help needed with translating the character 常 in the Dao De Jing

[kairon]

Hi everyone,

I'm a dutch acupuncture student and I started to dive into some classic texts, researching the character '命' / destiny and it's meaning for the practice of acupuncture.

Most translating goes pretty well with the help of software (Wenlin), yet I have some difficulties understanding the character 常.

In the Dao De Jing the character is mentioned in verse 16:

復命曰常，知常曰明

Legge translates this with: The report of that fulfilment is the regular, unchanging rule. To know that unchanging rule is to be intelligent.

A dutch translation of the Dao De Jing by J.Voigt says: Returning destiny means knowing the eternal; knowing the eternal means being enlightened.

Wenlin gives a few meanings: often, constant, ordinary. On other places I find also things like rule, eternal, permanent. The etymology of the character is not really clear or convincing; the lower part 巾 means towel, and 'that's an ordinary thing we use often'.

From the etymology, I can get the spectrum of meaning of constant, ordinary. Yet in the Dao De Jing it seems to be more about the eternal and permanent. The Dao De Jing has this character also in the first verse: 道可道，非常道. And later on, in verse 51 (in which I am interested because it's the second verse where 命 appears in de DDJ) it says 夫莫之命常自然 which is translated by Voigt as 'not by order, yet always spontaneous'. Again this combination of 命常.

Now; what is exactly my question? My experience until now is that almost all characters are understandable from their etymology; my experience is also that the etymology of the Wenlin software is not the best there is and often lacks a deeper understanding. Somehow this character 常 has a relationship to 命, according to the DDJ, and 'eternal' seems a good translation, or maybe 'rules', yet the etymology of 'towel' seems intuitive not right.

• One possibility might be that there is no deeper ground; 常 just means different things in different contexts, and the etymology is just not so exciting in this occasion.
  
• Another possibility might be that there is a deeper meaning to 常 and a etymology that makes more sense, in alle contexts.
  

​I was hoping someone here could help me out with my search....

[yialanliu]

What you're looking for isn't going to be adequately explained in this forum due to who actively posts here and the knowledge herein.

If you're Chinese is good, I'd recommend posting in Chinese to Chinese people (taoism forums or acupuncture forums although I'd go taoism first since while acupuncture is rooted in taoism, this is pretty deep stuff).

The reason why the translation is so different from the real words is because there is a lot of cutting of words to single characters to fit a poetic verse Look at 常 for instance and think of every word with that character in it and which one it fits. That's the best way to explain this simply. Not that there's a deeper meaning in a character but rather it's a representation of the word. thus, just because you see it in another verse does not mean it's the same usage since it can represent tens of different words and may or may not be directly comparable. After you find the word, can you go figure out what aspect of the word it's trying to utilize.

If you're Chinese isn't good, I'd just take whatever translation you feel is better since both have their perks and downsides. My preference is to go with a translation that breaks the verse structure although there are perils when doing that as well unfortunately.

[kairon]

Thanks yialanliu,

I think my main problem is that a proper etymology gives me a 'feeling' with a character and I miss this feeling with 常....

The idea to check every word with 常 in it as a combination is a good one! I'm going to try that and hope it will bring me some further. My chinese aint good enough to post it in C2C forums...

[Altair]

I agree that looking at compounds might be helpful.

According to the few sources I have consulted, there seem to be various competing etymologies for 常. One theory that mught unite them somewhat is to assume that the oral words represented by the characters 常, 裳, and 长 all have the same origin. 常 may have originally meant something like "long garment" and have been an alternate way of writing 裳. It may have then been borrowed to express the meaning "long-standing." From "long-standing," it is a small jump in meaning to either "regular"/"constant" or "permanent"/"eternal." The meaning "ordinary" is probably a development for "regular."

[LyYenKhang]

恆 is a synonym with 常. (I think that 长 has the connotation of "long", but not immutable and eternal like 常 or 恆, 长 has a beginning, but 常 is without beginning or end). In fact, some versions of the Dao De Jing have slightly different phrasing: 道可道非恆道也。

In one Latin translation of the Dao De Jing, 常 is translated (in the case of the first line of the Dao De Jing) as "aeterna-et-immutabilis".

[Mindmaxd]

In fact the whole sentence is 夫之莫命而常自然，命常is not a conbination.You should read like this夫莫之命-而常自然。

[yialanliu]

In fact the whole sentence is 夫之莫命而常自然，命常is not a conbination.You should read like this夫莫之命-而常自然。

Exactly, find the exact word each represents, then continue from there. Now the OP just needs to do this for the read of DDJ.\

If you go straight into etymology, you'll be grasping for straws and be wrong half the time. Kind of like reading 法 with the same pronunciation as 去。Not always going to be wrong, but wrong enough to make it not a good method.

[kairon]

Thanks for thinking along everyone!

@altair I'll check out the characters you posted

@lyYenKhang the notion that 常 is without beginning or end makes sense, As well as the alternative phrasing of the DDJ first verse.

@Mindmaxd & yialanliu on ctext.org it actually gives the sentence from verse 51 without the 而 between 命 and 常, and the 之 is between 莫 and 命 , which makes it a different sentence. Wondering where you found the sequence you gave here?

I'm wondering how anyone here would translate this sentence in verse 51; my guess would be something like:

道之尊，德之貴，夫莫之命常自然

'The Dao is respected, the De is highly valued, men does this not by decree yet through a permanent spontanity' (in the case I read 而 between 命 and 常), but maybe it might aswell be something like 'men does this neither by normal decree nor spontaneous' which has a different meaning...

[yialanliu]

@Mindmaxd & yialanliu on ctext.org it actually gives the sentence from verse 51 without the 而 between 命 and 常, and the 之 is between 莫 and 命 , which makes it a different sentence. Wondering where you found the sequence you gave here?

Why does o'er = over? It's the same concept, a shortened word needs to be comprehended by knowing the full word representation. For natives, it's natural whereas if you are not a native and stare at o'er you'll be wrong to just stare at only o'er rather than over. Newspapers do this a lot especially with headlines. Poetry does it even more unfortunately.

In English you're lucky in o'er typically refers to only 1 word. In Chinese, there's many possible combinations.

[Mindmaxd]

Hi Kairon here is the link http://www.tianyabook.com/gudian/daodejingyiwen/51.html,verse 51 DDJ。

[kairon]

@yialanliu ok, makes sense It's just my first week study Chinese, so everyone here is further advanced than me, I guess, especially when you're a native... But, how then would you translate the sentence of verse 51 in English?

@mindmaxd thanks for the link!

[kairon]

Hi everyone,

It might be the wrong subforum, but I was hoping anyone here could help me find the chinese text of The Secret of the Golden Flower "Tai Yi Jin Hua Zong Zhi" 太乙金華宗旨 ?

[xiaocai]

Have you tried Googling with the name?

[kairon]

Sure I tried that... When i Google '太乙金華宗旨' I get a lot of hits, yet my Chinese ain't good enough to find out if there's a version of this text between the hits... A chinese-english text would be the best, yet I couldn't find that. So I was hoping someone overhere could help me find a chinese version of this text.

[xiaocai]

Link 1 Link 2 These were the first two links google gave when I searched.

IMHO your Chinese needs to be fairly advanced to be able to read it without any annotation.

[kairon]

Ah, thanks a lot!!! I have a dutch translation of the text, and with the Wenlin-software I hope to get somewhere