>From: "David Prince" "We *know* what quality is, so it isn't mystical."
>
> The Tao that can be known is not Tao.
> The substance of the World is only a name for Tao.
> Tao is all that exists and may exist;
> The World is only a map of what exists and may exist.
>
I know this is going back a fair way, but I thought this extract from an
essay on the Tao te Ching (or Daode jing, since the essay uses Pinyin
instead of Wade-Giles phonetic translations) by Dan Lusthaus might be of
interest:
"At times, like an inkblot test, the interpretations [of the Tao te Ching]
reveal more about the assumptions the reader brought to the text than what
the text seems to say.
"A prime example of this is the first line of chapter 1, usually
(incorrectly) rendered in English as "The Dao which can be spoken is not the
true eternal Dao," which expresses the interpreter's notion of ineffability
rather than Laozi's, since the line actually reads: "If a Dao can be Dao-ed,
then it's not always Dao." The word Dao appears three times in this
sentence. The first time its meaning is indeterminate; the second time ("can
be Dao-ed") refers to Dao as an ongoing process; the third time ("always
Dao" or "fixated Dao") refers to Dao as a fixed, constant thing. Basically
Laozi is saying that the term Dao can, when used in a sentence, function
either as a verb (process) or as a noun (thing), but not both at the same
time. Thus linguistic usage compels us to bifurcate what initially is
non-dual. This is reinforced later in the same chapter when he writes:
"these pairs emerge together yet are differently named." In other words, it
is not that the Dao is ineffable, but rather that language itself always
reveals the contrastive polarities of Dao's movement, though if one only
pays attention to the surface meaning that movement becomes hidden. The
chapter never aims to encourage the reader to pick sides between a speakable
Dao and an ineffable Dao. On the contrary, it and the following chapters
strongly advise against reifying the products of dichotomous thinking. But
attractive interpretations have a way of permanently infiltrating the main
text, so reading the Daode jing requires vigilance if one does not want to
be improperly swayed by erroneous interpretations."
It seems to me that if Phaedrus had had access to this translation in ZAMM,
the concept of the non-dichotomous duality of Dynamic and Static Quality,
process and thing, would have presented itself a lot earlier.
James
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