Laozi: What did he say?

Author: Guo Shiming
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-06-01
Features: The text of this chapter in the bamboo slips differs from the Wang Bi edition in several important places. The surviving text of Bamboo Slip Jia in this chapter is as follows:
The Way that can be spoken is not the eternal Way.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of all things;
The named is the mother of all things.
Perpetually without desire, one observes the subtle;
Perpetually with desire, one observes the born.
These two spring from the same source but have different names.
The Profound is profoundly profound,
The subtle is the mouth of subtleties.
"The Way that can be spoken is not the eternal Way;
The name that can be named is not the eternal name"
are two concise ancient texts that can be analyzed as:
The Way that can be spoken is not the eternal Way;
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
Alternatively, they can be analyzed as:
The Way, what can be spoken of it, is not the eternal Way;
The name, what can be named of it, is not the eternal name.
The meanings derived from the two analyses are completely opposite. Historically, only a few, such as Sima Guang of the Song Dynasty, advocated the first analysis, but it did not gain acceptance. Modern works on the Laozi all adopt the second analysis, leading to the conclusion that "The Way cannot be spoken" and "The Way cannot be named." This view can be traced back to Wang Bi, with nearly two thousand years of history. Wang Bi's annotations on these two sentences are: The Way that can be spoken and the name that can be named refer to things and forms, and are not their eternal nature, hence they cannot be spoken or named. The New Translation of the Laozi translates these sentences as:
"The Way," what can be spoken of it, is not the eternal Way;
"The name," what can be named of it, is not the eternal name.
Today, "The Way cannot be spoken" and "The Way cannot be named" have almost become the dominant ideology in the study of the Laozi, and people have long grown accustomed to it, resulting in a rather strange phenomenon: everyone claims that the Laozi speaks of "The Way," yet everyone also claims that Laozi believed that the "eternal Way" is unutterable. So, what exactly is the Laozi talking about? Is it talking about the "non-eternal Way," or the "unutterable Way"? If the former, why speak of it at all? If the latter, how could the Laozi possibly articulate the "unutterable Way"?
The two sentences in Bamboo Slip Jia align with the first analysis (Bamboo Slip Yi only survives with "The Way that can be spoken is" and "the eternal name is" in seven characters), leaving no grammatical ambiguity. Therefore, we naturally should analyze the opening two sentences of the Laozi according to the text of Bamboo Slip Jia. In the bamboo slips, "" is written as "" in Wang Bi's edition, likely altered by later generations to avoid the taboo of Emperor Wen of Han, Liu Heng. The character "" (constant) and "" (perpetual) can both mean "eternal" or "forever," but also "frequently," "consistently," "always," or "persistently." The difference between the two interpretations lies in whether they include the future—the former does, while the latter does not, only referring to the present. According to this latter interpretation, we can see that the first "" in "The Way that can be spoken is not the eternal Way" is a specialized term in the Laozi, a noun. The last two "" characters both mean the verb "to speak." The entire sentence means: The Way can be made clear, but it is not the Way people have always spoken of. In other words, others before Laozi and during his time also spoke of the Way (which is indeed the case), but Laozi believed they were all wrong, and now he is speaking of it anew.
In pre-Qin texts, speaking of "The Way" was quite common, and the Analects even uses the character "" more frequently than the Laozi. For example, in Analects·Li Ren:
The Master said, "Zan, my Way is one that I pursue with consistency."
Zengzi replied, "Yes."
When the Master left, the disciples asked, "What did he mean?"
Zengzi said, "The Master's Way is simply loyalty and forgiveness."
This is a familiar example of speaking of "The Way." However, the "Way" in Confucianism is a conceptual thing, while the "Way" in the Laozi is an objectively existing, material thing.
"Names that can be named are not the eternal names" corresponds to "The Way that can be spoken is not the eternal Way" in structure and meaning. Therefore, its meaning should be: Names of the Way can be called, but they are not the names people have always used. In general, when naming something, people start from their perceptions, naming it based on its form, composition, function, etc. Wang Bi's "refer to things and forms" likely refers to this. Since the Way is very different from ordinary things, we cannot name it using conventional methods. Thus, although it is "nameable," it is "not an eternal name." In the following chapters, we can clearly see how the Laozi explains and refers to the Way using "non-eternal" methods.
Wang Bi understood that the general method of naming is "refer to things and forms," and that the Way cannot be named using this method, which aligns with the original meaning of the Laozi. However, concluding that "The Way cannot be spoken" or "cannot be named" is somewhat one-sided: the Way that cannot be explained using conventional methods can still be explained using "non-conventional" methods.