Dao Ke Dao

So I was watching a crazy kung fu movie the other day — my favorite type of movie, by the way — and this Daoist monk was engaged in mortal battle with a terrible yet beautiful tree spirit demon thing that had been literally sucking the life force out of a series of local young scholars as they prepared for the prefectural examinations. Evil. She was a beautiful demon and the young scholars were easily seduced. That is, until they met our protagonist and his friend the monk.

So as he bounces from tree trunk to tree trunk dispensing his very serious tree-spirit-demon-vanquishing kung fu — which is itself a beautiful thing to behold — the monk is reciting a kind of incantation under his breath:

Dao ke dao, fei chang dao. Yan ke yan, fei chang yan.

So cool.

Long story short: the ritual dance of the monk vanquishes the tree demon, the young scholar is saved, gets to take his prefectural exam after all, the monk continues on down the path. Probably to vanquish more demons. I don't know. Roll credits.

So cool.

Anyway. Now go rent the movie.

OK so back to my story. So what was this saying, exactly? It was clearly important in the movie. The monk said it like it mattered. The way he said it, the way he repeated it — clearly important. So now I had to know.

Sometimes I have extra time on my hands here in the cave. Plus I have interweb. So.

Dao ke dao, fei chang dao.

Forty-five seconds of typing into a search engine and I figured out it's the famous opening line of the Dao De Jing, attributed to an old fellow named — and I love this — Lǎozǐ, which translates very appropriately as "Old Child." Or "Old Master." Or maybe "Old Boy." The translations vary. Look, even the name of the author has multiple translations, OK, this is a clue.

A quick search reveals — and please double-check me on the exact number, but it's something like — over 250 English translations of the Dao De Jing exist. Two hundred and fifty. In English alone. Wikipedia says over 1,930 translated versions in 94 languages total.

Take a second with that.

One book.

Five thousand Chinese characters.

Eighty-one short chapters.

Translated more than 1,930 times into 94 different languages.

Translated more than 250 times into English alone.

I mean. Hmmmm. Obviously an important text. Wow.

So I'm sitting here in the cave going, OK, clearly I should read this thing. But how to pick a translation? With 250+ to choose from? Impossible. Each one a different rendering. Each one disagreeing with the others on what the first sentence means. The first sentence. We can't even agree on the first sentence.

So I do what I do. I turn to the Chinese dictionary.

Dao (道). The dictionary tells me it means way, road, path, route. Also to say, to speak, to tell. Also method, principle, doctrine.

So in one little character we've got: a path you walk on, a thing you say, a method you follow.

Hmmmm.

OK look at the character itself though. 道. Two parts. On the left, that wavy thing — 辶, the walking radical. Movement, going, walking along a road. On the right, 首 — head.

Walking, plus a head. OK, now we're going somewhere.

But notice what those two parts together make. Head, in classical Chinese, doesn't only refer to the body part. It also functions as a verb — to head somewhere. The same way English does it: which way are you headed? The head is the part that leads. The body follows. So head + walking isn't just a head moving along. It's to head somewhere. To lead the way. To go in a direction with the head pointing first.

That's dao. Built into the character. The dynamic part — the going-toward, the heading-in-a-direction — is right there in the structure.

This is why the English translation way misses something. Way is a static noun. A way just sits there. But the Chinese 道 has the verb in it. Dao is way AND to head along the way. Both at once. It's why dao in the Daodejing keeps slipping out from under translators — the word is doing two jobs, and English wants it to do one.

Hmmmm.

OK fine. Moving on.

Ke (可). The dictionary says: can, may, able to, possible. Pretty straightforward. Can-as-in-possibility.

So dao ke dao is roughly: the dao that can be dao-ed.

The way that can be wayed. The path that can be pathed. The road that can be roaded. Or — and here's where the second meaning of dao (to speak) comes in — the way that can be said. The way that can be told.

The way that can be put into words.

Hmmmmmm.

Fei (非). Not, is not, no, non-. The negation. Fine.

Chang (常). Constant, eternal, regular, ordinary, usual, often. Also the rule, the constant principle.

So fei chang dao means is not the constant dao. Is not the eternal way. Is not the unchanging principle.

So put it together:

Dao ke dao, fei chang dao.

The way that can be said is not the eternal way.

Or:

The path that can be walked is not the constant path.

Or, if you really want to twist your brain a little:

The dao that can be dao-ed is not the constant dao.

Hmmmmmm. Now I'm starting to see why there are 250 English translations.

OK so the second line. The monk in the movie said:

Yan ke yan, fei chang yan.

Yan (言). Speech, word, saying, to say.

So the second line is something like the saying that can be said is not the eternal saying. The word that can be worded. The speech that can be spoken.

So the whole thing together:

Dao ke dao, fei chang dao. Yan ke yan, fei chang yan.

The way that can be spoken is not the eternal way. The saying that can be said is not the eternal saying.

OK well now I'm hooked. I want to see what the rest of the chapter says. Because already, just from the first two lines, the old Old Boy is doing this thing where he opens his book about the way by telling us that the way he's about to tell us about isn't really the way. AND that the words he's about to use to tell us about it aren't really the words either. Which is — I mean, that's some next-level do not trust me, trust the thing itself energy. That's a hell of an opening move.

So I read the rest of chapter one. I read chapter two. I read a few more. I do some more research. I poke around. I read about the guy. I read about the period he wrote in (or didn't write in — opinions vary on whether he was a real person, opinions also vary on whether he was one person or many people, opinions on this guy basically vary on everything). I read about what people were arguing about in his time. I read about the other guys arguing — Confucius and his crowd, the Legalists, the Mohists. I read about how Daoism developed after him.

And here's what I come away with. Forgive me, Daoism scholars. I am one guy in a cave with the interweb. But here's what I come away with.

Dao (道) is the way things actually go. Not a god. Not a person. Not a force, exactly. Water flows downhill. Trees grow toward light. Seasons turn. Babies grow up. Old people die. The dao is that-which-makes-all-of-this-happen-in-the-way-it-happens. It is not separate from the world; it IS the world, in its operating mode. (Later commentators piled a lot of metaphysical weight on top of this — cosmic principle, underlying source of all being, that kind of thing — but in the early Daodejing itself the dao is more practical than that. The cosmic-principle reading is mostly later accretion.) And — crucially — you cannot fully say what it is, because the moment you put it in words you've made it smaller than it is. Hence: the way that can be spoken is not the eternal way. The opening line is a warning label. Do not mistake the description for the thing.

De (德). This is the second character in the title. Dao De Jing. way and de-jing. So what's de? The dictionary says virtue, morality, ethics, kindness, favor, character. But etymologically — and this is where it gets fun — de originally meant something more like inner power, potency, the quality that something has by being what it is. Trees have tree-de. Rivers have river-de. People have person-de. De is what something brings to the world by being itself, in alignment with the dao. Living in accordance with the dao gives you de. It's not virtue in the moralizing sense. It's more like — the quality that emerges when you stop fighting the way things actually go.

Wu wei (無為). Two characters. Wu means not, without, no. Wei means to do, to act, to make. Together: not-doing, or non-action. But — and this is the part that always gets translated weird in English — wu wei is NOT laziness. Wu wei is more like — not forcing things. Acting without strain. Doing what the situation requires without imposing your will on it. Water carving a canyon is wu wei. The water isn't trying. The water is just being water. The canyon happens. Wu wei is the way of acting that the dao itself acts. You don't have to make the canyon. You let the canyon happen by being water.

(There's a famous story in the Zhuangzi — the other founding Daoist text, more on that another time — about a butcher named Cook Ding who's so good at his work that his blade glides between the joints of an ox without ever hitting bone or tendon. He's been using the same knife for nineteen years and it's still sharp as the day he got it. He's not hacking. He's finding the spaces. That's wu wei. The work is real. The action is effortless. The blade lasts forever.)

Ziran (自然). Often translated as nature, but more literally self-so. Self-such. Such of itself. It's the way things are when they're being themselves without external pressure. A tree being a tree is ziran. A river being a river is ziran. A person being a person, without all the social posturing and forced effort, is ziran.

OK so maybe — maybe — we're starting to get somewhere. The Dao De Jing, if I'm reading any of this right, is maybe pointing at something like:

There's a way the universe operates. It's not a thing you can fully describe. The closer you align your own life and behavior with how the universe actually operates — instead of with what you think should be happening, or what other people are telling you should happen, or what you're trying to force — the more you have de, the inner quality of being what you are. The way to get there is wu wei, which doesn't mean doing nothing, it means stopping the unnecessary doing. And what you're trying to align with is ziran, the self-so-ness of things being what they are.

You stop forcing. You stop saying. You stop trying to make the way be what you want it to be. You just let the way be the way.

That's basically it in a nutshell! Whew!

Of course, that took me about three hours of poking around the interweb in the cave to figure out, and people have spent entire lives studying this stuff and I'm sure I'm getting some of it embarrassingly wrong. But it's a start.

Also: the kung fu monk vanquished the tree demon. Did I mention that? He vanquished the tree demon. He bounced from tree to tree, recited dao ke dao, fei chang dao, and did the ritual dance. The tree demon withered away into a smoking pile of demon dust. The scholar was saved, and the local village rid of the menacing evil spirit!

So what was the kung fu monk doing? Reciting the opening of the Dao De Jing while bouncing tree to tree and dispatching the demon? Was it word magic? Was it incantation — the words themselves doing the work? Was it more like a focusing practice, the way an athlete repeats a phrase before the throw? Was it a kind of declaration of allegiance — I'm with the way, demon, and you're not — and the alignment did the rest? Was it that the line itself is a refusal of fixed forms, and demons are nothing if not fixed forms trying to force themselves where they don't belong, and reciting the line dissolved the demon's pretensions? Was it just what the screenwriter put in the monk's mouth because it sounded cool?

I have no idea.

That's a real answer. I have no idea. Daoist ritual is rich and old and full of recited formulas, talismans, paced steps, breath patterns, sound-based practices, syllabic incantations going back to texts older than the Dao De Jing. The kung fu movie is drawing on a long tradition that takes recitation seriously, that treats certain phrases as operative — not just descriptive but doing something. What that something is, and how it works, and whether it works, is a question that's been asked for over two thousand years and is still being asked.

What I can say, after my afternoon of cave research, is this. The phrase the monk recited is one of the most important opening lines in human literature. It's been translated into English over 250 times. The character dao contains within itself the suggestion of moving and being-led-toward, fused as one motion. The text it opens warns us, in its first breath, that it can't really tell us what it means to tell us. The Daoist tradition that grew out of it has, for millennia, produced practitioners who do things like recite passages while bouncing tree to tree and vanquishing demons.

Whether they're vanquishing demons because the words have power, or because the practitioner has aligned themselves with something deeper than words, or because we're all just watching a really good kung fu movie, is for someone wiser than me to figure out. I am one guy in a cave with the interweb.

Should I write the 258th English translation?

My ego says yes.

The cave says no.

You'll find me in the cave.

Dave out.