Tao Te Ching

So I have Mitchell's version and like it as well. But he notably did not call his piece a new translation, only a new version. He doesn't speak or read any Chinese[1], so to begin with he was studying from secondary sources. He also generally just rephrased and reworded liberally. It's his version of Tao Te Ching, and to be fair this is the case for many translations.

But for example, Mitchell begins #3:

    If you overesteem great men,
    people become powerless.
    If you overvalue possessions,
    people begin to steal.

While American sinologist Robert Henricks[2] translated it as:

    By not elevating the worthy, you bring it about that people will not compete.
    By not valuing goods that are hard to obtain, you bring it about that people will not act like thieves.
    By not displaying the desirable you bring it about that people will not be confused.

And from Chinese jurist John C. H. Wu[3]:

    By not exalting the talented you will cause the people to cease from rivalry and contention.
    By not prizing goods hard to get, you will cause the people to cease from robbing and stealing.
    By not displaying what is desirable, you will cause the people's hearts to remain undisturbed.

Some of his changes are like this, Mitchell's version was more readable and accessible compared to the genuine translations, but compressed the message (sometimes to the point of being a bit reductive).

In other cases his edits were more substantial. In #9 for example:

    Fill your bowl to the brim
    and it will spill.
    Keep sharpening your knife
    and it will blunt.
    Chase after money and security
    and your heart will never unclench.
    Care about people's approval
    and you will be their prisoner.
    
    Do your work, then step back.
    The only path to serenity.

Compare to Henricks:

    To hold it upright and fill it,
    Is not so good as stopping [in time].
    When you pound it out and give it a point,
    It won't be preserved very long.
    When gold and jade fill your rooms,
    You'll never be able to protect them.
    Arrogance and pride with wealth and rank,
    On their own bring on disaster.
    When the deed is accomplished you retire;
    Such is Heaven's Way!

And Wu:

    As for holding to fullness,
    Far better were it to stop in time!
    
    Keep on beating and sharpening a sword,
    And the edge cannot be preserved for long.
    
    Fill your house with gold and jade,
    And it can no longer be guarded.
    
    Set store by your riches and honour,
    And you will only reap a crop of calamities.
    
    Here is the Way of Heaven:
    When you have done your work, retire!

Mitchell's version differs significantly from Henricks, in meaning. He interprets Tao as the way to serenity (vs the Way of Heaven), and gold and jade like money (risk of consumerism, individual peril) instead of a gratuitous display of wealth (risk of burglary, social peril).

[1] https://scott.london/interviews/mitchell.html

[2] https://terebess.hu/english/tao/henricks.html

[3] https://terebess.hu/english/tao/wu.html

Perhaps the alchemical axiom was influenced by Taoism? The east and west both had roughly contemporaneous periods of alchemical development and lots of known knowledge transfer so it's certainly possible that religious texts associated with a group known for alchemy in the east would end up in some way in the hands of western alchemists.

"Though the only thing that proves is that mystics all over the world could count to three."

And that they thought about transformation and did not believe that anything is fixed and unchangable (like for example atoms were supposed to be.)

I don't know the DDC very well, but this is a beautiful translation.

The pattern of 3 comes up often. For example, a "classical" approach to something puts the flag in the ground. A reactionary "modern" approach takes a radical differentiating tack to the classical way. And a "postmodern" tries to reconcile what each camp got right broadly, while acknowledging that no one-size-fits-all objective approach exists.

I'm not denying that. I just personally don't find that particular lens appealing.

To use the cliché imagery, all empty vessels contain the same thing but not all are equally potent.

Mandarin was just as inaccessible to speakers of other Sinitic languages without special training, but they do not appear to have been left behind in the literacy push, suggesting to me that it was pushing for mass literacy in the first place that did it (effectively providing the necessary special training), rather than the specific choice of language to push.

Thanks for clarifying, shows my naivete even here.

It is also worth noting that as of time of writing, the idea of whether or not Laozi was a single person that ever existed is less clear than originally interpreted.

One of the translations I've read more recently takes note of how it, and Zhuangzi were likely penned within the same century, and that Chinese culture of the time did not frown upon "borrowing" or "building" upon knowledge bases and presenting them as "yours".

Actually kind of an interesting attitude towards communal wells of knowledge compared to many modern attitudes, I think. The Tao Te Ching may technically be the ultimate work of textual "sampling" if there's any truth to it.

Not me. I'm keeping my traps and my words so I can keep using them tomorrow.

Words are placeholders for meaning. Once you lose the words, you lose the ability to retain the thought with any reliable accuracy due to how our brains work.

My experience reading ancient Greek philosophy has been indeed that many philosophers use allusion and metaphor and are focused on leading a good life.

To be fair, it's far easier in written Chinese[1] to have allusion and metaphor because of the multifaceted nature of meaning in the characters. For instance, 行 (pronounced xing or haeng in Mandarin) has an absolute laundry list[2] of meanings even though originally it meant an intersection of roads. It's also possible (but to my knowledge less common) to play with the actual character shapes to induce other meanings, or to use replacement characters that are direct (or close) homophones to construct a play on words. The example that immediately pops to mind is the use of "river crabs" (河蟹 or héxiè) to replace "harmonized" (和谐 or héxié) in order to evade censorship.

I'd honestly be willing to say that there is no real accurate translation of the Dao de Jing into English. Ancient Chinese commentators (including Confucius) note the difficulty of understanding the Dao de Jing, and they could read and speak the language! Not to say that it's impossible, but it's just extremely difficult to replicate. I look at it as being akin to translating Shakespeare into Mandarin. Even English speakers struggle with Shakespeare and when translated it loses the lyricism and a lot of the underlying meaning.

[1] Noting here that when speaking the context will generally make it less ambiguous. Additionally, Mandarin and ancient Chinese at the time of Lao Zi share very little in common phonetically. [2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%A1%8C [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemisms_for_Internet_censor...

This is a common stereotype, but wholly inaccurate on both sides. We in the West are coming out of a long cultural period several centuries where that sort of analytic, rational style has been particularly popular, so it's easy to mistakenly assume that it is representative of the entirety of Western philosophy. It's not.

Likewise, we in the west are in a period when certain specific Eastern philosophies, notably Buddhism and Taoism, have become widely known and popular for the first time in the West. It's easy to mistakenly assume that they are representative of the entirety of Eastern philosophy. They're not.

Western philosophy has a deep and broad mystical and esoteric tradition that routinely does what you describe as an essentially "eastern" practice. More recently, postmodernism discards all that analytic precision in favor of vague impressionistic primacy for one's personal experience, and has become by far the dominant philosophy in many parts of the west. Postmodernism was (according to its progenitor Martin Heidegger, who was incidentally a Nazi) explicitly and profoundly influenced by Taoism.

Eastern philosophy, on the other hand, has its own well-developed "excruciating pedantic detail" traditions such as Legalism[1] (among others) that routinely do what you describe as an essentially "western" practice. They have been profoundly influential in Asian thought, yet they are not currently popular in the West, so we just don't think about them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalism_(Chinese_philosophy)

Ha, this reminds me of Wiio's laws -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiio%27s_laws

"1. Communication usually fails, except by accident."

Seconding this-- and I can recommend the Merton translation. Great for late night reading, or if you are feeling especially unsettled.

I personally like Angus Graham's translation, Chuang-tzu: The Seven Inner Chapters and Other Writings from the Book Chuang-tzu, as well as his essays on it, A Companion to Angus C. Graham’s Chuang Tzu.

For one thing, it gave me some significant sympathy for analytic philosophy for the first time.

Trying Not To Try by Slingerland is a great accessible introduction to the different modes of Chinese philosophy, and the two approaches to Daoism by Laozi and Zhuangzi are discussed.

For more depth I highly recommend Van Norden's Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy. I took a course that used this book as its text and it was really life changing and made me hopeful that there are some more practical philosophies out there for us.

I love the I Ching for divination. Not in the "tell me my fate!" sense, but as a way to use randomness as a means to look at things differently. It's like Oblique Strategies but even obliquer.

Zen IS Buddhism, it's not influenced by it. It's one of the most important schools within Mahayana Buddhism. It has Daoist influences via Chan from which it originated. It absolutely is categorically not Daoism though. It is Buddhism with a somewhat Daoist sensibility.

The thinking starts with the beer, then progresses towards one entity, then backpedals because one needs a second to offset against, and from two comes three, and we have come full circle.

I see a similar pattern in the advent of abstract art. People have independently settled upon primary colors, primary shapes, and primary compositions, only to then get stuck in a rather limited playing field, from which people started again to create the total utter chaos that is called post-modernism.

My personal conviction is that neither religion not abstract art have found the key to understanding the universe. They merely reflect our limited way of thinking.

> Is it an in-built preference? I think a robust monism is still a fairly radical position, especially among religious views. For example even the branches of Christianity which tack more materially tend to draw a rigid boundary between creator/created, God/the universe, etc. (and if you interrogate lay views they tend to skew even more dualistically).

Can you expand on this a bit? I have an intuition about what you're saying, but I confess that the definitions can be a little slippery.

University of British Columbia: Chinese Thought: Ancient Wisdom Meets Modern Science - Part 1

Part 1 introduces the basic philosophical, religious and scientific concepts that will be drawn upon throughout the course, and then goes on to cover early Shang and Zhou religious thought, the Analects of Confucius, the Daodejing (a Daoist text attributed to Laozi), the utilitarian thinker Mozi, the newly discovered and very exciting Guodian texts, and the momentous philosophical changes that occurred in the mid Warring States period.

https://www.edx.org/learn/humanities/university-of-british-c...

Excellent course on this period's philosophy.

That's not quite what happened (or it is a overly simplified version of the historical accounts...)

First, it wasn't clear when the Tao Te Ching was written. Anyway, the political philosophy that survived and emerged "victorious" during the turbulent periods was the legalist school of thought, which was like Lao Tzu and Confucius married and had a child together. The Taoist ideas of Wuwei (non-action) morphed into the idea of automation via laws and regulations. Their logic was that rulers are not supposed to do the work themselves because it would not "scale". In the end, Qin, who went all in on legalism, having made the whole kingdom a terrifying economic and military machine governed by strict regulation (incidentally, informed by "behavioral economics"), conquered all the other states.

The Taoist ideas we know from Tao Te Ching only gained prominence after the legalist school was dealt a deadly blow due to the quick dissolution of the Qin empire. The new elite (that of early Han) thought that the harshness of strict laws and cutthroat competition were the cause of the empire's collapse. It was only then that the "take it easy", "small government" kind of Taoist ideas took hold.

Sometimes language is used, to point to that which is beyond language.

That is the irony of the whole thing, it starts out: The Dao that can be talked about is not the Real/Eternal Dao - then proceeds to talk about it for 81 chapters. He was just funny like that.

Guess because you have to try.

Almost everything in the world comes with warning labels.

Does that mean you just sit down and don't move?

There are dozens of branches of religions and philosophy and SCIENCE, that questions the ability of language to pass information, its 'fidelity'.

That doesn't mean you just sit at home and stair at the wall. Thought that is one very valid solution. Actually, just staring at a wall is the way some interpret as the best way to deal with the situation.

It's like courting a woman. If you're too direct in your communication, you will lose. When trying to make your philosophy expand, if you're too direct in your communication, there won't be anything to speculate about, making its discussion short-lived.

Have you seen the amount of ink used by analytic philosophy?