The Classic of Purity and Stillness: original text, transliteration, translation and line by line commentary

The three opening lines are built on the same pattern: the Great Dao lacks one thing, and yet it accomplishes something great. It has no form yet gives birth to heaven and earth, it has no feelings yet sets the sun and moon on their courses, it has no name yet nourishes the myriad things. The three instances of vô, without, are not a complaint that the Dao falls short. It is precisely because no form, no feeling and no name limits it that the Dao can do its work everywhere.

The term vô tình Wú qíng is the easiest to misread. In present-day Vietnamese, vô tình comes close to meaning cold or careless. Here it means free of partial love and hatred, close to the line thiên địa bất nhân, heaven and earth are impartial, in chapter 5, explained on the page Tao Te Ching chapters 1 to 9.

The line ngô bất tri kỳ danh, cưỡng danh viết Đạo is taken almost directly from chapter 25 of the Tao Te Ching: Wú bù zhī qí míng, zì zhī yuē dào, qiáng wèi zhī míng yuē dà.

Two pairs form the axis of the whole text: thanh and trọc, clear and turbid, and động and tĩnh, movement and stillness. They are mapped onto heaven and earth and onto male and female, following a familiar Chinese cosmology in which the clear, light qi rises to become heaven and the turbid, heavy qi settles to become earth. Giáng bản lưu mạt, descending from the root and flowing out to the branches, is the direction in which the myriad things are born. The practitioner travels against that direction.

The line nam thanh nữ trọc is read in different ways. Many commentaries in the internal alchemy tradition take male and female here to mean the yang qi and the yin qi present in every person, not a ranking of the two sexes. A more literal reading sees in it the social views of the time the scripture was composed. The library records both.

The last line has a variant. Jiang Menma's critical edition, which takes the Song dynasty stele of 980 as its base, reads Jìng zhě dòng zhī jī, and so does Zhao Mengfu's copy. The morning service version, the anonymous annotated edition on ctext.org and the commentaries of Bai Yuchan and Wang Yuanhui read Dòng zhě jìng zhī jī, the reading this page follows.

This is the most quoted line, and also the hinge: from here the text stops speaking of heaven and earth and turns to the human being. The word thường Cháng, constant, is the key, because the text speaks of clarity and stillness kept up constantly, not for a moment.

The clause thiên địa tất giai quy can be understood in two ways. One is that heaven and earth all turn toward that person. The other, common in commentaries of the internal alchemy tradition, is that heaven and earth within the body, that is, the clear and the turbid, the moving and the still inside a person, return to their proper place.

This is the central diagnosis of the text, naming three things arranged from the inside out: thần Shén, the spirit, tâm Xīn, the mind, and dục Yù, desire. The spirit lies deepest and by nature loves clarity. The mind lies in the middle and by nature loves stillness. Desire lies outermost and pulls the mind away, and the mind, once pulled, in turn disturbs the spirit. The text does not say that human nature is bad: clarity and stillness are the natural state, and turbidity and movement come afterwards, like mud stirred up in water.

According to Jiang Menma's critical edition, the Song stele reads Ér qíng rǎo zhī, with the character tình, emotion, in place of tâm, mind. The other versions have tâm, as on this page.

Khiển Qiǎn means to send off, to see off, not to drive out by force. Trừng Chéng means to let water settle until it is clear: people of old cleared water by leaving it undisturbed so that the sediment sank, and the more it was stirred the murkier it became. Then there are the two instances of tự Zì, of itself: the mind becomes still of itself, the spirit becomes clear of itself. The text does not tell the reader to make the mind still. It says to remove what is disturbing it, and stillness will come of itself.

The result is lục dục bất sinh, tam độc tiêu diệt, two sets of terms borrowed from Buddhism, explained in the section on clarity, stillness, the three poisons and the six desires below.

This is the part on method. The three rounds of contemplation move from near to far: inward to examine the mind, outward to examine the body, into the distance to examine things. Each round ends with the same formula. Tâm vô kỳ tâm: look for a fixed mind standing still there and none is found, only thoughts following one another past. The same holds for the body and for things. Once these three are understood, duy kiến ư không, one sees only emptiness, but in the flow of the text that is not yet the place to stop.

This is the hardest passage to read, because the words không, empty, and vô, without, are piled on top of each other. Read slowly, it shows a descending ladder, each rung removing the very thing reached on the rung before: once emptiness is seen, emptiness itself must be empty too, until even the gone is gone and there remains only trạm nhiên thường tịch, deep and clear, constantly silent.

The reason is very close to the Heart Sutra: whoever still holds on to emptiness as something attained turns that emptiness into one more thing to cling to. The series vô vô diệc vô recalls Wú wú míng, yì wú wú míng jǐn in the Heart Sutra. Some read this passage in terms of the Buddhist teaching of emptiness (śūnyatā), while readers in the internal alchemy tradition link it to the successive layers of settling of the mind in seated meditation.

The term chân tĩnh Zhēn jìng, true stillness, separates two kinds of stillness. A stillness that knows it is being still remains a kind of clinging. True stillness is silence with nothing to be silent about, so desire finds nothing to hold on to and cannot arise.

Then chân thường ứng vật turns the direction around completely: after so many words of emptiness, the text brings the reader back to things, back to the world. The true and constant still makes contact, responds and acts, and this is where the text itself blocks the reading of clarity and stillness as withdrawal from the world. According to Jiang Menma, the Song stele reads Zhēn jìng yīng wù in the first clause.

The text has just called entering the true Dao đắc Đạo, attaining the Dao, and at once it takes that back: though it is called attaining, in truth nothing is attained, and the name is only given in order to hóa chúng sinh, transform living beings, that is, to have words with which to teach people. If there were some object called the Dao to be seized, the practitioner would still carry the whole of craving and seeking, only with a different object. The line thực vô sở đắc comes very close to Wú zhì yì wú dé, yǐ wú suǒ dé gù in the Heart Sutra.

The second Lord Lao said opens the second part, which moves from method to an analysis of why people fail to arrive. Bất tranh, not contending, is a central idea of the Tao Te Ching, and chapter 8 has the line Fū wéi bù zhēng, gù wú yóu.

The line thượng đức bất đức comes from chapter 38: Shàng dé bù dé, shì yǐ yǒu dé, xià dé bù shī dé, shì yǐ wú dé. The Tao Te Ching says that inferior virtue does not let go of virtue. The Classic of Purity and Stillness changes this to chấp đức, clinging to virtue, and then says that those who cling cannot be said to have the Dao and its virtue. The word chấp, clinging, here links directly to the word trước, attachment, in the passage that follows.

A chain of cause and effect, each link hooked into the next: vọng tâm, a deluded mind, kinh thần, a startled spirit, trước vạn vật, attachment to the myriad things, tham cầu, craving and seeking, phiền não, vexation, and then lưu lãng sinh tử, drifting through birth and death. The way the links are chained and most of the terms come from Buddhist scriptures. The most unusual link is kinh kỳ thần, startling the spirit: a deluded thought is like a stone thrown into still water, the spirit is shaken, and then one clings to outer things.

There are two variants. The quanxue.cn version and many present-day printed editions read Dàn zāo zhuó rǔ, while Zhao Mengfu's copy, the taolibrary.com version and the morning service version read Biàn zāo zhuó rǔ. Jiang Menma notes that the Song stele reads quite differently at the start of the chain: Wèi jiàn wàng xīn. jì jiàn wàng xīn, jí jīn qí shēn.

The main text ends with the line đắc ngộ Đạo giả, thường thanh tĩnh hĩ. The three passages that follow are the words of three other figures. Those who chant them call them the three verses, and textual editors call them colophons. Tiên nhân Cát Ông, the Immortal Elder Ge, is Ge Xuan Gé xuán, a Taoist who lived around the year 200 according to Komjathy, honoured as Ge the Immortal Elder. His passage recounts the line of transmission from the Queen Mother of the West through the Imperial Lord of the Golden Gate Tower and the Imperial Lord of Eastern Florescence down to himself, an account given within the tradition. The title Chính Nhất Chân Nhân, the Perfected of Orthodox Unity, is usually understood to refer to Zhang Daoling, founder of the Way of the Celestial Masters. Who Tả Huyền Chân Nhân, the Perfected of Left Mystery, might be is not made clear by the sources the library was able to consult.

The wording of these three passages differs considerably between versions. Zhao Mengfu's copy reads Xiān rén gé xuán yuē, Wèi hù qí rén and Zāi zhàng bù shēng. According to Jiang Menma, the Daozang version reads Xiān rén gé xiān wēng. Some versions have Yōng hù qí shén in place of Yōng hù qí shēn, and Cháo bài gāo zhēn in place of Cháo bài gāo zūn. This page chooses Qí shēn following the morning service version of the Beiji Xuanyuan Gong, and Gāo zūn following Zhao Mengfu's copy and the versions on quanxue.cn and lurenjiaweb.