Chang and Plato's Cave

The first 2 lines of the Dao De Jing are a masterful introduction to the rest of the piece. It's succinct, it's poetic, it sets up the theme of duality and it tells you that nothing contained in the rest the work is The Dao. It goes like this:

*Side note, Traditional Chinese doesn't have punctuation. This is how it's presented, often, to modern readers.

If you don't read Chinese, that's totally fine for my purposes. We are focusing it's form. We have 2 sentences, each with 6 characters. In both sentences there is one character used 3 times, and 3 characters used 1 time. The 3 characters that are used one time are the exactly same in both sentences.

The first repeated character is '道' which is pronounced 'Dao' (we're being real lazy here and avoiding pinyin / tone). It's literal translation [1] is 'road' or 'way'.

The second repeated character '名' which is pronounced 'Ming'. It's literal translation is 'name'. You can see we're setting up this duality between the thing, and what we call it. Later in the poem it talks about surface versus depth, material and immaterial, desire vs non.

The 3 non repeated characters are:

• 可 (ke), which means “can” or “able to”
• 非 (fei), which means “not”
• 常 (chang), which doesn’t have anything close to a 1:1 equivalent in English. It’s somewhere between constant, continuous, immortal, and mundane.

The first line is often translated as something like:
The Dao that can spoken is not the Immortal Dao.
-- or --
The road that can be walked is not the true road.
-- or --
The constant way is not the way that can be trod.

I've read the Dao De Jing a handful of times and the sentence that helped me most understand what the poem is doing doesn't appear in the poem itself. The sentence goes like this:

We're now going to jump from one ancient work of wisdom to another, Plato's Republic, and specifically, Plato's Cave. It talks about living your whole life unable to move your head and only seeing shadows cast on the wall by the objects behind you. An entire existence only seeing lower dimensional projections of the true object. Beyond that, the cave wall is jagged. There are stalagmites and flickering firelight; distortions upon distortions. How is one supposed to ever understand that nature the world you cannot look at?

With this in mind, let's move the fire a little and get another angle on the Dao casting the darkness. From this angle, we will argue that the first 2 lines are not about 道 (dao | road) or 名 (ming | name), after all one is swapped for the other so we are concerned with their relationship to each other. It's not about 可 (ke | able to) or 非 (fei | not) these are more so plumbing words that help bring out the nuance of Dao and Ming. The lens we are going to adopt is the one where 常 (chang) is the focal point. 常, the immortal. 常, the unchanging. 常, the mundane. 常, the constant. 常, the repetitive. 常, the fact.

If you've read or listened to David Foster Wallace's talk This is Water, he opens it with a parable: an old fish is swimming past 2 younger fish and the older fish nods at them as asks, "Morning boys, how's the water?" and the two younger fish swim on for a bit and then one of the younger fish turns to the other and says, "What the hell is water?" Despite water often being used as a metaphor for change, here, water is 常. It is always with them, it is what they breathe, it is what surrounds them from the moment they are born until the moment they die and they, in this parable, couldn't tell you what it is. It is life, it is miraculous, it is utterly mundane to the point of being unnoticed.

So what are the first 2 lines saying about 常? I believe that they are telling us that one of the steps on the way is to hold space for understanding the profound and the subtle in the things so constant in our life that we glaze past them. Moving more secular, think deeply on simple things.

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[1] I am not fluent in Chinese, I wouldn't even say I have passable Chinese. My translations are that of a dilettante at best.

[2] The Dao is an ancient text and it does seem that more modern use of 常 tends to skew more towards 'always' or 'frequently'