Punctuation (continued)
In the previous post I talked about punctuation in the 道德经. This is the response post.
Randy said:
Your “Buddhist” reading is very interesting. It seems to ring true with the paradoxes in the rest of the text. I wonder if there is any strong reason not to consider such a translation.
As Daan said,
My two cents: perhaps 道可道非常道 cannot be parsed as [[道可][道非]][常道] because for the sentence to mean “The Dao that is and the Dao that is not, that is the Eternal Dao”, as you suggested, you would expect [[可道][非道]][常道]. After all, if we parse it as you suggested, in 常道 the adjective precedes the noun, but in 道可 and 道非 it does not.
Which is right on the money, it turns out. The reason the “Buddhist” reading doesn’t work is basically because the grammar of Guwen doesn’t really work that way.
I’m told that to someone who’s really familiar with classical Chinese, there’s actually little difficulty in knowing when one thought ends an another begins, thanks to the use of 也, 者 et cetera.
Much of the rest of the discussion was on specific words and how they’re used in the verse, but more for the philosophy than the language, so we’ll skip it here.
Thanks for following up on this, Kellen. I don’t know how long you’ve been studying Classical Chinese, but at my home university, after just a couple of months of instruction, we were sometimes required to read texts without punctuation. I initially though that was going to be impossible, but it turned out to be easier than I thought
I’m reading the 大學 and 中庸 right now and I’ve seen some interesting grammatical constructions, such as 有弗問，問之弗知弗措也。 I could write a bit on that, if anyone’s interested.
thought* and thanks for making this text box a bit bigger!
No worries on the text box. It’s not the only thing that needs some work around here.
I know of a PhD student in the US writing a thesis on English translations of the Daodejing, so maybe there will be a book that can guide us through the different interpretations coming out in a few years.
I was thinking about Victor Mair’s translation which you quoted in the earlier post on this subject: “The ways that can be walked are not the eternal Way.” Particularly, how does one get from 道可道 to ‘the ways that can be walked’? Or indeed to ‘the Dao that can be named’, which is structurally the same?
If you ask me, admittedly not an expert, the noun phrase “the ways that can be walked” would probably be expressed as 可道之道 in classical Chinese, since determiners and adjectives (etc) come before the head in noun phrases. Compare 王之无道 ‘that the king has strayed from the Way’ vs 无道之王 ‘the king who has strayed from the Way’.
Even if we inserted a subordinating particle 之 between 道 and 可道, we would only get the noun phrase 道之可道, or ‘that the road can be walked’, ‘that the dao can be spoken of’, or ‘that which can be said of the dao’. It’s probably the latter that leads to the translations you quoted. But I think it’s interesting to see that it’s a relative stretch to get there. Unless, of course, I am mistaken – in which case I would be glad to stand corrected.