Alan Saunders: On The Philosopher's Zone this week with me, Alan Saunders, a seriously enigmatic piece of Chinese philosophy: the Dao De Jing:

"The Dao that can be told, is not the eternal Dao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The un-nameable is the eternally real. Naming is the origin of all particular things. Free from desire, you realise the mystery, caught in desire you see only the manifestations. Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source. This source is called Darkness. Darkness within darkness, the gateway to all understanding."

That was the whole of the first chapter of the Dao De Jing, a work of Chinese philosophy whose influence it is just not possible to underestimate. But what does it mean?

Well, let's start at the beginning. What does Dao De Jing mean? Here's Dr Karyn Lai, senior lecturer and philosophy discipline co-ordinator at the University of New South Wales.

Karyn Lai: Jing means a treatise or a text, and Dao and De are concepts you could say, that belong to Daoism, so if you wanted to translate it very loosely, it would mean a treatise on the idea of Dao and the idea of De.

Alan Saunders: Right. And so what do these two ideas, Dao and De, what do they mean?

Karyn Lai: Oh you'd be asking me to translate 3,000 years of work Alan. Or more. The notion Dao in Chinese philosophy can refer to a whole range of things. As you probably do know, a lot of Chinese terms are extremely malleable, flexible and Dao can mean 'teaching', it can mean 'way', it can mean 'the path to get to the way'. So it can mean a whole range of things. De has traditionally been translated as 'virtue', but many scholars agree now that that's a post-Confucian understanding of De. In more ancient texts, pre-Confucian texts, De could mean something like 'the power of an individual'. Much like, actually, 'essence' in Aristotle.

Alan Saunders: And do we know anything about the circumstances of its composition?

Karyn Lai: Well, enough to say that it is not a single authored text, and it's not even clear when it was compiled. There are different versions of the text, and indeed the received version has now been dated - the received version that scholars have been studying for the last 2-1/2-thousand years, has now been dated a little bit later than a text which was recently unearthed. Of course this was during the pre-printing days, and so scholars, or thinkers rather, who were aware of ideas basically remembered them or they copied them from different bits and pieces that they had together. So in that sense, therefore, it should be unsurprising to find many different versions of the one text. You know, some would sit and copy, in fact there is a version of the Dao De Jing where the last 38 chapters have now been put on to the front, and it's been called the De Dao Jing. So it's the nature, it's in the nature of copying really, that frustrates any attempt to try to pin down the details of the composition and the text.

Alan Saunders: If you buy a cheap paperback English translation, which is what I've done, it's attributed to somebody called Laozi. Did he exist? Did he write it? Did he write any of it?

Karyn Lai: Well there is a mention of a man called Laozi who met with Confucius, and this is written by a Chinese historian, about 400 years later. Scholars now think that if the person Laozi did exist and if he did write something, it would be extremely difficult to make those connections first, to discover the person, or to unearth the person, and secondly then to say this person wrote particular sections of the book. One of the difficulties is that the person who's called Laozi, Lao translates literally to 'old' and Zi means 'master'. So how are we going to find a person called 'Old Master'?

Alan Saunders: Now Daoism is sometimes presented to us as a religion. Should we see it as a religion, or as a philosophy? Or is that a Western distinction and not a Chinese distinction?

Karyn Lai: Well the term 'Daoism' in English I believe has two references, and one refers to the whole series of texts that philosophers study. In a quite separate context, Daoism has been used to describe religion, a whole, entire, religious traditional practice. But it's still well and truly alive today. These practices have somewhat to do with what's being said in the text, but the connection is very, very loose. Within the Chinese intellectual tradition itself, scholars normally distinguish the two, one they call it Daojia, which refers to some of the teachings associated with the text, and the other they associate with Daojiao, which is associated with religion. So in Chinese, yes these two are quite separate and distinctive. It's just unfortunate that in English it's the same word we have for two quite different things.

Alan Saunders: Well let's look at some of the basic concepts of the Dao. What is the difference between the 'You' and the 'Wu'?

Karyn Lai: Maybe I'll start at the beginning. I might talk a bit about different ways of interpreting the Dao De Jing, simply because a lot of the language in there is rather open - it's more suggestive and more metaphorical, and so commentators have a lot of fun with it. From the philosophical angle, a traditional position is to understand the Dao De Jing as a text that deals with metaphysics.

In that regard, the concept Dao is a notion that relates to being, is a notion that relates to ontology that tells you about reality. More recently, scholars have also started looking at epistemological approaches to the text, which then see the text as a criticism of what's going on then in Chinese society. In that regard then, if we take the metaphysical approach, the 'You' is often translated as being, and the 'Wu' as non-being. There's quite a lot of scholarship that has been spent on this topic, and there's also been comparative philosophical studies for instance, between Chinese philosophy and Continental philosophy to talk about being and non-being.

When we look at these two ideas, from the epistemological perspective, 'You' can be understood as what we see. The term 'You' can literally mean 'to have' or 'to be present'. And so from an epistemological perspective, 'You' means to see and 'Wu' means not to see. Taken from that point of view, the treatise then becomes one which seems to discuss what we are conditioned to see, what our current norms condition us to perceive, to see, and what we miss out, what we fail to see, given that we see the world with a particular pair of spectacles, so to speak. The ones that we've grown up with.

I'll give a good example to illustrate that. One of the passages in the Dao De Jing talks about the utility of being and non-being, or rather the utility of You and Wu. It talks about doors and windows, and it says frames are used to make doors and windows, but it is in its Wu, what we do not see, where the door has its full utility. So that becomes a kind of epistemological take on the text.

Alan Saunders: Where do you think the strength of the work lies then? In ethics? In metaphysics, or as you seem to be inclined to say, in epistemology, in the theory of knowledge.

Karyn Lai: I think you could take it either way. When I say either way, I mean either the metaphysical path or the epistemological path. The ethical connotations and implications of the text I think are dependent on which of these approaches you take. I tend to think that it's value lies in the epistemological approach, although I must emphasise that the dominant approach is still the metaphysical one. So I'm off-centre really when I say I prefer the epistemological approach.

There is value in the metaphysical approach in that scholars who take on this view suggest that there's another way of understanding reality. So in comparative philosophy, this is extremely valuable in pushing the boundaries of what is traditional in Western philosophy, a traditional platonic understanding of the world. And the epistemological view expressed I've already.

Alan Saunders: We might turn to another brace of concepts, Wu Wei and Ziran. Now you could argue I think that they provide a unifying ethical framework for understanding the philosophy of the Dao De Jing.

Karyn Lai: I interpret Ziran as spontaneity. Again, there is quite a lot of flexibility in this term. It could mean literally, 'nature', literally the tress, the wind and so on and so forth. And there are passages in the Dao that explicitly refer to elements in nature. It could also refer to spontaneity which one could argue, many passages in the text see as a true characteristic of nature.

So the term can be used at the same time to describe these differing characteristics of nature as well as nature itself. If you take the metaphysical view, then you say Look Ziran is about nature, and Wu Wei is about a method of non-coerciveness as a method of letting things be, letting nature take its course, going with the flow, and so on and so forth.

If you take the epistemological view, which I take, that understands Ziran as spontaneity, it's more the characteristic feature rather than the natural things themselves, that is valued. And if we appreciate spontaneity, then the resulting implication is that the Daoist sage who governs, must govern the people mindful of their spontaneity. In other words, the Daoist Sage should refrain from imposing too many constraints and so on and so forth. This indeed was one of the key aspects of Daoist criticism of Confucian approaches and indeed the status quo of the day, that was, to impose standards for people's behaviour. And the Daos could be seen as wanting to wind that back. So this would then lead you to a lot of ethical implications.

Alan Saunders: On ABC Radio National, you're with The Philosopher's Zone, and this week we're talking about the Dao De Jing, a great work of Chinese philosophy from around the 6th century BC.

Now Dao means 'the way', but there may be more than one way. According to Wan Keping, professor at the Beijing International Studies University who's been in Australia lecturing on the Dao De Jing, there are three sorts of Dao.

Wang Keping: I think these three types of Dao reflect the moral dimension in Dao De Jing, or possibly a sociological dimension in a sense. And the first kind of Dao is the Dao of Heaven, and the second kind of Dao is the Dao of Human; the third type of Dao is the Dao of the Daoist Sage, and these three types of Dao are all derived from a very interesting analogy, that is, the bow drawing analogy.

It's a sense that you draw a bow, when it aims high, you lower it. When it is lower you raise it. So there's a very interesting description. The Dao of Heaven reduces what is excessive, and that supplements what is insufficient. But in striking contrast, the Dao of human is rather different. The Dao of human reduces the insufficient and then adds to the excessive, and here it implies something like the law of the jungle in the human society.

So Laozi possibly describes these two kinds of Dao as what he observes. But here he offers a third alternative, the Dao of the Sage. The Dao of the Sage, by and large means it works for others, but never competes with others. So I think that he offers the Dao of the Sage as the model for human beings to act upon, so that is the way not only for moral cultivation, also to reduce the social conflicts.

Alan Saunders: So we are to see the Dao as something that we as individuals seek to attain?

Wang Keping: Yes, OK. Because when we read the Dao De Jing as a Daoist book, we find just the one channel of moral teaching or whatever. But if you compare it to some texts by the Confucianists, you may see the sort of critical reflection and also possibly the differences.

But anyway, Laozi really argue that, and he encouraged people, to pursue the Dao and even offer different teachings. For instance, have fewer desires, and then reduce your selfishness. And for instance, try to purify yourself, your mind, of cares and worries, and then try to exercise a deep contemplation of the Dao as such. And try to follow the Dao of spontaneity or naturalness and then you become your true self. So that possible way to attain, we call it a spiritual freedom and an independent personality. So this involves a sort of social detachment rather than social commitment.

Alan Saunders: But if I become myself, does this mean cultivating certain virtues? Karyn Lai.

Karyn Lai: Certainly the Daoist text does identify a whole series of characteristics, I'm not sure I call them virtues, but a whole series of characteristics that it holds in higher esteem, so to speak, including non-assertiveness, femininity, submissiveness and so on and so forth.

Alan Saunders: What does he mean by femininity?

Karyn Lai: Passages in the text speak explicitly about the male and the female, and some of them go on to uphold the way of the female. Some of the passages can in fact be quite graphic, so to speak. It says, you know, the female takes the weaker position and by taking the weaker position, it lies underneath.

Alan Saunders: What about the application of Daoism in dealing with the issues of our time. How can the concepts of Dao and De in the Dao De Jing be invoked, for example, as I think you would, to support an account of environmental wholism?

Karyn Lai: Well what I might argue is that in challenging the received norms of the day and the accepted practices, that Dao De Jing in fact challenges the entire conceptual framework of what was going on. It challenges the imposition of standards and proposes spontaneity instead. It also challenges the assertions of power. A lot of the prescriptions for the unrest during the warring states period and this war's period when the text was written, and indeed many of the early Chinese philosophies arose, it challenges a lot of the approaches that they promote: people to power, you know, and when they promote people to power, it often goes with a particular set of values that the strong, the powerful, you know, the male.

And in that regard, the Dao De Jing seems to want to overturn these nominative expectations and behaviours. It also in that regard, challenges the conceptual framework of detachment. It views these approaches as extremely divisive within human society; to promote some is to leave others behind, and so on and so forth. And the Dao De Jing sees this as methods that lead to severe fragmentation of society.

In that case, the notions of Dao and De, where De, as I explained earlier, refers to a kind of the power of the individual, it's what's inherently in the individual that can be used or applied. It applies the notion of De to suggest a self within the environment that it believes better captures the nature of human flourishing.

One good example - and this example is an example from cooking - I love this example, it's from a very early text and it's about soup. Genuine harmony is like soup is the title of that example. It discusses the elements that go in a soup, you know vinegar, ginger, in the Chinese soup you probably have some vinegar, ginger, salt, and so on and so forth. And if you just take the example of the ginger, when you put it into a pot of soup, the ginger loses its distinctiveness as a piece of ginger. However, the taste of ginger now permeates the soup. And so Daoism tends to see potency or power 'De', of an individual, that piece of ginger, as being much more far-reaching, and much more integrated and much more interdependent with the entire environment, than the necessity of keeping its essence to itself, so to speak.

Alan Saunders: Karyn Lai from the University of New South Wales.

Curiously, when I asked Professor Wang Keping about the relevance of the Dao to our times, he too turned to culinary metaphor.

Wang Keping: I'm thinking about several elements which may bear a certain kind of relevance to our reality now. But I would think of one particular element, that is the political dimension for instance. Laozi talks about political administration in different ways, and as far as the governance is concerned, the argument is 'Governing a large country is just like cooking a small fish', and by 'cooking a small fish', is not meant to do something easy. It's meant in fact not to disturb the people from town to town, by introducing different laws, regulations and whatever. For instance like tax or some other things, even ideological control, whatever.

And secondly, talking about the leadership, he has some very interesting views, and there could be three kinds of leadership. The best one is to be heard, all remains unknown to the populace, because he had done a good job. People just live their life. So the second best is praise and glorified, and then the third is not the best, in fact the worst, is condemned and possibly bullied by the populace because they're not very happy about it.

And then there's also the democratic element there, and say the leadership should not have fixed mind; they should take the mind of the people as their mind. I think that's a very interesting argument here. So they should really not simply listen to the public opinion on the one hand, than to really think, what the people really think. They're not simply economic creatures. They're also social, political, and even spiritual beings. They have different kinds of needs. You can't just confine yourself, OK as long as I can give you some bread, you'll be OK. So I think it's a very interesting idea.

Alan Saunders: The Dao and our needs.

That was Wang Keping, Professor at the Beijing International Studies University.

The show is produced by Kyla Slaven; the technical engineer, who knows the way of the mixing desk, is Charlie McKune. I'm Alan Saunders, and I'll be back next week.