Tao Te Ching chapters 19 to 27: original text, transliteration, translation and line by line commentary

The Guodian bamboo slips, excavated in 1993, give the first three lines in a completely different form. The received Wang Bi text reads abandon sageliness, discard wisdom and abandon benevolence, discard righteousness. Guodian bundle A gives three different pairs in a different order: abandon wisdom, discard disputation 絕智棄辯, cut off cleverness and throw away eloquence. Abandon cleverness, discard profit 絕巧棄利, the same as the received text. And abandon falseness, discard scheming 絕偽棄慮, cut off the false and throw away calculation, though the first character of this pair is read by some scholars as 偽, false, and by others as 爲, acting. In the oldest copy that survives, the character for sage and the two characters for benevolence and righteousness are absent.

If that copy is close to the early shape of the book, then the sharp anti-Confucian wording of the received text may be a later shape, from a time when the Confucian and Taoist schools were clearly opposed. The Mawangdui silk manuscripts read almost exactly like the received text, so that wording already existed before the Han. The library records both rather than choosing for you.

As for the meaning, jue 絕 is to cut off and qi 棄 is to throw away. The line does not say these things are bad. It says stop exalting them, because when sages are exalted, people compete to be sages.

The character wen 文 in the line above means wording, written clauses: if those three commands are only three sentences, they cannot stand. Su 素 is raw silk not yet dyed, and pu 樸 is a log not yet carved. The whole line names a single state, not yet added to.

One doubtful break: the four characters that open chapter 20, abandon learning and be free of worry 絕學無憂, are held by many textual critics to belong at the end of chapter 19, because they rhyme with pu and yu. The library keeps the break of the received text.

Wei 唯 is the respectful yes, and a 阿 is the casual yeah. In Zhou ritual they were a whole rank of status apart. The chapter asks how far apart these two sounds are, then raises the stakes and asks how far apart good and bad can be, but the third line pulls straight back: what others fear, one cannot help but fear.

This chapter has many textual variants that need stating. The character the library transliterates as bạc is written 怕 in the Wang Bi text and 泊 in others. Both mean a state of stillness without motion. Reading 怕 by its present-day Vietnamese sense of fear is a mistake. For the reduplicated pair in the next line, the Fu Yi text has 儡儡, the Wang Bi text has 儽儽, and the Heshang Gong text has 乘乘, all meaning something close to worn out. This page uses the Fu Yi form because its Sino-Vietnamese reading is more certain, while the meaning does not differ across the three. The line ngã độc nhược hôn also appears in some copies as 我獨昏昏.

If 食 in 食母 is read with the sound shi, food, the phrase means the mother of food. If it is read with the sound si, to feed or nurse, then si mu is the nursing mother, and most scholars take the second reading and understand it to mean the Tao.

Put that line in place and the whole chapter changes meaning: others are well fed by things laid out before their eyes, while he takes his nourishment from an unseen root, so the dull, rustic look that runs through the chapter is how a person with a different root looks from the outside. Even so, commentators do not agree on the tone of this chapter. Wang Bi reads it as a description of the state of someone who has attained the Tao, while many modern readers read it as the self-account of a lonely human being.

The pair hu huang, blurred and flickering, was met in chapter 14, but chapter 21 goes one step further: chapter 14 only says the Tao has no form and no thing, while chapter 21 says within that blur there is something. Three layers from the outside in: there is xiang 象, an image, a shadow not yet become a thing. There is wu 物, a thing. Then, in the deepest dark, there is jing 精, essence, a character that originally meant well-pounded rice, the core left after the husk is removed.

Reading chapter 14 it is easy to conclude that the Tao is empty void. Chapter 21 says the opposite, and the words shen zhen 甚真, utterly real, carry great weight where they are placed.

The character xin 信 here is not a person's faith but the reliability of the thing itself, that is, it is always so, and therefore people can rely on it to predict. If the root had no xin, every method of divination would be meaningless.

The four characters that open this line have two readings. The received Wang Bi text reads from of old until now 自古及今. The Mawangdui silk manuscripts reverse it to from now back to of old 自今及古, and the next line there reads dĩ thuận chúng phụ 以順眾父 rather than dĩ duyệt chúng phủ. Many modern textual critics prefer the reversed reading because 古 rhymes with 甫 in the line below.

The chapter itself confirms that these three characters are a saying of the ancients, in the line cổ chi sở vị khúc tắc toàn giả. The meaning lies in very ordinary experience: a bent, crooked tree is left alone by the woodcutter and lives out its full life, while a fine straight tree is felled first. Quan 全 means intact, unbroken, not total victory. The remaining five clauses follow the same pattern: what sits in the disadvantaged position is what lasts.

On the clause the crooked becomes straight commentators disagree. Some understand it as suffering injustice and later being vindicated, others as a warped plank that must be bent the opposite way to become straight.

The character 見 here is read kiến but carries the meaning of 現, to display, not to see. The reasoning of these four clauses rests on who confirms: when a man praises himself, the praise comes from his own mouth and so has no value.

These four clauses should be read together with chapter 24, which restates them in the reversed, negative form. The same passage appearing twice in two adjacent chapters is a trace showing that the book was assembled from many pre-existing fragments of sayings.

The character xi 希 was met in chapter 14. Its root meaning is sparse, so rare as to be almost absent, so xi yan is almost never putting anything into words. The term zi ran here carries exactly the meaning that will be discussed at length in chapter 25.

The gale and the downpour are the two noisiest things heaven and earth produce, and also the two that die away fastest. What heaven and earth do without pause is quiet: day follows night, the four seasons go round. The closing line weighs more than either example: if even heaven and earth cannot keep it up for long, how much less can human beings.

The three clauses on the Tao, Te and loss form a descending staircase. The character shi 失, loss, names the state of having already left the Tao and Te. The point of the passage is simple and cold: whatever a person merges with is what receives that person. There is no reward or punishment from outside, only correspondence.

One textual note: the Wang Bi text as transmitted reads cố tòng sự ư đạo giả, đạo giả đồng ư đạo, repeating the two characters đạo giả, which the great majority of textual critics regard as dittography, surplus characters added by a copyist. The library follows the reading with those characters removed. The last line of the chapter repeats word for word the closing line of chapter 17.

The character qi 企 is made of the person radical over the foot radical, a person lifting the heels, that is, standing on tiptoe. The character kua 跨 is taking an overly wide stride. The two images are two ways of reaching beyond one's own measure.

On tiptoe one really is taller, but after a few breaths the legs tire. With long strides each step covers more ground, but after a few dozen steps one is spent. The fault lies not in being tall or going far but in a posture that cannot be held: the book does not ask how far the effort reaches, it asks how long it can be sustained.

These four characters are among the hardest to read in the whole book. Yu shi 餘食 is leftover food thrown away. The fourth character is the trouble. As written it is 行, read hành. But zhui 贅 is a growth, a surplus lump on the body, so a great many commentators hold that 行 here is a copying error for 形 hình, form, and that it should be read dư thực chuế hình, leftover food and a growth on the flesh. The Mawangdui silk manuscripts still read 行. The library keeps the character of the received text, transliterates it as hành, but translates the meaning in the direction of a surplus growth on the body.

What the chapter means does not depend on that point: self-display, self-praise and pride are all things added on that nourish nothing.

The character hun 混 means blended together, not yet distinct, so hun cheng means already formed, but formed in a state not yet divided. The whole later tradition of East Asian cosmology rests on that word.

Note the character wu 物, thing: chapter 14 has just said the Tao returns to where there is no thing, and now it is called a thing. The contradiction is deliberate, because each time the book is forced to speak it borrows a word for the moment and then immediately takes that word apart again. The Mawangdui silk manuscripts read khả dĩ vi thiên địa mẫu, mother of heaven and earth, instead of thiên hạ mẫu, and lack the line chu hành nhi bất đãi.

In ancient ritual custom, ming 名 was the name given by one's parents at birth, and zi 字 was the courtesy name added on coming of age so that outsiders could address one conveniently. This line says that I do not know its ming, so I only give it a zi, which is Tao. The word Tao is therefore only a convenient label. The character qiang 強 in the next line is even blunter: forced, against the grain, to give it a name, I call it Great.

The four characters great, goes forth, far, returns form a closed circle: what is great spreads out, grows distant, and at the farthest point comes back to where it was. The character fan 反 will become the core proposition of chapter 40, phản giả đạo chi động, returning is the movement of the Tao.

The four greats are the Tao, heaven, earth, and a fourth. The dispute concerns that fourth one. The received Wang Bi text and the Mawangdui silk manuscripts both read wang 王, the king. The Fu Yi text and some other copies read ren 人, man.

That one character changes the scope of the whole chapter. If it is wang, this is a political proposition: the ruler is ranked alongside heaven and earth, but for that very reason is bound to follow the model of heaven and earth. If it is ren, this is a proposition about the place of human beings in the universe. The reason many scholars lean toward ren: the very next line opens with man takes earth as his model, not the king takes earth as his model. The library follows the received text and records the dispute here so that you can weigh it yourself.

These sixteen characters are the most quoted line in all of Chinese thought, and also the line most often misunderstood when carried into Vietnamese. The character fa 法 here is a verb, to take something as one's model. The first three clauses form a clear ascending chain: people live on the earth and so should follow the rhythm of the earth, that is, seasons, soil and terrain. The earth is subject to the rhythm of heaven, that is, sun and rain, day and night, the solar terms. Heaven is subject to the rhythm of the Tao. Here the chain must stop, because above the Tao there is no further level.

This is the point that must be stated with the greatest clarity, because it is where Vietnamese readers go wrong most often. The two characters zi ran 自然 in this line do not mean nature, plants, mountains and rivers, the environment. That meaning is new. It entered Chinese and Vietnamese around the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when a word was needed to translate the Western concept of nature and the Japanese usage was borrowed. In classical Chinese, 自然 is not a noun for the natural world but a compound of two characters: zi 自 is itself, and ran 然 is so, thus. Zi ran is being so of itself, so by its own nature, not made to be so by anything else.

Therefore the Tao follows zi ran does not mean that the Tao imitates nature, still less a call to live close to plants and trees. It means: heaven, earth and man must each follow something higher than themselves, but the Tao alone follows nothing outside itself. The Tao follows only what it is of itself. Wang Bi's note is very concise: in a square place it takes the model of the square, in a round place it takes the model of the round, and toward what is so of itself it goes against nothing at all.

One other reading needs recording: some people, especially in modern times, read zi ran as something standing above the Tao, that is, a fifth level added on. That reading is rejected by most commentators, because it contradicts the first part of this very chapter, which has already said that the Tao was born before heaven and earth and stands alone unchanging. The same two characters also appeared in chapter 17 and at the start of chapter 23 on this page, with exactly the old meaning.

The two opening clauses set up two pairs of opposites, heavy against light and still against restless, then place the first term of each in the position of root and master. The character gen 根 is a root, and jun 君 is the one in charge. These two characters do not say the heavy is better than the light. They say the light must be anchored to the heavy or it blows away.

The character zao 躁 contains the foot radical. Its root meaning is feet that keep moving and cannot rest, so it means agitated restlessness, not ordinary movement.

Zi zhong 輜重 is a military term, the train of wagons carrying provisions and heavy gear that accompanies a body of troops: slow and cumbersome, but a general who leaves it behind to march faster usually loses. The next line uses the opposite image, rong guan 榮觀, splendid towers and terraces. The character 觀 has two readings, quan when it means to gaze at and quán when it means a tower, hall or temple. Heshang Gong explains it as the palace gate towers while Wang Bi explains it as a scene of splendor, so you should know both readings.

The closing line has a variant: the received text and the silk manuscripts both read khinh tắc thất bản 輕則失本, balancing the character gen at the start of the chapter, while some other copies read khinh tắc thất thần 輕則失臣, lose the minister, to pair with the character jun.

The five clauses that open the chapter follow one pattern, skill so great that the tools of the task are no longer needed. Zhe ji 轍跡 are the ruts left by wheels. Chou ce 籌策 are the bamboo rods used for counting. Guan jian 關楗 are the horizontal bar and vertical bolt that fasten a gate. Sheng yue 繩約 are the ropes that bind.

The two characters xi ming 襲明 are a concept particular to this chapter, and commentators do not agree on it. The character xi 襲 means both to put on an extra layer of clothing and to inherit, to carry on in succession. By the first meaning, xi ming is a brightness kept covered, bright without showing it, which fits the five opening clauses, and the library follows that reading. By the second meaning it is keeping the brightness passing on without a break, and you should know both.

The character qi 棄 in vô khí nhân, no one is cast aside, is the very same character as in tuyệt thánh khí trí in chapter 19, which opened this page. Set side by side, the point is plain: the book is ready to throw away the standards, but throws away no person.

The character zi 資 originally means capital, the stock one draws on to do a job. The first clause is easy: the skillful teach the unskillful. The second reverses it: without the unskillful, the skill of the skillful would have nowhere to be used. The closing line is heavy: whoever does not prize that teacher and does not cherish that resource is greatly lost, however clever they may be.