A One-Time Interruption: Introducing ‘Gate of All Mysteries’
A Two-Year Close Reading of an Ancient Text
(3 min read) Below is a quick interruption to introduce a new project I’ve been quietly working on for the past eight months, and which launched today.
My recent essays here on being WEIRD and the reflexive self might have primed some of you for what Gate of All Mysteries is up to. It’s a slow, two-year reading of the Daodejing — that famous ancient Chinese text which opens by announcing that its subject cannot be put into words, and then spends 81 short chapters circling it — in its original Classical Chinese.
No prior knowledge of Chinese required.
Here is the opening of the Daodejing (aka the Tao Te Ching), a foundational text of Chinese philosophy first written down over 2300 years ago:
道可道非常道
名可名非常名
You may well have come across this already, even if you have read or heard only a tiny bit of Chinese philosophy. Well, you almost certainly didn’t encounter the above exactly; rather, you came across some translation of it — after all, the Daodejing has been translated into English more times than any other text in the world, including the Bible.
But take a close look at the twelve characters above. Each represents a one-syllable word. Each line uses only four different characters, and the two lines share the same structure, with just one word — repeated three times — changing between them.
In Mandarin, the lines sound something like this:
Dow kuh dow fay chawng dow.
Meeng kuh meeng fay chawng meeng.
It’s a beautiful, mantra-like rhythm.
Now let’s take a look at what happens when you need to put the ideas behind these words into English. Here are six expert translations of those same two lines, all from the past sixty years:
The Tao (Way) that can be told of is not the eternal Tao;
The name that can be named is not the eternal name. (Wing-Tsit Chan, 1963)
A way can be a guide, but not a fixed path;
names can be given, but not permanent labels. (Thomas Cleary, 1991)
TAO called TAO is not TAO.
Names can name no lasting name. (Addiss & Lombardo, 1993)
Way-making (dao) that can be put into words is not really way-making,
And naming (ming) that can assign fixed reference to things is not really naming. (Ames & Hall, 2003)
Of ways you may speak, / but not the Perennial Way;
By names you may name, / but not the Perennial Name. (Edmund Ryden, 2008)
Any course can be taken as the right course to take, but no course like that can be the course taken always.
Any name can be named to determine what is or should be, but no name like that can be what determines them always. (Brook Ziporyn, 2023)
These are all translations by experts, and all highly regarded. None of them is wrong. And yet they are saying noticeably different things — different enough that a reader relying on any one of them is, in a real sense, reading a different text than a reader relying on another.
This is why I am inviting you to a slow, two-year reading of the Daodejing in its original Classical Chinese. One chapter at a time, every Friday.
No knowledge of Chinese is required. Seriously.
The text is only 81 short chapters (about 5300 words total), and I’ll walk you through every one of them — what each character means, how the grammar works, what the philosophical issues are, and what trade-offs translators are forced to make.
By the end, you won’t just have read about the Daodejing or read a translation of the Daodejing. You will have read the Daodejing in the original language.
You will be able to…
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If this interests you, head over to Gate of All Mysteries and subscribe — the full announcement is there, along with an About page, a working Lexicon, and an extensive Sources & Bibliography which includes notes on over twenty English translations of the Daodejing.