I’m soon going to write about what I’m up to, but today I got caught up in doing something that I’ve been meaning to do for a long time, which was to translate the opening of Dao De Jing, the well-known “Writings on Process and Power” from early China.
Just giving it that English title is going to annoy a lot of people. Just wait till they see the translation.
I do not read early Chinese fluently, and so what follows is bound to be wildly inaccurate. But one thing I am trying to do with this translation is position the text as something that was intended to offer a ruler guidance, which is my understanding of its original purpose.
Dao De Jing is widely regarded as enigmatic, to say the least. Its inscrutability is seen as a defining characteristic of the text, a feature rather than a bug.
Accordingly, you should take my take with a pinch of salt. But I don’t think Dao De Jing was intended to mystify. Far from it; I think it was intended to offer a powerful leader practical guidance that would contribute to that leader’s further success, with the person offering the guidance, an early Chinese life coach, hoping that this guidance would result in continued employment. So to my mind, Dao De Jing was at the very least a text that early Chinese life coaches would have felt comfortable referring to when guiding their clients, even if it did result in a certain amount of head-scratching among the clients themselves.
More importantly for the purposes of this Substack, I see Dao De Jing as a seminal NowHow text. Key characters that we have already discussed are right there in the Chinese title: 道 (dao: path) and 徳 (de: virtue). Here, I have chosen to translate them as “process and power”, as these sounded more like the words an early Chinese life coach would use in conversation with a successful early Chinese warlord, if both early Chinese people spoke modern English.
But so far I may not have used the following way of explaining these two characters. I also regard 道 as “head in motion” and 徳 as “heart in motion”. That is because in each case, that is my interpretation of what the Canjeez “picture” represents.
On any path, you’re going to make good progress if your heart and head are in constant motion, dynamically engaged with your circumstances, with your perceptions of what’s happening, with your memory, and with what you foresee on the path ahead. This dynamic engagement is the ideal of NowHow.
How do you keep head and heart in motion? By means of a sincere engagement (真心) with the truth (真相), which generates a perfect “think about”: 想.
Anyway, here goes.
Chapter 1
No way can be the way
No name can be the name
"Is not" is where we start
"Is" is what we make of it
By not wanting, we discern nothing
By wanting, we discern something
The two things start out the same but get different names
That's the mystery of naming
It's the mystery of mysteries
Borderline weird
Chapter 2
We all know what fair is
That’s how we know foul
We know what good is
That’s how we know not-good
And there again we have it: the "is" and "is not"
Generating difficult or easy
Forming long or short
Pitching high or low
Resolving to sound or noise
Presenting before or behind
So the smart approach is “is-not” action
Taking wordless as your watchword
Be resourceful yet restrained
Productive yet prudent
Effective yet phlegmatic
Accomplished yet never done
And by never being done
You’ll never be done with