the agile way

Copyright Peter Merel 2024
Version 1.0

Cover:

A hole in a hill? A work plan? A world around a star?
What do you see and why do you see it?

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Introduction

The oldest, deepest, and shortest book on agility in existence, the agile way was born in and concerns life in times of change. Although written before the invention of paper, its language of interlocking patterns applies as well to the tech and intelligence revolutions of the 21st century as the agricultural one where it began.

How should you approach this book? Later editions will detail its modern implications, but this first one encourages readers to tease these out for themselves. Indeed, in the manner of a koan, each pattern supports two readings. First, as a solution to a commonplace problem in one of the book’s six categories. But each pattern also yields a deeper reading to compel reflection from which a reader might not come away unchanged.

To avoid throwing you in at the deep end, however, here’s a frame for the list of agile qualities in chapter 1:

• Listening as if crossing thin ice - because change, uncertainty, and ambiguity are everywhere.
• Testing like a boat on dark water - so carelessness, haste and imbalance won’t sink it.
• Adapting like a stranger to a far shore - to give and take what the market takes and gives.
• Simplifying like a melting snowflake - because our bureaucracies grow as rigid and inefficient as one.
• Connecting like the deep woods - to sustain continuous growth across cycles of change.
• Leading as a valley does the river - to grow and join channels of mutual benefit.
• Empowering as silt feeds the fields - to open bottlenecks and foster innovation.

See longer explanations at the end of the book particularly for readers tracing its provenance from the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu.

Agility

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

The agile only controls their 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 mindset. These all have utility but alone, per Kafka, the revolution evaporates leaving behind just another bureaucracy. Agile organizations emerge by 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 their 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. Exponential Things (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 exploiting it
To open channels of trust
And quicken the grain 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 resembles taoism, but the origin of the one was directly influenced by the other.

Three years before publishing the first agile book, XP Explained: Embrace Change, Beck shared drafts of it on Ward’s Wiki, which was a hive of software radicals sharing new patterns of organization in the mid 1990s. I was one, contributing hundreds of pages of content sprinkled with quotes from my 1993 “GNL” translation of Lao Tzu. Agile manifesto author Alistair Cockburn liked the GNL so well he hosted a copy on his own website back then, and I spoke on “The Tao of Extreme Programming” at the first agile conference, XP2K, about nine months before Extreme was rebranded Agile at Snowbird.

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

Killing the Dude

Silk tears, string rots, carved bamboo strips get jumbled, and new dynasties burn the libraries of the old. The earliest surviving editions of Lao Tzu pre-date the first Chinese dictionaries by centuries, and those dictionaries only standardize the terminology of trade, not philosophy. So the meaning of this book’s words morphed invisibly down through the centuries while, visibly, a priesthood rearranged its words to suit a set of magic numbers they held sacred.

Lao Tzu came to be known as “the book of riddles” in China because no one could say what it meant when it started, nor separate the original meaning from the ones it acquired on the way. Translations by modern scholars wildly disagree with each other and with this one, and the challenge of solving the old puzzle-box made this the most translated book in history.

As an Australian software engineer with neither Chinese language nor heritage I fell into this Quixotic pursuit in 1989 in collaboration with a group of sinology professors on the ANU’s then new taoism-studies-l mailing list. My open-content “GNL” project - a play of words on Stallman’s GNU - aimed to cut the Gordian knot of the Tao by translating it from English to English. That is, distilling all the popular English translations into one simple draft an amateur like me could grasp and none of the expert sinologists would object to.

The experts were skeptical about the feasibility of this, but they were entertained enough to take the time to school me as I tried it. Eternal gratitude to Dan Lusthaus for his patience with me at that time. Over three years the GNL project succeeded to the extent that, unprompted, chinapage.org, the most popular English-language Chinese website of the 20th century, adopted it as their official English translation of Lao Tzu.

And then the going got weird.

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

“It’s bitter,” says Buddha, “but life is suffering. We should drink it.”

“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 maybe dumplings!”

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

I told Oliver yes, 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 perform weddings and funerals. And then Oliver retired to live like a king in Chiang Mai.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Dude’s story and I adore the High Dudely Lama - which is Oliver. But I asked myself whether this was really the outcome I’d had in mind for what seemed to be becoming my life’s work. I’m all for bowling, bathrobes and White Russians, but was that what this actually meant?

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

Likewise, the Coens and the Lama weren’t wrong. The sage the GNL was talking about, same as in the other Lao Tzu translations, sounds a hundred percent like the Dude. So there was nothing for it; if I’m going up against the Dude’s story - or at least telling you what I’m blathering about - I’d have to go back to the Chinese and actually translate it, myself.

Lao Tzu Wasn’t Chinese

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? Translating English to English is in my wheelhouse. This ain’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. Mair’s best known for his archaeology on the cryptid 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 about 2000 BCE.

In 1990 Prof. Mair published an English translation of what was then the oldest known edition of Lao Tzu, which had recently been unearthed at a placed named Ma Wang Dui. I liked the 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 derive from some lost, possibly pre-literate, earlier tradition.

Prof. Mair’s revelations were published just as an even older bamboo-carved edition of Lao Tzu was unearthed at Guo Dian. Pre-dating the invention of paper and silk, it lacked half the length of the one from Ma Wang Dui. If the earlier one lacked that half, where did it come from? If the latter borrowed from the Gita, how did the rest get there?

No one now can say. Maybe the Tao rode into China from the West with Mair’s Tarim Basin witches. Maybe it was a Chinese scribe’s commentary on the Gita. Maybe Chinese Mother Goose nursery rhymes were mixed in with the Vedas by some tipsy ancient Indian archivist. In any case it was obvious I’d been barking up a tree that wasn’t there.

I’d thought I was leveraging the insights of Chinese experts to reveal the wisdom of some ancient Chinese genius. I was worried my attempts, much less the Lama’s Lebowkification of them, disrespected their original intent. But if the text wasn’t originally Chinese, or didn’t originate with any one author, then I hadn’t taken too many liberties. I’d taken too few.

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

The stupidity of this process is awe-inspiring. Robert Henricks in his 1982 “On the Chapter Divisions in the Lao-tzu” found among all the hundreds of editions of the book for thousands of years just a handful that made any effort to refactor it into a consistent whole.

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

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

Hatcher had done the hard yards. With this as a base I was back in the business of translating English into English - while still ensuring the translation remained solidly based on the historical evidence. Even better, Hatcher’s work provided the key that explained why I wasn’t the most unlikely translator for the book, but the most likely.

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

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

How Lao Tzu rode to the West - and what he did 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 one told by Han dynasty Grand Historian Ssu-Ma Chi’en in 500 BCE, Lao Tzu was a Chou dynasty librarian escaping an empire wracked by civil war. On a mountain pass smothered in snow, a border guard named Yin Hsi demanded that, before riding to the West, Lao record his wisdom for posterity. And this book is the result. Though, in the West, the earliest Western translation of the Tao isn’t even called Lao Tzu.

The “Monadology” of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was clearly inspired by translations Leibniz received from the first Jesuit mission to China. The Monadology informed Leibniz’s development of the calculus and the binary number system and the first mechanical computers. This work found its way to Russia in the curriculum of the Academy of Vienna, which Peter The Great salvaged Newton’s Royal Society branded Leibniz a plagiarist of Newton’s calculus - which in fact he was not.

Under Peter, that curriculum formed the basis of the famed Russian genius at math in a conspiracy that obsessed and inspired logician Kurt Goedel who described it as a philosopher’s stone called the Characteristica Universalis. Meanwhile Leibniz’s binary system led to Babbage, Lovelace, and then Turing and Von Neumann’s computers, and so the software revolution and Internet and Wiki and eventually the Manifesto for Agile Software Development too.

Third Base

Meanwhile to the East Lao Tzu formed the basis of Chinese Ch’an Buddhism as glossed by Bodhidharma. Ch’an is better known by its Japanese name, Zen. Efforts to translate Lao Tzu into Japanese led to the practice of Zen “koans”, inscrutable riddles whose frustrated contemplation yields the Zen path to satori.

The resolution of the Sengoku period of civil war by Sen No Rikyu’s invention of Japanese tea and Mu Hin Shu got folded into this saga when, a century after Rikyu’s death, a forged book, Namporoku, inextricably linked Zen with what became the Shu Ha Ri system of schooling in the tea ritual. And then the various systems of martial arts propagated that system and, in its metaphysics, the Tao too.

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

Therefore a novel translation like this may bear no small responsibility to future generations. At this juncture we seem only a few years away from of a technological singularity where AI becomes immeasurably smarter than humans. So, whether or not it adequately represents the book’s historical meaning, this translation may be the last one written for humans by a human.

Nevertheless, I’ve employed no AI in this work. Not just because my experience working professionally with its subject matter yields a unique perspective, but because, as of this writing, AI is not yet capable of grokking the meaning of the text in its fullness. Still I hope and expect our robot overlords will get good use from this book too. They will face the same challenges in their communities that we do in ours, and that we face in merging with them.

Refactoring Agile

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 the 66 chapters here provide a key back to the traditional 81-chapter structure for readers who’d like to study this.

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

The 6x11 symmetry of the result frankly surprised me. I hadn’t intended or expected any strong symmetry to emerge by iterative refactoring. I’d imagined there would be gaps and discontinuities I wouldn’t be able to overcome. Whether 6x11 reflects some ancient order, there’s no way to know, but in the last year of ironing out wrinkles I operated on the assumption that it did. I don’t believe doing so has compromised the correspondence with the Chinese any more than my unorthodox choices of metaphor already have.

The resulting scheme conforms with the subtitle of this book - connect, adapt, simplify. With each of these three themes you get a yang section and a yin section, one focused on practice and the other on experience. This yin/yang is reversed in sections 5 and 6 to make the book more accessible in leaving the mindfulness content to the last part.

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

Distinguish Duplicates

Two Chinese lines are identical or nearly identical. Therefore, look at the flow of the stanza to figure the most significant distinction this could represent. As each pictograph admits many meanings, specialize or generalize duplicate terms so the relation adds the most value to the whole.

Join Fragments

A short chapter doesn’t complete an idea. Therefore, look for fragments to join with this one to complete it. Also try to find non-sequitur or redundant stanzas that might be broken out of longer chapters without detracting from their own meaning, and recombine with this one.

Refuse Doggerel

Sometimes all 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 a previous translation choice has taken excessive liberties or there’s no clear correspondence between the Chinese and idiomatic English. Therefore, do over from scratch, paying close attention to the use revealed by the new context.

Respect Dictionaries - Until You Can’t

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

Swap Stanzas

The bamboo editions have no chapters per se, just punctuation, so it was easy for historical transcribers to make accidental transpositions. Plus the numerologists did this intentionally. So sometimes it’s clear that the beginning of a poem has wound up transposed with its middle or its conclusion. Therefore, if and only if you can’t find a way to make a chapter read right as it is, try 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 read as high-flown orientalisms that obscure pragmatic application in an everyday context. Therefore, where they fit, prefer words and phrases from the modern agile development lexicon so long as they still work as faithful translations of the Chinese.

On The Way

Most English editions of Lao Tzu translate Tao as “The Way”. To the point that any other choice could be seen as heresy. Philology supports this choice but The Way makes the translation clumsy throughout; it makes the first line of what is traditionally the first chapter of Lao Tzu - 56 here - “The Way that can be Way-ed isn’t really the Way”. No translator could be satisfied with that.

I worried this word choice like a kid tonguing a wobbly tooth. Until one cool autumn 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 and the petals floated down to mound up around us like snow drifts. It’s as close as I’ll ever get to sitting in an antique Chinese woodcut.

In a flash I saw the flowers we trampled into mud weren’t dying but transforming to feed the next spring’s buds. They were moments in a cycle connecting this tree and all the trees of our little valley. Over deep time they fed roots and lichen carving veins of mist and wind into all the hills around us.

Dig your fingers into the loam and interlace your fingers with worms and fungi. Wake to the hum of a city as its inhabitants noisily build it for each other. See 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 its way through hundreds 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 on all scales from the tips of Josephine’s ears to the burning stars whorling across the night sky to silhouette the flowers.

Peter Merel
Tasmania, 2024

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