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Chapter One of the Tao Tê Ching: A ‘New’ Interpretation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

David Loy
David Loy
Affiliation:
San-Un Zendo, Kamakura, Japan
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Extract

The Tao Tê Ching is probably the world's second most translated and annotated book (after the Bible), yet it remains among the most enigmatic. Of its eighty-one chapters, no one denies that the most important is the first, and many scholars (e.g. Wing-tsit Chan, Chang Chung-yuan) go further to claim that it is the key to the whole work: if it is understood fully, all the rest may be seen to be implied. Unfortunately, the first chapter also happens to be the most ambiguous. But even so, after so much attention can there be anything left to say? It seems to me that an important point has been missed or at least obscured, and that the popularity of certain translations has made this obscuration more prevalent recently. To correct this, I shall offer below a line-by-line explication of this crucial passage. The following interpretation first demonstrates the parallel structure of the first eight lines as signifying two different ways of experiencing: lines one, three, five and seven refer to the experience of Tao, and lines two, four, six and eight to our more usual way of experiencing the world. I shall suggest that the difference between these ways is the difference between our familiar dualistic experience (or understanding of experience) and a much less common nondualistic way of experiencing in which there is no bifurcation between subject and object. Second, we shall see that the parallel structure unfolds dialectically: each succeeding pair of lines elaborates upon the issues that naturally arise in response to the preceding pair. In the process of showing this, I shall take sides on the two main controversies over this chapter: first, whether it should be interpreted cosmologically or ontologically/epistemologically (I have already revealed my preference for the latter), and second, whether lines, five and six should be punctuated to translate yü as ‘desire/intention’. My main thesis is that the traditional understanding of yü as ‘desire’ or ‘intention’ is an essential part of the meaning of the chapter. This is by no means an original claim, but why it is so important does not seem to have been noticed before and provides the reason for this paper. Wing-tsit Chan's criticism of such translations, that ‘intention interrupts the thought of the chapter’, 1 is thus a serious misreading of the text.

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Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , September 1985 , pp. 369 - 379
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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References

page 369 note 1 According to Wing-nit Chan, 350 Chinese commentaries are extant, plus some 350 more which have been It or survive only in fragments. (A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 1963, p. 137.) The controversy about whether the work is a compilation from many sources or the product of one person is ignored as irrelevant to this paper.

page 369 note 2 See Chan, Wing-nit, The Way of Lao Tzu, (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), p. 99.Google Scholar ‘This chapter both introduces and summarizes the entire Tao Tê Ching. The “five thousand” words of the text are all based on this chapter.’ (Chung-yuan, Chang, Tao: A New Way of Thinking, New York: Harper and Row, 1975, P. I.)Google Scholar

page 370 note 1 The Way of Lao Tzu, p. 99.

page 370 note 2 Heidegger, Martin, What is Called Thinking?, trans. Wieck, Fred D. and Gray, J. Glenn (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 178.Google Scholar

page 370 note 3 My translation, (with the help of a transliteration), although not very different from many others which render yü as ‘intention’.

page 371 note 1 That the Tao is unnameable is repeatedly emphasized in subsequent chapters: e.g. 32 (‘The constant Tao is unnameable’) and 41 (‘The Tao, when hidden, has no name’).

page 371 note 2 For a discussion of what ineffability in the Tao Tê Ching does not mean, see Danto, Arthur C., ‘Language and the Tao: some reflections on ineffability’, Journal of Chinese Philosopy, I (1973) 45–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For an argument that the Tao Tê Ching is not ineffable, see Ahem, Dennis M., ‘Ineffability in the Lao Tzu: the taming of a dragon’, Journal of Chinese Philosophy, IV (1977), 357–82.Google Scholar

page 371 note 3 See Nagatomo, Shigenori, ‘An epistemic turn in the Tao Tê Ching’, International Philosophical Quarterly, XXIII (06 1983), 174 if.Google Scholar Nagatomo also sees the first chapter as referring to two different modes of experience, but in my opinion the subjectivist bias of his phenomenological categories keeps him from being able to illuminate the difference between them. He sees Lao Tzu as rejecting sense-perception and he gives a subjectivist interpretation of meditation, whereas a nondualist account is what is needed.

page 371 note 4 Nāgārjuna's, Mūlamadhamikakārikā xxv. 24Google Scholar

page 372 note 1 See ‘Vacaspatimisra on the Buddhist theory of perception’, in Stcherbatsky, Th., Buddhist Lagic, II (New York: Dover Press, 1962), 260–1.Google Scholar

page 372 note 2 ‘Enlightenment in Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta: are Nirvana and Moksha the same?’ International Philosophical Quarterly, XXII, I (March 1982); ‘How many Nondualities are there?’, Journal of Indian Philosophy, XI. (December 1983).

page 373 note 1 For a discussion of this see Loy, David, ‘Wei-wu-wei: nondual action’, Philosophy East and West XXXV. 1 (01 1985).Google Scholar

page 373 note 2 The latter interpretation is usually described only as ‘ontological’, but the epistemological and ontological issues here cannot be separated: a difference in experience changes our understanding of what is.

page 373 note 3 An account of these interpretations would encompass the whole history of Taoism. Fung Yu-Ian, author of the monumental History of Chinese Philosophy, gave an ontological interpretation in A Short History of Chinese Philosophy (1948), but later (probably under pressure from the authorities) changed to a cosmological view in 1964. (For a discussion of Fung's interpretations see Yu, David C., ‘The creation myth and its symbolism in classical taoism’, Philosophy East and West, XXXI, 4 (1881), 487, 497.)Google Scholar According to Charles Wei-hsun Fu, chapter two of Chuang Tzu refutes the cosmological interpretation. Fu has used Wang Pi's distinction between origin and function to interpret the first chapter of the Tao Tê Ching as distinguishing Tao-as-origin from Tao-as-function. (‘Creative hermeneutics: Taoist metaphysics and Heidegger’, journal of Chinese Philosophy, III (1976), 125 ff.)

page 374 note 1 The obverse is not true: the world could be a plurality of discrete nondual experiences, and this in fact seems to be the Abhidharmika position.

page 374 note 2 Ñānananda's, Concept and Reality in Early Buddhist Thought (Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 1971)Google Scholar is devoted to an analysis of the role ofprapañca(Pali, papañca)in the Pali sutras. Etymology yields pra + √pañc, ‘spreading out’ in the sense of expansion and manifoldness. Ñānananda refers to its primary meaning as ‘the tendency towards proliferation in the realm of concepts’ (pp. 3–4), but this loses any direct relation to perception, whereas prapañcais used in the sutras to describe what happens in the later stages of sense-perception.

page 374 note 3 Sprung, Mervyn, trans. and ed., Lucid Exposition of the Middle Way (Candrakirti's Prasannapadā), (Boulder: Prajñā Press, 1979), p. 273.Google Scholar

page 374 note 4 Ñānananda, chapter one.

page 375 note 1 The Way of Lao Tzu, P. 99.

page 376 note 1 Tao: A New Way of Thinking, pp. 3–4.

page 376 note 2 However, Lao Tzu's Non-Being should not be taken either in a Parmenidean sense or (what is more likely) as equivalent to the Mahāyāna śū;nyatā; Nāgārjuna takes pains to distinguish śūnyatā from both being and non-being, which as relative to each other are both denied. A more fruitful interpretation of Lao Tzu's Non-Being is to see it as one way of making what Heidegger calls ‘the ontological difference’ between beings and Being.

page 376 note 3 Philosophical Investigations I. 31. For a more general discussion of the parallels between Wittgenstein and Taoism see Goodman, Russell, ‘Style, dialectic, and the aim of philosophy in Wittgenstein and the Taoists’, Journal of Chinese Philosophy, III (1976), 145–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 377 note 1 See Being and Time, division one, part III, sections 15–16. In contrast to my use of the distinction, Heidegger views vorhanden objects, just ‘lying there’, as derivative from zuhanden; he saw his project in Being and Time as an attempt to overcome the error (prevalent since Parmenides) of basing a metaphysics upon vorhanden. Whether his later work after the Kehre is consistent with this is unclear to me.

page 377 note 2 Wittgenstein reserved the term ‘seeing… as’ for more ambiguous types of seeing (e.g. the duck-rabbit). See Philosophical Investigations II. x. 1.

page 377 note 3 Such ‘mind-fasting’ is discussed in the Chuang Tzu, but there are only oblique references to meditation in the Tao Tê Ching – e.g. in chapter ten.

page 378 note 1 Mūlamadhyamikakārikā xxv. 19–20.Google Scholar

page 379 note 1 My translation, following Chang's Tao: A New Way of Thinking.

page 379 note 2 I am grateful to Professor Cheng Hsueh-li, of the University of Hawaii at Hilo, for comments on an earlier draft of this paper. For discussions of other aspects of subject-object nonduality, see ‘The Difference between samsāra and nirvāna’ Philosophy East and West xxxiii. 4 (October 1983); ‘The Paradox of Causality in Madhyamika’ International Philosophical Quarterly XXV. 1. (March 1985); ‘The Mahayana Deconstruction of Time’ Philosphy East and West XXXVI. 1 (January 1986); and ‘Nondual Thinking’ Journal of Chinese Philosphy, probably XIII. 2 (June 1986).