Chapter 4

Original Text

道沖而用之，或不盈。
淵兮，似萬物之宗。
挫其銳，解其紛，和其光，同其塵。
湛兮，似若存。
吾不知誰之子，象帝之先。

Translation

The Dao is a balanced hollow; used, it never fills.
Deep—seeming the ancestor of the ten thousand beings.
It blunts sharpness, loosens tangles, softens its radiance, mingles with the dust.
So limpid—as if it were there.
I do not know whose child it is; it seems to precede the Lord-on-High.

Word Notes

沖: harmony/balance; also “hollowed” so that it can receive and give—hence inexhaustible in use.
淵: deep, far-reaching.
宗: forebear, progenitor, sovereign source.
挫: to blunt, check. 銳: keen, aggressive edge.
解: to unbind, undo. 紛: entanglement, turmoil.
光: luminosity, brilliance. 塵: the dusty, ordinary world.
湛: clear, still, pure.
帝: the High Sovereign (archaic “Lord-on-High”).

Chapter Explanation

Although Dao is supremely empty and supremely without, when it issues forth as a balanced, harmonizing breath it nonetheless has effect. It pervades the six directions; there is nowhere it does not fill. It is extremely deep and cannot be fathomed—thus it seems the progenitor of the myriad beings.

It blunts the keen, contending spirit; it releases the mind from vexed entanglement; it does not flaunt its own brilliance, but blends with the world’s dust.

Clear and empty, with nothing stored up—yet as if there were something present. I do not know whose child it is or whence it came; it looks as though it were prior to the Lord-on-High.

Discourse

This chapter says that the sage—having realized Dao through “emptying the heart, filling the belly; softening the will, strengthening the bones”—takes emptiness as his body and balanced harmony as his function. The graph 沖 is “middle” plus “water,” the outflow of the middle; what issues from the middle is harmony. “Dao as chōng” thus means central harmony. The Great Harmony fills Heaven and Earth; it can stand in the place of Heaven and Earth and nourish the myriad beings. Its appearance is deep and vast beyond naming.

Yet it neither prides itself on virtue nor claims merit. Gentle and wholly harmonious, it is like an infant: calm and desireless. It mixes its own radiance with the dust—this is the realm of the “Greatly-Transformed” sage and the “un-knowably divine.” It goes along with the world’s common dust—not merely “keeping one’s head down” to avoid notice and “preserving oneself in wisdom,” but truly embodying the teaching so as to draw others in. (See Zhuangzi, “In the World of Men”: Ju Boyu instructs Yan He on teaching the Crown Prince of Wei—“In form, nothing suits like going along; in heart, nothing suits like harmonizing.”) This is a gloss on “blending radiance and mixing with dust.” Guanyin’s “appearing in many bodies to preach the Dharma” is the same point.

Many commentators read this solely as “preserving oneself in wisdom.” That is not wrong—but it is only one side. Is the sage concerned only with preserving himself? Still and limpid, beyond any probing, his person seems to be above the world, while his spirit truly surpasses Heaven and Earth. Hence, “I do not know whose child it is, as though prior to the Lord-on-High.”

This is plainly Laozi recounting his own curriculum vitae: speaking his own Dao and De; painting his own portrait; vividly sketching the status of the “dragon.” Then, with “or,” “as if,” “it seems,” he returns to “now soaring, now diving; now showing, now hiding”—sometimes a scale, sometimes a claw—keeping people in the dark.

Certain Daoist texts say Laozi preached for twelve thousand days and transformed his body eighty-one times. I myself understand how such claims arise, but since the matter touches on the miraculous and ordinary records are insufficient to establish it, I will not press the point. Even if we take Laozi as “the Old Master beneath the pillar,” some say he was of the Shang; others, of the Zhou; he served long as historiographer and left no momentous memorials—he might seem a common fellow. Yet the greatest sage since humankind began—Confucius—revered him as a teacher and called him “like a dragon.” And after Laozi passed through the Hangu Pass, none knew his whereabouts. Is that not, too, transformation beyond measure?