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Appendix 2. Glossagraphy

Here’s a summary of critical word choices. Note that these are not always applied consistently; where context opposes them I’ve gone with best fit.

P’u

Uncarved wood, a state of awareness without distinctions. You may think of zen satori or Inception’s “pure unreconstructed dream space”.

Sheng-ren

Agility / The agile. A way of working focused on harmonious co-evolution rather than hope and fear for the self.

Tao

Life as a fractal, non-local continuum underpinning the surface of mind. The universal metaphor for Gaia and Panspermia.

Te

Harmony as a process of evolving mutual benefit and interdependence between people and nature.

Tian

Mind, a surface of awareness generated by the interplay of form and information. Traditionally translated as “Heaven”

Wan-Wu

The world constructed of patterns and distinctions - in many translations this is “The ten thousand things”

Wu-wei

Self-organization or autopoiesis, the self-sustaining relationship of living forms that itself constitutes a living form.

Tian-xia

Nature regarded as a co-evolving matroid rather than a composite of individual creatures. Traditonally “The Earth” or “all under Heaven”.

Ming

Contentment, not as self-satisfaction but as the experience of being in the right place at the right time

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Part 1: Community

1. Workflow (xv)

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

Listening as if crossing thin ice,
Testing as a boat on muddy water,
Learning as a stranger in a strange land,
Simplifying as the melting snow,
Integrating as the deep woods,
Leading as the valley does the river,
Evolving as its silt feeds the spring.

Imagine the ice solid or the stream clear,
Stop to plan the way ahead,
Ignore what flows underfoot;
You submerge and disappear.

2. Embrace Change (xxiii)

The tide of change isn’t smooth.
A hurricane may last a morning,
Or a flood an afternoon,
And change the land forever.

As natural forms change, so must our own.
Embracing change, we lead change
And we’re buoyed on nature’s tide.
Anchored to forms we succumb to change
And the tide drags us under.

3. Like Water (v/viii/vii)

Agility, like water, runs deep,
Dissolving rigidity,
Quickening growth,
Easing friction,
Adapting opportunity,
And accelerating flow.

As water flows where it’s not blocked,
The agile build channels of mutual benefit.
Adapting each to each other,
Abandoning old ways to share better ones,
They profit without competing.

As a tide lifts all boats,
Agility benefits all people.

4. Community (xii/iii)

Agility builds collaboration, not competition,
Feeds interdependence, not dependence,
Empties peoples’ mouths to fill their bellies,
Softens their hearts to strengthen their bones.

It controls politics by not centralizing decisions;
Bureaucracy by not delegating to roles;
Power by not privileging ownership.

Agility decentralizes management and leadership
So people who provide them can’t exploit them;
When no one can take advantage,
Community remains.

5. The End of Agility (lxvii)

People love to talk about agility.
Often, that’s all there is to it.

Yet there are three values
Agility represents and the agile express:
Compassion, openness, and discipline.

Compassion generates courage,
Openness, learning,
And discipline, flexibility.

Courage without a warm heart,
Learning without an open mind,
Flexibility without a coiled spine,
Spell the end of agility.

6. Compassion (xlix)

The agile treat people like a family -
With compassion for each.

They are fair to the fair,
And to the unfair,
Cultivating fairness.

They keep trust with the trustworthy,
And the untrustworthy,
Cultivating trust.

They adapt to people within their community,
And without,
Cultivating community.

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

7. Openness (xlviii/xli)

Scholars learn when they study,
Children, when they laugh,
The agile, whenever they can.

Laughter comes from learning
Because learning creates surprises
That simplify what remains to be done,
Evolving a system of harmony
Where nothing remains to do
To adapt each to each other.

The less you’re open to learning,
The more work you have to do.

8. Discipline (xxii/xxiv)

Flaunting loses respect;
Manipulating loses trust;
Promising loses impartiality;
Arguing loses fellowship;
Reacting loses opportunity.

These behaviors are wasteful and self-indulgent,
Generating inflexibility and conflict;
So the agile steel themselves against them.

Without vanity, no one can humiliate them;
Without deception, no one can discredit them;
Without debt, no one can compromise them;
Without contention, no one can denounce them;
Without reaction, no one can anticipate them.

9. Flexibility (xlv/xxii)

Nature adapts
With neither intent nor outcome,
Nor effort nor limit,
Nor beginning nor center.

So the agile adapt to nature,
Their form to the flow of forms:
Bending to straighten,
Emptying to renew,
Failing to learn,
Sharing to gain,
Accepting to heal.

Agile work achieves nothing
But to make all work easier.
Agile business profits no one
More than it profits everyone.
Agile manners are gentle,
Agile intents, sincere,
Agile words, reserved.

10. Reserved Words (lxxxi/lvi)

As beauty is rarely true,
Truth is often veiled.
As promises are hard to honor,
Honor makes few promises
As answers seldom enlighten,
Enlightenment seldom answers.

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

Friendship and enmity,
Wealth and poverty,
Honor and disgrace,
Don’t affect them.
They have the virtue within honor.

11. Without Competing (xxxiii)

Where soldiers serve hierarchy
The agile serve community.
Where philosophers increase knowledge;
The agile increase awareness.
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 own share
Than growing mutual benefit;
Investing in others and partaking with them.
As nature flourishes where it doesn’t struggle
The agile prosper without competing.

Part 2: Alignment

12. Throughput (xviii/xix)

Where people oppose mutual benefit
Churches and priests thrive,
And courts and lawyers,
Parliaments and politicians.

As community is compromised,
People are forced to compete.
As they struggle against each other,
Owners and managers gain power.

Where you suspend command and control,
People collaborate and share resources;
Repeal laws and taxes,
Communities of trust return;
Dissolve roles and privileges,
Corruption and conspiracy disappear.

Yet these remedies merely alleviate symptoms
Where real cures treat causes.
Measure throughput and prioritize bottlenecks;
Share ownership and reward outcomes;
Simplify workflow and minimize work in progress.

13. 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.

When people struggle for power,
Increasing the gap to tighten their grip,
That’s like aiming your bow at the sun.

14. Command and Control (xxxix/xxxii)

Priests speak of a heaven
Where the skies are blue,
The ground sure,
The mountains snow-capped,
The rivers full,
The soil fertile,
The people content,
And the king all-powerful.

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

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

15. Sweet Rain (xxxix/xxxii)

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

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

Agility only exerts power
To align people to share wealth
Like streams flowing into a river
And rivers into the sea.

16. Real Power (lxxviii)

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

Melting ice and carving valleys -
People see that as water’s function
And fail to grasp its real power.

The agile distribute water to prepare fields
To multiply grain so none go hungry
And none hoard it.

17. Exploitation (xxix)

You can’t control human nature no matter what you do
Because people will always adapt;
Punish one sin and another spreads;
Arrest one sinner and others conspire.

Some will lead where the rest follow;
Some profit where the rest pay;
Some grow wealthy where the rest struggle;
Some win wars, the rest lose lives.

So the agile only control the desire
To hoard, exploit, and compete.

18. Alignment (lxi/xxxv)

As maidens attract suitors,
Markets align traders
To mutual benefit.

Opening their markets to smaller players
The greater gains their supply.
Opening their markets to bigger players
The smaller gains their support.

The great supports and shelters the small;
The small supplies and strengthens the great.
As in a good marriage,
Each benefits by serving the needs of the other.

19. Power and Harmony (xxxviii/liv a)

Exploit nature and community remains.
Divide community and trust remains.
Break trust and justice remains.
Corrupt justice and power remains.

Harmony doesn’t serve power;
Those without it do.
It won’t divide or corrupt itself;
Those without it will.

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

20. Fruit and Flowers (xxxviii/liv b)

Power is as hard to uproot
As faith to refute
As each generation
Inflicts it on the next.

Power aligns justice and trust
Into a matrix of struggle
With faith in the flower of harmony
The root of its control.

Harmony roots in trust, not faith,
Yields fruit, not flowers,
Cultivates the one
And strews the other.

21. Cultivation (lxiii/lxiv a)

A tree broader than a man can embrace is born of 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 one’s feet.

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

It’s easier to promise than deliver
But taking things lightly makes them hard.
Solving problems while they’re still small
Aligns community before power can take control.

22. The Bottleneck (lxiii)

As a great harvest comes from a handful of seeds,
Complex problems have simple roots.

To solve a complex problem,
Focus on its tightest constraint.
Find hidden causes and correct thoughtless habits.
To prevent difficulty, anticipate it,
And start with the simplest practical solution.

As an oak grows from an acorn,
Competition generates conflict.
Therefore, prevent starvation by sharing resources,
Warfare by sharing trade,
And power by sharing trust.

Part 3: Leadership

23. The Captain (xxvi)

A captain tirelessly guides his ship at sea
So that, 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 a great ship
Dare not treat it as a pleasure boat,
Acting carelessly or hastily.

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

24. Strength Adapts (xxvii)

A great explorer leaves no trail unmapped;
A great teacher no question unanswered;
A great philosopher no fact unexplained;
A great general no threat unchecked;
A great tailor no thread unravelled.

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 a great carpenter leaves no wood uncarved.

25. Weakness Adapts (xl/xli)

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

Weakness seeks adaptation:
Power is born in struggle;
Community in loneliness;
Revolution in bondage;
Liberty in tyranny;
Strategy in retreat;
Invention in scarcity;
And fire in darkness.

26. Agile Leaders (xvii/xxxvii)

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

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 cannot trust each other.

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

27. Servant Leadership (lxvi/lxxii)

As a stream leads a valley by flowing beneath it,
To adapt people, attend to their needs
And help them supply them.

Without restricting freedom or demanding payment,
People happily submit to leadership.
Without fear of their leaders
They naturally support them.

As people live for their children,
They serve those who serve them,
Supporting agility
To feel themselves supported.

In this way the agile lead without claiming authority
And govern without wielding power.
Gaining loyalty without patriotism,
Recognition without pageantry,
And service without enslavement,
They have no use for authority.

28. Authority (lvii)

Where leadership is informal and impartial
People share with generosity and sincerity.
Where it’s centralized and efficient
People become fearful and deceitful.

The more values and principles,
The more sinners;
The more police and soldiers,
The more bandits;
The more hierarchies and fiefs,
The more rebels;
The more fines and taxes,
The more cheats.

The agile lead people by aligning them
To collaborate for mutual benefit
With no law but to secure trust,
No tax but to encourage trade,
And no goal but mutual benefit.

29. Tact (lix)

Leaders must align people gently
As if cooking a delicate fish,
Using tact to keep trust intact.

Tact eases agreement,
And easy agreement grows channels of trust.
As the network of trust grows, distrust falls away
And community takes its place.

Where a community of trust connects people, it propagates:
Rooting deeply, joining each to each other,
Community binds their histories and futures together.

30. Humility (lxx)

When a leader’s words and actions serve community,
Revealing neither strategy nor purpose,
Common people don’t oppose them.

The more you appear different to people,
The less they feel you understand them
Where the more you seem 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. Detours (lxviii/liii)

Trust makes the finest weapon and strongest defense.
To gain peoples’ cooperation, build trust among them;
To keep peace, trust must surround you like a fortress.

With only this small understanding
You may serve community like following a main road
And never risk losing your way.
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,
Hoarding money and resources,
Employing courtiers and courtesans -
These are detours leading away from harmony.

32. Enough (ix/xii)

As you temper a sword to the sharpest, it shatters;
Fill a 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 management confuses,
Too much ownership impoverishes.

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

33. The Grain of Harmony (xxviii)

Accept power without wielding it
To open channels of trust
And quicken the grain of harmony.

Keep secrets without making them
To connect networks of trust
And nourish the roots of harmony.

Master politics without playing it
To supply fields of trust
And share the harvest of harmony.

Explanations

Before The Tao

When open country was commonplace, there was always somewhere else to go. The streams were sweet, game plentiful, and fences rare. Hunting and gathering reliably fed a multitude of small tribes.

As the tribes settled into villages, domestication, agriculture and literacy evolved. Cycles of trade between tribes enabled transmission of ideas across great distances. One day a man we call Confucius injected the meme of ancestor worship into these cycles.

Common ancestry joined villages into kingdoms into nations. As these began to hem eachother in, tyranny and warfare spread. Splintered families rebuilt sacked cities. Dispossessed orphans mourned simpler times. Sold slaves dreamt of green hamlets beside gentle streams.

These dreams echoed back and forth between China and India, stories of a harmonious community forever on the other side of the mountains. This book was began then, but really it’s the product of hundreds of generations of editors each using their experiences of their times to reinterpret it.

My part started with a paper at the first Agile conference, XP2000, in Sardinia in the year the Agile Alliance began.

The Agile Empire

Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 film “Network” presents an inspiring vision:

”

There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is no democracy. There is only one holistic system of systems, a college of corporations inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. Our children will live to see that perfect world in which there’s no war and famine, oppression or brutality: one vast and ecumenical holding company for whom all men will work to serve a common profit in which all men hold a share of stock.

In 2011, two researchers at Credit Suisse surveyed ownership of 35 million corporations worldwide and found Chayefsky’s college of corporations had come to pass. The companies in their study were all owned by a cartel of 14,000. The cartel was controlled by a kernel just 143. Within that cabal, each owned the majority of the others’ stock.

That’s the natural outcome of laissez-faire capitalism, not an evil design of some conspiracy of masterminds. The 1% of the 1% don’t pull the strings. They delegate control of the system to accountants, lawyers and engineers who seldom require any direction to maintain it.

As technology accelerates, however, and demand for new products and services outstrips that for old, the system evolves. Even conservative corporations must compete, and the command and control machines of Chayefsky’s day can’t keep up with decentralised, self-directing streams of small, autonomous teams.

The pattern of these streams, each supplied by the great ecosystem of open source tools, isn’t unlike the hunter-gatherer tribes supplied by the primal forest ecosystems. Only learning has supplanted reproduction as the motive force. Such “Agile Organisations” provide commercial advantages by learning faster.

The flow of learnings multiplies workflow, which in turn multiplies the flow of value to market. It also reduces friction costs of waste, opportunity and quality while increasing return on investment. Inevitably, as corporate ownership centralises, corporate control of the means of production decentralises. This is an invisible revolution.

The Agile revolution has infected even the central 143 corporate college with a kind of humanism. Liberty in entrepreneurship; equality in open source; fraternity in collaborative teams. Agility inexorably transforms hierarchies of command and control into holarchies of mutual benefit.

In the coming 3D-printed artificially-intelligent free-solar augmented-reality world our children may indeed see the means of production fully distributed, in the form of a block-chained universal basic income, as their share of Chayefsky’s common stock. That perfect world with no war, famine, oppression or brutality may result. Though history teaches skepticism.

What does it mean to be Agile?

Curiously, the peak body of the revolution, the “Agile Alliance”, never defined the meaning of the word. It’s only a shibboleth that teams shouldn’t “do Agile” but “be Agile”.

Pragmatically, being Agile prefers the values and principles of the Agile Manifesto over blindly following some specific framework of practices. Decisions about practices should devolve to the individual teams doing the work, with team-members sharing accountability for metrics over delegating them to Confucian hierarchies of elder managers.

“Holarchy” is a word coined by Arthur Koestler in 1967 to describe organisation through patterns of collaboration among peers rather than delegation to accountable managers. At the scale of a corporation, being Agile requires a holarchy of teams to continuously self-align to optimise the throughput and impact of its products on its markets.

Individuals with enthusiasm for Agile also identify themselves as “being Agile”. The Agile Manifesto implies a way of life beyond the professional though the Manifesto doesn’t talk about individual ways of being. In a Confucian mode it talks about things to do and gives principles for doing them.

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working systems over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

The Manifesto doesn’t espouse cultural revolution at all. Agile teams still must function within top-down hierarchical regimes of command and control management and cost accounting. If the Manifesto had opposed that explicitly, it would never have succeeded.

Some prominent exponents of Agile culture have focused on this idea of Agile inside bureaucracy. “Scaling Agile” sees hierarchies of traditional managers delegate accountability for metrics to “certified masters” with “safety” the rallying cry for regressive command and control. Teams that organize by these tenets retain very little practical Agility, and their products are outcompeted by those of teams who do.

The Agile Tao may take a liberty in framing the meaning of being Agile in terms of Taoism, but clearly it is not alone in taking liberties. Indeed we can regard the development of Taoism as a long series of liberties.

Lao Tzu Wasn’t Chinese

The central Taoist book, the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu, didn’t originate with one person in one time and place. It accreted over many centuries after its author was invented by the itinerant Chinese satirist Chuang Tzu.

Though Taoism as a religion reveres Lao Tzu as its founder and Wikipedia has a page on him that speaks of his historicity at some length, sinologists generally agree he never existed. Archaeology shows the Tao Te Ching evolving over a cycle of transmissions between India and China, with considerable if circumstantial evidence that many of its ideas originate elsewhere.

The oldest edition of the text, unearthed in 1993 at Guo Tian in Hubei province, pre-dates paper and silk. It’s carved on bamboo slips tied together with string. Lacking most of the substance of the later editions, these slips may have been cherry-picked to fit the political sensitivities of the time. Most likely, however, they are all the Lao Tzu there was back then.

We can’t tell what the original poem meant to its first readers because dictionaries weren’t invented until centuries later, and deal with definitions used in agricultural contracts, not philosophical language. Chinese dynastic purges destroyed most of the other books of those times. Only the religious interpretation of Lao Tzu saved it from the flames.

Evolution of the text came through its propagation by manual transcription. Without printing presses, transmission from scribe to scribe caused duplications, revisions and omissions each generation had to reconcile with the culture of its own time. Confabulation with different religious ideas altered the subtext and broadened the interpretation of the words without documentation. Comparing Ma Wang Tui and Fu I editions of the Tao show the poem in flux.

We don’t know how far back this game of Chinese Whispers may go. In the 1990s, Pennsylvania University Professor Victor Mair, translating the silk edition of Lao Tzu from Ma Wang Tui, discovered philological relations between the Tao Te Ching and the Sanskrit Bhagavad Gita, the core text of Yoga. He concluded that either the one derived directly from the other or the two from some lost common ancestor, possibly in a language alien to both.

Mair subsequently investigated of the Tarim Basin mummies, remains of a tall, pale-skinned, ginger-headed people who appeared in China at the time of the introduction of horse-riding and metallurgy about 3,000 BCE. Their incursion raises the distinct possibility of Western contributions to Lao Tzu.

In any case, as these sources of the poem aren’t confined to China, Chinese speakers enjoy no special insight into its interpretation. We can’t properly regard it as representing only some ancient philosophy, either. It’s inextricably linked with development of our modern, Western civilization.

A Tao for our Time

The most influential European translation of Lao Tzu is seldom recognized as Lao Tzu. The 17th century “Monadology” of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was inspired by editions of the Tao Te Ching translated by the first Jesuit missions to China. It informed Leibniz’s luminary development of the mathematical continuum and his construction of the binary number system which he incorporated into the first mechanical computers.

These developments found their way to Russia by way of the curriculum of the Academy of Vienna. This curriculum was salvaged from the defamed and fading Leibniz by Peter the Great after the Royal Society accused Leibniz of plagiarism. Under Peter it became the basis of the famed Russian capability in higher mathematics.

In the West Leibniz’s binary system eventually led to Turing and Von Neumann’s invention of the first electronic computers, and so the information revolution and global Internet.

In a different strand, Lao Tzu formed the base of Chinese Ch’an Buddhism through reinterpretation by Bodhidharma. Ch’an is best known in the West by its Japanese name, Zen, which profoundly influenced all Japanese culture from archery to tea. The problems of translating Lao Tzu into Japanese led to the Zen practice of “Koans”, irrational riddles whose frustrated contemplation informs the Zen path to enlightenment.

Glosses of Tao and Zen in 20th century Kung Fu and Bushido cinema have been reinterpreted into Lucas’s Force, the Wachowski’s Matrix, the Coens’ Dude, and the unreconstructed dream space of the Nolans’ Inception. The Tao wove still another thread through 20th century popular music in the psychedelic tradition pioneered by The Beatles and The Grateful Dead.

Western culture would be unrecognizable without the influence of this little book. As postmodernism holds that reinterpretation of a translation has the effect of a new work even when it merely quotes the words of other translators, isolating the historical influence of the Tao Te Ching on the Agile movement is like trying to separate broth from soup.

The Book Of Riddles

Silk tears, string rots, bamboo slips are jumbled, copyists make errors and new dynasties burn the libraries of the old. Many modern features of the Tao Te Ching were only added for religious reasons, but the survival of the work to the present day probably owes a debt to these same features. This includes its ordering into 81 chapters.

Each pictograph of the Chinese evolved dozens of meanings in a process that makes it a hugely complex puzzle box. So Lao Tzu is referred to in China as “The Book Of Riddles” and first-time readers find translations by respectable scholars still wildly disagree with one another. This surprise leads some to attempt new translations themselves, and the viral cycle continues.

In 1990 an infection with this virus led me to undertake an informal collaboration with a panel of academic sinologists for the Australian National University’s taoism-l mailing list. The “GNL” project was my attempt to establish a modern consensus meaning of the work by integrating all the popular English translations into a stocktake of lessons learned. This idea was controversial but succeeded to the extent that Chinapage, for over a decade the most popular English language Chinese website, adopted GNL as its official English translation.

As the Internet grew I saw the GNL spawn sites, apps and forums that took its interpretation far from what I’d originally had in mind. Perhaps the most influential was its reinterpretation as “The Dude De Ching” after The Big Lebowski. Reading Oliver Benjamin’s ode to “The Fucking Toe” I realized my first approach was mistaken in its basic intent, and stronger medicine still would be needed to answer the riddles.

Professor Mair’s realization of the relationship between the Gita and the Tao, as well as the discovery of the abbreviated nature of the early Guo Tian text, provide all the license we need to stop taking the poem as a sacred legacy and dare instead to refactor it.

Refactoring The Tao

Though ancient Chinese bears a more distant relation to modern Chinese than Latin to Italian, most translations treat the language as stable over time. If the bulk of the puzzles in Lao Tzu are artefacts of interpolation, copying errors, misunderstandings and commentaries folded in by mistake, no translation has given the book what it really needs: a proper refactoring.

Leibniz’s transmission means we can think of the Tao Te Ching as the ur-text of all modern software engineering. “Refactoring” is the software engineer’s term for the process of improving the design of an existing text to simplify its design while keeping its effect intact.

Without refactoring, software inevitably decays over time. In the process of codebase growth and maintenance, programmers create unnecessary redundancies and interdependencies. Eventually it becomes so tangled and expensive to maintain that its owners are obliged to junk it and rewrite their system from scratch. Or else freeze the code as a legacy, building new services on top of it like Schliemann’s Troy.

Sinologists likewise regard the Chinese text of Lao Tzu as such a legacy. Naive translations, including the GNL, imagine its challenges can be met by refining word choices and scansion, as if solving a jigsaw by polishing the pieces but leaving them scattered across the floor. This ignores the context of transmission of the work. The real problem isn’t translation but integration.

Refactoring iteratively fixes “smells” in the code through a continuous series of small improvements. Reconciling fragments and duplications, stepping back to sketch the relationship of composites to patterns, explicating cycles of dependency, testing the meaning and backtracking when combinations don’t fit, continuing iteratively and impartially until a simple whole emerges with each element in its place.

To refactor the Tao Te Ching I’ve proceeded along these lines:

Non-sequiturs

One stanza doesn’t follow from the previous one. Perhaps strings tying together one of the bamboo slat editions perished and it was hastily reconstructed, or perhaps there was some numerological reason for a transposition. Therefore, search for stanzas that logically lead into and out of the non-sequitur, and cut and paste those that best fit. Examine the flow of the text before and after the cut, and if that’s non-sequitur then reconsider.

Duplicates

The Chinese seems identical or nearly identical from one line to the next. Therefore, look at the flow of the stanza to figure out what it’s trying to say in context. Remember that each pictograph admits many meanings, so specialize or generalize those of duplicate terms so the relation to the others adds value to the whole.

Fragments

A short chapter doesn’t complete an idea. Therefore, look for other fragments that combine with this one to make a complete chapter. Also seek non-sequitur stanzas that may be broken out of long chapters without losing meaning, and recombined with this fragment to discover meaning.

Doggerel

The dictionary meanings provide insufficient significance to make anything more than a Hallmark style platitude. Therefore, examine the etymology of the word in context and the visual form of the pictograph to help determine more specific meanings. For example in all other translations chapter 67 concerns three virtues - compassion, frugality and humility. This conveys little of significance. The etymology, however, reveals the first as the compassion of parent for child, the second as husbandry, hence to do with families or tribes, and the third from respect of people for heaven. Applying these concretely provides the bridge for the flow of the poem from chapter XX to chapter YY.

Glosses

In context the existing translation takes excessive liberties or there’s no reasonable correspondence between the Chinese and idiomatic English. Therefore, do over, paying more attention to the context of use revealed by progress on the poem as a whole. Remember Chuang Tzu’s parable of Cook Ding. It is best to take a gloss to bits, let it gently fall apart, then see what it’s telling you about how it wants to come together. This is what Kent Beck called “listening to the code”.

Lost In Translation

As the earliest dictionaries came long after the Lao Tzu, dictionary definitions of words in the text should be treated with at least a little skepticism. Therefore, if there is a word that really gums up the works in numerous places, look at context of use to find a better translation. Examine the effect of such a novel translation throughout the rest of the poem. If it breaks too many other things, it’s not good.

The result isn’t the only plausible refactoring of Lao Tzu. It has what software engineers call “opinionated” design, reflecting a specific context and intent. And so does any translation, and by this explicit process of refactoring the Agile Tao has obtained virtues found in no other edition.

For a start, it’s simple. Clean, direct and unambiguous, unadorned by new age mysticism or oriental stylization. It is, nevertheless, in word for word correspondence with the received texts and makes no unjustified addition to them. To verify the correspondence, two appendicies are provided: the original GNL and a literalist reworking of it to support the key translation choices.

This work is endebted to all the sources of the GNL, especially Robert G. Henricks’ and Victor Mair’s translations of the Ma Wang Tui texts. The second appendix further relies upon Bradford Hatcher’s 2009 transliteration, “Tao Te Ching Word By Word”, which lists all philologically plausible modern Chinese alternatives for each pictograph of Fu I, Guo Tian and Ma Wang Tui texts.

By intent, all the fragments of the poem fit neatly together here. For the first time a modern reader can understand the plan of the poem just as there’s a whole pot in the shards of a smashed vase.

Killing The Sage

There is a famous koan, “If you find Buddha on the road, kill him”. While Buddhists may appear worshipful, their Buddha is not in the name, image, identity, story or likeness of the Buddha. The moment these representations are kept up they become an obstacle to Buddhist enlightenment, not its embodiment.

They serve the purpose of communication; once their meaning is expressed they should be discarded or the meaning is lost. A Zen Buddhist might say that the meaning should be discarded too.

Translations of Lao Tzu, on the other hand, are lousy with sages, masters, superior men, wise men and enlightened beings, all terms deriving from the Chinese “sheng ren”, which is literally “the lively ones”.

Rendering this as if it meant some illustrious and inaccessible old man takes away its intent. In context it’s clear that sheng ren isn’t a person of historical pre-eminence and rare gifts, but an ordinary person, you and I when we’re at our most adaptable and most awake. It’s pragmatic, a way for people to get along and work together.

With this change in perspective Lao Tzu becomes a pattern-language for people to live and work together in harmony. In the pragmatic context of the “lively ones”, harmony becomes the “Te” of the poem’s title. Although traditionally translated as power or virtue, there’s plentiful context in the poem to back this choice.

In keeping with the engineering tradition therefore we have “the Agile” or “Agility” instead of “The Sage” for sheng ren. This translation makes the poem an explanation of the way Agile mindset generates harmony by embracing change.

What is Tao?

Most English editions of Lao Tzu translate Tao as “The Way”. Indeed that’s so common that any other choice may be regarded as heresy. Academic philology supports this choice even though it makes the poetry clumsy throughout. “The Way” makes the first line of the first chapter of Lao Tzu read, literally, “The Way that can be Way-ed isn’t really the Way”. No translator can be satisfied with that when the whole poem depends on it.

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 …

A golden rain tree loses all its flowers in just a few days. As I curried Josephine the donkey the bees bothered the blossoms and petals floated down around us like great yellow snowflakes.

I suddenly saw these flowers we trampled into mud weren’t dying so much as transforming to feed next spring’s buds. They were moments in a cycle interconnecting our tree and all the trees of our little valley, and on deeper timeframes not just trees but the hills beneath them carved by roots and lichen into veins for mist and wind.

Dig your fingers into the soil and twine them with worms and fungi. Wake to the hum of a city as people interleave their lives. Watch the night sky churn with more stars than grains of sand on all the beaches of Earth. See Lao Tzu evolving through its generations of hands and ears as a living fractal, the surface of life describing itself.

Not life as the lives we live, nor the abstract distinction between flowering buds and fertile loam, but a physical fundamental flowing on every scale from quantum correlations at the tips of blades of grass in Josephine’s paddock to billions of galaxies whirling above us as we bathed in the shadows of flowers.

Peter Merel
Sydney, 2017.

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