Chapter 1

The first line of the Tao Te Ching is six characters long and no two translations of it agree. The difficulty is not that the Chinese is obscure but that it is underdetermined in ways English cannot leave open.

The character rendered as speak or tell is the same character as the one rendered as way, used in a second sense. So the line turns on a pun that is also a claim: the way that can be way-ed is not the constant way. English has no single word that is both a road and an act of speaking, so a translator must pick, and picking closes something the original leaves open. Some render it as speaking, some as telling, a few as treading or following, which yields a quite different sentence about ways that can be walked.

The word rendered constant carries its own history. In the received text it is the character for constant or enduring; in the Mawangdui manuscripts it is a different character with much the same sense, changed later to avoid the personal name of a Han emperor. That kind of taboo substitution is ordinary in Chinese textual transmission and is one of the routine ways the manuscripts and the received text can be told apart.

None of this is a reason to distrust translations. It is a reason to read more than one, and to treat the differences between them as information about the text rather than as evidence that somebody got it wrong.

The second half of the chapter contains a punctuation crux that changes what the book is about, and classical Chinese supplies no punctuation to settle it.

Read one way, the text says: the nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth, and the named is the mother of the ten thousand things. Read the other way, it says: not-being is the term for the beginning of heaven and earth, and being is the term for the mother of the ten thousand things. The characters are identical. What differs is where the reader breaks the phrase, and with it whether the chapter is about the limits of language or about a pair of cosmological terms.

Both readings are ancient and both have been defended by major commentators. The choice is not decorative: an entire metaphysics of being and non-being can be built on the second reading and cannot be built on the first, and the commentarial traditions that took the two paths diverge accordingly.

The chapter ends with a pair of ways of looking, one free of craving and seeing what is subtle, one full of craving and seeing only outcomes, and then says the two come out together and differ only in name. Whatever is decided about the punctuation, that closing move is the same: two things that look opposed are declared to have one source. The chapter's last words, darkness within darkness and the gateway of everything subtle, are the book's first and least apologetic admission that it is describing something it cannot show.