The Way That Cannot Be Told
Try to tell someone what the sea smells like.
You can say salt, and wind, and something green. They nod.
And you both know that you haven't told them.
道可道，非常道；
dào kě dào, fēi cháng dào;
The Way that can be told is not the constant Way;
名可名，非常名。
míng kě míng, fēi cháng míng.
the name that can be named is not the constant name.
無名，天地之始；
wú míng, tiān dì zhī shǐ;
Without a name: the beginning of heaven and earth;
有名，萬物之母。
yǒu míng, wàn wù zhī mǔ.
with a name: the mother of the ten thousand things.
故常無欲，以觀其妙；
gù cháng wú yù, yǐ guān qí miào;
So, ever without desire, you see its mystery;
常有欲，以觀其徼。
cháng yǒu yù, yǐ guān qí jiào.
ever with desire, you see its edges.
此兩者，同出而異名，
cǐ liǎng zhě, tóng chū ér yì míng,
These two come out together, but have different names;
同謂之玄。
tóng wèi zhī xuán.
together, they are called dark.
玄之又玄，眾妙之門。
xuán zhī yòu xuán, zhòng miào zhī mén.
Dark, and darker still: the gate of all mysteries.
The words
a way, a road; to speak; to guide
Look inside the character: a foot walking (辶) and a head (首). A road, and someone moving along it. But 道 is also a verb, to say. So the first line plays on its own word: the 道 that can be 道'd, the Way that can be told, or walked, or explained. Both readings are right. The Way is what you can walk but not say.
constant, lasting, always so
Not "eternal" in the sense of a statue that never changes, but constant like the tide: what is always there underneath the changing. In the old silk copies of the book the word is a different one, 恆 (héng, "enduring"). It was changed after 180 BCE, when it became the personal name of an emperor and could no longer be written.1
dark, deep; the dark of far water or the night sky
Not the black of a closed box, but the dark you see when you look into deep water or up at the night: a darkness with depth in it. "Dark, and darker still" is the book's way of saying: you can go further in, and further, and never reach a bottom.
The lines about name and desire can be cut in two places, because old Chinese had no punctuation. Since Wang Anshi and Sima Guang in the eleventh century, some have read 無，名天地之始: "Non-being names the beginning of heaven and earth", and likewise "ever in non-being, wishing to see its mystery". The course follows Wang Bi, as printed above. Either way, the movement of the chapter is the same.
Sitting with it
A book about the Way opens by saying that the Way can't be told. It is like a guide at the start of a long walk saying: whatever I tell you about where we're going, that isn't it.
This is not a trick. It is honest. Every word you will read in this course points at something, and the pointing is not the thing. A map is not the mountain. The word tea has never warmed anyone's hands.
Then the chapter goes back before words altogether. "Without a name: the beginning of heaven and earth." Before anything was called anything, there was still something there. Names come later, and with names come things, the ten thousand things, separate and countable: this cup, that tree, me, you. The named world is a mother; it gives birth to everything we can point at.
Notice the next turn. When you want nothing from the world, you see its mystery. When you want something, you see its edges: where it begins and ends, what it is for, what you can get from it. Both are real. If you are hungry, an apple is food, with clear edges. If, for a moment, you want nothing from it, it is just an apple, round and red and astonishing that it exists at all.
The book doesn't say desire is wrong. It says the two ways of seeing come from the same place. The mystery and the edges are one world, seen two ways. And that one place they both come from it calls dark. Not evil, not frightening. Deep.
"Dark, and darker still: the gate of all mysteries." The chapter ends at a gate. It doesn't take you through. Nothing in the book can. It can only bring you to the door, again and again, in eighty more ways.
A practice
Today, choose one ordinary thing: a cup, a leaf, your own hand.
For one minute, look at it without naming it. When the word comes ("cup", "handle", "chipped"), let it go and keep looking.
You will find it hard. Words come quickly. Notice what is there in the moment just before the word arrives.
To carry
道可道，非常道。
dào kě dào, fēi cháng dào.
The Way that can be told is not the constant Way.
Sources
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Robert G. Henricks, Lao-tzu: Te-Tao Ching, a new translation based on the recently discovered Ma-wang-tui texts (Ballantine, 1989). The emperor was Liu Heng, Emperor Wen of Han, who reigned 180-157 BCE. ↩