Daodejing by Laozi

Author:Laozi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2022-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

NOTES

CHAPTER 1

1any beginning of the ten thousand things: Following both of the Mawangdui manuscripts, which have wanwu “the ten thousand things” in both this line and the next one. The received version has “heaven and earth” tiandi instead of “the ten thousand things” in this line, but keeps “the ten thousand things” in the next one.

1“the mother of the ten thousand things”: These two sentences can and often have been parsed so as to mean “Nonbeing is named the beginning of all things [or of heaven and earth]. Being is named the mother of all things.”

1Thus is desirelessness: “Desirelessness” is an uninflected translation of wuyu , but it is important to note the sense here of maintaining what is beyond all desiring in both the objective and the subjective sense, implying both the presence of what is “undesirable” and, therefore, the presence of what is “undesiring.” This provides a key connection to the previous lines about names and namelessness, rooted in the assumed connection between names and desires. What is unnameable and indeterminable is ipso facto incapable of being experienced as an object of desire (cf. chapters 34 and 37, the latter being traditionally the other bookend to this half of the text), hence something literally undesirable, but this also makes available an aspect within ourselves that is not doing any desiring—perhaps even at the same time as we are also engaged in desire. It is suggested here that this aspect of ourselves allows us to perceive the mystery, the wondrous sublimity of the namelessness of all things, untouched by whatever we may desire from them or determine of them. And at the same time, this nameless aspect of things, the course never taken as a course, is itself entirely devoid of desire: it does what it does only by “nondoing,” i.e, without any deliberate intentions or purposes.

1in each of them and all: The translation emphatically points to a plurality of the mysteries, a specific dimension of sublimity pertaining to each of the ten thousand things considered severally (“in each of them and all” translating a simple possessive pronoun), on the basis of the final line of the chapter, which specifies that we are talking not about a singular mystery but zhongmiao “the multitude of mysteries” or even more emphatically, as in the translation here, “the manifold mysteries of each of them and all.”

1that each of them strives and cries for: The translation follows the Mawangdui texts, both of which here have suojiao . This can mean literally either “what they cry” or “that which cries,” which might imply either what they cry for or what they quest after: either the object of their desires, or that which impels their cries, i.e., their desires themselves. “What they cry” might also mean simply what issues from them, what they express. “Enabling a view of just what it is that each of them strives and cries for” exploits the ambiguity of the English word “just” to capture a delicate double implication in

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