Reading “Dao De Jing” in English

By K. T. Fann

Composed more than twenty-five centuries ago, Laozi’s Dao De Jing is the first known philosophy book in human history and the only surviving record of pre-historical matriarchal thought. Extolling the feminine virtues and warning against the advent of science and technology, Laozi’s philosophy is the best antidote to the ills of modern life. It will provide inspiration to environmentalists, feminists, pacifists, and anyone questioning the status quo. A must-read for Daoist scholars, philosophy students, Chinese learners, and anyone interested in Daoism!

This book consists of three parts. In the first part the author introduces the novel idea of reading Chinese characters in English. Unlike all other major written languages which are alphabetical, Chinese written language, known as the Han script, consists of ideograms that can be read by anyone in their own mother tongue. It has already been used for centuries as the common means of communication for Eastern peoples. The time is ripe for introducing a universal script for the computer age; this book is a part of the author’s effort to promote this idea by giving an example. The complete text of Dao De Jing is given and under each Chinese character is an English equivalent. So when you read this book, don’t treat it as a literal translation, but try to recognize the characters so that when you come to the end of the book you may be able to read the text without looking at the English. 

The second part gives the author’s English translation on the facing pages line by line so that you may compare it with the original. The third part contains commentaries explaining the author’s corrections of the text based on recently unearthed old texts. His radical interpretation of some key passages are also included. The book concludes with a fascinating account of the meetings and friendship between Confucius and Laozi.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing Singapore
• Release date: Feb 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781543754766

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Copyright © 2020 by K. T. Fann.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Cover photo by Po Chen

www.partridgepublishing.com/singapore

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

Reading Dao De Jing in English and English Translation

Section 01

Section 02

Section 03

Section 04

Section 05

Section 06

Section 07

Section 08

Section 09

Section 10

Section 11

Section 12

Section 13

Section 14

Section 15

Section 16

Section 17

Section 18

Section 19

Section 20

Section 21

Section 22

Section 23

Section 24

Section 25

Section 26

Section 27

Section 28

Section 29

Section 30

Section 31

Section 32

Section 33

Section 34

Section 35

Section 36

Section 37

Section 38

Section 39

Section 40

Section 41

Section 42

Section 43

Section 44

Section 45

Section 46

Section 47

Section 48

Section 49

Section 50

Section 51

Section 52

Section 53

Section 54

Section 55

Section 56

Section 57

Section 58

Section 59

Section 60

Section 61

Section 62

Section 63

Section 64

Section 65

Section 66

Section 67

Section 68

Section 69

Section 70

Section 71

Section 72

Section 73

Section 74

Section 75

Section 76

Section 77

Section 78

Section 79

Section 80

Section 81

Commentaries

Appendix: Confucius’ Meetings With Laozi

Postscript

About the Author: My Philosophical Journey

PREFACE

It has often been said that Laozi’s Dao De Jing is the second-most-translated book in the world, next to the Bible. That may be true in terms of the number of languages, but in terms of the sheer number of translations, Dao De Jing definitely surpasses the Bible. There are about eighty English translations of the Bible and more than 200 English translations of Dao De Jing alone, not to mention other languages and thousands of Chinese translations.

Dao De Jing was written twenty-five centuries ago on bamboo slips strung together by threads. It consists of about 5,000 characters without a title, chapter division, or punctuation. It was copied by hand and passed on from one interested individual to another. But, when the threads that bound the bamboo broke, what was left was a pile of slips that needed to be rearranged. You can imagine the problems this created, which I will explain later. What’s worse is the fact that China’s dominant ideology has been Confucian and the Confucian scholars have tampered with the text by changing a few words here and there to make Laozi more palatable to themselves.

There are hundreds of different versions of Dao De Jing. It was composed in terse and condensed ancient Chinese which needs to be annotated and translated into modern Chinese to be understood. Over the years thousands of these translations were created, each claiming to be the closest to the original. Of course, English translations were then made from these. I myself published Lao Tzu’s Tao Teh Ching: A New Translation (Social Praxis 8-2/3, 1981) almost forty years ago. So why another book and translation? To put it simply, I am not satisfied with any of the innumerable English or Chinese translations I have read over the last half-century, including my own. In fact, none get even a passing grade from me now, given my deeper understanding of Laozi’s philosophy and my twenty some years of experience putting his philosophy into practice.

Faced with the original text of Dao De Jing, if you know Chinese, you can read it directly, but you wouldn’t be able to get much out of it. If you are not a speaker and do not know Chinese, you have no choice but to get an English translation. I am going to do something here that has never been done before. As the title indicates I am going to teach you how to read the original Dao De Jing in English. This book contains the whole text, and beneath each character you will find the direct English equivalent. You may think this is simply the literal translation, but I am trying to do something different here. Let me digress a little and explain.

Most languages have two forms, spoken and written. Most written languages are phonetic and alphabetical—they are simply the spoken languages spelled out. Spoken and written English, for example, are actually one language. The two forms of Chinese language are quite different. The many spoken Chinese so-called dialects, such as Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, etc., are actually different languages, as different as English is from German and French. Luckily, they can communicate with a common written language, known as the Han script. The written Chinese is unique in that it is not phonetic and alphabetical, but rather characters or ideograms that were originally pictures and signs or symbols. So, for example, pictures of the sun and moon Figure1_Symbols.jpg became 日 月, mountain and river Figure1_Symbols.jpg became 山 川. The word person is 人; with arms stretched out it is 大, meaning big. 乳 is a pictograph of a hand holding a baby at the breast Figure1_Symbols.jpg , meaning nursing. And I really like the character 愛. It consists of three words: hand, heart, and long, denoting a hand holding the heart for a long time. Is there a better definition of love? From here they grew in number and abstraction until now there are more than 60,000 characters in the dictionary. Luckily you can get along quite well if you know about 1,000 characters.

The beauty of this written language lies in the fact that anyone in the world can learn to read it in their own mother tongue. Not only was it the common means of communication for the different ethnic groups in China, it was for centuries the common international means of communication for Eastern countries. For centuries, Japanese, Koreans, Mongolians, Vietnamese and others read Dao De Jing and other Chinese thinkers’ books in their own mother tongues. There is no reason whatsoever that Westerners cannot learn to read Chinese in their own language. Think of mathematics where 1, 2, 3, 4 is read one, two, three, four in English, Yi, Er, San, Si in Mandarin, Ichi, Ni, San, Xi in Japanese, and any other languages. Written Chinese is just such a system which can be adopted as an international means of communication for the computer age.

During the last century or so when China was really downtrodden, scholars started to regard written Chinese as a hindrance to modernization. Especially with the advent of typewriters, since it was not possible to have Chinese typewriters without alphabets. A serious attempt was made to alphabetize Chinese, but luckily they did not succeed, as that would have been disaster. Meanwhile, after the founding of the United Nations, there was an attempt to come up with an international language. But the linguists in charge of the task were all from the West, and they created an international alphabetical language called Esperanto that no one can speak. After years of trying, it was a total failure. The world does not need a universal spoken language which everyone needs to learn, but rather a universal script which can be read in your own mother tongue. In theory we can create a totally new script for such a purpose, but since there’s already one that is being used by at least one-fifth of humanity, I propose we might as well adopt it as the international script.

Another advantage of my proposal is that anyone using this Han script will have direct access to the richest body of literature existing in the world. The script is also particularly suited to the computer age. The user needs to learn to recognize about 1,000 of the most commonly used Han characters and simple classical grammar, so that when you type an English word a corresponding Han script would appear on screen. When you send a message, the receiver will receive it in Han script and read it in their own language, and vice versa.

The time is ripe for introducing a universal script for the computer age. This book is part of my effort to promote this idea by giving an example. When you read this book, don’t treat it as a literal translation, but try to recognize the characters so that when you come to the end of the book you may be able to read the text without looking at the English. If you cannot do this the first time, try it many times and you will surely succeed! In fact, I intend this book to be the first textbook for Learning to Read Han Script in English.

The second thing I want to do here is to provide an as-good-as-possible translation. There are readings, translations, interpretations, and elaborations of an old text. Most, if not all, translations are interpretations and elaborations. I try to stay at the reading and translation level. Even at the reading level there are different possible readings for each key word and when you are faced with an unclear passage, an element of interpretation is inevitable. My general guideline is that, first, I take Laozi’s words at their face value, and second, when different readings or interpretations are possible, I choose the one that’s most consistent with his total philosophy.

On the facing page I will provide my translation. A good translation tries to retell Laozi’s philosophy in English. It need not be faithful word for word, but must be faithful to the original idea. You can compare my translation to the original on the facing page to see whether I have succeeded or not. My lifelong study of philosophy convinces me that a great philosopher has a simple, consistent, and clear message to tell that is very different from the prevailing way of thinking. He does not contradict himself. If there is a contradiction in a philosophy then it is completely useless. As any logic student knows, from a contradictory statement you can deduce anything. So, if you find contradictions in a translation of Laozi, either the translation is wrong or the text is corrupted.

Let me just give a few examples to show you why I dare to make the bold claim that none of the existing translations get a passing grade. Let me start from the first sentence: 道可道,非常道,名可名,非常名. It’s universally translated as, The Dao that can be talked about is not the eternal Dao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. First of all, if Laozi thought Dao cannot be talked about, why did he spend 5,000 words talking about it? There is obviously a contradiction. Secondly, what’s an eternal name? Names are a human invention, there is no such thing as one that is eternal, and what does this have to do with Dao? We are in a fog. No wonder he has been made into such a mystic.

Word for word, what he said was, Dao can be spoken, not ordinary Dao. Name can be given, not ordinary name. What he meant was, "Dao can be explained, but it’s not like ordinary Dao. Its name can be