Tao Te Ching (Translated by Sam Hamill) - Lao Tzu [2]
The Taoist scholar-translator Red Pine, however, quotes a Taiwanese scholar who presents a persuasive case for the “head” in the character actually being the “moon” . He suggests, therefore, that the “way” of the Tao Te Ching is centered in coming into harmony with the tides, with the phases of the moon that bring light in darkness. Even the universal symbol for Taoism represents waxing and waning moons: in darkness, light; in light, darkness. To be in harmony with the Tao is to be “at one” with nature, both one’s own innermost nature and the “force of nature” we experience everywhere. These are not two things. To follow the Tao is to embody the Tao. Life is transient, but as we more fully experience the Tao, each moment blossoms.
The te is most often translated as power or virtue (virtue in its root, Latinate sense, a cousin to virile, suggesting fecundity as well as strength). It conveys a sense of ethical or moral power. The elements in the character are “walking legs” on the left, and on the right top, “straight,” with “mind” below. There is the suggestion of the mind moving straight forwardly, directly. Te conveys energy and dynamism, the forces of nature.
Lao Tzu is a great subversive. He’s not interested in whether a ruler has the Confucian “mandate of heaven” or was born to high station. The filial sentiments are neither strictly maternal nor paternal, but are manifest everywhere, “thirty spokes converging at a single hub.” From the great “feminine mystery” of origin, the Tao flows, the seasons turn, the moon waxes and wanes, while in the paternally dominated world of today, the political arguments and the war-making of nations continue, unabated since his day. “Civilizations are as short-lived as our days,” the late Nobel poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote. Lao Tzu insists, “The world is feminine, / feminine in constant stillness / overcoming the masculine.”
And our place in that world must embody that feminine stillness, the desire to listen; real peace is learning to embody the force of change while resisting the temptations of mere power.
As the Chinese say, the sage “wears rough clothes,” eschewing prosperity, preferring rather to preserve the “jewel” (or literally “jade”) within—the jewel that is the te of Tao. The sage “acts without presumption, and accomplishes without acclamation.”
The Old Master’s masterpiece is one of the most frequently translated books in all of history, in part because it is simply impossible to translate into a Western language in a strictly literal way. Too many words and phrases convey plurisignation, multiple meanings. Some translations go wrong by trying to explain too much within the text, thereby losing the poetry of terse clarity so often found in the original; and some bear faint resemblance to the original.
Poetry is itself a Way. It thrives on image and metaphor and juxtaposition and rhythm. It requires alert, active reading, and benefits from being spoken as it is read, in order to properly engage the ear as well as the eye with the embodiment of language. The rhythm of the heartbeat and the rhythm of the breath are the foundations of all spoken language and are important to every poem. Enunciation, phrasing, lineation, punctuation (in English), rhyme and slant-rhyme, the sounds of syllables, vowel-againstconsonant—all contribute to a fuller understanding of the language in hand. They are its pleasure as well as its genius—and all languages express genius, each in its own way. Each poem is a body of music.
This a poet’s translation, one that adheres very closely to the original, almost word by word, while replicating as much of the sheer poetry of the original as I could convey. The way and the power of its virtue: