Chapter 40 of DDJ

[Eric Woon]

Chapter 40: 反者道之动。弱者道之用。天下万物生於有，有生於无。

Chapter sub-title: When to use the principles of leadership

[LP115]When you run into someone who opposes or does not want to follow your order (反者), it is about time to draw upon the principles of leadership (道) and deploy them diligently (动).

[LP116]On the other hand, when you run into someone who does not have the will to follow your order (弱者), you can also draw upon the principles of leadership (道) and apply them assiduously (用).

[LP117a]When a determined leader (天下) wants to do something (万物) and ensures its completion, he has a purpose (生), that is, to acquire it (有). [LP117b]Moreover, what he is going to obtain (有) arises (生) from naught (无).

Notes:

1)     In modern vernacular Chinese language  the two characters, 之 and 於 can be dropped with no detrimental effect to modern sentence construction.

2)     LP is the abbreviation for Leadership Principles. I label each sentence or clause in this way for ease of referencing later.

3)      道, as is explained here, means leadership.

4)     天下, supposed to means anyone under the sky. In view of this chapter, I must limit it to apply to leaders.

5)     万物, means things. Hence, something is proper.

6)     First 生, here it implies to sprout an idea. Therefore, purpose is appropriate.

7)     First 有 means to possess. Acquire makes more sense here.

8)     Second 有, means to obtain. Well, you must obtain something before you can own it.

9)     Second 生, means to grow. Over here, arises is more appropriate.

10)  无, nothing, or naught.

Btw. The English language is the most beautiful language in the world, today. At least this is my personal opinion. I can choose from a choice of words. For examples: 有 possess, acquire obtain; 生 sprout or grow or arise.

This is truly mind-boggling to you. In the official online Chinese dictionary, zdic.net, there are 14 different meanings given for 道. Yet, I am not happy with any one of them. Therefore I choose to create a new meaning that is hard for just anyone to accept. Here is the reason why I am certain means leadership. Please read the detail explanation below.

 

The Chinese characters are basically built up from graphical blocks to form ideographic characters called hieroglyphs. Chinese characters are more like pictograms which are rich in associative wisdom through which a reader at first sight can interpret or decode each character semantically. For example, the word 道 (pinyin: dào) is a combination of two root characters 辶 and 首.    

1.      首 means a person who is leading, or is ahead of the rest of the people.

2.      辶 signifies the left graphic block for characters associated with the verb run or walk. It is similar in meaning to the word 辵 (pinyin: chuò) which means stop and go repeatedly.

The word 道 when decoded by the combination of 辶 and 首 gives rise to the meaning of leadership. Why?

When a leader is walking ahead of the rest and the people behind him are following closely, stopping and going repeatedly, it gives you an impression that this person is leading the rest and there is leadership ability in him. On the contrary, when no one walks, stops and goes repeatedly behind a person, whichever way you look at this person walking all alone by himself, he is definitely not a leader. The contrasting difference between these two situations points out clearly that the word 道 correctly implies leadership.

In real life, how do you observe whether one is a leader or has leadership quality?

Whether a person is a leader or not, the three criteria observable by a third party are: one, someone is behind him; two, one or more people are following him closely and paying attention to his every word and/or noting it down; and three, they then go about executing his instructions. Even if only one of these three criteria is present, there is sufficient proof that he is a leader or has leadership ability.

By the way, leadership is quite a recent word. As late as thirty years ago, the word management was almost exclusively used to describe the behavior and execution abilities of corporate leaders. Leadership qualities were often intermingled with management abilities.

Summing up, Dao means leadership. 

 

Edited March 24, 2018 by Eric Woon
Added the section in Times New Roman font

[Taoist Texts]

Good research Eric.

From your prospective how you explain 反者道之常也，柔者道之刚也，弱者道之强也。?

[Marblehead]

When I first started reading I thought I was reading "The Art Of War".

 

Yes, good research Eric.

 

RE your summary:  Differentiating between Dao and Way, I would have said:  Way means leadership.

 

But then we have:

 

Man follows Earth,

Earth follows Heaven,

Heaven follows Dao,

Dao follows itself.

 

[Eric Woon]

9 hours ago, Taoist Texts said:

Good research Eric.

From your prospective how you explain 反者道之常也，柔者道之刚也，弱者道之强也。?

1) May I know where you get these texts?

2) Who wrote them?

3) Before we read a book, we must get the theme right. Because all author must have a theme. If not, his writings will be all over the place. This is exactly what Zhuangzi is. His compilation <Zhuangzi > writes about almost anything under the sky. 

4) Second, we must also try to get the Chapter theme. This is most important before we can start to decipher what the meaning of each word or phrase. Especially, classical Chinese is horrendous because any Chinese character can be a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, or you name it.

4a) For example, I kick of Chapter 40 with this theme: When to use the Leadership principles.

4b) If a Taoist (from a religious practice point of view),  give it a good chapter theme, perhaps, he can make up a good short story that is interesting.

 

Did it come from 春秋-文子 （Chunqiu-Wenzi？

I  glanced through briefly. Yes, this is very old classical text in the era of Lao Zi or a few hundreds years later. Wen Zi is definitely not Lao Zi. The way he expounded on some of the phrases taken from DDJ points to a very different theme (leadership) that I chose. Anyway, I have to spend a lot more time to understand this book. To me, its style of writing is not coherent with Lao Zi style as in DDJ. This is as far as I think, as of now.      

[Eric Woon]

21 hours ago, Marblehead said:

When I first started reading I thought I was reading "The Art Of War".

 

Yes, good research Eric.

 

RE your summary:  Differentiating between Dao and Way, I would have said:  Way means leadership.

 

But then we have:

 

Man follows Earth,

Earth follows Heaven,

Heaven follows Dao,

Dao follows itself.

 

I am sorry. I am not going to discuss on the twelve chapters that describe Heaven and Earth because they has nothing to do with the theme leadership. It is not because I did not make a full translation on these twelve chapters. I just find that it is quite useless. Should anyone of you want to read my translation on these chapters, you have to wait until I published this book, title, "The Wisdom of Lao Zi" authored by Woon Chok Thin. This is my birth-given name.  

Edited March 25, 2018 by Eric Woon
correct typo error

[Eric Woon]

This is the theme for which I translate the remaining 69 of the 81 chapters. Please read the book cover page of "True Leadership". It is an abridged version of "The Wisdom of Lao Zi", whereby I removed the twelve chapters that related to the discussion pertaining to Heaven and Earth. 

Edited March 25, 2018 by Eric Woon
Correct typo errors.

[Marblehead]

43 minutes ago, Eric Woon said:

I am sorry. I am not going to discuss on the twelve chapters ...

Hey, It's your thread.  You can take it which ever way you wish.  I'm just responding to you in my own way.

 

[flowing hands]

15 hours ago, Eric Woon said:

The Chinese characters are basically built up from graphical blocks to form ideographic characters called hieroglyphs. Chinese characters are more like pictograms which are rich in associative wisdom through which a reader at first sight can interpret or decode each character semantically. For example, the word 道 (pinyin: dào) is a combination of two root characters 辶 and 首.   

 

Yes they are 'pictograms' and are basically symbols or drawings. The root of Dao is foot and the head of an ancient shaman wearing deer antlers, meaning to walk in a wise way.

[Marblehead]

I doubt I would enjoy wearing antlers.  Women might think I was horny.

 

 

[Taoist Texts]

12 hours ago, Eric Woon said:

Did it come from 春秋-文子 （Chunqiu-Wenzi？

yes

12 hours ago, Eric Woon said:

to me, its style of writing is not coherent with Lao Zi style as in DDJ.

which is strange because it contains the same phrase as DDJ

 

12 hours ago, Eric Woon said:

This is as far as I think, as of now.  

good, thanks)

[Taoist Texts]

3 hours ago, Marblehead said:

I doubt I would enjoy wearing antlers.  Women might think I was horny.

 

 

thats why when u wear antlers, you really really have to walk in a wise way. may be even run in a wise way.

[Eric Woon]

11 hours ago, Taoist Texts said:

yes

which is strange because it contains the same phrase as DDJ

 

good, thanks)

Perhaps, I can give you a fair idea who 文子 (Wenzi) was. The following short texts are copied from a recent viral message.

《礼记》中说：“博学之，审问之，慎思之，明辨之，笃行之”。.... Note: .... means some other truncated texts from this speech. Please respect the word, privacy. I copied them without permission. Other than the word 之, the rest of the texts make perfectly readable, current vernacular texts. 

Why I am bring up this truncated message as an example?

I want to bring up this habit, which runs deep in Chinese history, across at least 2500 years, supposedly using Wenzi as an ancient example.

1) 99% of the mainland Chinese cannot read classical Chinese. Less so, texts that belong to the Pre-Qin era. When the speech writer picked up these 15 words, it was sort of a showmanship, telling the audience he reads a lot, knows a lot, and has substance, especially in Chinese history as ancient as the Pre-Qin era.

2) Perhaps, he might want to lend some phrases (in this case, 15 words) from this book to draw out a point. Interestingly, this ancient book is 《礼记》The Book of Rites, which is one of the Five Classics of Ruism (Confucianism is misleading). 

3) Perhaps, 80% of the readers would skip these 15 words. By the way, they could not understand them. No harm though. They can go on to read the other texts which were written in modern simplified Chinese.

4) Maybe, 1% would copy down these 15 words, and make a search in Baidu to obtain a better understanding what these five phrases mean.

5) To me, frankly, there is no harm done to his overall message. May I suggest, it could be better if the speech writer could add in five footnotes,  one each, immediate after each 之?

 

Now do you see the similarity between what Wenzi did and the above piece of message polished up by the above speech writer? 

 

Now, further down this book, I copied down these from 春秋-文子 （Chunqiu-Wenzi). The texts highlighted bold and in slightly bigger fonts size were copied from DDJ. I mean Wenzi copied them from DDJ. AND there is a distinguishing manner in which he imported these copied texts. He did not explain them, not even a single word. Likewise, the speech writer of the above message where he plucked the 15 words from 《礼记》 The Book of Rites, he too, did not explain any of the these words. This is why I suggested to add footnotes.  

 

1) 老子〔文子〕曰：天地未形，窈窈冥冥，浑而为一，寂然清澄，重浊为地，精微为天，离而为四时，分而为阴阳，精气为人，粗气为虫，刚柔相成，万物乃生。精神本乎天，骨骸根于地，精神入其门，骨骸反其根，我尚何存！故圣人法天顺地，不拘于俗，不诱于人，以天为父，以地为母，阴阳为纲，四时为纪。天静以清，地定以宁，万物逆之者死，顺之者生；故静默者，神明之宅；虚无者，道之所居。夫精神者，所受于天也；骨骸者，所禀于地也。故曰：「道生一，一生二，二生三，三生万物。万物负阴而抱阳，冲气以为和。」

2) 老子〔文子〕曰：以不义而得之，又不布施，患及其身，不能为人，又无以自为，可谓愚人。无以异于枭爱其子也。故「持而盈之，不如其已；揣而锐之，不可长保。」德之中有道，道之中有德。其化不可极，阳中有阴，阴中有阳，万事尽然，不可胜明。福至祥存，祸至祥先。见祥而不为善，则福不来；见不祥而行善，则祸不至。利与害同门，祸与福同邻，非神圣莫之能分，故曰：「祸兮福所倚，福兮祸所伏，孰知其极。」人之将疾也，必先甘鱼肉之味；国之将亡也，必先恶忠臣之语。故疾之将死者，不可为良医；国之将亡者，不可为忠谋。修之身，然后可以治民；居家理治，然后可移官长。故曰：「修之身，其德乃真；修之家，其德乃余；修之国，其德乃丰。」民之所以生活，衣与食也。事周于衣食则有功，不周于衣食则无功，事无功德不长。故随时而不成，无更其刑；顺时而不成，无更其理。时将复起，是谓道纪。帝王富其民，霸王富其地，「上无为而民自化」。

 

Summing up:

1) The word 老子 as in 老子〔文子〕曰：is most misleading. The compiler of this book tried to fool the readers that Laozi said all these.

2) No! This book did not explain a single word that the author imported from DDJ. Please do not refer to this book as having substance that you can understand DDJ better. Most often than not, you are misled. 

3) He merely muddled through with his own thinking, his own ideas and whatever he wanted to expressed as was shown in the body of the texts (other than the DDJ verses). Yes, he muddled through. Got it!

4) I would not refer to this kind of writing. It is not doing any good to those imported words. There were there to show-off the author has read DDJ. 

5) Btw, in Singapore (where I am living) now, I can find a few folks who read classical Chinese, often write this this manner. I do not give them attention. Why?  For reason of (4) above.

6) In Taiwan, perhaps, you can find a much larger number of older folks who write in this same manner.

7) Now is the final answer. This is not strange. It is a habit dies hard. And it has been running among the educated Chinese people for at least 2500 years.

8) I do not qualify myself to make a comment on this. Perhaps, the religious texts that you might come across, were written in this manner. Some of you, might be able to land on some of these religious texts. Please forward them to me. Let me take a good look. Thank you.

 

 

Edited March 25, 2018 by Eric Woon
Edited to make it smoother to read