First session of the reading group here in Sydney. The first line on the page is 道可道，非常道.
The students who grew up in Chinese mostly know it before I open my mouth. They know it the way you know a proverb, which is to say the words arrive well ahead of any meaning. They don’t all come by the same road, either: the ones from Guangdong mostly heard it at home from an older relative, the ones from Taiwan had to memorise it for school, and the Malaysian Chinese students often came up through independent Chinese secondary schools and read traditional characters faster than I do. What they share is that someone tells me before class every year that they have this one covered: the Dao can’t be put into words. That’s not wrong, and it’s where nearly everybody stops. The students reading in English get stuck somewhere else. They’ve met the line as The Dao that can be told is not the eternal Dao, concluded that the book opens mysteriously, and settled in for more of the same.
I give this chapter two sessions and regularly don’t finish. Three things in it need stopping for: a character that was swapped out to avoid an emperor’s name, a comma nobody has ever settled, and a word that English translation pushes reliably in the wrong direction.
The character was 恒, not 常
Start here, because it’s a fact about the text rather than a question of how to read it.
The version everyone uses is the received text that comes down through Wang Bi in the third century: 道可道，非常道；名可名，非常名. The silk manuscripts recovered from the Mawangdui tombs give these lines as 道可道也，非恒道也；名可名也，非恒名也. There’s an extra particle marking where the sentence joints are, which helps. More to the point, where the received text has 常, the manuscripts have 恒.
The reason is a naming taboo, which is worth explaining if you didn’t grow up inside the convention. The characters in a reigning emperor’s personal name could not be written; scribes and officials substituted something close in meaning, and the substitution generally outlived the emperor. Emperor Wen of Han was named Liu Heng, 劉恒. So 恒 came out of the texts and 常 went in. The northern sacred mountain, Mount Heng, was renamed Mount Chang for the same reason and kept the substitute for a very long time. The Laozi got the same treatment. (Chang’e, the moon goddess, was written 恒娥 before the same substitution. I’ve heard that one and never checked it.)
This matters because the two characters don’t point the same way in a modern ear. 常 now suggests ordinary, usual, the run of things. So a Chinese reader’s first pass often comes out as “not the ordinary Dao,” as though a premium grade and a standard grade were on offer. 恒 doesn’t leave that door open. It means lasting and unchanging, so the split is between what changes and what doesn’t.
English readers get this for free. Translators overwhelmingly write eternal, or constant, or unchanging, all of which sit closer to 恒 than the received Chinese does.
One qualification: not every 常 in the book arrived that way, and scholars argue over which ones did. I’m only claiming it for these two lines.
Which 道 is the verb
Three characters, two of them 道. The first is the noun. The second is a verb, and the standard reading is to speak of. Wang Bi’s gloss runs that whatever can be spoken of and named has already been 指事造形, pinned to a particular affair and a particular shape, and therefore isn’t the constant one.
A minority reading takes that second 道 as to walk, to be travelled as a path. I mention it in class and move on, because I can’t defend it properly.
What students want to know next is why, if the thing can’t be said, five thousand characters follow.
Laozi handles that himself in Chapter 25. Describing something formed out of the undifferentiated and born before heaven and earth, he writes 吾不知其名，字之曰道，強為之名曰大. I don’t know its name; I style it Dao; and if pressed to name it I’d say great. 強 is the load-bearing word there. It means forced. He knew the tool was the wrong size and picked it up anyway, there being no other tool on the bench.
People also read the opening line as an instruction to shut up. A man who then wrote five thousand characters plainly didn’t hold that view. What the chapter does is put a scale on language. Use it, but know where the markings run out.
Where the comma goes
Classical Chinese comes without punctuation. Someone decides later, and here the decision moves the chapter.
無名，天地之始；有名，萬物之母. The nameless, the beginning of heaven and earth; the named, the mother of the ten thousand things. Subject is the nameless and the named. Nothing has a name when heaven and earth begin; names find places to land as the ten thousand things come up one at a time. That reading runs on smoothly from 名可名，非常名 and keeps the chapter’s weight on naming.
無，名天地之始；有，名萬物之母. Non-being, call it the beginning of heaven and earth; being, call it the mother of the ten thousand things. Now 無 and 有 stand alone as terms and 名 has become a verb. This turns Chapter One into the opening of an ontology and lines it up with Chapter 40, 天下萬物生於有，有生於無, the ten thousand things are born of being, being born of non-being. Song dynasty readers were already punctuating it this way, and a good many modern editions do.
The fork appears again in the very next line, 故常無欲以觀其妙，常有欲以觀其徼. Either you are constantly without desire and observe its subtlety, constantly with desire and observe its edges, which makes the line about the state of the person looking. Or you are constantly in non-being, constantly in being, which keeps it about the pair of terms. Whichever way you went before, you usually go again.
English can’t hide any of this. A Chinese reader slides over the ambiguity without noticing it exists; a translator has to fix a syntax before the sentence exists in English at all. Which means the choice was made for you before you opened the book, and nothing on the page says so. I have the English-reading half of the room compare copies. Two incompatible chapters are usually in circulation, and nobody had noticed.
On the board I write both and teach the first. My reason is that the text seems to lean that way: the line before is about naming, and the line after, 此兩者同出而異名, comes back to naming. But the second reading has more force in it, and it explains why 有 and 無 keep coming back through the rest of the book.
Which one Laozi meant, I don’t know. I’ve taught this chapter for years and I’ve grown less willing to rule on it rather than more. If someone tells you the matter is settled, discount them a little.
There’s a related piece I have never taught well. 此兩者, these two. Which two? The nameless and the named? Subtlety and edges? Being and non-being? I’ve heard all three argued and all three hang together. In class I follow whichever falls out of the punctuation I’ve chosen, and when a student asks why not one of the others, the honest answer is that I’m not sure.
玄 is a colour
The close: 同謂之玄。玄之又玄，眾妙之門.
玄 usually arrives in English as “mystery,” and from mystery an English reader reaches mysticism in about a second. The older sense is a colour. Black with red down inside it, the shade cloth takes after being dyed over and over, dark enough that your eye doesn’t get into it.
So 玄之又玄 is that dark, and then darker. Further in, past where you can see. And 門 is a gate. You walk through it.
The first session usually ends here
We reach 玄 and the time is gone.
Someone asks on the way out which punctuation they ought to use. Read the book through once on the first, then once on the second. A few chapters change flavour. Most don’t move at all. That will tell you how large the argument really is.
The other thing that comes up every year: people stall on Chapter One and won’t go past it. Skip it. Start at 8, or 11, or 64, where there’s water and a wheel hub and a tree you can get your arms around, then come back. The book isn’t arranged by difficulty.