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., 2000
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 Explained was the first book on what came to be called Agile software development. Three years before publishing it, Beck shared drafts on the world’s first Wiki, which his business partner Ward Cunningham built around a hive of software radicals writing on engineering patterns in the mid 90s.
I was a steward for the place, contributing a couple thousand pages nonymously and salting conversations with quotes from my 1993 “GNL” translation of Lao Tzu. Agile Manifesto co-author Alistair Cockburn too a shine to that one and hosted it on his website for the next decade too.
I spoke on “The Tao of Extreme Programming” at the first agile conference about nine months before the manifesto, and this talk became the first chapter in the second Agile book, XP Examined. So the historical relationship of agilism with taoism is basically an identity, with the connection between the two the book you hold in your hands.
Killing the Dude
Silk tears, string rots, carved bamboo slips get jumbled, and new dynasties burn the libraries of the old. The earliest editions of Lao Tzu pre-dated the first Chinese dictionaries by three centuries. And those dictionaries just standardized terms of trade, not philosophy. As a result this book’s words morphed invisibly over the centuries while priesthoods edited and shuffled it to suit the magic numbers they held sacred.
Lao Tzu is known in China as “the book of riddles” because no one knows what it originally meant and no one now can separate any one meaning from the others its words acquired over time. Modern translations wildly disagree with each other. It’s an irresistible puzzle-box, the most translated little book in history.
As an Aussie engineer with no Chinese roots or Chinese language skills, I took up this pursuit in 1989 in cahoots with a community of sinology professors on the ANU’s taoism-studies-l mailing list. The “GNL” translation - named after Stallman’s GNU project - aimed to cut the Chinese Gordian knot by translating from English to English; distilling the most popular English translations into a consensus an amateur like me could grasp but the academic sinologists couldn’t refute.
The sinology professors were sensibly sceptical about this, but they were entertained enough to take the time to school me as I struggled through it. Eternal gratitude to Prof. Dan Lusthaus in particular for his patience. The GNL project succeeded to the extent that chinapage.org, the highest ranking English-language Chinese website of the day, adopted it as their official translation.
Then the going got weird. Joel and Ethan Coen made a movie called The Big Lebowski in 1998 that fused Bogart noir The Big Sleep with a Hunter Thompson take on a 4th century Japanese Zen koan, The Vinegar Tasters. In the koan, avatars of Confucius, Lao Tzu, and Buddha meet over a jar of spoiled wine and argue about what to do with it.
“The wine is unacceptable.” says Confucius, “It is too old. We should tip it out.”
“The wine is bitter,” says Buddha, “but life is suffering. We should drink it.”
“Hey, man,” says Lao Tzu, “it could work great in a salad dressing. Or with dumplings!”
The bitter beverage in the Coens’ movie is coffee, not vinegar, but the movie’s heroes reflect similar sentiments. Walter as Confucius, Donnie as Buddha, and The Dude as Lao Tzu - not many modern viewers notice. But I should have done when Californian uber-fan Oliver Benjamin reached out in 2004 asking to adapt the GNL as the bible of Dudeism in his “Church of he Latter Day Dude”.
I pointed out the open content license and Ollie agreed to give the book away free. To his credit, he did – and then sold a half million “Dudeist Priest” certificates authorizing the bearer to perform weddings and funerals. High Dudely Lama” Oliver retired to live like a king in Chiang Mai.
And so he should. I dig the Dude’s story and admire the genius of the Lama, but I was forced to ask myself whether this was what my work was actually about. Nothing wrong with bowling, bathrobes and White Russians, but I wasn’t trying to champion a “take it easy” slacker culture so much as “make it easy to take it easy” engineering culture. So I had to have a think.
There’s a zen koan, “When you meet Buddha on the road, kill him.” Buddhist practice isn’t about the name, image, identity, story or likeness of Buddha, so the moment those turn up they’re an obstacle that has to be surmounted. Likewise Coens and Lama weren’t wrong. The Sage in the GNL and the other English translations of Lao Tzu is 100% like the Dude. If I was going up against all that - or at least telling Dudeists what I’m blathering about - I had to go back to the Chinese and translate this book from scratch properly.
The Translation Game
Except I can’t. My expertise is architecting systems, coaching teams, helping organizations increase throughput. What could I bring a Chinese translation that generations of academics and native speakers hadn’t? Translating English to English was in my wheelhouse. Chinese was not.
Or at least it wasn’t until two new translations came out that completely changed what I thought I was doing.
The first was from Sanskrit scholar Prof. Victor Mair. He’s best known for archaeology of the cryptid mummies in China’s Tarim basin. Red-haired caucasian giants wearing tartan and witches’ hats that turned up introducing domesticated horses to China from the West about 2000 BCE.
In 1990, Mair published an English translation of the newly discovered silk scroll edition of Lao Tzu just dug up at Ma Wang Dui. I liked his translation fine but what really grabbed my attention was his discovery of philological connections between Lao Tzu and the Bhagavad Gita. The Gita being the root text of Indian Yoga, the primary source of culture on the other end of the silk road. Reading the originals side by side, Mair found either one is a bad translation of the other, or both derived from a lost common ancestor. Maybe dating from before the invention of writing.
Just as Mair’s translation was published, an even earlier bamboo-carved edition of Lao Tzu was discovered at Guo Dian. Pre-dating paper and silk, it lacked half the length of Ma Wang Dui and was jumbled with various seemingly random bits and pieces. Perhaps a notepad of popular quotes some noble had had their scribe jot down or the discards of a hasty grave-robber. Or maybe it was all there was to the work back then - and the rest came from some other time and place. Maybe the Tao rode into China from the West with Mair’s giant witches. Maybe it started as a rustic folk song inspired by the Gita. Or maybe the common ancestor ping-ponged back and forth between India and China more times than we know.
In any case I realized I’d been barking up the wrong tree. Or a tree that wasn’t there. I’d thought I was leveraging the insights of the world’s primary experts in an ancient Chinese book to reveal the intents of its ancient Chinese author. I worried my work, much less the Dudely Lama’s gloss of it, would pervert the original meaning. If this book wasn’t originally Chinese, however, or if it didn’t begin with just one author, there was no original to pervert. I hadn’t taken too many liberties with it. I’d taken too few.
We translators, east and west, are collaborating on a big jigsaw puzzle. Though we know this book’s a jumble, we reverently pick up piece after piece and polish them by choosing words we feel reveal their meaning in context. And then carefully replace each piece right back in the pile where we got it. Over and over for thousands of years, like trying to solve the jigsaw while never reassembling the pieces into a picture.
Well, not never. Robert Henricks in his 1982 “On the Chapter Divisions in the Lao-Tzu” explains that, among hundreds of translations of the book over the last three millennia, a handful did try to rearrange it into a consistent whole.
XXX Summarize Hendricks findings and explain the numerological shuffle
“The Chinaman is not the issue here.”
Still the received Chinese was all I could go by. Becoming an expert in Chinese, much less its lost etymology, was more than I could hope to achieve before dying of my advancing years. I was stuck.
Then in 2009 the other shoe dropped when Bradford Hatcher published a complete English transliteration, Laozi Word by Word. Hatcher had made a translation of his own on top of this transliteration but the great benefit of his work from my point of view was that it listed all likely English meanings for every Chinese pictogram across all ancient editions of the book including Ma Wang Dui and Guo Dian.
With this as a base I was back in the English to English business. And, studying Hatcher, I finally saw that not only was I not the least likely person to translate this book, but now uniquely qualified to do so. Because now I understood the Sage is sheng ren. Ren meaning person or people or polity, and sheng perceptive, responsive, and, per a rhyme in the second chapter of the Chinese, harmonious and lively. Perceptive, responsive, harmonious, lively … Lao Tzu was literally about agility. And, of all this book’s translators, I’m the only one with three decades professional experience as an agile coach.
Rendering sheng ren as “the sage”, some unattainably enlightened mystic, took away the book’s application to all us everyday slobs. Dudeism makes fun of this conceit. But if the book isn’t about a long-haired hermit, but advice for ordinary humans, what is that advice all about?
How Lao Tzu rode to the West - and what he found there
As with many religious figures, perhaps all of them, there was likely no historical person named Lao Tzu. The pictograms mean only “old philosopher” or “old philosophy”. There are endless cults and stories about him, however. In 500 BCE, Han dynasty Grand Historian Ssu-Ma Chi’en wrote the most popular one. His Lao Tzu was a Chou dynasty librarian escaping civil war. On a mountain pass, smothered in snow, border guard Yin Hsi demanded he record his great wisdom for posterity before letting him pass on to the West.
Lao Tzu glossed by Bodhidharma formed the heart of Ch’an Buddhism, best known by its Japanese name, Zen. Japanese translations of the scrambled Lao Tzu inspired their study of koans, insoluble riddles whose frustrated contemplation yields the Zen path to enlightenment.
In the fifteenth Century, Sen No Rikyu’s invention of the Japanese Teahouse and Mu Hin Shu - “no host, no guest” - had the effect of ending two centuries of civil war and ushering in the Tokugawa shogunate. A century later, a forged book, Namporoku inextricably linked Zen to Tea and led to Shu Ha Ri, a certification system that spread through the martial arts and eventually the agile software development method too.
XXX Tea-Master and Samurai …
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.