Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching (6 page)

Nothing in the world
is as soft, as weak, as water
;
nothing else can wear away
the hard, the strong,
and remain unaltered.
Soft overcomes hard
,
weak overcomes strong.
Everybody knows it
,
nobody uses the knowledge.

So the wise say
:
By bearing common defilements
you become a
sacrificer
at the altar of earth;
by bearing common evils
you become a lord of the world.

Right words sound wrong.

After a great enmity is settled
some enmity always remains.
How to make peace?
Wise souls keep their part of the contract
and don’t make demands on others.
People whose power is real fulfill their obligations
;
people whose power is hollow insist on their claims.

The Way of heaven plays no favorites.
It stays with the good.

This chapter is
equally relevant to private relationships and to political treaties.
Its
realistic morality is based on a mystical perception of
the fullness of the Way.

Let there be a little country without many people.
Let them have tools that do the work of ten or a hundred
,
and never use them.
Let them be mindful of death
and disinclined to long journeys.
They’d have ships and carriages
,
but no place to go.
They’d have armor and weapons
,
but no parades.
Instead of writing
,
they might go back to using knotted cords.
They’d enjoy eating
,
take pleasure in clothes,
be happy with their houses,
devoted to their customs.

The next little country might be so close
the people could hear cocks crowing
and dogs barking there
,
but they’d get old and die
without ever having been there.

Waley
says this endearing and enduring vision
"can be understood in the past, present, or future tense,
as
the reader desires." This is always true of the
vision of the golden age, the humane society.

Christian or Cartesian
dualism, the division of spirit or mind from the material body and world,
existed long before Christianity or Descartes and was never limited to Western
thought (though it is the "craziness" or "sickness" that
many people under Western domination see in Western civilization) . Lao Tzu
thinks the materialistic dualist, who tries to ignore the body and live in the
head, and the religious dualist, who despises the body and lives for a reward
in heaven, are both dangerous and in danger. So, enjoy your life, he says; live
in your body, you are your body; where else is there to go? Heaven and earth
are one. As you walk the streets of your town you walk on the Way of heaven.

True words aren’t charming
,
charming words aren’t true.
Good people aren’t contentious
,
contentious people aren’t good.
People who know aren’t learned
,
learned people don’t know.

Wise souls don’t hoard
;
the more they do for others the more they have,
the more they give the richer they are.
The Way of heaven profits without destroying.
Doing without outdoing
is the Way of the wise.

This is a rendition, not a translation. I do not know any
Chinese. I could approach the text at all only because Paul
Carus
,
in his 1898 translation of the
Tao
Te
Ching
, printed the Chinese
text with each character followed by a transliteration and a translation. My
gratitude to him is unending.

To have the text thus made accessible was not only to have a
Rosetta
Stone
for the book itself, but also to have a
touchstone for comparing other English translations one with another. If I could
focus on which word the translators were interpreting, I could begin to
understand why they made the choice they did. I could compare various
interpretations and see why they varied so tremendously; could see how much
explanation, sometimes how much bias, was included in the translation; could
discover for myself that several English meanings might lead me back to the same
Chinese word. And, finally, for all my ignorance of the language, I could gain
an intuition of the style, the gait and cadence, of the original, necessary to
my ear and conscience if I was to try to reproduce it in English.

Without the access to the text that the
Carus
edition gave me, I would have been defeated by the differences among the translations,
and could never have thought of following them as guides towards a version of
my own. As it was, working from
Carus’s
text, I
learned how to let them lead me into it, always using their knowledge, their
scholarship, their decisions, as my light in darkness.

When you try to follow the Way, even if
you wander off it all the time, good things happen though you do not deserve
them.
My work on the
Tao
Te
Ching
was very wandering
indeed. I started in my twenties with a few chapters. Every decade or so I’d do
another bit, and tell myself I’d sit down and really get to it, some day. The
undeserved good thing that happened was that a true and genuine scholar of
ancient Chinese and of
lao
Tzu, Dr. J. P. Seaton of
the University of North Carolina, saw some of my versions of bits of the
Tao
Te
Ching
(
scurvily
quoted
without attribution by myself
) .
He reprinted them
with honor, and asked me for more. I do not think he knew what he was getting
into. Of his invaluable teaching, his encouragement, his generosity, I can say
only what Lao Tzu says at the end of the book:

Wise souls don’t hoard
;
The more they do for others the more they have,
The more they give the richer they are.

Though the
Tao
Te
Ching
has been translated
into English very much more often than any other Chinese classic, indeed almost
overwhelmingly often, it wasn’t easy to get hold of more than a few of these
versions until quite recently.

Carus’s
word-for-word Chinese-to-English
was endlessly valuable to me, but his actual translation wasn’t very
satisfactory. "Reason" as a translation of Tao did not ring true. I
always looked at any translation of the book I found and had a go at it. The
language of some was so obscure as to make me feel the book must be beyond Western
comprehension. (James
Legge’s
version was one of
these, though I did find the title for a book of mine,
The Lathe of Heaven
, in
Legge
. Years
later, Joseph Needham, the great scholar of Chinese science and technology,
wrote to tell me in the kindest, most
unreproachful
fashion that
Legge
was a bit off on that one; when
Chuang Tzu
was written the lathe hadn’t
been invented.)

Listed roughly in the order of their usefulness to me, these
are the translations that I collected over the years and came to trust in one
way or another and to use as my exemplars and guides:

Paul
Carus
.
Lao-
Tze’s
Tao-The-King
.
Open Court
Publishing Company, 1898. The book has recently been republished, but the
editors chose to omit its unique and most valuable element, the character-by-character
romanization
and translation.

Arthur
Waley
.
The Way and Its Power: A Study of the Tao
Tê
Ching
and Its Place in Chinese Thought
. First published
in 1958; I have the Grove edition of 1968. Though
Waley’s
translation is political where mine is poetical, his broad and profound
knowledge of Chinese thought and his acutely sensitive tact as a translator
were what I always turned to when in doubt, always finding secure guidance and
illumination.

Robert G.
Henricks
.
Te
-Tao
Ching
: Lao-
Tzu,
translated from
the Ma-
wang
-
tui
texts
.
Modem Library, 1993. It was exciting to find that new texts had been
discovered; it was exciting to find their first English translation an
outstanding work of scholarship, written in plain, elegant language, as
transparent to the original as it could be.

Gia
,Fu
Feng
and Jane English.
Tao
Te
Ching
.
First
published 1972; I have the Vintage edition of 1989. Arising from a sympathetic and
informed understanding, this is literarily the most satisfying recent
translation I have found, terse, clear, and simple.

D. C. Lau.
Lao Tzu Tao
Te
Ching
.
First
published 1963; I have the Penguin edition of 1971.
A clear,
deeply thoughtful translation, a most valuable reference.
Lau has also translated the Ma
wang
tui
text for Everyman’s Library (Knopf, 1994).

Michael
Lafargue
.
The Tao of the Tao
Te
Ching
.
State University of New York Press, 1992.

Tam C. Gibbs and Man-
jan
Cheng.
Lao-Tzu: "My words are very easy to
understand."
North Atlantic Books, 1981.
These books, though somewhat quirky, each proved useful in casting a different
light on knotty bits and obscure places in the text and suggesting alternative
readings or word choices.

Witter
Bynner
.
The
Way of Life According to Lao Tzu.
Capricorn Books,
1944.
In the dedication to his friend Kiang Kang-
hu
,
Bynner
quotes him: "It is impossible to
translate it without an interpretation. Most of the translations were based on
the interpretations of commentators, but you chiefly took its interpretation
from your own insight . . . so the translation could be very close to the
original text even without knowledge of the words." This is true of
Bynner’s
very free, poetic "American Version,"
and its truth helped give me the courage to work on my own American Version
fifty years later. I did not refer often to
Bynner
while I worked, because his style is very different from mine and his vivid
language might have controlled my own rather than freeing it. But I am most
grateful to him.

I started out using translations by Stephen Mitchell and
Chang Chung-
yuan
, but found them not useful. Since I
began working seriously on this version so many
Tao
Te
Chings
have
appeared or reappeared that one begins to wonder if Lao Tzu has more
translators than he has readers. I have looked hopefully into many, but none of
the new versions seems to improve in any way on
Waley
,
Henricks
, Lau, or
Feng
-English,
and many of
them blur the language into dullness and vagueness. Lao Tzu is tough-minded. He
is tender-minded. He is never, under any circumstances, squashy-minded. By
confusing mysticism with imprecision, such versions betray the spirit of the
book and its marvelously pungent, laconic, beautiful language.*

*If you want to know more about Taoism, or would like some
help and guidance in reading the
Tao
Te
Ching
, the best, soundest,
clearest introduction and guide is still Holmes Welch's
Taoism: The Parting of the Way
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1957).

For
tao
,
I mostly use "Way," sometimes "way,
"
depending
on context. "Way" in my text always represents the
character
tao
.

I consistently render the character
te
as
"power." "Virtue" (
virtus
,
vertú
) in its old sense of the inherent quality and
strength of a thing or person is far closer to the mark, but that sense is
pretty well lost. Applied obsessively to the virginity or monogamy of women,
the word lost its own virtue. When used of persons it now almost always has a
smirk or a sneer in it. This is a shame. Lao Tzu’s "Power is goodness"
makes precisely the identification we used to make in the word
"virtue." "Power," on the other hand, is a powerful word,
almost a
mana
-word for us. It is also a very slippery
one, with many connotations. To identify it with goodness takes a special,
Taoistic
definition of it as a property of—the virtue of—the
Way.

The phrase
t’ien
hsia
, literally "under
heaven," occurs many times throughout the text. More often than not I
render it as "the world." It is often translatable as "the Empire"—which
after all meant the world, to Lao Tzu’s contemporaries. I avoid this, in order
to avoid historical specificity; but often
t’ien
hsia
indubitably
means one’s country, one’s land, as in chapter 26. Elsewhere I call it the
public good, the commonwealth, or the common good, and sometimes I render it
literally.