Explanations

The Hand Of The Potter

I’m twelve sitting with my father in his ornate library. Floor to ceiling shelves brace rows of leather-bound books. Baroque wood-burning fireplace, persian rug, plush chairs … Larry was raised sleeping two to a bed. The library is his childhood’s vision of wealth.

It’s a moment dreamt of for a long time. Nowhere to be, no one visiting, and I’m just now old enough for Khayyam. It’s a cold night and, as he reads, burning logs crack and pop. You can only hear the Rubaiyat aloud for the first time once.

But after Silence spake
A Vessel of a more ungainly Make:
“They sneer at me for leaning all awry;
What! did the Hand then of the Potter shake?”

I’m twenty one. At dawn I pad down the corridor taking care not to wake my brother. It’s spring and my father is lying on his bed dressed to go out. I want to believe he’s asleep, but when I touch his arm it’s cold. I know he’d dreamt of this for a long time.

Larry is ten. Outside the house the bus-stop is marked by a wooden obelisk, as they all are then. A tapering four-sided wood pole with the top planed into a pyramid, painted yellow and green.

Larry’s taught himself how to climb and balance on top of the pole. His three year old brother Sydney is trying to climb up to grab his foot. They’re both laughing, but then the infant loses his grip and tumbles into the street. A taxi runs him over and kills him. My grandfather, Max, sees this happen. He chases Larry around the house with an axe.

Max is thirteen, the youngest scion of an Austrian noble house on a train headed to a boarding school. He doesn’t know war has begun until the train arrives in Poland, where he’s shanghaied into the army.

Months pass. Max steals a heavy dried sausage as tall as he is and heads cross-country, staying far from roads, until he comes to a bombed out farmhouse. He sleeps that night safe in the stable.

He stays there, nibbling sausage and drinking well water, hearing shells thud in the distance. He tries to make the sausage last, but the wind blows cold and he has no warm clothes. So he heads down the road, not knowing where it will lead.

Max comes to a border. Two guards in heavy coats sit by a fire. A skinny youth in a Polish uniform is a welcome diversion, and they play dice to decide who gets to shoot him. But Max pulls out a three foot butt of sausage and, in perfect hochdeutsch, explains he’s been sent by the Geheime Feldpolizei - the military secret police - to resupply them.

Slices of sausage sizzle in a pan on the fire as Max continues down the road. He feels a twinge between his shoulders, wondering whether they’ll still waste a bullet on him.

Max begs on the streets of wartime Berlin until he’s taken in by a jewish grocer to work as shop boy for bed and board. One day the grocer’s daughter tips him a wink, and he takes her religion and they marry.

Max and Cecile have two children, a boy and a girl. But Max can see what’s coming. He writes Von Ribbentrop through old school friends to request exit visas. Ribbentrop has jews clipping his lawn with their teeth at the time, but sends the visas along with a cordial note. Max and Cecile bundle the children aboard the first steamer they can book and learn English on the trip to Australia.

Sheltered by the Sydney jewish community, Max finds work in a brewery while Cecile’s family write letters imploring them to get on the next steamer back and bring the children home.

And then the letters stop.

Some stories are your own, but others still belong to you. I tell these to explain the origin of the question this book seeks to answer. My father’s question, Max’s question, Fitzgerald’s question, and Khayyam’s question.

Khayyam, given the opportunity to spend his time however he liked by the Sultan and Grand Vizier of the Seljuk Empire, devoted himself to science and poetry. Of the latter, some collections claim many thousands of verses. Modern Persian scholars conclude, however, that fewer than forty are authentic to Khayyam. Still among them is the same verse from Fitzgerald quoted above.

Embrace Change

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, 3,000 years before.

Beck’s “Extreme Programming” was a frontal assault on the 20th century “Waterfall” method, a bureaucracy in which hierarchies of committees planned, budgeted, and designed software through reams of paper. Code was written in a phase afterwards to meet the paper specs, then a phase of testing checked the code did what the specs said. It was like schoolchildren trying to pass an exam.

The results were often unfit for use by the time they shipped and invariably inflexible in the face of change. The paper specs weren’t supposed to change. So the business made up arbitrary deadlines for fixes, each more expensive and chaotic than the last. Technical debt rose exponentially until the funding business either began a new Waterfall project to pave over the old, or simply imploded. And this happened over and over, filling the codebase with layers of unmaintainable legacy one on top of the other like Schliemann’s Troy.

Beck’s XP turned Waterfall upside down. It began with a spike - a solution that didn’t solve any problem - like tuning a guitar before playing any song. Then, iteratively, it added features one at a time, each beginning with test code that reliably failed. No phases and minimal work in progress; the team worked on a feature until its tests passed, then immediately started work on the next feature. The growing library of tests kept executing continuously so technical debt was paid off immediately, before it could earn interest.

That enabled design to work continuously too - design as the discipline of simplification of the whole collectively owned codebase XP called “merciless refactoring”. And user feedback continuously changed feature priorities to continuously maximize ROI. Business continuously collaborated with developers face to face in small teams. No project specs, budgets, or deadlines needed - only working products.

It was a brave new world … and it’s dust today.

First came the “Agile Manifesto”, which replaced Beck’s concrete praxis with management-friendly platitudes. Then a church called Scrum built on top of that, turning the platitudes into compromises. And then the church scaled up into a cathedral called SAFe that turned the compromises right back into layers of committees. It was as Kafka wrote, “every revolution evaporates to leave behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy”.

And now not even the slime is left. In a world where software develops itself faster, cheaper, and better than biological teams, developers and managers have gone the way of horses and blacksmiths. A modern XP team would be like nailing horseshoes on a Tesla.

Nevertheless, the potter’s hand still shakes. Tech debt in the form of carbon pollution is boiling the world while “Agentic” AI specs and codes and tests solutions to problems that don’t make any difference. When change comes, it starts again from scratch. XXX If those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, we can forget it quicker, cheaper, and better than ever.

XXX

Agility, in the original sense is about a working, functional alternative to bureaucracy that’s as critical now as it was thirty years ago. Or three thousand. Because this book dates to back when software was grain and development was domestication.

Circa 500 BCE, in the then Chinese capital of Chou, the imperial philosopher Confucius summoned the upstart Lao Tzu for a dressing down. Confucius promoted social perfection through hierarchies of committees that fit the moral order of the universe, as revealed by the mandate of heaven, as interpreted by the ancient masters, as encoded in their sacred precepts and analects. Neglect of ritual, disregard of authority, leaders performing ceremonies the wrong way or at the wrong time - all led to chaos, said Confucius.

As with most religious figures, most likely there was no historical person named Lao Tzu. The name means only “old philosopher” or “old philosophy”. Most likely Kung Fu Tze - Confucius - didn’t exist either. If people by those names did exist, separation in time and space means they couldn’t have met. But history loves drama.

According to Han dynasty historian Ssu Ma Chi’en, Confucius confronted Lao in the offices of his vast imperial library, bringing a long list of critiques and challenges compiled by his disciples. Lao Tzu listened patient, hearing him out. Then Lao replied that all ceremony is empty, that people benefit only by meeting opportunity, that anyone calling themselves a master is a fool, and that Confucius should forget heaven and learn from nature instead.

Ssu Ma Chi’en reports that a subdued Confucius returned to his disciples who were keen to hear his report of the outcome. Confucius drew himself up to his full height and said, “I know how to catch fish, shoot birds, and trap rabbits. But what can I do with a dragon of mist and wind?”

This book is about agility in the sense of Beck and Lao Tzu - which is the same sense - and the translation here and this explanation faithfully transmit it to both our biological and software children.

Killing the Dude

Silk tears, string rots, and each new dynasty burns the libraries of the old. The first known editions of Lao Tzu pre-dated the first Chinese dictionaries by three hundred years. And those dictionaries only explain terms of trade, not philosophy. So Lao Tzu’s meaning morphed invisibly for centuries while priestly committees shuffled the book’s words to fit the numerology sacred to them.

Nine was the ideal number so its square, Eighty One, was the ideal number of chapters. We don’t know how many there were in the original. Robert Henricks in his 1982 “On the Chapter Divisions in the Lao-Tzu” explains

XXX Summarize Henricks findings

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.

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 “the sage” and “the superior man” - the two most conventional English translations of sheng ren - are as much Western orientalism as yellow-face pantomime villains. Ren means person or people or polity, and sheng is perceptive, responsive, or, in a rhyme from the second chapter of the Chinese, harmonious and lively. Perceptive, responsive, harmonious, lively … agile. Of all this book’s thousands of years of translators, I’m the only one with multiple decades experience coaching agile people. So … “Who you gonna call?”

The Tea-Master and the Samurai

As with most religious figures, there was no historical person named Lao Tzu. The name means only “old philosopher” or “old philosophy”. But there are countless stories about him. In 500 BCE, Han dynasty Grand Historian Ssu-Ma Chi’en wrote of him as a Chou dynasty librarian riding to the West on a buffalo to escape civil war. He met a border guard on the trail, Yin Hsi, who wouldn’t let him ride to the West until he recorded his wisdom for posterity.

The journey to the West took took a while. Maybe a thousand years later, glossed by Bodhidharma, another likely fictional religious figure, Lao Tzu combined with Buddhism to form Ch’an, better known by its Japanese name, Zen. Japanese struggles in translating Lao Tzu likely inspired the Zen practice of insoluble riddles called koans, whose frustrated contemplation yields a path to enlightenment.

And then Zen turned into Tea.

In the fifteenth Century, Sen No Rikyu’s used Lao Tzu’s ideas to end two centuries of civil war.

He invented the Japanese Teahouse with its principle of Mu Hin Shu - Japanese for “no host, no guest”. A century later, a forged book, Namporoku, 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.

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.