Dao De Jing core 33 chapters – completed!
After 7 months of work and sharing, i’m pleased to announced that our weekly lecture on Daodejing core 33 chapters has come to an end. I hope you have gained something in this series, as i certainly had. We will continue our weekly lecture on Confucius Analects starting next week. Please stay tuned. Let’s see what the most revered and influential teacher in Chinese history has to say to his students and our society.
Hi Derek,
thanks for the superb site/blog of yours, quite good indeed!
Allow me to disagree with you on this 33 cut, though.
As far as I know this is wrong, the corpus, despite many changes/editions, has endured down the millennia, at least, that I was told by one seeress here in Bulgaria, her name is Gergana Gerasimova.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYO2OhUu2Z8
Two fun facts:
– I asked one of our Bulgarian seeresses about Lao Zi whether DaoDeJing teaching has been changed and deformed through the years and whether modern translations carry the spirit of the original, she answered me that the spirit is reserved and no deviation is made, also surprisingly she wrote that Lao Zi has written few other books but they are to be found!
– Also, I asked her a second question about on what medium the original was written, one crackpot (sorry but this is my perception of him) living in Taiwan (and claiming that he has spiritual conversations with the author) said on ChineseHistory forum that he wrote Dao De Jing on pieces of leather, we all know that the earliest found books were written on wooden sticks and on silk. For my surprise *Gergana* (the name of this fellow Bulgarian) replied that his books were written either on specially manufactured rice pergamens (of superb durability) or on wooden blocks processed in ancient technology unknown to our nowadays scientists. I believe her.
I have many favorite translations but I won’t go into details, just want to share with you one thing that I understood after many years and more than 70+ read versions – the translation of the second word of the title – ‘De’. The only rightful in my opinion explanations of the term was given by R.L. Wing, namely the ancient agricultural designation for the potential-living-power-in- seeds, he explained that Lao Zi was referring to the most revered force in the ancient times – the life in its sacred unmanifested form.
Hope you are gonna offer the full array of 81 chapters here on your beautiful site. My favorite pseudo-chapter 20 is missing, grrr.
Best regards
Sanmayce / Chén wèi tā / 陳為他
Hi Sanmayce,
Thank you for your compliment. Happy to learn that you find treasures and homage in Daodejing. It is indeed a text with great width and depth. Just as there are many translations and interpretation of the text, information presented in this site represents my limited interpretation only. I am fine, and i believe Laozi would be too, to see many different translations and interpretations sprouting out from the original manifesto. As long as there is acknowledgement that the form we superimpose on the original is not the only and highest, i think then there would be no contradiction to the original spirit of non-duality and form/language-transcendence of the Dao. The reason i did not post the so-called non-core chapters is that i found that they are more prone to interpretations that might sway readers away from the essence, which is not in the spirit and style of this website (it seeks to point reader directly to the core). If you have question on specific chapter or sentence, i would be happy to further discuss.
Regards,
Derek