Tao Te Ching

Most books earn your trust before they admit their limits. This one admits them in its first sentence: "The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao." A second line follows at once, saying the same of names.

Read slowly, that is not false modesty. It is exact. Whatever you are about to be given, a way to walk or a word to hold, will be one particular version of the thing, never the thing itself.

This is the book's first honest move, and almost everything strange that follows rests on it. Eighty more chapters of advice come after this sentence, and every one of them sits underneath it.

You may know the line in another form, the Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. Legge's walking is not a slip. The Chinese word tao means a road or a way, and it can also mean to say or to tell.

So the opening turns the word against itself. Most translators hear speech: any Tao you can explain is not the real one. Legge hears feet: any Tao you can follow step by step is not the real one.

Both readings end up in the same place. A path you can walk and an account you can give are both particular. Each goes somewhere specific, and the enduring Tao is not a somewhere.

Why can the first line honestly be translated both as the Tao that can be "trodden" and the Tao that can be "spoken"?

• The Chinese word tao means a road and also to say✓Correct answer
• Walking and speaking were one ritual act in old China
• Later editors reworded the line to sound more mystical
• Legge worked from a damaged copy with one word missing

Tao is a road or way, and it is also a verb for saying. Legge chose the walking sense and most modern translators choose speech; neither is a corruption of the text, they are two honest readings of the same word.

There are two easy ways to get this line wrong. One is to hear mystical fog, a lovely vagueness that lets the book off the hook for meaning anything. The other is to hear a shrug: if nothing true can be said, why read on?

Neither survives what happens next. The author keeps talking, chapter after chapter, and his images are stubbornly concrete: a wheel, a bellows, water, a small fish in a pan.

So the line is not a refusal to teach. It is an instruction about how to hold everything that follows. Take each saying seriously enough to walk it, and loosely enough that you never mistake it for the Tao itself.

The author applies this rule to his own vocabulary. In chapter 25 he describes something undefined and complete, there before heaven and earth, and then simply confesses: "I do not know its name, and I give it the designation of the Tao."

So even the word on the cover is a label stuck on for convenience. Tao is a name given, not found.

Chapter 14 comes at it from another side. We look and do not see it, listen and do not hear it, reach and cannot hold it, and still we give it names, because people need a handle. The handle is useful. It just is not the door.

The author admits that "Tao", the word his whole book is built on, is not the real name of the thing it points to.

True✓Correct answer

True, and he says it flatly in chapter 25: he does not know its name, and gives it the designation of the Tao. The central word of the book is a borrowed label, which is chapter 1's rule applied to the author himself.