Tao: speak the tao. It is not the eternal tao.
Name: speak the name. It is not the eternal name.
Unnamed at first, sky and earth emerge.
Naming generates ten thousand things.
So: never seeking, we glimpse infinitesimals.
Always seeking, we mark boundaries.
Both there from the start, given opposite names.
Out of the deep,
Deep mirrored in deep,
Infinitesimals multiplied open all gates.
Lao-Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 1
Translated by Richard Blumberg
Ursula LeGuin says this cannot be translated. Of course not. But is there anything more worth trying? Or any more delightful choice for the first post to a new blog?
Notes
Lines 1 & 2. These may be the most famous two lines in world literature; if the meaning is not clear, then nothing that follows will be clear. The structure here mirrors the structure of the original. The first line, for example, is, in pinyin romanization, dao ke dao, fei chang dao (literally, “Tao mouth tao, not permanent tao”.)
Lines 3 & 4. The concept of “name” in the Tao Te Ching seem to me to be similar to the Theravada Buddhist concept of namarupa (Sanskrit: “name and form”). The Buddha’s doctrine of “dependent causality” posits “ignorance” as the fundamental condition; I take that to be equivalent to “chaos”, or “uncertainty”. From ignorance, consciousness arises: the fundamental analytical act of drawing a line, separating chaos into this and that, here and there, sky and earth. Once that essential discrimination is made, there is no end to the proliferation of namarupa. “Naming generates ten thousand things.”
Lines 5 & 6. But, of course, that does not end it either. Between the nine thousand and ninety-ninth thing and the ten thousandth thing, the dynamics of naming can distinguish ten thousand things. And another ten thousand between each two of those, and so forth. In these lines, it seems to me (and indeed, throughout the chapter), Lao Tzu has formulated a statement that prefigures the calculus. The terms “infinitesimal” and “boundary” are quite literal translations of the Chinese ideographs 眇 [miao3] and 徼 [jiao4].
Lines 7 through 10. The term “deep” in these lines is a translation of 玄 [xuan2]; the literal meaning is “black” or “mysterious”. Ellen Chen tells us that the term, “usually understood as the dark color of water, originally meant the dark color of the sky, … the depth of heaven from which all things come”. (The term used for sky here is the same as the term used for sky in line 3.)
