Summary
Dao 道 is a Chinese word meaning road: the road people walk on, then a method, then speech, then leading someone onto the road. In the early books of wisdom it became the name of what all things run on without anyone seeing it. The best-known book on it is the Daodejing (Classic of the Way and Virtue) attributed to Laozi 老子, followed by the Zhuangzi 莊子.
The Daodejing tells the origin of things in a few lines. In chapter 25: there was something formed out of confusion before heaven and earth, silent and empty, standing alone and unchanging, going round everywhere without tiring, fit to be the mother of all under heaven. "I do not know its name; I style it Dao; forced to name it, I call it Great. Great means passing on, passing on means going far, going far means returning." In chapter 42: Dao gives birth to one, one to two, two to three, and three to the ten thousand things, that is, everything; and everything carries yin on its back and holds yang in its arms, and blends qi to reach harmony. Daodejing 25 and 42. The third chapter of the Huainanzi explains the passage: Dao begins with one; one alone does not give birth, so it divided into yin and yang, and their union produced things. The same chapter says that Dao began in an empty vastness, the vastness produced space and time, space and time produced qi, and from qi heaven and earth separated.
The book opens by saying that words cannot hold this road: "The Dao that can be spoken is not the constant Dao; the name that can be named is not the constant name. Nameless, it is the beginning of heaven and earth; named, it is the mother of things." In chapter 8: the highest good is like water; it benefits everything and contends with nothing, and it settles in the places people despise, so it is close to the Dao. In the Zhuangzi Huangdi says: those who know do not speak, those who speak do not know. And a man asks Zhuangzi where the Dao is. "There is no place without it." Asked to be specific, he says: in the ant. "So low?" In the weeds; in the tiles; in piss and dung. The questioner falls silent.
The idea these texts turn on is that the Dao is the course along which things move of themselves, as water finds its way to the low ground. It is known by walking in it and lost when it is shut inside a name, and it is not only on high: it is in the lowest things as in the first. That is why the Zhuangzi describes the ancient founders as those who "obtained the Dao": Fuxi obtained it and entered the mother of qi, Huangdi obtained it and rose to the clouds, and Zhuanxu, the rival of Gonggong, obtained it and dwelt in the Dark Palace.
We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. The project's Chinese essay reads dào as Arabic ṭawā, and explains it as "the folded road". In Lane, ṭawā a garment or a written sheet is to fold or roll it up, the contrary of spreading it out; ṭawā al-bilād is to traverse the countries one after another; ṭawā ʿanhu al-ḥadīth wa-l-sirr is to conceal the story and the secret from someone; and the ṭiyya is the destination a traveller makes for. On this reading the Dao is a road that is crossed on foot and that folds its secret away from speech, which is what the first line of the Daodejing says: the Dao that can be spoken is not the constant Dao.
Linguistic Root
| Form | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 道 dào | road; method; to say |
| 導 dǎo | to lead onto the road, to guide |
| dawX | Middle Chinese pronunciation of 道 |
| *[kə.l]ˤuʔ | 道 in the modern Old Chinese reconstruction |
The Shuowen jiezi defines 道 as "the road that is walked", builds the graph from "walking" 辵 and "head" 首, and adds that a road running through in one direction is called 道. Shuowen jiezi, juan 2. The first line of the Daodejing uses the word twice in two senses: "the dao that can be dao-ed", the road that can be spoken of. Mandarin says it with an unaspirated t, written d; in Middle Chinese it was a voiced d. Arabic ṭ answers that d, since ṭ, t, d, dh and ẓ form one group that becomes t or d in other languages; w answers the rounded vowel; and the final weak letter of ṭawā answers the glottal stop that closed the old word and later became the rising tone. The point that needs explaining is that the modern reconstruction puts an l at the start of the old word, *[kə.l]ˤuʔ, and gives the verb "to lead" 導 as *lˤuʔ-s, so the comparison with ṭawā meets the word as it was spoken from the Han period on.
The essay compares the Dao with the Qur'anic ṣirāṭ and with aša in the Persian religion, truth and right order. Lane gives sirāṭ, with ṣirāṭ as a dialect form of it, as a plain road, so called because the one who travels it disappears into it as swallowed food does; the comparison with the ṣirāṭ is one of meaning, not of sound. The essay also sets the first line of the Daodejing beside the Qur'anic "vision does not attain Him" and finds one idea in both: that the highest truth is reached neither by speech nor by sight.
Key Mythic Narratives
The Xici appendix to the Book of Changes says: "One yin, one yang: this is called the Dao", making the Dao the alternation of the two sides. Its twelfth chapter adds: what is above form is called the Dao, what is below form is called vessels, the made things that are seen and used.
The sixth chapter of the Zhuangzi describes the Dao: it has reality and evidence, but no action and no form; it can be handed on but not received, obtained but not seen; it is its own root, existed before heaven and earth, gave the spirits their holiness and gave birth to heaven and earth. The twenty-second chapter tells how "Knowledge" went out asking about the Dao. The first one asked did not answer, because he did not know how; the second forgot what he meant to say; when Knowledge asked Huangdi, he answered, and then said that the first was the true one, the second came near, and he and Knowledge had not come close.
Symbolic Reading
The Semitic-reading essay calls the Dao "the cosmic road" and "the highest principle", and finds the deep parallel in the claim that absolute truth cannot be put into words. The texts themselves give two images that explain this: water that goes down to what people despise and so comes near the Dao, and a road that is walked rather than carried. The Dao in them is learned by doing rather than by definition, as a farmer learns the course of the water on his own land.
Cross-Cultural Parallels
In Zarathustra's hymns aša means truth and right order, which a person is called to choose in thought, word and deed. The Dao too is an order on which things run, but it is not chosen against an opposite: yin and yang alternate within it and do not make war. The Dao meets Egyptian Maat in that each is an order of the world and of conduct together, and they part in that Maat is upheld and offered, while the Dao is left to run its course.