How to Understand the Tao Te Ching Without Actually Reading It

The Tao Te Ching, a venerated book of Chinese wisdom, has endured for more than 2,500 years despite the fact that nobody has really figured out what it means yet. The last person who spoke the dialect in which the Tao was originally composed supposedly died in a single-cart accident during the Three Sovereigns Around the Moon dynasty (345–287 BCE), which tells you how long people have been improvising interpretations.

The fact that nobody knows what Lao Tzu, the eighty-something-year-old author of the Tao, was talking about has never stopped anyone from pretending they do. Nor has it stopped people from pretending that their pretend understanding of the Tao helps them understand other things they definitely do not understand—things like physics, rugby, the stock market, and blockchain.

The first step to “understanding” the Tao without actually reading it is learning how to pronounce it correctly and then correcting anyone who doesn’t: dow-deh-jing. Next is memorizing what the words mean. Tao means “way”; Te means “virtue”; and Ching means “text.”

Because the Tao has been translated, retranslated, and rearranged for centuries, feel free to deploy those words in any order that best flatters your argument. You can call it “the text of the virtuous way,” or “the virtuous text of the way,” or “the way of the text of virtue.” As long as you sound serene and confident, most people will nod along.

The Tao comprises 81 short “chapters” or “verses.” The over/under for first-time readers is the twenty-first chapter; if you get farther than that, you’ve already exceeded expectations. We are probably not going to get that far. What we are going to do is explain the meaning of a dozen or so verses, starting with the first. That should give you everything you need to hijack the conversation whenever the Tao comes up.

1.
The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.

Now we can see why the last person who spoke this dialect drove his ox cart into a tree. What is the old boy going on about? Is he musing about the difference between proper and common nouns? Does he mean to say that everything that has a name is not real? Or that everything real doesn’t have a name, so we don’t know what to call it, much less what it is, therefore we spell it with a capital letter? Of course! But the take-away is this: you can understand only that which you do not desire; you should not want that which you already understand. The key to happiness is learning to fight darkness with darkness.

To be continued. Last one out turn off the lights.  

1.
The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.

Now we can see why the last person who spoke this dialect drove his ox cart into a tree. What is the old boy going on about? Is he musing about the difference between proper and common nouns? Does he mean to say that everything that has a name is not real? Or that everything real doesn’t have a name, so we don’t know what to call it, much less what it is, therefore we spell it with a capital letter? Of course! But the take-away is this: you can understand only that which you do not desire; you should not want that which you already understand. The key to happiness is learning to fight darkness with darkness.

To be continued. Last one out turn off the lights.