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道 Tâo
Chapter 14

1. We look at it, and we do not see it, and we name it 'the Equable.' We listen to it, and we do not hear it, and we name it 'the Inaudible.' We try to grasp it, and do not get hold of it, and we name it 'the Subtle.' With these three qualities, it cannot be made the subject of description; and hence we blend them together and obtain The One.

2. Its upper part is not bright, and its lower part is not obscure. Ceaseless in its action, it yet cannot be named, and then it again returns and becomes nothing. This is called the Form of the Formless, and the Semblance of the Invisible; this is called the Fleeting and Indeterminable.

3. We meet it and do not see its Front; we follow it, and do not see its Back. When we can lay hold of the Tâo of old to direct the things of the present day, and are able to know it as it was of old in the beginning, this is called (unwinding) the clue of Tâo.

十 四 章

視 之 不 見 , 名 曰 夷 ;
聽 之 不 聞 , 名 曰 希 ;
摶 之 不 得 , 名 曰 微 。
此 三 者 不 可 致 詰 , 故 混 而 為 一 。
其 上 不 曒 , 在 下 不 昧 。
繩 繩 不 可 名 , 復 歸 於 無 物 。
是 謂 無 狀 之 狀 , 無 物 之 象 ,
是 謂 忽 恍 。
迎 不 見 其 首 , 隨 不 見 其 後 。
執 古 之 道 , 以 語 今 之 有 。
以 知 古 始 , 是 謂 道 已 。

Key Terms

Observations and Comments

Legge Translation Notes

###, 'The Manifestation of the Mystery.' The subject of par. 1 is the Tâo, but the Tâo in its operation, and not the primal conception of it, as entirely distinct from things, which rises before the mind in the second paragraph. The Chinese characters which I have translated 'the Equable,' 'the Inaudible,' and 'the Subtle,' are now pronounced Î, Hî, and Wei, and in 1823 Rémusat fancied that they were intended to give the Hebrew tetragrammaton ###, which he thought had come to Lâo-dze somehow from the West, or been found by him there. It was a mere fancy or dream; and still more so is the recent attempt to revive the notion by Victor von Strauss in 1870, and Dr. Edkins in 1884. The idea of the latter is specially strange, maintaining, as he does, that we should read the characters according to their old sounds. Lâo-dze has not in the chapter a personal Being before his mind, but the procedure of his mysterious Tâo, the course according to which the visible phenomena take place, incognisable by human sense and capable of only approximate description by terms appropriate to what is within the domain of sense. See the Introduction, pp. 14, 15.