Hi Dan, what a nice idea! But there remain at least some questions. At first I wonder why chapter 1 was no matter untill now in this recent discussion. You know, dao kedao fei chang dao. How would this translate? If dao was a way to do things, why should the eternal way could not be told/explained? This opening sentence in chapter 1 (of course not of the Daode jing, for we all know that originally the de- part seems to be the first one, but it still is the first sentence of the DAO-part) seems to make clear that this text is NOT concerned about any concrete way (not only a path on the ground but also the right way of doing things), what might perhaps have been the first idea of it's reader.
Despite of that, isn't it problematic to imagine a way of doing things in an active subject-position of a sentence as e.g. in ch.37 (dao chang wuwei er wu bu wei) or ch. 42 (dao sheng yi, yi sheng er, etc.)? The latter one seems to me very close to what I would understand as a rather clear hint, that dao refers to a metaphysical entity, for the physical entities only came into being (just depending on interpretation) with the dao-born One, the two (might be heaven and earth), the three (heaven, earth and man? -- I'm not sure) or the tenthousand kinds of entities (wan wu). BTW, it may be the old what was first, the hen or the egg question, so I won't ask whether the way of doing something could exist before the things you could work on with it, but that this way is also the creator of the things you could work on with it without being a metaphysical way seems to be really problematic...
Maybe it is a misinterpretation, but large parts of the Daode jing seem to struggle with words to express something that is nearly not to express with pre-Qin Chinese lacking a language for non-concrete matters. You remember those passages like: forced to give it a name, I call it..., it is like..., it is suble, you can't see it, you can't touch it..., or the usage of onomatopoetic sounds. Wheather all these passages refer directly or indirectly to dao is depending on whether you understand dao as the main subject of the whole text (I do), but if one doesn't, one has to explain, how dao was related to these unexplainable entities.
I wouldn't deny that dao is also and of course also in pre-Qin-times a way of doing things, but it seems that it wasn't only later philosophers who supposed some kind of analogy, saying there was an eternal and metaphysical dao that brought all things into being and also the rules according which they interact and the best way of doing things was to imitate therein this metaphysical dao. Wang Bi seems to do this in his commentaries, but at least to my understanding the contents of the Daode jing seems not far away from such an interpretation.
HolgerDate created: 10/28/96 Last modified: 10/28/96 Questions? Contact: Stephen C. Angle