What I've learned about the Dao De Jing

What I have learned about the Dao De Jing

Since 2020 some friends and myself have been making an in depth study of the Dao De Jing.

When we started out we spent four years studying Dao De Jing and Dao De Jing Chan Wei, the only complete internal alchemy based annotation of the text.

More recently another group of us has spent the last nine months going through the text chapter by chapter and reading it from four perspectives:

1: the character meaning and etymology of the document,

2: early annotations including He Shang Gong and Wang Bi,

3: Dao De Jing Chan Wei,

4: Modern interpretations from a Chinese philosophical lens.

We have learned quite a bit in the process and I’d like to share a few key points:

1: you can’t understand the Dao De Jing simply by reading it:

The Dao De Jing is a document which was written during the spring and autumn and warring states periods, if we take the text as a simple linguistic exercise without analyzing the culture of that time period it will be impossible to understand even the basic conceppts imparted within it.

Another factor is that Warring States era Chinese writing has specific rules that are different from later periods such as no compound words, so while in modern Chinese we might write 自然 Zi Ran as one word meaning natural, in Warring States period writings it has to be read as two separate meanings with Zi meaning something like self and ran meaning something like according, so Ziran means self according, spontaneous or automatic rather than natural. Language changes over time and to be fair to the past we must try to understand their language when we read their books.

Another key factor is that we must understand the Dao De Jing as an evolving idea within the Daoist and Chinese cultural traditions which has changed meanings over time. This why reading commentaries from across Chinese history is valuable, otherwise we are stuck with a philosohical relic rather than a historically impactful document with meaning that resonates even 2500 years after it was first conceived.

2: The religion v.s. Philosophy debate is a dead end:

Many scholars, regardless of whether they are located in China or other countries have taken sides in a debate about whether Daoism should be viewed as a religion or a philosophy.

This debate is likely not to end until people stop being interested in Daoism, but from my perspective it misses some essential points about early Daoist writings:

• the authors of those writings do not make such distinctions: Laozi does say that the Dao comes before the Heavenly Emperor and we do have enough knowledge of the Warring States and before to know that the heavenly emperor was the main deity associated with the Zhou dynasty, however that does not mean that Laozi rejected the religion of the Zhou, it only means that he proposed the idea that there is something which comes before that which is more original and primary.

• Daoism has existed in many forms and is sometimes not even contained within a major, active Daoist tradition: Chinese, East Asian and even Indian people have been interested in the Dao De Jing for centuries and Westerners have also been fascinated with this text for a long time. It is normal that not everyone agrees about the nature of the text and it would be a historical abnormality for there to be lock step agreement about the precise meaning of the text. Even documents which are not as vague and open ended as the Dao De Jing such as the Christian Gospels have been hotly, and I mean at the tip of a sword levels, contested for hundreds of years, so difference in opinion is natural, it is human.

3: Chinese philosophical modernism has problems:

Before going really deeply into the Dao De Jing I was a big fan of Feng Youlan’s philosophical modernism, but more and more I recognize that it has many inherent problems. To give you a simplified perspective, during the early part of the 20^th century various Chinese scholars went to the west to study different elements of culture so they could build a new China under the auspices of the Republic. Philosophy in China was a new academic field and largely related to Western philosophy on account of Chinese philosophy not having been fully codified into an academic system. Keep in mind that the concept of a University in the sense that we recognize them today was fairly new at the time, even if the original idea of Universities traces its path from East To West and did not originate in Europe. Nevertheless, Chinese philosophers such as Feng Youlan visited the West to study doctorates and began to work toward an idea of a unique Chinese philosophical system which could stand as a cultural pillar in comparison to the West. Feng came up with the idea that because Chinese metaphysics is a fixed system without debate that it is the only true metaphysics, which is just an insane idea, but I digress. I’ve always had a soft spot for this school of thought, but have come to recognize some specific problems with it that I think make it really disfunctional:

• There is a tendancy to perceive early Chinese philosophical writings as rationalist, non superstitious, and naturalist without sufficient attention to the aspects of the philosophies which are of a religious nature. This is a big mistake since it does not account for the religious elements contained in the texts or the traditions which stemmed out of them. This intentional ignorance of the historical flow of chinese civilization has caused me to consider that the approach of these early modernists was more utility based than academically honest. It is understandable that they would take such positions since they needed to reform China culturally in order to make it competative in the modern world, but if we make the mistake of not recognizing this utility based approach, it is possible to buy into their arguments and form a very partial opinion of texts like the Lun Yu and Dao De Jing which are disconnected from much larger historical trends that we should not ignore.

• This flow of knowledge precipitates into modern Chiense and even some western scholarship about Daoism, but the situation today is much better since the field is robust and there are many voices advocating for more subtle perspectives. I personally suggest you to look into the writings of Chen Guying who advocates for the idea that Dao De Jing and Zhuangzi exist within the context of the religious culture of the Zhou, Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods. This approach to argumentation provides a much more believeable rationale than the black and white approach taken by the philosophy only crowd. At the same time I have to give credit to the religion crowd who account for the reality of philosophical elements of Daoism within a broader religious context, even though I feel that they often understate the importance of the philosophical aspect.

I’m not trying to dunk of Feng Youlan at all, but you have to understand that his ideas were quite specific to a certain period of time where specific historical forces shaped what was possible and that these things should be reviewed and revised for the sake of progress.

4: We do not actually know what Laozi thought:

This is the most important thing since there have always been plenty of mouthy people who want to tell you that they have figured out the precise meaning of the Dao De Jing and that anyone who disagrees with them simply belongs to an inferior group of people, whether that be linguistically inferior foreigners, or other Chinese people who they perceive as holding the wrong opinion for whatever reason.

The fact of the matter is the Dao De Jing is a terse 5000 character long text which is intentionally obscure and does not make specific proclamations, instead preferring flexibility of interpretation.

Compared to Confucius and even Zhuangzi, the Dao De Jing is exceptionally open ended which is probbaly why so many people have done so much with this text.

These are some ideas that come to mind about what I’ve discovered since beginning to seriously investigate this text.

I guess the project really started in 2013 when I took my first crack at reading Dao De Jing in Chinese. It took a year to finish the text, then from 2020 it took four years to finish, and now it looks like this current project will take about six years. I hope one day I’ll be an expert, but due to the illusive nature of the Dao De Jing it is impossible to say whether I or anyone will ever truly grasp its original meaning. Nevertheless, the 2500 years of Daoism since the text has been written have given us a lot to work with and that is great because it provides us with meaning, direction and entertainment.

I’m going to Shanghai for a few days, will post again when I return.

behind the wall today is Li Leqiu’s interview with Yu Yangzi from Fang Dao Yulu. Yu advocates for the practice of Xing Gong before starting with energetic cultivation. This is an important trend in Neidan which comes from the Quanzhen Longmen tradition. I agree with this perspective more and more as my practice and teaching progresses.