Taomeow

By Deng Ming-Dao SEGMENTATION AND TRANSLATION See this block of text? It’s the arrangement of the first chapter of the Dàodéjīng before the last hundred years. If you open an old Chinese version of the Dàodéjīng, each chapter will be a block of text. No punctuation, word spacing, capital letters, or paragraphs. Distinguishing between single words and compound terms remains as much of a problem today as it was in ancient times. Imagine reading chapter 1 without the punctuation added in the early twentieth century. Reading the Dàodéjīng in its old form thus began with a practice called segmentation. You can find red dots, hóngdiǎn, 紅點, in the margins of used books, indicating where past readers began dividing, deciding, and decoding. This practice was called “sentence division,” jùdòu, 句讀, and is still done today when reading the received classics—and with only partial consensus: “Many researchers have tested Chinese native speakers’ word segmentation; a common finding is that participants can only reach about 75% agreement, and have difficulties replicating their own previous segmentation.” (Zhang, 2024) Even after the segmentation process, the text continues to challenge modern readers. The Dàodéjīng lacks plurality; past, present, or future tense; pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions; gendered nouns; or punctuation, word spacing, or paragraph indents. Sentences might not have a subject. Verbs lack conjugation. Moreover, Chinese ideograms are sometimes used singly and sometimes combined to make compound terms. Lǎozì may employ a compound term in one case and then use those constituent words separately in other cases. For example, line 71.1 uses the word for “know,” zhī, 知, four times: 知不知上不知知病. This translates to: “know don’t know superior; don’t know, know sick.” Bùzhī, 不知, means “not know.” Otherwise, zhī, 知, should be read as a single word. If you combine the issues of segmentation with the multiple-meanings of words, you can see that no single, absolutely “right” version is possible. Reading the Dàodéjīng in Chinese is like getting a box of ideograms on tiles, and then trying to assemble them as if it was a Scrabble game. This makes translation an interpretive as much as a critical process. Of course, everybody today will use the punctuated versions, but it’s worth remembering that segmentation is arbitrary and once had to be provided by each reader. Nevertheless, gaining the wisdom of the Dàodéjīng is well worth the effort! That's why it's survived for 2,600 years and has spread around the world.

I don't know. Do you have examples of 常 in the DDJ not standing for 恒? I doubt it would be easy to differentiate.

Very interesting, thank you. I, too, have never believed in 'junk DNA." I also never believed in what was once "settled science"-- that the tonsils and the appendix are obsolete unnecessary organs, that there is such a thing as an "overreactive immune system" (instead I'm convinced there's immune systems damaged by wrongful interventions), or "high cholesterol" in need of statins, or that perfectly healthy wisdom teeth are to be removed "preventively" (a widespread practice in our parts), or that our knees were designed to work for 40 years and then evolution meant for us to die (the fact that we have the longest-maturing offspring on Earth and therefore the existence of elderly grandparents was crucial to the survival not only of the tribe but of the species itself never occurred to the "reproduce and die" theory proponents) -- to name a few.

What a pity. I used to know how to preserve fish with just salt and sunlight -- no pepper was used but a whole lot of salt. This fish was a special kind of treat, you only ate it with beer, not as a meal but as a side snack. It was chewy and could get hard like wood if you overdried it, but nobody minded, it was a beer-side classic and surely beat chips hands down.

A strange and dangerous Russian just delivered some food to my home. He owns a fishing boat. He fishes, and then he sells his catch to the Russian, Ukrainian, etc. local community, some of it freshly caught (not frozen) and some of it smoked. He does the smoking (cold and hot) himself too. His prices are very competitive and he charges nothing for delivery. He also makes some foods at home that only Russians and Ukrainians eat (and can't live without), and delivers those too. The ordering process is a mess, timing of arrival more on the "whatever" side, I wound up buying something I didn't order and not getting what I did order. Doesn't matter, it's all delicious and either can't be bought elsewhere, would take me hours of work if I were to make it myself, or very competitively priced. Dangerous because I am inclined to buy more for his trouble than I was planning on, strange because nothing about the operation is business-like, it's so informal and haphazard -- yet convenient and delicious. I remember things being done this way, old country old school... Now it's almost exotic.

La mamma degli idioti è sempre incinta -- Italian proverb "Mother of idiots is permanently pregnant."

I think there was another thread, years ago, where I may have advocated for the advantages of squatting on the regular toilet. Of course it's absolutely not recommended for those who never did, but these days they sell contraptions people put around the regular toilet so they can squat -- some kind of steps, as I recall. If you've used the regular toilet as a squatting one all your life though, you just never lose the squat. I got my cat when she was 6 weeks old, so she had to look to me for how things are done in this world. Like many other cats, she likes to participate when a member of her household goes to the bathroom, and observe. Well, what do you know -- she learned to do her number two squatting on the edge of the litter box over the sand, not inside it. Her litter box is stainless steel and the edge is probably only half an inch wide, so she also has to microadjust her balance while at it, rocking a bit back and forth, almost imperceptibly. Oh, and she prefers to stand on only three paws for this, I guess she uses the fourth as some kind of counterbalance.

Everything is dangerous for the old and weak. Including not squatting. Humans evolved to squat, chairs are an anomaly. Disadvantages of not squatting are cumulative, we don't suddenly contract some Acute Nosquatitis disease -- but it can be a gateway to quite a few health adversities. To wit, Reduced ankle dorsiflexion Achilles and calf shortening Hip joint stiffness and reduced cartilage nourishment Increased risk of hip osteoarthritis Weaker end-range quadriceps and patellar tendon intolerance Higher knee injury risk during unexpected deep flexion Increased lumbar spine loading and low-back pain risk Impaired pelvic floor mechanics Increased constipation and hemorrhoid risk Reduced balance and proprioception Decreased ability to recover from falls Earlier loss of mobility and independence with aging

I follow a group titled "The old photo album" of my home town. Today someone posted a picture from 1969 which reminded me how recycling worked before it was a thing. Newspapers, of course, were a thing back then. Not that they were worth reading, but at least they didn't resist other uses, since they were printed with the kind of inks that didn't smear, smudge, or leave dirty streaks on whatever they touched. And everybody knew how to recycle them.

Fire from the Heavenly Stem hits the stable where the Horse has been chomping at the bit for 60 years. The Horse jumps out of the burning gate and takes off galloping, mane fiery, tail ablaze. It never fails to leave its hoof prints on the world's politics, economy, and landscape. Here are some of them: 1846 Mexican–American War begins, reshaping the future borders of the U.S. Peasant uprising in Galicia, future Ukraine, engineered by the occupying Austrian empire against the local Polish nobility. 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, one of the worst urban disasters in U.S. history. Mount Vesuvius eruption in Italy, a major disaster affecting Naples and surrounding regions. 1966 Cultural Revolution begins in China, profoundly reshaping society and politics. Flooding in Italy destroys a lot of cultural heritage in Florence and Venice. A major escalation in the Vietnam war. 2026 -- ? Of course there were good things happening too. The type of qi known as the Fire Horse can be quite transformative and, under the right circumstances and given the right treatment, energizing, illuminating, and magnificent. But it's the most volatile kind of them all, unpredictable and not easily governable. Let's hope no pale riders manage to mount it.

Reserve is good -- I for one don't care for his politics -- but he's a taoist, associates himself with Quanzhen school, and is not a buddhist. And what am I, chopped liver?

Ah, it gets complicated. The earliest excavated version of DDJ has a different word in that spot -- 恒, heng. 常 chang, a synonym (with somewhat different shades of meaning) appeared later. Here's how: In modern Chinese, the common meanings of chang 常 are "ordinary," "usual." The word has undergone a number of permutations -- the earliest meaning was "skirt," "undergarment.'" From there social norms and rituals were later inferred -- skirts as a sine qua non element of ceremonial dress. Therefore it became associated with "constancy," "regular propriety," "permanence" as opposed to "fashion trends" if you will. It existed in this context for a while -- not in the DDJ though -- but then 常 was substituted. That's because Heng happened to be the name of Emperor Liu Heng (劉恆), and using the emperor's name was taboo. So, to avoid writing the emperor's personal name character 恒 heng, scribes systematically replaced it with 常 chang in copied texts, including the DDJ. Thus, the version that has been standard for the last 2,000 years uses 常 chang, but with the meaning of 恒 heng. Eternal, constant, unchanging. That chang is therefore interpreted as heng, while it doesn't exactly mean the same thing. Chang is not about things eternal as much as things "accepted," "proper," apropos.

The point Deng Ming-Dao was making and I agree with is, anyone who claims a better understanding of DDJ solely on the merit of being fluent in Chinese, or being a respected Sinologist, or even a lineage taoist, is ultimately in the same boat as a native English speaker dealing with Beowulf, only a bigger one. I.e. knowing the modern version of the language, by itself, or knowing the culture and traditions, or their development through the ages, is still nowhere near enough to make claims about presenting "the correct version." Even the meaning of the very first line, which became a meme of sorts, is the product of interpretations rather than of Laozi's calligraphy brush -- which produced only this opening: "Tao can be told, tao is not eternal." So one has to superimpose the kind of grammar (absent from the original) that will allow to ascribe to Laozi a statement that not only was never made by him but is the opposite of what he actually wrote verbatim. And then just repeat it for two and a half thousand years. That beats Lewis Carrol's "what I tell you three times is true" with a vengeance. But what if we don't do that? What if we take those words for face value instead? Then this line can be read as, say, the opening manifesto of a writer who asserts his right to write about tao. Tao can be told. I, Laozi, can tell you about it. I can tell about it here and now. I am not an eternal being, and so I'm not tackling an eternal subject -- just the here-and-now tao which is what I can tell you about. How's that?