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Introduction

This book represents the original guide to the agile mindset. It’s agilism as a philosophy of human connection, collaboration and community, not a technocratic manifesto. Resembling an Alexandrian pattern language, it compacts the experiences of a hundred generations into just five thousand words. Although the book offers six narrative through-lines, each of its sixty six chapters rewards study as a stand-alone societal pattern.

In short, it’s not a book to skim and set aside, but a touchstone for leaders negotiating opportunities and dilemmas throughout even a long career. It’s neither religious nor irreligious and neither requires nor rejects any faith or worldview. Though it touches on physics and metaphysics, it focuses consistently on improving the conditions of business. Its methods apply equally as well to organizations navigating the intelligence revolution of the 21st century AD as they did those of the agricultural one in the 21st century BC, where it originates.

Later editions of this book will be annotated chapter by chapter to detail implications and applications. But this first edition assumes that you, gentle reader, will prefer to engage directly with the text to tease these out for yourself, so provides a little space for notes against each chapter in the manner of a workbook.

Finally, to avoid dumping readers cold into the first chapter, here’s a little context for its terse list of agile leadership practices:

• We listen as if crossing thin ice because risk, complexity, and ambiguity are everywhere.
• We test like a boat on dark water so that carelessness, haste and imbalance don’t sink us.
• We adapt like a stranger to a far shore to give and take what the market takes and gives.
• We simplify like a melting snowflake because our bureaucracies grow rigid and inefficient as one.
• We connect like the deep woods to sustain continuous growth across cycles of change.
• We lead as a valley does the river to prosper and join communities of mutual benefit.
• We empower as the river’s silt feeds the fields to open bottlenecks and foster innovation.

I think that’s enough to come up to speed but offer some explanations at the end of the book for readers inquiring into its provenance.

Agility

“The sage” sounds like an old man on a mountain. But sheng means perceptive, wise, dextrous and lively, and ren is person or people. So here sheng ren literally translates as agile person, agile people, or just “agility”.

1. A Way Of Life (xv)

Agility is practical, not mystical.
A way of life, not a state of grace.

Listening as if crossing thin ice,
Testing as a boat on dark water,
Adapting as a stranger to a far shore,
Simplifying as a melting snowflake,
Connecting as the deep woods,
Leading as a valley does the river,
Empowering as its silt feeds the fields.

Imagine the ice solid or the water clear,
Stop to plan your way ahead,
Ignore what moves underfoot;
You fall and disappear.

2. Cultivation (lxxviii)

Nothing is as soft and flexible as water,
Melting the rigid and flooding the fixed
Which cannot control it.

Melting ice and flooding valleys -
People see this as the power of water
And fail to grasp its real force.

The agile channel water to irrigate fields
To multiply grain so people don’t go hungry
And fight over it.

3. Like Water (viii/v/vii)

As water runs where it’s not blocked,
The agile carve channels of mutual benefit.
Learning by sharing learning,
Letting go old ways to find better ones,
Trusting in those trusting in them.

Like water, agility sustains community,
Clarifies understanding,
Dissolves complexity,
Quickens growth,
Eases friction,
Fills opportunity,
And speeds flow.

As a rising tide lifts all boats
Agility adapts all people.

4. Embracing Change (xxiii)

Change occurs suddenly.
A cyclone may pass in the night,
Or a flood in a day,
And change the world forever.

As nature’s forms change, so must ours.
Embracing change, we lead change
Like a ship sailing ahead of a storm.
Anchored to form or set adrift,
Change overwhelms us.

5. Mindset (lxvii)

People talk about an agile mindset.
Talk is often all there is to it,
But there are three qualities
The agile manifest and defend:
Connection, adaptation, and simplicity.

Connection generates strength,
Adaptation, flexibility,
And simplicity, ease.

Strength without a warm heart,
Flexibility without a coiled spine,
Ease without a cool head,
Spell the end of agility.

6. Warm Heart (xlix)

The agile connect people like a family
By fostering.

They’re fair to the fair,
And to the unfair,
Fostering fairness.

They’re trustworthy to the trustworthy,
And the untrustworthy,
Fostering trust.

They’re kind to people within their community,
And without,
Fostering kindness.

No matter what anyone says or seems,
They treat each like each other.

7. Coiled Spine (xlv/xxii)

Nature adapts with neither intent nor outcome,
Nor effort nor limit,
Nor reason nor purpose.

So agility adapts its form
To the flow of forms:
Bending to straighten,
Emptying to fill,
Failing to learn,
Yielding to fit,
Losing to gain.

Agile work achieves nothing
But to make all work easier.
Agile business profits no one
More than it profits everyone.
Agile speech is honest,
Agile intents, sincere,
Agile outcomes, shared.

8. Cool Head (xxii/xxiv)

Flaunting loses respect;
Conspiring loses trust;
Owing loses impartiality;
Arguing loses fellowship;
Reacting loses opportunity.

These behaviors are wasteful and self-indulgent,
Generating entanglement and conflict.
So the agile avoid them.

Without pride, no one can humiliate them;
Without secrets, no one can betray them;
Without debt, no one can compromise them;
Without contention, no one can refute them;
Without reaction, no one can anticipate them.

9. Tact (lxxxi/lvi)

Words are often misleading,
So honesty offers few of them.
Promises are hard to honor,
So honor picks its promises.
Answers seldom enlighten,
So enlightenment seldom answers.

The agile don’t explain themselves
When explanation won’t serve harmony.
They reserve their opinions and judgements
To ease differences and disagreements,
And check their power
To empower people to organize themselves.

Beyond friendship and enmity,
Wealth and poverty,
Honor and disgrace,
They hold the virtue inside honor.

10. Integrity (xxix)

You can’t control human nature no matter what you do;
People always find new ways to express it;
Tax one sin and another spreads;
Arrest one rebel and others conspire.

Some will lead where others follow;
Some own what others owe;
Some win when others lose;
Some make rules others obey.

Agility only controls its own desires
To hoard, exploit, and compete.

11. Without Competing (xxxiii)

Where soldiers defend hierarchy
The agile defend harmony.
Where philosophers increase knowledge;
The agile increase understanding.
Where princes control empires;
The agile control desires.
Where heroes defend their homeland;
The agile survive their homeland.

The agile care less for growing their slice than growing the pie;
Investing in others and partaking with them.
As nature flourishes where it doesn’t struggle
The agile collaborate without competing.

Connection

Agile organizations don’t come from a manifesto, framework, or toolset. These have their uses but then, per Kafka, the revolution evaporates leaving behind just another bureaucracy. Agile organizations emerge from xiang: connecting people by mutual benefit.

12. Mutual Benefit (lxxvii)

Mutual benefit is like drawing a bow:
As the top lowers the bottom rises;
As the gap reduces, the middle increases;
A positive sum game
Where each gets more than they give.

Where you lead people to compete,
Increasing the gap to tighten your grip,
That’s like aiming your bow at the sun.

13. Interdependence (xii/iii)

Reward collaboration, not competition;
Feed interdependence, not dependence;
Open peoples’ minds to fill their bellies;
Soften their hearts to strengthen their bones.

Agility distributes management and ownership
So those who provide them won’t exploit them;
Controlling politics by not centralizing decisions;
Bureaucracy by not delegating to managers;
Power by not privileging owners.

When no one can take advantage,
Harmony remains.

14. Compromise (xxxviii/liv a)

Neglect harmony and community remains.
Divide community and trust remains.
Break trust and justice remains.
Corrupt justice and power remains.

Harmony doesn’t experience fear;
But, without it, you do.
It won’t divide or corrupt itself;
But, without it, you will.

Trust serves harmony without compromise;
Justice compromises it to serve it;
And power compromises it to serve itself.

15. Bureaucracy (xviii/xix)

As mutual benefit is compromised
Princes and priests rise,
And courts and lawyers,
Parties and politicians.

Wherever people are led to compete,
Harmony is compromised.
As they struggle,
Owners and managers gain control.

If we could control command and control,
People might contribute and collaborate;
Outlaw laws and taxes,
Communities of trust might return;
Reorganize roles and responsibilities,
Corruption and conspiracy might disappear.

Idealism focuses on symptoms
Where practical solutions treat causes:
Sharing resources and rewarding outcomes;
Measuring throughput and opening bottlenecks;
Simplifying workflows and minimizing work in progress.

16. Ideals (xxxix/xxxii)

People pray for a heaven
Where the skies are always blue,
The ground always sure,
The mountains snow-capped,
The rivers full,
The soil fertile,
The people happy,
And the king benevolent.

Yet the sky must darken
For, without rain,
The ground cracks,
The mountains brown,
The rivers stop,
The soil blows,
The people starve,
And the king falls.

Princes depend on subjects
Like priests on followers,
Each claiming to be wiser,
Nobler, closer to heaven,
To keep people in their power.

17. Systems (xxxix/xxxii)

If a ruler was truly ordained by heaven,
All nature would follow his commands
And a sweet rain would fall,
Effortlessly slaking his every thirst.

Power can only control systems
And all systems are temporary.
As nature has no true form,
No system can truly control it.

Agile leaders only exert power
To align people to share and trade resources
Like streams flowing into a river,
And rivers into the sea.

18. Sharing (lxi/xxxv)

As flowers attract bees,
Markets align traders
To their mutual benefit.

Opening a market to smaller players
The great gains their supply.
Opening a market to bigger players
The small gains their support.

Plants feed and shelter animals,
As animals fertilize and propagate plants.
Like a good marriage, each benefits
By connecting the other.

19. At The Bottleneck (lxiii)

As a bountiful harvest comes from a handful of seeds
All complex problems have simple beginnings;
Like an oak from an acorn,
Hunger leads to war.

To solve a complex problem,
Focus on its tightest constraint.
To prevent difficulty, anticipate it;
Root out hidden causes and thoughtless habits
At the bottleneck.

Prevent poverty by sharing resources,
Conflict by sharing trade,
And fear by sharing trust.

20. Fruit Not Flowers (xxxviii/liv b)

Fear is as hard to dispel
As power is to uproot
As each generation
Sews it in the next.

Fear binds justice and community
Into a matrix of struggle
With faith in the flower of harmony
The root of its control.

Harmony roots in trust, not faith,
Yielding fruit, not flowers,
Planting the one,
And supplanting the other.

21. Small Solutions (lxiii/lxiv a)

A tree broader than a man can embrace
Starts in a slender shoot;
A wall greater than an army can breach
Begins with a clod of earth;
A journey of a thousand miles
Starts at the spot under your feet.

Still things are easily grasped;
Distant things easily navigated;
Small things easily sewn;
Fragile things easily broken.

As it’s easier to promise than deliver,
Taking small things lightly makes big things hard;
But solving problems while they’re small
Makes things easy.

22. Nurture And Nature (liv)

As harmony starts in one person,
It grows fertile in a family,
Prosperous in a community,
Abiding in a culture,
And complete in nature.

As marriage connects people to each other;
Family connects generations to each other;
Community connects families to each other;
Culture connects communities to each other;
And nature connects cultures to each other.

So, to cultivate harmony,
Align nurture to nature.

Leadership

Agile leaders (zhu) take responsibility for their whole community and operate on the rules of the games - technology, accounting methods, reward models, feedback loops, and learning protocols - empowering without interfering.

23. The Stone Keel (xxvi)

A captain tirelessly guides his ship at sea
Until, safe in port, he can lose it in sleep.

As calm is the master of haste,
And care the path to ease,
The captain of the great ship
Can’t treat it as a pleasure boat,
Steering lazily or hastily.

Without care he loses his bearings at sea;
Without calm he loses the trust of his crew.
The great captain doesn’t command his ship as a proud figurehead
But steadies her as a stone keel.

24. Command And Control (lvii)

Where leadership is focused on alignment
People innovate and collaborate,
But when it’s based on command and control
They compete and defy.

The more values and principles, the more sinners;
The more fines and taxes, the more cheats;
The more police and soldiers, the more renegades;
The more hierarchies and frameworks, the more rebels.

Agile leaders align autonomous groups
Using no laws but to secure trust,
No taxes but to encourage trade,
And no goal but mutual benefit.

25. By Adaptation (xvii/xxxvii)

The best leaders are barely known by their subjects;
The next best, loved and praised;
The next feared;
The next despised.
With no trust in their people,
Their people can place no trust in them.

As nature does nothing but adapt,
The best leaders lead by adaptation,
Neglecting no one
Controlling no one,
And taking no one’s side.

So, when agile leaders achieve their purpose,
Their people claim it as their own.
People prosper under agile leadership
By adapting to each other.

26. Strength Adapts (xxvii)

Great explorers leave no trail unmapped;
Great teachers no question unanswered;
Great philosophers no fact unexplained;
Great generals no threat unchecked;
Great tailors no thread unravelled.

So great leaders find use for everyone,
Adapting each to each other,
Accounting for the weakest
To multiply their strength.

The strong must find use for the weak
As the weak are the source of their strength;
Where the strong neglect the weak
Chaos results no matter how clever you are.

This is the method of adaptation:
As wood is shaped, it becomes a tool;
As a person is served, they become a servant;
So great carpenters leave no wood uncarved.

27. Leadership as a Service (lxvi/lxxii)

A valley leads a myriad streams to form a river
By running beneath them.

Given freedoms of trade and community,
People naturally lead each other.
With no reason to fear leaders,
They gladly support them.

So the agile lead without imposing commands,
Manage without enforcing controls,
Gain loyalty without promoting patriotism,
Recognition without ceremony or celebration,
And cooperation without enslavement.

Without fear of authority,
People live for their children,
Serving those who serve them.
They supply leadership
By generating leaders.

28. Alignment (lix)

Agility aligns people gently
As if cooking a delicate fish,
Using tact to keep trust intact.

Tact eases agreement,
And easy agreement secures a network of trust.
As channels of trust join, distrust is displaced
And community takes its place.

As community connects people, it grows:
Rooting deeply, joining each to each other,
Community weaves their history and future together.

29. Weakness Adapts (xl/xli)

Nature functions to adapt
As mind functions to represent;
Forests are adaptations of seeds
As seeds of dirt.

Weakness seeks adaptation.
Power is born in struggle;
Family in loneliness;
Revolution in bondage;
Liberty in tyranny;
Strategy in retreat;
Invention in scarcity;
Fire in darkness.

30. Humility (lxx)

As a leader’s words and actions serve community,
Promoting no other strategy or purpose,
Community adapts to them.

The more you appear different to people,
The less they feel you understand them
Where the more you speak as one of them,
The more they feel they understand you.

This is the benefit of humility.
The agile wear plain clothes;
Only their hearts glitter.

31. Trust and Distrust (lxviii/liii)

Trust is the finest weapon and strongest defense.
As, gaining cooperation, you weave trust among people,
So, securing peace, trust protects you like a fortress.

With just this simple design
You can build community as if following a main road
And never risk losing your way.
Nevertheless, though following a main road is easy,
Many take the scenic route.

As palaces rise,
Fields turn to weeds
And granaries empty.
Wearing fine clothes,
Bearing sharp swords,
Amassing resources and control,
Employing courtiers and courtesans -
These are detours leading away from community.

32. Too Much (ix/xii)

As you temper your sword to the sharpest, it shatters;
Fill your cup to the brim, it spills;
Hoard food, it spoils;
Concentrate power, it corrupts.

As too much light blinds,
Too much sound deafens,
Too much flavor disgusts,
Too much talk confuses,
Too much ownership impoverishes.

The agile say enough when they have enough
And grow their slice by growing the pie.

33. Harvesting Community (xxviii)

Accept power without wielding it
To open channels of trust
And quicken the grains of community.

Learn secrets without making them
To connect networks of trust
And nourish the roots of community.

Master politics without playing it
To cultivate fields of trust
And share the harvest of community.

Explanations

Before Agile

Listening, testing, coding and refactoring. That’s all there is to software. Anyone who says different is selling something. – Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained, 1st Ed.

Listening as if crossing thin ice, testing as a boat on dark water, adapting as a stranger to a far shore, simplifying as a melting snowflake … – Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 3,000 years earlier.

XP was the first agile software development method, but not the first agile method. It’s not just that agilism bears similarities to taoism, but that the origin of the software movement was directly influenced by it.

Three years before publishing the first agile book, XP Explained: Embrace Change, Beck shared drafts of it on Ward’s Wiki, a hive of engineering radicals sharing new methods of software development in the late 1990s. I was one, contributing a thousand pages of content and liberally sprinkling them with quotes from my first translation of Lao Tzu. Agile manifesto author Alistair Cockburn liked that translation so well he hosted a copy of it on his website for several years, and I got invited to speak on “the Tao of Extreme Programming” at the very first agile conference, nine months before its Snowbird manifesto.

I thought then that the resemblance was just a matter of parallel history, that agile’s refutation of bureaucratic management mirrored taoism’s refutation of Confucian orthodoxy. It took another decade before I realized Lao Tzu was literally about agility, and that the relationship of the one with the other is an identity. Because, to understand that, I first had to kill the Dude.

Killing the Dude

Silk tears, string rots, carved bamboo slips get scattered and jumbled. New dynasties burn the libraries of the old, passing down only the texts their new priesthoods consider sacred. The earliest editions of Lao Tzu pre-date the first dictionaries by centuries; those dictionaries only standardize the terminology of agriculture, not philosophy. The meanings of the book’s words were reinvented over and over, invisibly, while, visibly, numerologists rearranged their order into what seemed important to them.

So this book came to be called “the book of riddles” in China. No one knows what it meant when it started nor separate that from the many meanings it acquired on the way. Translations by modern scholars wildly disagree too, and the intellectual challenge of finally solving this old puzzle makes it still the most translated book in the world.

As an Australian software engineer with no Chinese I fell into this Quixotic occupation in 1989 in an informal collaboration with a group of sinology professors on the then-new taoism-studies-l mailing list. My open-content “GNL” project - a play of words on the famous GNU project - aimed to cut the Gordian knot by translating from English to English: distilling all the popular English translations into a single, simple explanation of the book an amateur like me could understand but none of the expert sinologists would object to.

Those experts were skeptical but entertained enough by this project to take the time to school me as I went about it. Eternal gratitude to Dan Lusthaus in particular for his patience then. Over three years this project succeeded to the extent that, unprompted by me, chinapage.org, which was then the most popular English-language Chinese website in the 20th century, adopted the result as its official English translation of Lao Tzu.

And then the going got weird.

In 1998 Joel and Ethan Coen produced The Big Lebowski, which fused the 1946 Bogart noir The Big Sleep with a 1980s Hunter Thompson take on a Japanese Zen koan The Vinegar Tasters in which 4th century avatars of Confucius, Lao Tzu, and Buddha meet over a jar of vinegar.

“It’s a bitter flavor,” says Buddha, “but life is suffering. Let’s just drink it.” “No, this wine is spoiled.” says Confucius, “It is unacceptable. We should tip it out.” “Man,” says Lao Tzu, “this stuff would go great in a salad dressing. Or with dumplings!”

The bitter beverage in the Coens’ movie is coffee, not vinegar, but the trope is the same. And so I should have seen what was coming when a Californian uber-fan of this film named Oliver Benjamin contacted me in 2004 to ask if he could re-use my GNL translation as the bible for his new “Church of he Latter Day Dude” under the title “The Dude De Ching”.

I told Oliver sure, but the GNL’s got an open content license so you’ll have to give it away free. Which, to his credit, he did … while selling a half million “Dudeist Priest” certificates that authorize the bearer to officiate at weddings and funerals. And then he retired to live like a king in Thailand.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Dude’s story and I adore the High Dudely Lama - which is Oliver. But obviously I had to ask myself whether this was really what I had in mind for this project. I’m all for thai sticks, bathrobes and White Russians, but was that what this was supposed to be about?

There’s a famous Buddhist koan, “If you meet Buddha on the road, kill him.” While Buddhists may appear worshipful, their idea of Buddha isn’t in the name, image, identity, story or likeness of Buddha. The moment those representations turn up they become an obstacle to Buddhist enlightenment.

I had to admit the Coens and the Lama weren’t wrong. The sage the GNL kept talking about, same as all the other translations, sounded 100% like the Dude. So there was no alternative for me. If I was going up against the Dude’s story - or at least telling people what I was blathering about - I’d have to go back to the actual Chinese and actually translate it, myself, to figure out when and how El Duderino could turn up his toes.

Lao Tzu Wasn’t Chinese

Except that made no sense. My expertise is in building systems, coaching leaders, and refactoring organizations. What can I bring to a Chinese translation that hundreds of generations of professional academics and inspired native speakers hadn’t already? Translating English translations into an English translation is in my wheelhouse. This wasn’t.

Or so it seemed until two new translations fell into my lap that completely changed what I was trying to do and how I was trying to do it.

The first was by Sanskrit scholar Prof. Victor Mair. He’s best known these days for his archaeology on the cryptic mummies of China’s Tarim basin. Red-haired caucasian giants wearing tartan and witches’ hats that rode the first domesticated horses into China from the West seven thousand years before history began.

In 1990 Prof. Mair translated what was then the oldest known edition of Lao Tzu, which had been unearthed at a place called Ma Wang Dui. I liked his English translation just fine, but what stood my hair on end was Mair’s discovery of deep philological connections between this Lao Tzu and the Bhagavad Gita, the root text of Indian Yoga. Reviewing these systematically, Mair concluded that either one of these books is a bad translation of the other, or both were translations from some lost, likely orally transmitted, earlier tradition.

Prof. Mair’s revelations were published just as a bamboo-carved edition of Lao Tzu was unearthed at Guo Dian. Pre-dating the invention of paper and silk, this one lacked half the length of the Ma Wang Dui edition. If the earlier Guo Dian version lacked that half the Ma Wang Dui text, where did that come from? If a later editor borrowed half the book from the Gita, where did the first editor get the other half from?

No one now can say. Maybe the Tao rode into China from the West with Mair’s Tarim Basin mummies. Maybe it was some old librarian’s interpretation of the Gita, or just some Chinese Mother Goose nursery rhymes. In any case it was clear to me I’d been barking up a tree that wasn’t there. I thought I was leveraging the insights of Chinese experts to reveal the intent of a Chinese author. And I was worried my attempts, much less the Lama’s Lebowkification of them, had disrespected the original Chinese context. But if this text wasn’t originally Chinese, and didn’t originate with one Chinese author. I hadn’t taken too many liberties. I’d taken too few.

Look, we’re solving a puzzle, maybe the wickedest one in history. Though we know it’s jumbled, we translators, east and west. We reverently pick up a piece, carefully polish it by choosing words we think best relate to it, and then we carefully set it right back down in the jumbled pile of pieces where we found it. Over and over and over for thousands of years, trying to solve a jigsaw without ever rearranging the pieces into a picture.

When you look at it like this the idiocy of the process is awe inspiring. Robert Henricks provides a great survey of this landscape in his 1982 “On the Chapter Divisions in the Lao-tzu” which lists among all the hundreds of editions of this book over thousands of years just a handful that make some effort at refactoring it into a consistent narrative.

Still, even if Lao Tzu wasn’t Chinese, the Chinese text is all we have to go by. And learning Chinese, much less deciphering its ancient etymology, was still biting off far more than I could chew before dropping dead of old age. It was clear any effort of this kind would be foolish. I was stuck.

Until 2009 when Bradford Hatcher came to my rescue. Hatcher had painstakingly produced the first complete English transliteration of the book, “Laozi Word by Word”. He’d made an old-style translation as part of it too, but the enormous benefit of his work was in its appendices where he listed all the plausible dictionary meanings of every pictogram in the Lao Tzu - in English - with cross-references explaining all their variations across all the Chinese editions of the book including Guo Dian and Ma Wang Dui.

He’d done the hard yards for me. With this new base I was back in the business of translating English into English - while still making sure the new translation was solidly based on all the historical evidence. Even better, Hatcher’s work gave me the key that explained why I wasn’t the most unlikely translator for this book, but the most likely.

Because going Chinese word by Chinese word I finally realized that the Dude - the Sage - was sheng ren. With ren meaning person or people, and sheng meaning perceptive, intuitive, or, in the sense linked by the second chapter of the Chinese, harmonious and lively. Perceptive, intuitive, harmonious, lively … agile … person or people. Lao Tzu was about agility all along!

Rendering sheng ren as some enlightened hermit took away its everyday pragmatism. If this book isn’t about an ancient mystical white-haired eminence of rare gifts, but just an ordinary person, you and I when we’re treating each other right, it’s just a practical way to help all of us get along and work together.

How Lao Tzu rode to the West and what he did when he got there

There was almost certainly no one named Lao Tzu. The name itself only means “old philosopher” or “old philosophy”. But there are many stories about a man by that name writing this book.

In the one told by Han dynasty Grand Historian Ssu-Ma Chi’en in 500 BCE, Lao Tzu was a Chou dynasty librarian escaping from an empire going up in flames. On a mountain pass smothered in snow, a border guard named Yin Hsi demanded that, before riding to the West, he record his wisdom for posterity. And this book is the result and that’s all, folks.

In the West, the most influential Western translation of Lao Tzu isn’t even recognized as Lao Tzu. The 17th century “Monadology” of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was clearly inspired by translations he received from the first Jesuit mission to China. And Monadology informed Leibniz’s development of the calculus and the binary number system and the first mechanical computer.

Then his work found its way to Russia in the curriculum of the Academy of Vienna, which Peter The Great salvaged from the defamed Leibniz after Newton’s Royal Society branded Leibniz a plagiarist of Newton’s calculus. Under Peter, this curriculum became the basis of the famed Russian genius at math in a conspiracy that obsessed Kurt Godel while Leibniz’s binary system led to Turing and Von Neumann’s electronic computers, and then the software revolution and thereby the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.

Meanwhile in the East Lao Tzu formed the basis of Chinese Ch’an Buddhism as glossed by Bodhidharma. Ch’an is best known these days by its Japanese name, Zen. And efforts to translate Lao Tzu into Japanese led to the tradition of Zen “koans”, inscrutable riddles whose frustrating contemplation yields to the Zen path to satori.

Finally Tao and Zen via Teaism and various martial arts morphed into Lucas’s Force, the Wachowskis’ Matrix, the unreconstructed dream space of Nolans’ Inception, and of course the Coens’ Dude. And, in 20th century music, the lyrics of The Beatles and Grateful Dead. And Jobs’ design philosophy at Apple. And so on. In all, our “Western” culture would be unrecognizable today without this little “Eastern” book.

Which means a novel translation like this one carries with it no small responsibility to future generations. At this pass we seem no more than a few years away from of a technological singularity where AI becomes immeasurably smarter than humans, and so, whether or not it adequately represents the original meaning, this book may well be the last edition produced for humans by a human …

Refactoring The Tao

Although differently structured and framed, this translation still corresponds painstakingly, line by line, with the Chinese as transliterated by Hatcher. The Roman numerals given in each of my 66 chapters provide a key back to the traditional 81-chapter version for readers who’d like to check this by comparison.

As to how this new structure came about, it evolved just like when you’re solving a jigsaw. I began by grouping stanzas according by the commonalities I’d learnt working on the GNL version. I refactored each of these groupings into a poem with a form consonant with existing standalone chapters, and then analyzed the resulting 66 chapters to discover consistent narrative through-lines.

The symmetry of the result - six sections of eleven chapters each - frankly surprises me. I hadn’t intended or expected any symmetry to emerge from this iterative workflow. I’d imagined there would still be gaps and discontinuities I wouldn’t be able to overcome. Whether the 6x11 structure might reflect some ancient edition, I have no way to know, but in the last year of working on the wrinkles I operated on the assumption that it did. I don’t believe doing so has compromised its correspondence with the Chinese any more than my unorthodox choices of metaphor already did.

The resulting scheme conforms with the subtitle of this book - connect, adapt, simplify. With each of these three themes we get a yang section and a yin section, one focused on practice and the other on experience. This order is reversed in the last two sections in order to make the book more accessible by leaving all its mindfulness content till the last part.

In doing this work I found myself repeating several simple editing patterns over and over:

Distinguish Duplicates

Two Chinese lines seems identical or nearly identical. Therefore, look at the flow of the stanza to figure out what distinction it’s trying to make. Remembering that each pictograph admits many meanings, specialize or generalize the duplicate terms so the relation to the others adds value to the whole.

Join Fragments

A short chapter doesn’t complete an idea. Therefore, look for fragments that combine with this one to complete it. Also seek non-sequitur or redundant stanzas that may be broken out of longer chapters without detracting from their meaning, and recombined with this fragment to evolve its meaning.

Refuse Doggerel

Dictionary meanings provide insufficient significance to make more than a Hallmark-style platitude. Therefore, examine the Chinese and English etymology of the words in context to discover more specific meanings.

Undo Glosses

On review or in a new context it seems my previous translation has taken excessive liberties or there’s no solid correspondence between the Chinese and idiomatic English. Therefore, do over, paying more attention to the use revealed by the new context.

Respect Dictionaries - Until You Can’t

there’s a word that really gums up the works in numerous places. As the earliest dictionaries came long after the Lao Tzu, dictionary definitions should be treated with deeper skepticism. Therefore, Examine the effect of a novel translation throughout the the poem. If it breaks too many other things, start over.

Swap Stanzas

The bamboo editions had no chapters per se, only punctuation, so it was easy to make accidental transpositions. And the numerologists did this intentionally. So sometimes it’s clear that the introduction of a poem has wound up being transposed with its middle or its conclusion. Therefore, if you can’t find a way to make this work as it is, fix it by swapping the order of a pair of adjacent stanzas.

Agile In, Agile Out

translating sheng ren as agility places this translation in a very specific context. Many traditional translation choices are lazy orientalisms that obscure application to an everyday context. Therefore, where they fit, apply words and phrases from the modern agile lexicon so long as they still make faithful translations of the Chinese.

What is Tao?

Most English editions of Lao Tzu translate Tao as “The Way”. Indeed any other choice could be seen as heresy. Philology supports it but The Way makes the translation clumsy throughout; it makes the first line of what is traditionally the first chapter of Lao Tzu, literally, “The Way that can be Way-ed isn’t really the Way”. No translator can be satisfied with that.

I worried this word choice like a kid tonguing a wobbly tooth. Until one cool autumn day in 2004 beneath a golden rain tree in the donkey paddock of my teahouse in the rainforest in Limpinwood, Australia, the tooth fell out.

A golden rain tree loses all its flowers in just a few days. As I curried Josephine the donkey the bees bothered the blossoms. The petals floated down around us and mounded up like snow drifts. It’s a close as I’ve ever been to being in one of those beautiful old Asian woodcut pictures.

In a flash I saw these flowers we trampled into mud weren’t dying. They were transforming to feed the next spring’s buds, moments in a cycle connecting this tree and all the trees of our little valley. And on deeper timeframes the hills beneath them carved by roots and lichen to make veins of mist and wind.

Dig your fingers into the loam and intertwine them with worms and fungi. Wake to the hum of a city as its people collaborate on building it for each other. Watch the night sky churning with streams of stars older and more numerous than we can count if we all take turns. See Lao Tzu wriggling through thousands of generations of hands and eyes as a poem writing itself.

What is Tao? Not life as the lives we live, nor the distinction between flowers and soil, but a physical flowing at every scale from subatomics in the tips of blades of grass to the burning galaxy spilt across the night sky silhouetting the shadows of the flowers.

Peter Merel
Tasmania, 2024

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