道dào
the Way
The word the book is named after, and the one it opens by refusing to define. It is at once a road, a method, and the unnamed source that things come from.
Tao Te Ching/Key terms
Key terms in the Tao Te Ching
Laozi builds eighty-one short chapters out of a small number of loaded words. Each term below gives the Chinese, its reading, the sense it carries in the text, the English James Legge settled on in 1891, and the chapters where it does its work.
德dé
power, virtue
Not moral goodness so much as the power a thing has by being what it is. A thing that follows the Tao has de the way water has the power to wear down stone.
无为wúwéi
not doing, doing nothing
Acting without forcing and without leaving a mark. Not idleness: the sage still rules, but by not reaching for the outcome.
自然zìrán
of itself, spontaneity
What happens when nothing is pushing it. The last line of chapter 25 makes even the Tao follow ziran.
朴pǔ
the uncarved block
Wood before the carver touches it: the plain, unshaped state Laozi keeps telling the reader to return to.
无wú
not-being, what is not there
The empty half of a pair. Chapter 11 turns on it: the hole in the hub is what makes the wheel useful.
有yǒu
being, what is there
The other half of the pair. Being and not-being come out of the same place and carry different names.
常cháng
constant, enduring
What does not change. Laozi uses it for the way things work when nothing interferes, and warns that not to know it is to act blindly.
圣人shèngrén
the sage
Laozi’s model for how to live: not a saint but a person who has stopped insisting on himself.
玄xuán
the dark, the deep
Darker than black: the depth you cannot see into. Chapter 1 ends by calling the pair of names the gate of all mystery, dark and again dark.
谷gǔ
the valley
The lowest place, where water collects. Laozi’s favourite image for the kind of emptiness that can hold something.
水shuǐ
water
Soft, low, and unstoppable. Water does not fight and still gets where it wants to go.
柔róu
soft, yielding
What survives. Laozi sets the soft against the hard in chapter after chapter: the soft lives and the hard dies.
反fǎn
turning back
Chapter 40 condenses it to seven characters: turning back is how the Tao moves. Things go far and come home.
一yī
the One
The first thing the Tao produces. Heaven, earth, the spirits and the valleys all hold to it; lose it and each of them would fail.
气qì
breath, vital force
The stuff a thing is alive with. Chapter 10 asks whether you can keep body and soul from parting, and breathe with the softness of a newborn.
天下tiānxià
all under heaven
The world of people and states, the domain a ruler is trying to hold. Laozi keeps saying it cannot be held that way.
万物wànwù
the ten thousand things
Everything that exists. The phrase makes no distinction between people, rivers and insects: all of it rises and returns together.