the skillful closer needs no bolts or bars,
while to open what he has shut will be impossible;
~ James Legge translation, from The Sacred Books of the East, 1891 ~
A good door needs no lock,
Yet no one can open it.
~ Gia-fu Feng and Jane English translation, published by Vintage Books, 1989 ~
Good closure needs no bar and yet cannot be opened
~ Derek Lin translation, from Tao Te Ching: Annotated & Explained, published by SkyLight Paths, 2006 ~
You could build a door with no lock that nobody could open.
~ Ron Hogan rendition, from Beatrice.com, 2004 ~
Here are two different perspectives on this line. See if one or both speaks to you.
Te-Ch'ing as quoted by Red Pine: [The sage] does not set traps, and yet nothing escapes him. Hence he uses no locks.
Derek Lin: In ancient China, doors were locked from the inside with a wooden bar set horizontally. Thus, this line is talking about how we can capture people's attention so they naturally gravitate to us, as if they are locked in, but without the wooden bar.
To view the Index page for this series to see what you may have missed or would like to read again, go here.
SInce I have been adamant about the interpretation of this verse, I will offer my teacher's commentary:
ReplyDelete"One who is really good at cleansing the heart of desires and passions does not need anything such as bars or blots to keep away the incursions of others."
He also says of the previous line, which I ranted on about below:
"The person accomplished in Tao enforces his or her own "plan" by following the way of Nature and discarding acquired things."
He concludes, "Such explanation just touches the surface of the meaning."
I am a bit at a loss as to why you feel the need to be adamant about any specific interpretation. It sounds as if you are suggesting there is one path and this is the orthodox one.
ReplyDeleteThe thing about art -- and I view the writings of the Taoist sages as a form of art -- is that each person gets different things out of it and the same person can get different things at different times of their life.
If you and a friend were looking at the Mona Lisa and your friend said, "This is how this painting speaks to me," I would hope that you wouldn't say, "You've got it all wrong. It definitely means x."
No, I'm just saying show me -- with reference to the actual text -- where the interpretation comes from. And wringing meaning out of the English word doesn't do it.
ReplyDeleteI don't see this as a Mona Lisa thing. If one person said, "Look the Mona Lisa is weeping," I would simply say, where are the tears? You know, give me some evidence.
It's not a matter of orthodoxy; you still haven't explicated your interpretation based on text. I don't see where you "get it" out of this line (#3).
You need to do careful review of the text. We have some characters, the Wade-Giles, then pinyin, then English...you need to go backwards too. All the meanings of one of the chosen English words do not necessarily attach to the Chinese. (And vice versa.)
I don't read Chinese, so I depend upon interpretors. As I have shown throughout this series, there are often wide disagreements amongst the interpretors as to what any particular line or word conveys. Since I'm not all-knowing, I am not in a position to judge which interpretors are more correct than others. In addition, since each interpretor is working with an ancient language, none of them may capture the specific essence of what the original authors are trying to convey.
ReplyDeleteThe other thing I would like to point out is that I never advertised this series as being one in which I would serve as a final arbiter amongst the translators. As I wrote in one of the introductory posts, "While some of the things I write will well up from my being -- my personal take on the message of the line[s] conveyed -- much of it will also come from many other authors and, of course, this will be noted."
Therefore, I sometimes offer thoughts on what a certain passage says to me and what passages say to me is born out of my experience and perspective.