A few nights ago I fell asleep to the Dao De Jing and ended up having a dream about cuddling a really hunky blind man on a waterbed. I was stargazing and he kept quoting the Dao De Jing to me, and I was like, “Wow, you’re so knowledgeable that you can quote that from memory!”
Last night I fell asleep to the Zhuangzi and ended up having a dream about traveling through a forest while narration could be heard from nowhere in particular. Eventually I stumbled upon seven locked doors on the side of the forest path. These doors were not attached to any walls or fences, they were simply freestanding, like you could just walk around them. Each of the seven locked doors bore a colored triangular warning sign representing a bodily orifice — let’s say that two of the signs depicted eyes, two depicted ears, two depicted nostrils, and one depicted a mouth, though I figure that the signs were in the dream probably fuzzy and inconsistent.
I saw these seven doors right as the narration explained that Shu, the emperor of the South Sea; and Hu, the emperor of the North Sea; were going to drill seven orifices into Chaos, the emperor of the Central Region, as a way to thank him for his generosity. And so I got to witness each of the seven locked doors slowly get forced open before me, through either crowbar or lockpicking; and with each door opened, I felt myself grow more lethargic.
After I woke up, I thought, “Drilling seven orifices into Chaos, the Emperor of the Central Region? That had to be something I just made up in my dream.” — but then I looked it up, and no, that was actually from the Zhuangzi. The part about the doors in the forest was just my dream, but the Zhuangzi does actually contain a story about Shu and Hu drilling seven orifices into Chaos/Hundun until he just dies. It’s the last parable of chapter 7, the last of the inner chapters. I guess I’d just forgotten that specific parable since I last read the Zhuangzi many years ago, amid the veritable parade of other surreal anecdotes in that work.
But yeah. Early Daoist texts can get pretty surreal. Truly the Butthole Surfers of the Warring States period. You should check them out. I promise they’ll give you a better understanding of dialectics and all.
Edit: Of course I also had a dream in which I was a butterfly, and then when I woke up I wasn’t sure if I’d just woken up from that dream about being a butterfly, or if the butterfly was the real me and I’d actually just fallen into a dream about being a human, har har har har har har har [gets vaudeville hooked]
Truly the Butthole Surfers of the Warring States period.
I’m sold
listening to audiobooks or podcasts is the only way i can fall asleep anymore… and they tend to knock me out about 10 words in. without them i just lay there and toss & turn
I can’t pay attention to audiobooks. I think i ‘Ve only completed 1 with me actually paying attention and it was that Nabokov book about an execution, was 3 hours long or something, perfect for my car ride
Atlas Shrugged was the first audiobook I ever listened to. That was back when I had a 1 1/2 to 2 hour commute to and from work everyday. If you’re in the car on a long ride they’re easy to listen to.
At home in bed, different story. I’ve listened to 4 of the Dune books before bed, but it takes me about 5x longer that way because I constantly have to try to find the last thing I remember each night and sometimes I listen to the same thing over and over and over because I can’t remember if I listened to it or not. Not the best way to listen to books really. Works great for commuting though either on the train or driving.
Yeah, it’s way better for commuting but even then, I space out and have to rewind every 15 minutes.
All I know about the Dao is from this rap in one of the best films ever made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5kmkYMqfYY
It makes it seem pretty cool
“The Dao that can be followed is not the eternal Dao” from that rap is the first line of the Dao De Jing, the foundational text written by Laozi (who probably didn’t exist). In modern Standard Chinese, the line is 道可道，非常道。
Glossed character by character, the line means something like “way can way, not-be invariable way”. This line, being the very first line of the work and already an example of several poetic devices crunched into just six characters and six syllables, gets cited as an example of why the Dao De Jing is so darn hard to translate.
How does that translate to that at all?
Also is him biting his finger, drawing a yinyang on his palm in blood, saying “heaven and earth are infinite”, and then blowing up a succubus vampire lady with a fireball have a literary foundation?
First translation decision: leave 道 untranslated as Dao, instead of going for a more literal meaning like “way” or “path” or “road” or whatever.
Second translation decision: how to handle 可道? Literally “can way”, but the meaning is “[that] can [serve as a] way”. A more natural way of phrasing that idea is “that can be followed.”
Third translation decision: how to handle 常? The character doesn’t neatly map onto the word “invariable” or “eternal”, it’s also glossed as (among other things) “normal, general, common, often, frequent, long-lasting, enduring, constant, continuous, unchanging, always” — but the idea is in any case that the way/dao won’t stay the same forever, right? A translation like “invariable” focuses more on the change, while “eternal” focuses more on the time.
Fourth translation decision: inflect for tense and add articles, and that’s how you get “is not” from “not-be” plus the extra the’s.
Cool!
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Which do you recommend?
The aforementioned Dao De Jing (AKA the Laozi) as well as the Zhuangzi. These are the two most central texts of Daoism. I actually have a physical copy of the former — specifically the 1993 translation by Man-Ho Kwok, Martin Palmer, and Jay Ramsay — on my nightstand, but any of these old works you’ll be able to find a bajillion public domain translations of online, and probably some copyrighted translations of on Anna’s Archive (and it is very much the sort of work where you might want to compare different translations). I also think it’s worth mentioning that Mao quoted Laozi a number of times in his own works, like in “Methods of Work of Party Committees” and On The Correct Handling of Contradictions Among The People, so I’ve heard it said that Mao’s interpretation of Marx was informed by the preexisting dialectical tradition in China represented by Daoism, and that you’ll get a better understanding of Mao in turn by better understanding his cultural background.
I would also like to read the Huainanzi at some point — I currently only know the parable of the old man who lost his horse from that book because it’s the basis of a four-character idiom shared across the Sinosphere, 塞翁失马 / 새옹실마 / 塞翁が馬 (“silver lining, blessing in disguise”). Apparently CCTV made a 52 episode children’s cartoon based on the Huainanzi in 2012. Neat!
