History-Makers: Laozi and the Daodejing

My job as a historian is to explain things, to describe people, places, and events, and to make things make sense. Sometimes it takes an extra bit of hard work to entangle a complex topic, but the solution there is simply explain it better. Weave a stronger thesis. Do the job, but more. What's especially tricky are those rare topics which cannot be logicked out, which by their nature refuse to be understood cleanly. Subjects like the ancient Chinese classic, the Tao Te Ching, and its enigmatic author, Laozi. This short text of 5,000 logographic characters across 81 chapters is a genuine masterpiece of Chinese literature, and an essential source for the philosophy of Taoism. This book is, quite simply, a paradox. It is both delightful and impenetrable. A joy to read and puzzle over, yet it willfully defies decipherment. The Tao Te Ching simply refuses to be grasped like any other work of philosophy. To explain it, contains it. To define it, confines it. Now, if I sound like I'm losing my mind, good! Because the Tao Te Ching calls for a completely opposite approach to how we usually cover books around here. So if I do my job correctly, by the end of this video, you won't have any interest in understanding the Tao Te Ching, but you will be equipped with the historical and literary context to feel it. Our first task is to wind our way back to the mid-first millennium BC, and see where the text and its author supposedly came from. In lieu of doing some history, allow me to quote the book itself. How do I know these origins? Like this. Now, cast your eyes back to the 5 and 400s BC, where China was a web of independent states competing for power, prestige, and territory in an increasingly contentious neighborhood. But as the states got bigger and the armies got meaner, there was a parallel contest playing out in the realm of philosophy. Scholars developed principles for how society should function, how people should act, and what rulers should do for an advantage in the endless conflict. Known to history as the Hundred Schools of Thought, this scholarly climate served as China's laboratory for quintessential philosophies like and our subject of choice today, Taoism. This is the philosophy of the Tao, which literally means the way or path, but represents something far more abstract. Many somethings, really. The way of the universe, the force that is and governs nature, how one follows that nature. It's hard to pin down, the point is kind of that we're not supposed to, but it's enough of a concept to know what the book is broadly about. Tao Te Ching can translate to the classic of the way, Tao, and its virtue, Te. Obviously, I cannot speak Chinese, but I hope I can at least convey a sense of the language here. Our oldest written account of its origins comes from the records of the Grand Historian by Su Ma Qian. Not just any historian, THE Grand Historian. Don't forget it. And his Han Dynasty era work from the 90s BC contains, among so many other things that the book literally does not yet have a complete English translation, a brief description of the scholar Laozi. The name is an honorific, meaning old master, but in his lifetime, his personal name was Li'er. According to the story, which is not true, but let's indulge ourselves, he worked in the city of Luoyang as a historian for the Zhou Dynasty, during which time he was visited by none other than Confucius, who asked about etiquette and walked away so impressed he told his followers, I met Laozi today, he's like a dragon. But all would not be well forever, and seeing the decline of the Zhou, Laozi left the royal capital and headed west to the mountains. At the pass, the gatekeeper recognized that this wise man was about to withdraw from the world, and asked Laozi to put his great wisdom into a book before departing. So, after finding the flattest surface to write on, Laozi got scribbling, expounding the meaning of Dao and De in some 5,000 characters, and then departed. What became of him afterwards, no one knows. These attributions, like so many narratives about the Warring States period and earlier, were all written centuries afterward, and thus very hard to verify. But given Sima Qian immediately pivots his account to various rumors of who Laozi might actually have been, or how some say he was over 200 years old, one gets the sense of some ass covering here. Now, here's the thing. Chinese history loves having provenance for ideas and texts, even if it has to be invented here and there. So while Sima Qian and his contemporaries eyed this narrative with suspicion, it's still a good story, and the scene of Laozi setting off into the mountains became a recurring motif in Chinese painting. It's straight-up iconic. The man just wanted to leave. Imagine the dialogue with the gatekeeper. Speedrunning a consolidated rundown of every key philosophical idea in your head in the time it takes the gatekeeper to put the kettle on and ask for your autograph? Every artist I know of dreams they could be that quick on the draw with their life's work. Do you know how long we agonize over these scripts? Oh, good god. Okay, back on track. So where does that leave us? Essentially, Laozi is a ghost, created by folk tradition and codified in record by Sima Qian. What we can work with is the text itself, the earliest version of which had long been the so-called Wangbi text from the Three Kingdoms period in the 200s A.D., when Daoism grew in popularity across China and morphed into something more like a religion. However, in 1973, an older version was discovered in a tomb at Mawangdui, dating to 168 B.C. Then in 93, archaeologists found it written on bamboo slips in a tomb dated to 300 B.C. Both of these texts invert the chapter order from the Wangbi version, and the earliest copy contains less than half the total chapters. This aligns with the notion of a rolling composition, where folk knowledge accumulated over time into the book we know, rather than coming from any singular author. We've seen a similar process with Sun Tzu's Art of War, so it's no surprise for it to happen here, but the Dao De Jing remains an atypical philosophy text, as it's written more like poetry than a treatise. For example, looking at Confucius, Sun Tzu, and even the other core text of Daoism called the Zhuangzi, they all explain themselves, drawing on examples, stories, and characters to impart a specific message on the reader. The Dao De Jing does none of that, instead speaking through opposites, paradoxes, and puzzles, with the intent for the reader to tease out a meaning from the enigmatic chapters. Let's take the very first one. In my best attempt at Chinese, the opening line is Later in the book, Lao Tzu tells us that It's humorous on the surface, and I fully recognize the irony of what I'm even doing here, but paired with the opener, we can intuit something. Talking uses the human construct of language, and words have meanings. Things they are and they aren't. Identifying something creates a division. Recognize good and evil is born. Is and isn't produce each other. For me to call the Dao De Jing poetic implies books that aren't, and it attaches this book to a particular set of assumptions that you have with the word poetic. To name is to divide, and thus to try and name the Dao is to make that not the Dao. And that's a lot of my difficulty here. I promised I can't explain the Dao De Jing to you, because no matter how well chosen my words may be, they create divisions within the very pointedly indivisible Dao, so I'm playing a losing game. The Dao is kind of the metaphysical order of the universe, kind of a oneness that pervades all existence, impossible to comprehend, but possible to recognize, and with discipline and wisdom, possible to follow. One goal of the text is to give the reader an intuition, a hunch, a vibe for the Dao, so they can learn to live in harmony with it rather than acting counter to it. And that's a principle called Wu Wei, translatable as effortless action, the habit of doing what follows the flow of nature, the opposite of forcing it. Daoism is very much a game of opposites. To collect, first scatter. To weaken, first strengthen. That coexistence of contrast takes an elegant symbolic form in the Tai Chi tool, one variant of which is the iconic black and white disc containing the inverse forces of yin and yang. There's the straightforward read of harmony across the light and dark of nature, but the Tao Te Ching extends this into valuing seemingly weak characteristics and even emptiness itself. Clay is fired to make a pot. The pot's use comes from emptiness. Windows and doors are cut to make a room. The room's use comes from emptiness. The pot don't work so good if it's a solid block. Emptiness itself is an essential piece of the cosmic whole, and also your ability to drink tea. Daoism is so dang fun to think about because it's an entirely new pattern of thought than any of us normally do. It's a thinking of unthinking. It has to be felt. Plenty of philosophies are complicated, but Daoism is straight up mysterious, and that's a rare delight. To that end, I cannot in good conscience conclude this video. It just wouldn't be right. So instead, let's read a few chapters together. Attain complete emptiness. Hold fast to stillness. Ten thousand things stir about. I only watch for their going back. Things grow and grow, but each goes back to its root. Going back to the root is stillness. This means returning to what is. Returning to what is means going back to the ordinary. Understanding the ordinary? Enlightenment. Not understanding the ordinary? Blindness creates evil. Understanding the ordinary? Mind opens. Mind opening leads to compassion, compassion to nobility, nobility to heavenliness, heavenliness to Dao. Dao endures. Your body dies. There is no danger. Wounded becomes whole. Crooked becomes straight. Hollow becomes full. Worn becomes new. Little becomes more. Much becomes delusion. Therefore the sages cling to the one and take care of this world. Do not display themselves and therefore shine. Do not assert themselves and therefore stand out. Do not praise themselves and therefore succeed. Are not complacent and therefore endure. Do not contend and therefore no one under heaven can contend with them. The old saying wounded becomes whole is not empty words. It becomes whole and returns. My words are very easy to understand. Very easy to practice. No one under heaven can understand them. No one can practice them. Words have ancestors, deeds have masters. If people don't understand this, they don't understand me. If you understand me, then that is my value. Therefore the sage wears rough clothing and carries jade inside. Thank you for watching. While we're at it, why not have another? Heaven is long, earth enduring. Long and enduring because they do not exist for themselves. Therefore the sage steps back but is always in front. Stays outside but is always within. No self-interest, self is fulfilled. Puzzle over that one and I'll see you in the next video.