Dragons of Mist and Wind

This question began back when software was grain and development was domestication. Circa 500 BCE, according to Han dynasty Grand Historian Ssu-Ma Chi’en, in the ancient Chinese capital of Chou, the great reformer Confucius summoned a controversial upstart named Lao Tzu to inquire about it.

As with most religious figures, however, there was almost certainly no historical person named Lao Tzu. Nor any single originator of the book attributed to him. The name means only “old philosopher” or “old philosophy”. Kung Fu Tze - Confucius - most likely didn’t exist either. If they did, separation in time and place means the two could never have met. But let’s not let that get in the way of the story.

Confucius promoted ideals of social perfection through hierarchies of roles arranged to meet the moral order of the universe as revealed by the mandate of heaven, as interpreted by the ancient masters, as encoded in their sacred laws and calendars. He taught that chaos results from neglect of rule and ritual, disruption of hierarchy, or leaders performing the rituals the wrong way at the wrong time.

The book you hold in your hands disagrees. So, according to Chi’en, Confucius confronted Lao in the offices of the vast imperial library. He came with a long list of fine points drawn on the ceremonies of the ancient masters. Lao replied that all ceremony is empty, that all people benefit by adapting to opportunity and change, that someone calling himself master is a fool, and that Confucius should forget heaven and study nature.

Confucius returned to his disciples who were all keen to learn the outcome of the meeting. “I can catch fish, shoot birds, and trap rabbits,” said Confucius, “but what am I to do with a dragon of mist and wind?”

Killing the Dude

Silk tears, string rots, and each new dynasty burned the libraries of the old. The earliest editions of Lao Tzu pre-dated the first Chinese dictionaries by three hundred years. And those dictionaries only explained terms of trade, not philosophy. So the meaning of Lao Tzu’s words morphed invisibly for centuries as priestly committees shuffled their order to fit the sacred numerology they promoted. 9 was the best number so its square, 81, was the ideal number of chapters for a book …

Lao Tzu is called “the book of riddles” in China today because no one can say what it originally meant nor separate one layer of meaning from the others it acquired from century to century. So modern translations wildly disagree; it’s an irresistible puzzle-box, the most translated little book in history.

As an Aussie without Chinese roots or Chinese language, I stumbled upon this old game in 1989 when I got mixed up with a community of sinology professors on the Australian National University’s taoism-studies-l mailing list. At the dawn of the Internet, I proposed a “GNL” translation - named after Stallman’s GNU acronym - to short circuit the Gordian knot by translating English to English. Distilling the most authoritative modern English translations into a consensus that an amateur like me could understand but the academics couldn’t refute.

My professors were broadly skeptical, but entertained enough by the project to take time to school me as I struggled with it. Eternal gratitude to Prof. Dan Lusthaus for his patience. Over the next three years the GNL succeeded at least to the extent that chinapage.org, then the highest ranking English-language Chinese website, adopted it as their official translation.

So then the going got weird. In 1998 the Coen brothers produced their masterpiece The Big Lebowski, fusing Bogart’s noir thriller The Big Sleep with a Hunter Thompson take on a 4th century Japanese Zen koan, The Vinegar Tasters.

In the koan, the avatars of Confucius, Lao Tzu, and Buddha meet over a jar of spoiled wine.

“The wine is spoiled.” says Confucius, “We should tip it out.”

“It is bitter,” agrees Buddha, “but life is suffering. We should drink it.”

Lao Tzu laughs, saying “this stuff would work great on a salad. Or with dumplings!”

The bitter beverage in the Coens’ movie was coffee, but the avatars - Walter as Confucius, Donnie as Buddha, The Dude as Lao Tzu - represent similar sentiments. Most fans don’t notice. But I should have done when a Californian uber-slacker Oliver Benjamin reached out in 2004 asking me if he could use the GNL as the bible of Dudeism in his inspired “Church of he Latter Day Dude”.

I pointed out the open content license but Ollie happily agreed to give the book away free. Meanwhile selling a half million “Dudeist Priest” certificates authorizing their bearers to perform weddings and funerals. At ten dollars each, High Dudely Lama Benjamin could live like a king in Chiang Mai.

I dug the Dude’s story and admired the enterprise of the Lama, but Dudeism wasn’t what this book really meant to me. I have nothing against bowling, bathrobes and white russians, but it wasn’t about “take it easy” so much as “make it easy to take it easy”. Not slacking, engineering.

There’s a zen koan attributed to Linji Yixuan, “when you meet Buddha on the road, kill him.” Zen Buddhists don’t worship the name, story or likeness of Buddha. When those turn up they become an obstacle to overcome. Likewise the Coens and the Lama weren’t wrong; the Sage in the GNL and almost all English translations sure sounds like the Dude. If I was going up against them, I needed to translate the original Chinese to English from scratch.

The Translation Game

Except I couldn’t. My expertise was architecting software, coaching development, and focusing corporations on throughput. I could bring nothing to a Chinese translation that thousands of years of scholars and native speakers hadn’t already. I’d be silly to try. But then two new Chinese to English translations changed the game.

The first was by Sanskrit Professor Victor Mair. He’s best known for his archaeology of the cryptid mummies of China’s Tarim basin, red-haired caucasian giants wearing tartan and witches’ hats who might to have introduced domesticated horses to China around 2000 BCE.

In 1990, Mair published an English translation of the then newly discovered silk-scroll edition of Lao Tzu from Ma Wang Dui. I liked the translation fine but what grabbed my attention was Mair’s discovery of deep philological connections between Lao Tzu and the Bhagavad Gita, a root text of culture at the other end of the ancient silk road. Reading the two side by side, Mair found that either the one was a bad translation of the other, or both derived from some lost common ancestor, perhaps dating from before the invention of writing.

Just as Mair’s translation was published, however, an even earlier edition of Lao Tzu was discovered at Guo Dian. Pre-dating the invention of paper and silk, it was carved into bamboo slips tied together with string. Guo Dian lacked half the length of Ma Wang Dui and came with unrelated fragments, perhaps a list of popular sayings some noble had had a scribe jot down.

Was this abbreviation just the work of some ancient grave-robber? Or was it all there was to Lao Tzu back then - with the rest coming from other times and places? Maybe the Tao rode into China with Mair’s giant witches. Maybe it was a song inspired by the Gita. Maybe some common ancestor ping-ponged between India and China more than we’ll ever know. In any case, it became clear to me that I’d been barking up the wrong tree. Or a tree that wasn’t there.

I had thought I’d been leveraging the insights of the world’s experts on the ancient Chinese in this ancient Chinese book to reveal the intents of its ancient Chinese author. I’d worried that my work, much less the Dudely Lama’s take on it, had perverted that original meaning. If this book wasn’t originally Chinese, however, then those experts knew no more than I did. If it didn’t begin with just one author, there was no original to pervert. So I hadn’t taken too many liberties with it. I’d taken too few.

We translators, east and west, collaborate on a great big jigsaw puzzle. We know the book’s a jumble, but we reverently pick up piece after piece and polish them by choosing words we intuitively believe best reveal their true meaning to modern readers in an ancient context. And then we carefully replace each piece right back in the pile where we got it. Over and over for thousands of years, like trying to solve a jigsaw without ever assembling the pieces into a picture.

Well, not quite all of us. Robert Henricks in his 1982 “On the Chapter Divisions in the Lao-Tzu” explains that, among hundreds of translations of this book over the last three thousand years, a handful did try to refactor it into a consistent whole.

XXX Summarize Henricks findings and explain how numerologists scrambled the book.

Nevertheless, becoming an expert in Chinese, much less in its lost etymology, was more than I could hope to achieve before dying of old age. I was stuck. Until, in 2009, Bradford Hatcher published the book’s first complete English transliteration, Laozi Word by Word.

Hatcher built a translation of his own on top of the transliteration. I frankly don’t much care for his choices there. But the great benefit of his work for me was its lists of all the traditional dictionary meanings for every Chinese pictogram across all ancient editions of the book - including Ma Wang Dui and Guo Dian. In English. I was back in the translating English to English business.

Even better, I finally saw that I was not the least likely person to translate this book. Because now I saw “the sage” or “the superior man” - the conventional English translations of sheng ren - were just Western orientalism. Like not killing the Buddha. Ren simply means person or people or polity, and sheng means perceptive, responsive, or, per a rhyme in the second chapter of the Chinese editions, harmonious and lively. Perceptive, responsive, harmonious, lively … agile. Of all this book’s thousands of years of translators, I’m the only one with four decades experience as an agile coach. So … “Who you gonna call?”

The Tea-Master and the Samurai

As with most religious figures, perhaps all, there was no historical person named Lao Tzu. Those pictograms mean only “old philosopher” or “old philosophy”. There are endless cults and colorful stories about him, however. In 500 BCE, wrote Han dynasty Grand Historian Ssu-Ma Chi’en, a Chou dynasty librarian escaping civil war met a border guard, Yin Hsi, who demanded he record his wisdom for posterity before letting him pass to the West.

True or not, it took the old fellow quite a while to get here. About a thousand years later, glossed by Bodhidharma, a likely fictional religious figure himself, Lao Tzu combined with Buddhism to form Ch’an, known better these days by its Japanese name, Zen. Japanese translations of the numerologically shuffled book inspired the Zen practice of introspection over koans, insoluble riddles whose frustrated contemplation yields its path to enlightenment.

And then Zen turned into Teaism.

In the fifteenth Century, Sen No Rikyu’s invention of the Japanese Teahouse and Mu Hin Shu - “no host, no guest” - used Lao Tzu’s principle of alignment for mutual benefit to end two centuries of civil war, and ushered in the Tokugawa shogunate. A century later, a forged book, Namporoku, combined Zen with Tea and replaced Mu Hin Shu with Shu Ha Ri, a bureaucratic certification system that spread through the martial arts and eventually infected the agile software development community too.

The Circus of Doctor Lao

It took millennia for the him to actually arrive. The earliest Western edition of Lao Tzu is The Monadology by 18th century polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Inspired by translations sent by the Jesuit mission to China and seldom recognized as Lao Tzu by modern scholars, The Monadology was the basis for Leibniz’s inventions from calculus to the binary numbers and the first mechanical computer.

Leibniz’s work found its way to Russia in the curriculum of the Academy of Vienna, which Peter The Great salvaged after Newton’s accusation of plagiarism ended Leibniz’s career. This curriculum underpinned the famous cold-war Russian facility with mathematics, and, according to logician Kurt Goedel, a Russian conspiracy to keep Leibniz’s “Characteristica Universalis” a state secret to this day.

Leibniz’s work led to Babbage and Lovelace’s stored-program computer, then to Turing and Von Neumann’s 20th century electroni computers, the information revolution, the Internet, and the Manifesto for Agile Software Development too.

The Seven Samurai

Taoism, Zenism, Teaism and martial systems rendered through the lens of Japanese auteur Akira Kurosawa made their way to the West again in Randall’s Doctor Lao, Lucas’s Force, the Wachowskis’ Matrix, the dream space of Nolans’ Inception, and the Coens’ Dude. And in Beatles lyrics and Jobs’ design philosophy at Apple … and on and on. Lao Tzu arrived eventually.