dark.

That they have different names means that what they bring about is different.

So they have different names,

But they're called the same.

This alludes to something that we'll get into more detail once we finally get to the Heart Sutra.

But it alludes to a hidden oneness behind the apparent duality of existence.

This is often referred to more generally as non-dual thinking.

It is almost like a Hegelian synthesis,

Although that's really probably doing violence to the term,

To both terms really.

But between the apparent separation between the spiritual and the material,

Or perhaps more in Buddhist terms,

The separation between samsara and moksha,

That is the wheel of existence and liberation.

And various other kinds of dualities that you might think of.

So in the first turning of the wheel,

In Buddhism,

There's this idea that by ceasing to desire,

You can cease suffering and attain moksha,

Attain nirvana,

Attain liberation.

But later,

In the third turning of the wheel,

Or maybe it's the second,

Anyway,

There's this idea that there's not really a difference between samsara and moksha.

That the two are always here and present.

That they are really one.

They're not essentially different.

This is a very profound realization and it's difficult to grasp because it seems paradoxical,

And it is paradoxical.

But it's something that's alluded to in this very first chapter of the Dao De Jing.

Even though later chapters get more into,

You know,

Are not,

The whole thing is pretty mystical,

But it's not,

This is kind of the essence of it right here.

And it's interesting that this is how the book begins.

This is how the Daoists who,

You know,

Whether or not Lao Tzu actually wrote it in this order or whether it was later rearranged,

But this is how the Daoist scholars decided that it should be arranged,

That this would be the first chapter that you read when you approach the Dao De Jing,

And when you approach Daoism,

Because this is usually the first book that one would read before reading Zhuang Tzu and other things.

So I'll now read the whole chapter again.

I'm going to use a different translation this time.

This one is by Jonathan Starr.

And see how it's different from what we've just talked about and how it connects.

A way that can be walked is not the way.

A name that can be named is not the name.

Dao is both named and nameless.

As nameless,

It is the origin of all things.

As named,

It is the mother of all things.

A mind free of thought,

Merged within itself,

Beholds the essence of Dao.

A mind filled with thought,

Identified with its own perceptions,

Beholds the mere forms of this world.

Dao 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.

Hidden within the hidden.

It is the path to all wonder.

The gate to the essence of everything.

Thank you for listening.

I hope you will join us next month when we discuss the Dhammachaka Pavatana Sutra.