Tao Te Ching chapters 37 to 45: original text, Sino-Vietnamese reading, translation and line by line commentary

These seven characters are the closing line of the whole Tao Ching. The character chang 常, constant, was originally heng 恆. The received text changed it to avoid the personal name of Emperor Wen of Han, Liu Heng.

The second half can be read two ways, and both stand: there is nothing it cannot do, a statement about capacity, or there is nothing that does not come to pass through it, a statement about effect. This page follows the second reading because it matches chapters 34 and 51.

One very weighty textual fact has to be stated plainly: the four characters 而無不為 are absent from the two oldest copies. The Guodian bamboo slips read 道恆亡為也, the Tao is constantly without action, and the line ends there. The Mawangdui silk manuscripts read 道恆無名, the Tao is constantly without a name. The phrase wu wei er wu bu wei does appear in chapter 48, so it certainly belongs to the book, but its place in chapter 37 comes from later transmission.

The character zhen 鎮 originally means to hold something still with a weight, like a paperweight. It does not mean to suppress. The weight here is the uncarved block that has no name yet, the character pu 樸 already met in chapters 15 and 28 and named outright in chapter 32.

Letting the ten thousand things transform of themselves is good, but while they transform, desire stirs. The remedy is not to forbid each wish one by one but to set the nameless plainness back down as the ground, so that desire has nothing left to cling to.

The character de 德, Te, appears three times with two functions: the second time it is a verb, meaning to regard oneself as virtuous, to display one's virtue. Read that way the line stops being obscure. The person of the highest Te does not see himself as having virtue, so his virtue stays whole. The person of the lowest Te is forever on guard against losing virtue, and that very guarding has turned virtue into a possession to be kept.

Te in this book is not the same as the Confucian notion of virtue. Here Te is the portion of the Tao that shows itself in each thing, not a moral quality built up by training. Chapter 51 says it outright: the Tao gives birth, Te nourishes.

This is the hardest point in the chapter, and commentators differ over the character yi 以. The first reading takes yi wei as acting with an aim in view, so that wu yi wei is acting without aiming at any result for oneself. This page follows that reading. The second reading takes yi as deliberately. The third, associated with Han Feizi, reads it in the sense that one's heart is not led about by outside things.

One textual point has to be stated plainly: the Mawangdui silk manuscripts lack the clause 下德為之而有以為, and go straight from the highest Te to the highest benevolence, leaving only one grade of Te and the three grades of benevolence, righteousness and ritual. Another received text reads xia de wu wei er you yi wei, the lowest Te does not act yet has an aim in view. Three wordings exist side by side, and no copy settles the matter.

This is the book's most famous descending sequence, and the reason chapter 38 was chosen to open the Te Ching. Five grades run from high to low: the Tao, Te, benevolence, righteousness, ritual, each lower grade being what one must resort to once the grade above has failed.

The grades are ranked by how much one has to intervene and how much one demands a response from others. The highest Te does nothing. Benevolence acts but without an aim. Righteousness acts and has an aim. Ritual goes further and demands that the other side return the courtesy, and when they do not, it rolls up its sleeves and drags them, an image made deliberately crude to describe ceremony that can only be kept up by force.

The line ritual is where loyalty and good faith have worn thin, and it is the beginning of disorder is the harshest thing the book says about the Confucian school. But it must be read at its true weight: the book does not say abandon ritual, it says having to rely on ritual is the sign that people's hearts have already worn thin.

The phrase qian shi 前識 is understood two ways. Han Feizi in Jie Lao reads it as foreknowledge, working out affairs that have not yet arrived. The other reading takes it as preconceived knowledge, the ready made framework of categories one brings to looking at things. Both lead to the same conclusion: such a thing is only the flower, not the fruit. The pair hou 厚, thick, and bo 薄, thin, in the two closing lines is the same bo as in zhong xin zhi bo above, so the conclusion is drawn straight from the argument just made.

The character yi 一, the One, links straight to bao yi, embracing the One, in chapter 10 and to dao sheng yi, the Tao gives birth to one, in chapter 42. Here it is what lets a thing keep its own nature. In the vocabulary of chapter 38, the One is the thing's Te. Six subjects are ranked from heaven down to princes and kings, placing the ruler in the same row as mountain valleys and plants, and the six lines that follow repeat the list in reverse to say what happens when the One is lost.

These two lines take a fact of architecture as their proof: the high part stands because the low part serves as its base. The very real historical evidence is the three terms by which feudal rulers of the Zhou period referred to themselves: gu 孤, the orphaned, gua 寡, the little in virtue, and bu gu 不穀, the unworthy. Vietnamese still keeps a trace of this in the phrase quả nhân, the royal "I". The most honored person calls himself by the three ugliest words, and the chapter reads that outright as taking the lowly as the root.

This is the most divided point among commentators in the chapter, because the wording is not agreed. The received text has yu 輿, carriage: count up every part and no carriage is anywhere to be seen, an idea that links straight to chapter 11. But some copies have yu 譽, praise, giving gather up much praise and in the end no praise is left. The library presents both and settles on neither.

The final line uses two reduplicated words: lu lu 琭琭, the glitter of jade, and luo luo 珞珞, the rough hardness of stone. The point to remember is that the book takes neither side. A hasty reader usually thinks the line praises stone, and that is understanding only half of it.

The character fan 反 carries at least two meanings, and commentators stress different ones. Returning: in ancient usage 反 was interchangeable with 返, so the line speaks of the rhythm already set out in chapter 16. Reversal: the Tao moves contrary to what people expect, what is full is about to empty, what is hard is about to break. The two meanings do not exclude each other, but a reader should know which one is in hand.

The character ruo 弱 in the matching clause does not mean feeble and helpless but soft, not meeting hardness with hardness, and that is the root of the argument in chapters 43, 76 and 78. Taken together: the direction of the Tao is return, the manner of the Tao is softness.

These two lines are usually read as a chain of three stages: non-being gives birth to being, being gives birth to the ten thousand things. Wang Bi's commentary follows exactly that chain, and the whole later tradition followed him.

But one significant variant has to be stated plainly: the Guodian bamboo slips read 天下之物生於有生於無, lacking the separate you, being, that serves as the subject of the second clause. Many scholars read this as the ten thousand things are born from being, are born from non-being, two parallel clauses rather than a sequence, and in that case there is no three stage chain at all. The Mawangdui silk manuscripts read in full as the received text does. The library presents both and settles on neither.

The three kinds of scholar are ranked by how they react on hearing the Tao, not by learning or rank. The next line is where the edge lies: it does not blame the one who laughs but takes the laughter as proof by contradiction. It needs to be said clearly, to head off a fairly common misuse: this line does not say that whatever is laughed at must be right. It says only, in one direction, that the Tao is bound to be laughed at by the lowest kind.

These four characters show that the book is quoting someone else's words. The phrase jian yan 建言 is understood two ways: the title of a lost ancient book, or a common noun meaning sayings handed down from the ancients. No text survives to decide it. The twelve lines that follow form a very regular block, four characters each, all on one pattern: the genuine thing at its highest degree looks exactly like its opposite.

These four characters have become a proverb in Vietnamese, usually taken to mean that great talent succeeds late. But this is one of the places where a textual variant changes the meaning most heavily in the whole book.

The received text has wan 晚, late. The Mawangdui silk manuscripts have mian 免, giving da qi mian cheng, the great vessel is never completed. The Guodian bamboo slips have man 曼, a character scholars read both ways, as interchangeable with 慢, slow, or with 無, not. The reading "never completed" fits the flow better, since the three neighboring lines are all negations. The library presents both, but reminds readers that the meaning familiar in Vietnamese may be the one that came later.

These twelve characters are where the Tao Te Ching touches on cosmology most clearly, and where two thousand years of commentary have never reached agreement. The first thing to say: the book does not say what one, two and three are. It only counts. Every content assigned to those three numbers belongs to the commentators.

The first way, the qi based reading. This is the way of Heshang Gong and of the later Taoist tradition: one is the undivided primal qi, later called the taiji or supreme ultimate. Two is that qi split into yin and yang. Three is yin qi and yang qi plus the harmonious qi born where the two meet. The internal evidence lies in the very next line, which names exactly those three components. One variant reads three as the three powers, heaven, earth and humanity.

The second way, following Wang Bi. He does not read this as a chain of material generation. He asks the reverse question: the ten thousand things take countless forms yet return to one, so where does that One come from, and he answers that it comes from non-being. For him the passage is about the relation between the single and the many: as soon as one speaks of the One, there is already a name and already something counted, and from counting spring all the different things.

The third way, reading the numbers as a figure of speech. The Qi Wu Lun chapter of the Zhuangzi uses exactly this way of counting to discuss language rather than the cosmos: there is the one, then there is a statement about the one, which already makes two, and together they make three, and so on without end. On this reading, one, two and three merely describe the momentum of multiplication once distinguishing and naming begin.

The library presents the three ways and settles on none. What is worth holding onto is the direction of the line: chapter 40 describes the direction of return, chapter 42 the direction of going out, and the two chapters stand side by side precisely so that they are read together.

This is the only place in all eighty one chapters where the two characters yin 陰 and yang 陽 stand side by side as a pair, which is worth remembering because people today are used to treating the Tao Te Ching as the foundational book of yin yang theory. The two characters fu 負, to carry on the back, and bao 抱, to hold to the breast, draw a very concrete bodily posture, in keeping with the original meanings of yin as the shaded side of a hill and yang as the sunlit side.

The character chong 沖 is the hardest in the line. Its root meaning is empty, hollow, the same character as in dao chong er yong zhi in chapter 4 and da ying ruo chong in chapter 45, so chong qi is the empty breath in the middle that leans to neither side. Some commentators instead read chong in the sense of rushing against each other, taking it to mean that the two breaths collide and so produce harmony. This page follows the first reading because it agrees with how the character is used elsewhere in the same book.

The second half of the chapter changes tone, and the hinge joining the two halves is the three terms gu, gua, bu gu just met in chapter 39: the thing people hate most, which kings and dukes take as their titles, that is, diminishing oneself. From that follows the rule that to be diminished is to gain, to be increased is to lose. The pair sun 損, diminish, and yi 益, increase, are the names of two hexagrams in the Book of Changes, where they likewise form a pair, each the inversion of the other. The final line adopts an old saying as its jiao fu 教父, a phrase read two ways, the root of the teaching or the first teacher, with most leaning to the first.

The most striking word is chi cheng 馳騁, to gallop at full speed, already met in chapter 12 in the phrase chi cheng tian lie. Using such a strong and fast word for the soft is deliberate: the soft does not tiptoe and squeeze its way in, it ranges everywhere like a galloping horse inside the hard. The book does not say what the softest thing is. Most commentators take it to be water, following chapter 78, while some take it to be qi, breath, since breath slips into places water cannot reach.

Five characters so compressed they are almost a riddle, and the difficulty lies in the two characters wu you 無有. The first reading takes it as that which has no form, something that occupies no space and so can enter even what is solid throughout. The second reads wu and you as the two concepts of chapter 40. The first fits the flow better, since the whole chapter is talking very concretely about soft and hard. The point to remember is the leap of reasoning in the next line: from a physical phenomenon, the book draws a direct conclusion about how to act.

All three opening questions use the character shu 孰, which one, and all are left open without an answer, a rare way of writing in a book that usually speaks in assertions. The Vietnamese reading thân appears twice for two different characters: shen 身 is the self, one's own body, and qin 親 is near, close.

The third question is the sharpest and the one most often skimmed over. People take it for granted that gain is healthy and loss is the sickness. This question puts both back on the scale, then answers silently through the next two lines.

The two phrases zhi zu, knowing contentment, and zhi zhi, knowing when to stop, recur many times: knowing contentment in chapter 33, knowing when to stop in chapter 32, and chapter 46 will say huo mo da yu bu zhi zu, no calamity is greater than not knowing contentment.

What deserves notice is the manner of argument. The book does not say contentment is a good quality. It says whoever knows contentment meets no disgrace, whoever knows when to stop meets no danger, that is, it states consequences rather than issuing a precept. Set duo cang, hoarding much, against hou wang, heavy loss, and they make a matched pair: however high the pile, that is how far it falls.

This chapter takes up the exact pattern of the twelve established sayings in chapter 41 but adds a clause that chapter 41 lacks: a clause about use. The character que 缺 means chipped, and bi 弊 means worn out from heavy use. The argument lies right there: what is already complete and whole can only wear down from then on, while what still has a gap has not yet reached the peak and so does not yet have to decline, an idea that matches chapter 9 and bu yu ying, not wishing to be full, in chapter 15.

The three lines da zhi ruo qu, da qiao ruo zhuo, da bian ruo ne share one pattern: what reaches the highest degree loses every trace of technique and so looks clumsy. The book does not say act clumsy, that is, put on a show. It says skill carried to the end no longer looks skillful of its own accord.

The final two six character lines are so terse that commentators read them differently, and the wording also varies between copies. Read by the received text they are very plain: when cold, move to get warm, when hot, sit still to get cool. Many hold that the first clause is only a step up to the second, and that the weight falls on stillness overcomes heat. Some copies invert it to read stillness overcomes agitation, and read that way both clauses lean toward stillness, smoother in flow but losing the contrast. The library keeps the wording of the received text and records the other reading.

The silk manuscripts give the final line as qing jing ke yi wei tian xia zheng. The two characters qing jing 清靜, clear and still, later became a technical term of Taoism in its own right, and the name of the Qingjing Jing, the Scripture of Clarity and Stillness.