Tao Te Ching chapters 1 to 9: original text, transliteration, translation and line by line commentary

The second tao is a verb: to speak, to expound, to point the way. The whole line means: as soon as the Tao is put into words, what is expressed is no longer the thing itself. The reason is simple. Speech works by dividing. To say what a thing is, you must separate it from other things. But the Tao is what encompasses everything and cannot be separated from anything. The moment you name it, you have cut it.

Placing this line first is a very bold choice. The book has barely opened and it already admits that it cannot say correctly what it means to say. From here on, every line in the book should be read as a finger pointing at the moon, not as the moon.

One textual detail worth noting: the character thường 常 (eternal) appears in the Mawangdui manuscripts as hằng 恆. It was changed in the Han dynasty to avoid the personal name of Emperor Wen of Han, Liu Heng. The original meaning is the same: constant, unchanging.

These two lines can be punctuated in two ways, and the meaning shifts sharply with the punctuation. The first and more common reading takes the nameless and the named as units: when there were no names yet, that was the beginning of heaven and earth, and once names existed, the ten thousand things were born from them. The second reading, proposed by Wang Anshi and other Song dynasty scholars, separates non-being and being: Non-being is the beginning of heaven and earth, Being is the mother of the ten thousand things.

Both readings still have their followers today. What they share is this: the Tao has two faces, one undivided and one divided, and the two faces are not two different things.

The character huyền 玄 originally means a deep black tinged with red, the colour of the sky before dawn. From there it came to mean hidden, profound, hard to fathom. To say mystery upon mystery is to say: each time you think you have touched bottom, there is another layer beneath. This same character later gave its name to a whole school of thought in the Wei and Jin dynasties, Xuanxue, the Study of the Mysterious, and it is also the character in the name of Xuankong (Flying Star) feng shui used today.

This line is often read as a moral lament, as if to say that because people prize beauty, ugliness arises. That reading misses the layer of reasoning underneath.

The real point is an observation about how perception works: every concept is born as a pair. There can be no idea of beauty without at the same time raising the idea of not-beauty. The two come into being in the same moment, like the front and back of a sheet of paper. So when all under heaven agree on a single standard of beauty, that is the very moment ugliness is created, not before.

This is the logical root of the whole Taoist attitude toward every pair of opposites, and it is also the point that links directly to yin and yang: the two sides are not two things, but two ways of looking at one thing.

These two lines define wu wei through action rather than through words. Wu wei here is not sitting still. It is doing things according to their own natural course, without forcing and without display. Teaching without words is teaching by the way one lives, not by lecturing. Those below follow what those above do, without any need for exhortation.

When the work is done, withdraw. Do not stay to collect the credit. This line later became a guiding maxim for many celebrated ministers across East Asia, and it is also a lesson of life and death: history is full of people who did great deeds and did not know when to step back, until great merit turned into great disaster. Chapter 9 below repeats exactly this idea in an even more compact line.

This is the most misread line in the chapter, and also the one that confronts the Confucians most directly. The Confucians held that the worthy should be honoured and placed on high as models. The Tao Te Ching says: it is that very act of placing on high that breeds rivalry, because once there is a ladder, someone will climb it.

Read carefully: the book does not say do not employ people of talent. It says do not turn people of talent into something to be fought over. The same reasoning applies to precious goods: the problem is not the jewel, but hanging the jewel up where everyone can see it.

These four phrases have been pulled out of context countless times to accuse Taoism of advocating the keeping of people in ignorance. Read in context, that is not what they say.

The four phrases form two matched pairs: empty the heart but fill the belly, soften the ambition but harden the bones. What is emptied is the heart in the sense of scheming, comparing and competing. What is filled is real life: a full stomach, strong bones, good health. In other words: see that the people have enough to eat and are healthy, and do not stuff their heads with things that set them against one another.

The phrase vô tri (without knowing) in the following line works the same way. It does not mean ignorance, but freedom from petty cunning and scheming. Chapter 65 says more about this idea, and it is also the most debated chapter in the entire book.

The four characters hòa quang đồng trần, soften the glare and merge with the dust, have become a set phrase, and are among the most quoted lines in the whole book. Literally: dim your own light so as to blend into the dust of the world. In use: a person of ability who does not show off, who lives among ordinary people and does not set themselves apart on some higher plane.

Notably, Chinese Buddhism later borrowed these same four characters to describe the Bodhisattva who hides his form in order to save the world. It is a clear example of the two traditions borrowing each other's words across the centuries.

The closing line of this chapter carries great weight. The character đế 帝 here means the Lord on High (Shangdi), the supreme deity in the beliefs of the Shang and Zhou dynasties. To say the Tao existed before the Lord on High is to say: even the highest seat in the religion of the day is not the final root.

This is precisely where the Tao Te Ching differs fundamentally from religions that take a creator god as their root. In this book, the root is not a personal being with a will, but a principle of how things work. Later, when Taoism became a religion with a large pantheon, this line remained in the scripture unchanged, and that is a tension Taoist commentators themselves have had to address many times.

This is the most badly misunderstood line in the whole Tao Te Ching, and the one most often quoted online with the meaning that heaven and earth are cruel and regard people as rubbish.

Two characters must be understood first. Bất nhân here does not mean cruel. The character nhân 仁 (ren, benevolence) is the central term of Confucianism, meaning a love that distinguishes between near and far. To say heaven and earth are bất nhân is to say they favour no one, love no thing more than another. When rain falls, the fields of the good and the wicked are watered alike.

Sô cẩu 芻狗, the straw dog, was a dog woven from straw for use in ancient sacrifices. Before the rite it was kept in a fine box, covered with embroidered cloth, treated with reverence by all. When the rite was over it was thrown away, trodden on by passers-by, picked up by firewood gatherers to burn. The beauty of the image is this: the straw dog itself never changes, only its season changes. Heaven and earth are the same, neither resentful nor angry, simply moving with the seasons.

The second half applies the same principle to the ruler: one who governs must love no one specially and hate no one specially, but treat the hundred clans with a cool, even fairness. Read this way the line is not cruel at all. On the contrary, it is a very high demand for impartiality.

The character trung 中 (centre) here is not the Confucian doctrine of the mean, but the hollow at the centre of the bellows just mentioned in the previous line. To hold to the centre is to hold to the emptiness, for it is only because of the emptiness that the wind can come out. A person of many words is like a bellows stuffed full, with no room left for breath to arise.

This chapter is only twenty-five characters long, yet it gave rise to an entire tradition of cultivation.

Cốc 谷 is a mountain valley, a low and hollow place. Tẫn 牝 is the female of an animal. The governing image of the chapter is emptiness that is able to give birth: a valley is empty, but that very emptiness can hold, and what can hold can give birth.

A point worth noting about the thought: within a culture that honoured the male, the Tao Te Ching takes the image of the mother as its symbol for the root of heaven and earth. Not a majestic being who creates the ten thousand things by command, but a mother's womb that holds and gives birth. This recurs many times in the book, in chapters 20, 25 and 52.

In later ages, practitioners of inner alchemy read this chapter in an entirely different way: they took the gate of the mysterious female to be a specific point in the human body, and made it the place where qi is gathered in practice. It is a classic example of one line of scripture giving rise to two traditions of reading: one philosophical, one a path of cultivation. Both are present in the Taoist Canon.

This is where the Tao Te Ching states most clearly what later readers called the paradox of stepping back. Those who push to the front are usually pushed back. Those willing to stand behind are brought forward. Not because heaven rewards the humble, but because of how human hearts work: whoever does not compete with anyone is seen by no one as a threat, so no one stands in their way.

The closing line of the chapter is very frank and also very easy to argue over: act for the common good and in the end your own good is fulfilled too. Some commentators read this as practical advice, even as strategy. Others read it as the description of an objective law, with no hint of teaching cleverness. Both readings have existed from the Wei and Jin dynasties to the present, and this page records both rather than choosing one.

These four characters are probably the most often written in calligraphy of any in the Tao Te Ching, and they are frequently hung in Vietnamese homes.

Why water, and not a mountain or a fire? Because water has all three qualities the book prizes: it benefits without demanding, since without water there is no life, yet water claims no credit. It does not compete, since it flows around a rock and slips into a crevice rather than confronting. And it stays low, since water always runs down to the hollow, exactly the place everyone avoids.

That last detail is the weightiest: xử chúng nhân chi sở ố, settling in the place people hate. People race upward, water goes down. And precisely because it goes down, water gathers into the sea, and the sea is lord of the hundred rivers.

The seven consecutive phrases with thiện (good at) form a very compact list of how to live, and each one takes a quality of water as its underlying image.

The first phrase, cư thiện địa, being good at choosing where to dwell, is the one feng shui practitioners often cite to claim that the book already discusses choosing land. Honesty is needed here: the line is about how to choose one's position in life in the broad sense, not a technical instruction about geography. But it is also true that it shows the awareness that a person and their place must suit each other was present very early in Chinese thought, and that is the spiritual ground on which feng shui later stood.

The four characters công thành thân thoái, withdraw when the work is done, have become a set phrase in Vietnamese, and this closing line sums up all nine opening chapters.

The reason the book gives is not moral but a matter of law: what is too full spills over, what is too sharp chips, what reaches the peak begins to descend. The moon waxes full and then wanes, the tide rises and then ebbs. One who stands at the peak and does not step down of their own accord will be pushed down by circumstance, and being pushed hurts more than stepping.

This chapter links directly back to chapter 2 above, where it says công thành nhi phất cư, complete the work and do not stay to hold it. Two chapters seven chapters apart say the same thing, which shows this is not a passing thought but a central axis of the book.