Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching by Ursula K. Le Guin, Laozi, Jerome P. Seaton Read Free Book Online Page B

standard order, in which tao precedes te , and the
famous stanza about the go-able way and the namable name is the first chapter,
not the thirty-eighth. Where there are differences in wording, I follow
sometimes the standard text, sometimes Robert G. Henricks’s translation of the Ma wang tui , whichever seemed more useful.

Notes on the Chapters
Chapter 1
    Here, for the words in the third verse that I render
"what it wants," I use the Ma wang tui text. The words in
the standard text mean boundaries, or limits, or outcomes. This version seems
to follow more comprehensibly from the preceding lines.
    And yet the idea of what can be delimited or made manifest
is relevant. In the last verse, the two "whose identity is mystery"
may be understood to be the hidden, the unnameable ,
the limitless vision of the freed soul—and the manifest, the nameable, the
field of vision limited by our wants. But the endlessness of all that is, and the
limitation of mortal bodily life, are the same, and their sameness is the key
to the door.
Chapter 5
    As I said above, in a few of the poems I leave out lines
which I find weaken the coherence of the text to the point that I believe them to
be a long-ago reader's marginal notes which got incorporated in later copyings . My authority for these omissions is strictly
personal and aesthetic. Here I omit the last two lines. Translations of them vary
greatly; my version is:
    Mere talk runs dry.
Best keep to the center.
Chapter 12
    There are times Lao Tzu sounds very like Henry David
Thoreau, but Lao Tzu was kinder. When Thoreau says to distrust any enterprise that
requires new clothes, I distrust him. He is macho, flaunting his asceticism.
Lao Tzu knows that getting all entangled with the external keeps us from the
eternal, but (see chapter 80) he also understands that sometimes people like to
get dressed up.
Chapter 13
    T'ien hsia ,
"under heaven," i.e. the Empire, or the world: here I render it as
"the public good," "the commonwealth," and "the body politic."
    J. P. Seaton comments: "When Lao Tzu mentions 'the
Empire' or 'all under heaven,' he does so with the assumption that all his
readers know that it is a commonwealth where only the ruler who rules by virtue
of virtue alone is legitimate."
Chapters 17, 18, and 19
    Henricks considers these three
chapters to belong together.
    The last two lines of 19 are usually printed as the first
two lines of 20, but Henricks thinks they belong
here, and I follow him.
    In 18, line 6, the words hsiao tzu are traditionally translated as "filial
piety and paternal affection," a Confucian ideal. In that chapter Lao Tzu
cites these dutiful families as a symptom of social disorder. But in chapter 19,
line 4, hsiao tzu appears
as the good that will result when people cease being moralistic. Unable to
reconcile these contradictory usages, and feeling that Lao Tzu was far more
likely to use Confucian language satirically than straightforwardly, I fudged the
translation in chapter 19, calling it "family feeling." Evidently we
aren't the only society or generation to puzzle over what a family is and ought
to be.
    Sometimes I translate the characters su and p'u with such words as simple , natural . Though the phrase "the uncarved block" has become familiar to many, yet metaphor may distance ideas and
weaken a direct statement. But sometimes, as here, I use the traditional metaphors,
because the context so clearly implies knowing something as an artist knows her
materials, keeping hold on something solid.
Chapter 20
    The standard texts ask what's the difference between wei and o , which might be translated
"yes" and " yessir ." The Ma wang tui has wei and ho : "yes" and "no."
This is parallel with the next line ("good and bad" in the standard
text, "beautiful and ugly" in the Ma wang tui ) . Here's a case where the older text surely is correct,
the later ones corrupt.
    In the first two lines of the second verse, the Ma wang tui text is perfectly clear: "A person whom