Figure It Out

Thursday, February 3, 2022

"Don't look back on what might have been.

Rather, lift up, look up — now — where you are." 

ECRL 369-16

now — in other words —

An old man on an ox led by a child

made it to a gate that he called

衆妙之門

the door to all wonders.

At that pass, west out of the 洛伊谷

— the very name of which is disputed —

was a guard named 尹喜*, the Happy Overseer,

— a true civil servant —

who abided by the laws.

So he asked that old funny citizen

who seemed to have every intention to go through

"What do you have to declare?"

To which the elderly softly answered:

"Nothing much, really"

— But that will not do at all,

the guardian corrected him.

You must fill out the imperial declaration form N°1

Or I cannot let you travel on.

So step back, board in the Dragon inn

And start writing down your statement, or else..."

And so did the wise one comply,

Amused and jocularly.

1.

If you can talk about it,

it ain't Dào.

If it has a name,

it's just another thing.

Dào doesn't have a name.

Names are for ordinary things.

Stop wanting stuff;

it keeps you from seeing what's real.

When you want stuff,

all you see are things.

Those two sentences

mean the same thing.

Figure them out,

and you've got it made.

i.e. "all there is to get" is easily, freely and readily accessible through thirty and some — some of which are used only once, some at multiple instances — symbols renamed 字 composing the first "chapter" of a book entitled 《道德經 — Dàodé jīng》。

Context explained:

FOREWORD

"Ancient Chinese Secret, Huh?"

In the spring of 1994, I was handed a master's degree in film studies and politely invited not to return to graduate school in the fall. So I went to work at Dutton's, a fantastic indie bookstore in Brentwood, less than a mile from the Simpson condo, but that's another story. Doug, the owner, lets his employees borrow books from the inventory, on the principle that you can sell books better if you know them better, and that's how I discovered the Tao Te Ching (or TTC, as I'll abbreviate it from now on).

Oh, I knew about the book beforehand. I knew it existed, anyway, and I knew it was a classic of Eastern philosophy. But that's all I knew. Not that there's that much to know after that, about all anybody can really say about Lao Tzu is that according to legend, about six centuries before Christ, he got fed up with the royal court's inability to take his advice and decided to leave. Then, the story goes, he was stopped at the Great Wall by a guard who begged him to write down some of his teachings for posterity, and the result was this slim volume. Once I actually started to read the thing, I was hooked. Here was a book that managed to say with clarity what I'd been struggling to figure out about spirituality for several years.

The TTC I found at Dutton's was written by Stephen Mitchell, a version that remains popular nearly twenty years after its original composition. Having read a couple dozen translations since it's still one of the most accessible versions I've seen, but even then, I found his style a bit too refined, too full of a certain "wisdom of the ancients" flavour. For example, here's how Mitchell starts the first chapter:

"The Tao that can be named

is not the eternal Tao.

The name that can be named

is not the eternal Name."

At the time, I was newly infatuated with the writing of Quentin Tarantino and David Mamet, so my dream version of a TTC reflected the simplicity and grit of their dialogue:

"If you can talk about it, it ain't Tao.

If it has a name, it's just another thing."

Anyway, I grabbed a couple of other translations and started looking at the different ways they expressed the same sentiments ― or, as I quickly discovered, how much poetic license Mitchell and other translators were willing to take with the original text. I don't think this necessarily matters all that much; many current English- language versions are by people who don't know Chinese well, if at all, and I can't read or speak it myself. To that extent, then, we're *all* (unless we're fluent in Chinese, that is) at the mercy of, at best, a secondhand understanding of what Lao Tzu said.

Once I thought I had a rough idea of what was behind the words, though, I went about rephrasing the chapters in my own voice. My guiding principle was to take out as much of the "poetry" as possible, to make the text sound like dialogue, so the reader could imagine someone telling him or her what Tao's all about. You can't take the "poetry" out completely, because the TTC is always going to have those lines about Tao being an "eternal mystery" and whatnot.

But the beauty of the book isn't in its language, at least not for me ― it's in the practical advice Lao Tzu offers us about how to live a productive, meaningful life on a day to day basis. What I wanted to do was to make that advice as clear to a modern American reader as it would have been to the guard who first asked Lao Tzu to write it down.

I worked through the first twenty chapters, then put the rough draft up on my website under a pseudonym I used online back in those days. A bunch of fan mail came in, so I kept plugging away at the text, then my hard drive collapsed and all my files were completely erased. I was freelancing pretty steadily then, and what little free time I had I spent building my own website, so the TTC went on hold. I got an occasional email asking about the other chapters, and I developed a stock answer. When it was time for me to finish the job, I told people, I would.

Years went by. I'd left LA for San Francisco, then moved up to Seattle, chasing after big dot-com money. It was great for a while, but as Lao Tzu says, "If you give things too much value, you're going to get ripped off." In the middle of the worst of the frustration, I rediscovered the Tao Te Ching and realized I needed to finish what I started.

I dug out all my old copies of the TTC and went shopping for more versions, some of which were even better than the ones I'd found the first time. Brian Browne Walker's translation comes close to the modern oral quality I was striving for, though his voice is still much more of an "Eastern sage" voice than mine. David Hinton is somewhat more poetic, but I think he does a wonderful job of capturing what Lao Tzu may have actually sounded like to his contemporaries. And Ursula K. LeGuin strikes a balance between the modern and classical voices that gave me a new perspective on Dào; her commentaries on several chapters are enlightening as well.

I wish I could say that I wrote the remaining sixty-one chapters in a hurried creative frenzy, but things took a little longer than I thought. I got distracted by the decision to move to New York City, and though I did get some work done on the book, it was a little over a year later, when (and, yes, I know how cliched this sounds) the planes crashed into the World Trade Center and I realized I'd still been wasting too much of my life on things that didn't pan out. Instead of talking about getting serious about my life, it was time to actually do it. (Living through the following two and a half years has also made me appreciate chapters 30 and 31 a lot more, for reasons that will become readily apparent.)

So here you are ― with my own name attached, as the pseudonym has long since fallen away. From a scholar's point of view, this TTC is unfaithful to the original text on more than one occasion, if not in every single line. Case in point: in chapter 20, Lao Tzu didn't exactly say, "Don't spend too much time thinking about stupid shit." For all the liberties I've taken with his words, however, I've made every attempt to stay true to his message, and I hope you'll find something useful in my efforts.

― Ron Hogan

(tao@beatrice.com)

January 2004

* 老子騎牛出函關，尹喜留傳《五千言》

老子是春秋時著名的思想家。他看到周王朝越來越衰敗，就離開故土，準備出函谷關去四處雲遊。

尹喜，文始真人、文始先生、關尹。先秦天下十豪，周朝大夫、大將軍、哲學家、教育家，甘肅天水人，自幼究覽古籍，精通曆法，善觀天文，習占星之術，能知前古而見未來。

《莊子·天下》將尹喜和老子並列，稱為“古之博大真人”

《歷世真仙體道通鑑》記述尹喜得道經過：周代楚康王時尹喜為巨大夫，後為東宮賓友，結草為樓，仰觀乾象。一日，觀見東方紫氣西邁天文顯瑞，知有聖人當度關而 西，乃求出為函谷關令。遇老子，迎為師，拜求至道；老子因接喜玉曆三十五章及道德經五千言而去。喜欣爭持誦，奉行道成。

尹喜後辭官隨老子沿秦嶺終南山神仙路西行，老子與尹喜結草阿福泉，馬放南山，老牛坡放牛，南山不老松下講道，發現終南捷徑後清涼山講經，樓觀台煉丹，鑄南山鐵案，享南山之壽，化胡西域。

老子後西出函關,被關令尹喜求留,留下五千言,道德經,倒騎青牛而去。 

西晉道士王浮，寫《老子化胡經》，書裡說老子出函谷關後到了印度，在那裡教了個學生，叫釋伽牟尼~

實際上據說老子是去了秦國，在那裡生活了二十六年後去世。他首傳弟子是關吏尹喜，尹喜再傳列子、楊朱，再後來申不害、韓非子等，到漢朝張良和陳平。這些不一定真實。