Lost in Translation

The Tao Te Ching has been a source of inspiration in my life for many years. I don’t remember how I first encountered it in my young life, but I do remember that its simple wisdom resonated in my soul and I have loved it ever since.

Several years ago, I gathered various translations with the intention of taking one chapter at a time and comparing the different interpretations. However, I quickly saw that this was not enough. I needed to go to the source. And so I began a journey into the original ancient Chinese text. It was like finding a door hidden in the overgrowth to a secret garden of unimaginable beauty.

“Here there be dragons,” say the old maps designating uncharted areas at the edge of the known world. Dragons indeed, bursting from the depths of the sea, water diamonds cascading from their wings, dancing in the air, their form too brilliant to behold, then disappearing in a puff of smoke. I had no idea.

And that is the point perhaps. Having no idea.

The Chinese text dances like those dragons, defying analysis or intellectual understanding. It is poetic, with rhythm and music to delight the soul. The characters are cryptic, with multiple meanings swirling in fluid mystery. Trying to pin down a single meaning is like trying to catch with your bare hands a single slippery fish in a vast school of fish. Better to float in the water, watching the colorful fish dart and twirl. I quit trying to understand and just immersed myself in the experience.

We see such variations in translation, not because one is right and one is wrong, but because translators by necessity must dip their net into the water and catch a single meaning to put into language that we recognize. We form ideas about the meaning so that we can use words to share our ideas with each other.

My daughter grew up in China with Chinese as her first language. When I shared with her my exploration of the Chinese text of the Tao Te Ching, she brushed her hand through the air and shrugged. “No one understands this,” she said dismissively.

I had to laugh. But her response gave me a deeper insight. Even if we were native Chinese speakers, we would have to form ideas and use words to communicate with each other about the meaning of this wisdom teaching that defies explanation in any language!

Expanding even more, we can include all of life in this process. All of us, all the time, are “translating” our experience into ideas, concepts, beliefs. And using words to communicate these to each other. That’s not bad. Or good for that matter. It is a necessary process for us as embodied separate individuals. Our ideas, beliefs, and concepts then in turn shape our experience because we will only recognize what comports with the internal structure we have built. We create a loop of what we call reality through what we create and perceive.

Meanwhile, our direct experience of true realty has been “lost in translation.” To me, this is what the Tao Te Ching teaches. If I can embrace all the possible meanings in the mystery of the text, then I can appreciate the various translations without judging them as right or wrong, good or bad. Likewise, if we can embrace the direct experience of what is, then we can engage in and enjoy the dialogue of human-ness without the added suffering of attachment. We can dance with dragons.

Any belief limits my reality, because any belief is a prejudice. Any belief imposes an artificial structure on the free flow of experience. ~Paul Ferrini