Six types of ambiguity: The Dao's "straw dogs"

Tao Te Ching's inexpressible concepts, trapped in inarticulate speech of the heart

Skimming the predecessor to ABoaH, Blogtrotter’s posts which from 2007-2020 documented much, I find that although I tagged a few “Tao” that none were reviews of the actual 81 verses as rendered into our idiom. These five-thousand-odd words from about 2500 years ago, attributed to what’s roughly “old wise guy,” Lao Tzu, lag only behind the Bible (and some add the Bhagavad-Vita) in Western editions. It seems everybody who masters classical Chinese tries his or her go at this, as one of the masters himself muses of his Oxford professor, once retired. His spry student, John Minford, has spent half-a-century pondering Daodejing (alternate transliteration).

So, in pondering as to which take might suit my sensibilities, and maybe yours, among the hundred-plus out there, let’s start not with his opening gambit on the first utterance of the opening section, “The Tao’s not what can be spoken of as the Tao.” May rank second in pop culture’s recognition or confusion only to #47 where the lyrics of “The Inner Light” were adapted by George Harrison++ in '1968’s b-side to “Lady Madonna”; a more dignified, elusively spiritual, philosophically intriguing statement than John’s hit, heaven knows. Sanctioned BeatlesTM (ha) video tells all.

Here’s Prof Minford’s #5 “The Bellows,” as he treats the first half in his 2018 offering.

Heaven and Earth are not Kind.

They treat the Myriad Things

As Straw Dogs.

Taoists are not Kind.

They treat ordinary folk

As Straw Dogs.

What’s going on? “Straw Dogs” brings to a cineaste’s (as runs in my wife’s side of the family) mind Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 "psychological thriller” starring Dustin Hoffman. And checking the Wiki just now, I find that, yup, the title’s yet another Eastern-inspired reference, from this very passage. They were cheaply made figures for fiery sacred rites, created only to be discarded and consumed shortly after. Apt for us?

Sotheby’s signed poster, British style. Caption across Susan George’s chest—well., she’s supposed to be heavily preggers—: “The knock at the door will lead to the birth of one and the death of seven others.” Rather Dao-ish, a bad I Ching(-aste) fortune cookie.

#5’s commented on in Minford’s book—I like the commentaries interspersed from leading ancient masters and modern Sinologists (great term)—by Jan Duyvendak: “Straw dogs (chugou) are an image of ruthlessness. They were used as sacrificial offerings in ancient China. During the sacrifice itself they were treated with ceremonial reverence, but once they had been used, they were thrown away and trampled on.” It’s noteworthy that this is the only explanation of this in Minford’s selected sages’ sagacious suggestions. The others share their thoughts on “bellows” as the metaphor that takes up the second half of this typically gnomic, enigmatic saying.

Who let those dogs out? Too bad Penguin’s cover art didn’t cleverly include ‘em. I think somebody in Hong Kong may have taken the canine analogy too literally.

Minford prefers to Capitalize Wise Nouns from ye olde Chinese usage, to highlight their importance as would be second nature to the readers—or more likely hearers—of the enunciations in their contexts. The origin-myth claims that, Lao Tzu, atop his oxcart, dictated his teaching to a frontier seeker, as he crossed from the unstable Warring States (Minfordishly conventionally punctuated by historians) anarchy. Not in Red Emma flair, but the Portland Antifa Liberated Zone, or, cautionary tale, the giddy utopia of “Freetown Christiania, a semiautonomous commune spread across 74 acres in the heart of Copenhagen.” Founded in 1971’s afterglow of “The Inner Light,” it’s dimmed into Peck ‘n’ paw’d dystopia: “guns, drugs and f-ing” {on Pusher Street}, the last of which via not only pot; heroin, and gangs rather than free love as indulged.

N.b. caption on center item at its tourist trap": “Fake Joint is for practical jokes.”

Let’s move to exhibit #5.2. From a crowd-pleasing oft-cited collaboration between one of the counterculture’s Colorado contributions to the Mystick Lore of the fka Orient. Gia-Fu Feng emigrated to the Rocky Mountains high and with Jane English, produced a perennial bestseller in New Age racks and on the better sort of bookstore shelves.

I quote from their 25th anniversary 1997 ed. There’s a 2012 “text-only” four decades on update that’s been tidied up for fears of misgendering our sagacious seer, but that bowdlerization fumbles the balance of the Feng-English English’d team-tag. If you’d hanker for an illustrated companion, supra and older printings (do due diligence, caveat emptor: that above’s the one I’m recommending) feature English’s photos and calligraphy of the ideograms in a larger layout. Enhances the pleasure of encounter.

Heaven and Earth are impartial;

They see the ten thousand things as straw dogs.

The wise are impartial;

They see the people as straw dogs.

Many translate “ten thousand things” this way. In Californian dialect, maybe “like, a bunch of stuff, a s***load” might capture the vaguely enumerated accumulation. Pretty much the distractions, the material world we live in, those all things must pass. Feng + Eng (wasn’t he one of the Siamese Twins?) aim for a readable, contemporary phrasing that tries to hit the difficult sweet spot between explanation and expression. We’ll see how challenging remains the capacity to contain the emptiness-as-form pithy blunt quality of source-text within our framework, which needs more “stuff” to suss it out.

So Confucius says/said…

For another author rooted in the Northwest, Ursula Le Guin’s oft-misconstrued 1998 attempt’s not a translation. Like the unfortunately ubiquitous Stephen Mitchell—although I admired his Book of Job way back—she shuffles around what scholars and speculators alike have come up with, and, without knowledge of ancient (or for that matter modern) Chinese, she published a steadily selling summation. Given her wide fan base among aficionados of science fiction, fantasy, and feminist thought, Le Guin’s success in running front of the pack attests to her reputation in those fields. I admit sympathy, as her father—the Berkeley anthropologist whose posthumously published 1964 account of the Golden State’s final Yahi survivor Ishi in Two Worlds: a biography of the last wild Indian in North America, referred to colloquially as “the last Stone Age man” (1861-1911) so many of us of a certain age read; I had a discard from a grade school’s dumpster-doomed pile—Alfred Kroeber introduced his daughter during the Depression to open his well-worn copy of Tao, tellingly in Paul Carus’ 1898 tale, influenced by Theosophy, the Perennial Philosophy, New Thought-proto New Age perspectives—surely one of the first American youth luckily privileged to do so.

Kroeber, Alfred Louis (September 8, 1911). "The Indian Ishi". Foundations of Anthropology at the University of California. bancroft.berkeley.edu. Archived from the original on October 23, 2019. Retrieved February 11, 2021. In these notes, Kroeber summarized what was known of Ishi just four days after his discovery.

Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine: Burrill, Richard (December 6, 2009). "Ishi Discovery Site, Charles Ward Slaughterhouse, Oroville, CA". youtube.

All the same, this was the first full reading of the Tao Te Ching I tackled years ago, when teaching Comparative Religions spurred me on and invited me in, in retrospect I was led astray. Don’t take my word for it. Consider Le Guin’s “New English Version.”

Heaven and earth aren’t humane

To them the ten thousand things

are straw dogs.

Wise souls aren’t humane.

To them the hundred families

are straw dogs.

Now, I respect her. Look at my praise for her Hainish novel The Telling (2000) which imagines a totalitarian, atheist Chinese hegemony bent on eliminating any last traces of the Tao. But just as her Earthsea trilogy in fifth grade; The Lathe of Heaven whose PBS adaptation baffled me as a teen; The Left Hand of Darkness as taught by me as a T.A. at UCLA, The Dispossessed as scrutinized by me as I scoured the traces left by “principled anarchists;” Always Coming Home which elaborated—with songs scored—her spin on a grand Cascadian eco-mujerista collective aiming for what weakened those Danes too open to seductions of chemicals and calculators; The Word for the World is Forest leaving me when teaching Science Fiction as “meh” (which could be a Chinese phoneme); while “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” remained a short and sensible if symbolically sophisticated standard in our classroom anthologies, hard to get across in the less than fifty minutes allotted us for its analyses and small-group breakouts…well, let’s scry that her ambitions outpaced her articulation, common for novels of ideas. Which I gravitate towards, even if payoffs generally fail after launch.

Returning to Dao, doesn’t it seem evident, asks your prof, that she’s interpreting the lines and imposing her enlightened, late capitalist, post-Enlightenment, Panglossian view upon what Minford and Feng-English try to step aside from? That “humane” slides the meaning towards APSCA mindset, where the dogs pant for milked human kindness. Kindness itself, inverted self-actualization of the TTC, provocatively and disturbingly’s ranked lower than the Tao; it’s a step down from that pyramid level. After it’s goodness, then justice, then “rolling up the sleeves.” People’s Re-Education & Rehabilitation Sleep-away Camp during a Great Leap Forward or Pol Pot’s scrub.

In her note, Le Guin distinguishes “inhumanity” from cruelty, granted. She separates the “human attributes” of cruel and to be kind from the “Nature”/Heaven {tao} and its Way {te}. Those presences lack self-concern, and the “Followers of the Way, like the forces of nature, act selflessly.” Perhaps I overstate my objection. I let my case rest.

What’s behind door #5.4? First off, I have—back at my L.A. once-upon-a-time ‘til a year ago ten-thousand-titled and bound things paperbound (wish due to its heft it was cloth, but that’s way too pricy second-hand) Jonathan Star’s “Choose your own adventure”-type of ingenious apparatus, from 2003. According to its press, Tarcher’s blurb: “A definitive new translation of the ancient Chinese philosophical work reinterprets the book of wisdom in a volume that explores the multiple meanings of each Chinese character, provides a complete character dictionary, and includes incisive commentary on the Tao and its significance in modern life.” Sums it nimbly.

He enables readers to peruse the many nuances of the characters. While it’s as if you gave a thesaurus to an ambitious—but considerably, uh, “pre-literate” as they gently say in “cruelty-free” education circles rather than the no-nonsense, no touchy-feely isi se puede! un-empowering, anti-affirming, and curricula-unapproved non-inclusive, frank judgment inherent in “analfabeto” en Espanol—poet wanting to instantly shape-shift into an eloquent multi-lingual voice from an admission office’s you-go-girl marginalized upbringing, the attempt’s memorable. Imagine that you can search at will among the definitions to concoct your very own, individualized, expression of the formidable TTC. Star’s invention’s clever. When teaching my week four out of eight each term of World Religions on Taoism + Confucianism, I often hoisted my copy in class or on camera, showing my befuddled charges the vast options on this choose one from category A, B, etc menu that reminded me of the stereotypical sticky-red-booth Chinese diner, sweet-and-sour sauces, rice that hides 10,000 scraps, and a teapot.

Alternate pitch on poster: “Does this look like a movie that could give you bad dreams?” Can’t escape ‘68 middlebrow. I guess it’s an anti-MSG reference. Drugs…As for the “happy ending,” maybe it’s a dig at the bucking climax of Bonnie and Clyde. In our hedonistic, sex-positive, sex-worker, morning-after, hooking-up “liberation,” it connotes how “far we’ve come, baby” to wink-nudge at another strip-mall (?) Asian enterprise transported to the West’s Gold Mountain. No nail salons. Had to wait for “Better Call Saul” for that setting to glue viewers to the set.

But this bare-bones “Cornerstone” impulse-buy at the checkout scanner isn’t-this- cute stocking stuffer slices off editorial apparatus. Left with an enthusiastic “this’ll change your life, dude” onstage intro by one August Gold (great names, this duo), only Star’s verses remain. Lacking their scaffolding, the results falter, not soar. At least below. Again, I came away satisfied by Star’s full-course spread. Not its to-go takeout:

Heaven and Earth have no preference.

A man may choose one over another

but to Heaven and Earth all are the same

The high, the low, the great, the small—

all are given light

all get a place to rest

The Sage is like Heaven and Earth

To him none are especially dear

nor is there anyone he disfavors

He gives and gives without condition

offering his treasure to everyone.

My word, land o’Goshen. This makes Le Guin sound like Rilke or Rumi (Star’s done the latter, perhaps in Stephen Mitchell-esque shuffle-and-deal, lay ’em down sleight-of-what is the sound of one man typing), by comparison. The gist can be extracted. But the tough rind discourages the attempt by the hungry, if not-yet-ghosted, adept. There’s appeal in the “all are given light/ all get a place to rest” in Old Abe’s bosom. Maybe a bit of paternal affection amidst the ambivalence of a venerable Nobodaddy. Star’s cadence echoes the happier, hymn-friendly moments in the Psalms or Proverbs. But I can’t cotton to this exegesis glossing the source, contrasted with Minford or F-E.

Number five, number five, to allude to another trippy Beatles ‘68 tune. Here we find Stephen Addiss, a scholar of both Japanese and Chinese, and translator (Greek’s his specialty, but he’s also tackled Virgil, Ovid, and Dante) Stanley Lombardo (1993). This attempt’s lauded for its cut-to-the-chase, just-the-facts tone, sheared of any juicy fat.

Heaven and Earth are not kind:

The ten thousand things are straw dogs to them.

—-Sages are not kind:

People are straw dogs to them.

Impressively terse, in that “Grasshopper” Kung-Fu early-Seventies patter. Do I date myself? Then I date myself, Walt Whitman (catch that wonderfully sly—I always assigned “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” in my long march across the decades to my techie, careerist, greed-is-kinda-good press-ganged inductees, shanghai’d-we-gotta-take-this &%*^-lit course that has nuthin’ to do with my major/career Breaking Bad reference?). This smacks (ha) of charismatic (he took philosophy courses at San Francisco State) Bruce Lee’s concurrent rise before his untimely death, when we adolescents were immersed in Enter the Dragon. To his credit, he popularized the “be like water” teaching from Dao Number Eight…

While I’d long avoided any Chinese translations by Red Pine (Bill Porter’s nom de chine, 2009) as I thought his moniker risible, I swung around due to the handsome series of poetry from Copper Canyon Press, out of the rich literary motherlode that Raymond Carver and Tess Gallagher helped mine around the Olympic Peninsula. It’s been at it since ‘72—reflect how this mind-expanding era keeps popping up in this entry. This non-profit in Port Townsend—one harbor over from my late father-in-law’s Port Angeles concurrently when keen Ursula picked up dad’s marvelously bound volume. While they’ve erred in funding an organization proven to have squirreled away its lucre for its purported leaders and recently for its antisemitic ravings, they’ve since redirected donations “from viewers like you,” as PBS put it, to underwrite an intern. It’s encouraging to find idealistic publishers at the pit-face, chipping treasure.

Heaven and Earth are heartless

treating creatures like straw dogs

sages are heartless too

they treat people like straw dogs

This edition, although I only access its download in the Global South, mirrors that of Minford. The difference is that our sylvan scribe approaches the Dao from a proven personal engagement. Not that Minford’s detached, certainly. But prickly Porter-Pine’s tested his mettle as a Buddhist monk in Taiwan, as he pursued graduate work. He combines the academic duty for verity with the Muse’s call for beauty. He prunes this down to a Fab Four lines, aligned with the concision of Feng-Eng and Aldiss-Lombardo. Yet I aver that Red Pine’s captured an elusive glimmer that escapes the clarifying eye of F-E. And which A-L’s laconic declaration loses in its conversation-stopper serious sense. See how “too” and the alternation between the spheres “treating” and the sages, “they” who “treat” as a subtle nod to their subordination, against the cosmic indifference, the lack of anthropomorphic soft-sell amelioration.

He compliments Minford’s perspective in cadenced conversation—as Red Pine sees it, keeping the commentators close at hand near the text, to allow them to meet rather than segregate in separate rooms. I judge it succeeds. He plucks a plum nobody else I’ve plumbed did, distilled erudition as wisdom. Consider: “Cultivating the heartless center between Heaven and Earth, sages delight in the endless creation of something out of nothing without becoming attached to anything. The Chinese phrase pu-jen (no heart) not only means ‘unkind’ but refers to any fruit that has no seed or kernel in its center. The straw dogs used in ceremonies in ancient China were much like Christmas trees in the West—used for a day, a week, a month, but not for long.”

A timely reminder, eh? You never know where a post will wind up. Serendipity. Granted, I’m Scrooge when it comes to Yuletide winter wonderland and carol-curated singalongs. Yet this season as conflict rages not far from o’ lil’ town o’ Bethlehem, I sought out another trail through our dense Dao, when my dispirited soul needed this astringent wake-up call. I’ve spent most of daylight today working on these diffuse meditations. I hope this entry braces you, wherever this Advent, Festival of Lights, finds you as I peck away at my keys in a high range where the sun rarely roams astray.

++I review Philip Norman’s new George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle. I glance at his turn to the East prompted by a prop sitar on Help!’s set as his first step on his Indian quest….the title of this entry riffs off of the postwar generation on G.I. Bills, filling early Boomers' tenure-track lit-crit slots, who’d’ve assigned William Empson's precocious Seven Types of Ambiguity. Once a New Criticism mainstay. By the second Reagan Administration as I entered grad school amidst far lower odds for more than minimum-wage adjunct Frosh Comp, that paperback joined Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, Cleanth Brooks' The Well-Tempered Urn, F.H. Leavis' The English Temper, Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle, Alfred Kazin's In the American Grain, and M.H. Abrams’ The Mirror and the Lamp in evocatively allusive titles in many a college town’s used bookstore’s DWM musty stacks. Derrida, Kristeva, Foucault, Lacan=the cool kids.

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