The importance of the Daodejing* in the history of Chinese thought is hard to overestimate, yet at the same time, it is one of the most routinely misunderstood texts in the West. Personally, I think a lot of the misunderstanding comes not only from the fact that it has been completely stripped of context, but also because the act of translation demands interpretation, so many people are reading what amounts to a commentary on the Daodejing without realizing it.
To address this, I will be using Richard John Lynn’s translation of the Daodejing with commentary by Wang Bi. Now, I think that the Wang Bi interpretation is a good way to frame the Daodejing, because most people automatically read the text in a Zhuangzian (Chuang Tzu -ian), personal anarchist light which is a valid reading of the text, but is not necessarily the only reading of the text. Wang Bi instead focuses on a larger social dimension, which (I think) adds a great deal of depth to the Daodejing. Additionally, Wang Bi is really the first person to apply a rigorous system to hermeneutics to the Daodejing, so almost any version that you read will in some way be affected by his thinking. It is good to know the source of your own thoughts, is it not?
The format I’ll be adopting for this exercise is that the original text from the Daodejing will be bold, Wang Bi’s commentary will be in italitcs and my own comments will be in plain text. If you want to respond to anything from the post, please do. Wang Bi’s commentary, my commentary, your commentary, questions, anything your heart desires.
So, we will take the text, one passage at a time.
*You may be more familiar with the spelling “Tao Te Ching”, which is the older transliteration system known as ‘Wade-Giles’. If you are more familiar with that system, a conversion table between the old system, and the newer system, called Pinyin, that I use can be found here. The worlds mean the same thing, and are actually pronounced the same, they just use slightly different conventions
