Chuang Tzu · 46 of 137

40.

40. 1. The movement of the Tâo

Insight

Legge gives the opening of chapter 40 as a four-line poem: 'The movement of the Tâo / By contraries proceeds; / And weakness marks the course / Of Tâo's mighty deeds.' Two of the most compressed lines in the whole book. Heraclitus, half a world away in the same century, was writing 'the way up and the way down are one and the same.' Both pre-Socratic mystics noticed that real movement happens through opposition — that what looks like withdrawal is often arrival, what looks like weakness is the necessary condition for the strength that comes through. The principle is older and more cross-cultural than its Chinese formulation.反者道之動, 弱者道之用. Heraclitus DK B60 'ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή.' Comparative pre-Socratic/Daoist mystical cosmology: Charles Kahn; M.L. West.

By contraries proceeds;

And weakness marks the course

Of Tâo's mighty deeds.

2. All things under heaven sprang from It as existing (and named); that existence sprang from It as non-existent (and not named).

Insight

'All things under heaven sprang from It as existing and named; that existence sprang from It as non-existent and not named.' Two layers behind any object you can point to. Things have names because they have forms; the realm of named things has its source in the realm of nameable things; and that nameable layer has its source in the unnameable. The structure shows up in Christian apophatic theology too — Pseudo-Dionysius distinguishes the God who can be named (cataphatic) from the God beyond name (hyperousios), with the same insistence that the named version is the lower derivative. Both traditions point past articulation toward a source that articulation can't reach.有生於無. Pseudo-Dionysius, 'The Mystical Theology' I.1 on ὑπερούσιος. TTC/Christian apophatic parallel: Andrew Louth, 'The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition.'

, 'Dispensing with the Use (of Means);'--with their use, that is, as it appears to us. The subject of the brief chapter is the action of the Tâo by contraries, leading to a result the opposite of what existed previously, and by means which might seem calculated to produce a contrary result.

In translating par. 2 1 have followed Ziâo Hung, who finds the key to it in ch. 1. Having a name, the Tâo is 'the Mother of all things;' having no name, it is 'the Originator of Heaven and Earth.' But here is the teaching of Lâo-dze:--'If Tâo seems to be before God,' Tâo itself sprang from nothing.