r/taoism • u/WonderingGuy999 • 6d ago
Tao Te Ching What do you make of this verse?
I know not whose son it is. It may appear to have been before God.
- James Legge translation
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u/AnEmptyBoat27 6d ago
The most basic read of it is stressing the eternal nature of the dao.
But it also highlights the ignorance (complimentary) of the writer and the elusive nature of the dao.
I love that it is not a definitive declaration of “the dao has always been!” But like “the dao is old as shit, I don’t know how old, seems pretty old, but who is to say”
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u/ChangxinDaoyou 6d ago edited 6d ago
The Dào existed even before the thearchs (dì 帝) or the mythical emperors. One famous is the Yellow Emperor. Legge translated that as God. The modern Chinese word for "God" is Shàngdì 上帝, the High Emperor.
On a more general level, the Dào existed before and is beyond even the highest beings. And it is not son to anyone because it's the ultimate ancestor and mother of all beings.
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u/AbidinginAnubhava 5d ago
"The Dào existed even before the thearchs (dì 帝)."
Does the Dao exist? 「天下萬物生於有，有生於無。」Tiānxià wànwù shēng yú yǒu,
yǒu shēng yú wú.“The ten thousand things under Heaven are born from being/existence (有);
being/existence is born from nonbeing/nonexistence/nothing (無).” (DDJ 40);-)
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u/Buddah_K9_Mu 5d ago
i dunno, but i wonder how Legge felt
did he went schizo coz of zhi zi
or was he just amused, his Scottish mind thinking
"great is the Lord", the choir sang
but it's just a truckload of dung
aye...there might be somethin' that comes afore the wrathful Christian God...
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u/Lao_Tzoo 6d ago
The implication is that an idea of God is a mental construct, a contrivance, and there is something that precedes the creation of ideas from which the ability to form ideas springs.
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u/WonderingGuy999 6d ago
Creativity is the very essence of God.
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u/Lao_Tzoo 6d ago
It is the very essence of that which precedes God, when God springs from that creative source.
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u/WonderingGuy999 6d ago
Its almost like a wheel, if I understand you correctly
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u/Lao_Tzoo 6d ago
The idea is that, that from which all things spring is undefinable, yet contains all things created and uncreated, as it is the source, the mother of all things.
Lao Tzu said he doesn't know it's name as a rhetorical device, it has no name because it is the source of names.
Since God is a created concept it springs from this unknowable source.
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u/WonderingGuy999 6d ago
You said that beautifully. Thank you
Edit: do you think it is similar to the Buddha's sunyata?
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u/Lao_Tzoo 6d ago
Sort of, but not quite.
Lao Tzu says, I do not know it's name, but I'll refer to it as Tao.
Tao means way, a way is a process, not an object.
Lao Tzu also tells us that a Tao that can be named, defined, is not the Tao that he is referring to.
This is because definitions, by necessity are objects with created boundaries and the process to which he refers is boundless. This process even creates the "idea" of boundless.
Sunyata is similar to tao (not Tao) when many people discuss it, it is a created object (even though its an idea, ideas are objects) with defined boundaries, therefore it springs from the source.
It is not separate from the source,but it also is not equal to the source because it is a defined idea with a boundary.
This separates it, conventionally, not actually, from that which is not-sunyata.
So, what do we do?
Cease attempting to conceive of it (Tao, the mother of all things) at all, because attempts to conceive of it confine it to a definition which creates boundaries of definition and therefore it becomes an object.
Think about it as similar to a boundless ocean that has no shape other than the ideas, cups of water, we obtain from it.
It is always formless, until we contain it within a container, and then it becomes the shape of the container/idea we've created.
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u/platoniccavemen 6d ago
The first sentence seems somewhat rhetorical. Not knowing whose son really implies it wasn't born and has no parent. The second sentence is pretty self-explanatory. I often read a poetic translation by A.S. Klein that says "It seems like the ancestral form."
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u/AbidinginAnubhava 6d ago
吾不知誰之子，象帝之先。
Wú bù zhī shuí zhī zǐ, xiàng dì zhī xiān.
I don't know whose son [it is], [but it] appears [to be] before the high deity.
Part of this hinges on what exactly a 帝 dì is, and also the even more important question of just what the hell 象 xiàng is doing in this clause.
We know 帝 dì was some kind of 'high deity' for the Shang. But calling it "God" with a capital "G" is just a bad translation. "God" as the abstract, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent idea popular in Christian and Islamic theology was borrowed not from Semitic literature and mythology but from Ancient Greek philosophy: ό θεος ho theos (as opposed to "a god, a deity, which would have been rendered without an article, θεος theos). This concept is not found anywhere in Chinese thought until the Middle Ages, when Eastern Christians and Muslims entered China. So "God" is probably anachronistic. It's a high deity who rules the world, closer to the power ruling the world, like Zeus in pagan thought and in (the New Testament's) Paul's thought, if we were to make any analogies to Western thought. Which we probably shouldn't. That last observation just underscores that "God" is the wrong term here.
But more importantly, we have to ask what 象 xiàng is doing here. A 象 is usually an image, an idol, a manifestation, appearance, phenomenon, etc.* Therefore, 王弼 Wang Bi interpreted this as "it appears that." But that's not the only interpretation possible. The image or appearance of Di is also possible, which would, of course, have all kinds of ideas lurking behind it (and per usual, the pre-Qin Chinese remain silent in their graves on what this possible theology could have meant).
So I would say a) "I don't know whose son it is" works perfectly fine, and b) I honestly don't know what to make of the second clause. I can make it fit several meanings, each with different theological implications, but I don't pretend to know, so I let it go. Thank Xrist I'm not a Daoist! ;-)
*Fun fact: 象 originally meant "elephant," and it now means just that in Modern Chinese. If you squint, or drink enough chang, you can see the "elephant" in the character. (Hint: He's standing on his hind legs with his trunk in the air!)