is what i do

Lines 1 through 4. These lines can have two subtly different meanings. On the one hand, if everyone is together in their perception of beauty, that’s an ugly situation; similarly, if everyone agrees on what constitutes goodness, that’s not a good situation. That’s the reading that Thomas Cleary gives it: “When everyone knows beauty is beauty, this is bad.”

The better reading, it seems to me, and one that is consistent with the following lines, is that the perception of beauty is inextricably linked with the perception of ugliness; we can’t see the ugliness in in an ugly scene unless we are sensitive to the beauty in what is beautiful. And we can’t conceive the moral outrage that bad behavior provokes unless we understand why good behavior is good. Just as a physical compass has both north and south poles, so a moral compass has both good and bad poles, and an aesthetic compass beautiful and ugly poles.

Lines 5 through 11. Lines 5 through 10 are the arguments to Line 11. They fix, through the accretion of subtly morphing detail, the condition of our lives. The parallelism of the translation mirrors the parallelism of the text. Each of the lines in the Chinese text contains just four ideographs: the first two present the contrasting qualities; the third, in every line, is 相(xiang, “mutually”); the final ideograph is the concept that links the qualities—coming into existence, submitting to judgment, being measured, etc.

Lines 12 through 19. Under the circumstances presented in the lines above, which are the essential circumstances of our lives, it is unrealistic to expect that we can seriously alter balances: make everything easy, everybody smart or rich, all things beautiful and good. But Lao Tzu, here and throughout the book, does not give positive instructions for dealing with our situation. All he tells us is that the Sage, in the same situation, behaves so as to keep things from getting out of balance.

A word about the Sage. The idiom here is composed of the ideographs 聖人 (shengren, literally, “the person who hears”). This is the one who gets it. (Just so, the Buddha is the Tathagata, “the one thus gone”.) In working on these translations, I’ve tried various phrasings to substitute for the slightly alien and archaic term “sage”, but I’ve given up, for now, for several reasons.

• First, I’m not sure that “slightly alien and archaic” is wrong here. This is, after all, a gnomic text, 2500 years old, from the core of a profoundly foreign culture.
• Second, the shengren idiom, the archetype of the Sage, is vital to understanding that culture. The same idiom, the same archetype, appears in the other foundational literature of China—the I Ching, the Analects of Confucius, the oldest poems and most venerable histories. Even when it is gently mocked, as it often is in the works of Chuang Tzu (after Master Lao himself, the most important of the ancient Taoist sages), its definition, and the multiple layers of meaning that accrete to it, provide an essential foundation to an understanding of China—its politics, its government, its religions, its literature, its popular culture.
• Finally, I’ve come to believe that the Sage, as one who hears and lives the message, perceives and shows the way, is an ideal that translates into our emerging world culture comfortably and valuably. By not rejecting the archaic or alien nature of the ideal, we might be able to make it less alien and more obviously relevant to our contemporary condition. A very taoist dynamic.

More words, about “he” and “his”. I wish there were a way out of this one, but all the ways I see have what are, for me, unacceptable drawbacks. One way is to follow Stephen Mitchell, whose very popular translation uses “she” as the pronoun for the figure that he translates as “Master”. I think that’s a copout, and, more importantly, that it hinders the flow of the text; even the most liberated reader is brought up short and suffers a slight mental stumble coming across this:

The text is hard enough to get your head around; I don’t want to burden it further with neologistic phrasing that challenges thinking patterns that we have been burdened with since birth. (That may, in fact, be a noble agenda; it’s just one that’s more appropriate to Mother Jones than to Master Lao.)

The other way is that of Ursula LeGuin, who seems to me to have been almost totally successful at eliminating sexism from the narrative without a trace of awkwardness or artifice. She uses, throughout her translation, first person pronouns (”I”, “we”, “us”) and the third person “you”, in ways that eliminate the necessity of referring to the Sage. The problem, of course, is that she has thus eliminated the Sage from the narrative, and, for reasons that I referred to above, I would rather not do that. LeGuin’s approach gives her translation a personal, homespun quality that’s undeniably attractive and does not, I think, vitiate the essential meaning of the text. But it’s not what I read. Where Lao Tzu tells us what the Sage would do in some particular circumstances, LeGuin speaks directly to the reader; the model of the Sage is replaced by advice from the Author. And I’m not sure we gain by that.

The odd thing is that the problem does not exist in the Chinese text. As far as I can tell, there were not separate ideographs for “he” and “she”, “his” and “hers”. The generic pronoun took its gender association from the context. That is not to say, of course, that ancient China was not a sexist culture, judged by contemporary Western standards.