One Verse, Two Schools of Reading

The earliest surviving copies of the Tao Te Ching complicate any single reading of chapter forty two. Silk manuscripts recovered at Mawangdui in 1973 and bamboo strips recovered at Guodian in 1993 both predate the received text by centuries, and comparing them shows that the chapter's core cosmogonic lines were stable long before any of the standard commentaries that later explained them were written. That stability let two very different schools of reading grow up around the same fixed words. Philosophical commentators, working in something closer to the tradition of Wang Bi, treated the One, Two and Three as a logical account of how differentiation is even possible, closer to metaphysics than to myth. Religious Daoist readers, working within lineages that developed meditation and internal alchemy, treated the same numbers as stages an adept could retrace inward, returning the body's own yin and yang toward the undifferentiated One. The chapter is also a natural point of comparison with other traditions' accounts of how a single origin gives rise to a plural world, since it states the claim in four short steps without invoking any named creator god, ancestor or act of separation, a structure that reads as strikingly abstract next to most creation narratives told as stories about particular gods acting in a particular order.