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by SolubleSnake
138 days ago
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The Tao Te Ching is sort of impossible to translate into modern English. I don't really understand it but I can speak and read Chinese and it doesn't make much sense to Chinese people either. It is the weirdest thing that it has become famous. This is kind of how it translates in English: 'Light light moon
green grass mountain
snow sun together' For an entire book. It's totally nonsensical but the writing in Chinese at that time was just a bit like that. Classical Chinese sort of seems to have been written more like the way rappers put together their battling rhymes sometimes - you aren't meant to understand it |
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>"The simplicity of Lao Tzu's language can present an almost impenetrable density of meaning. The reversals and paradoxes in this great poem are the oppositions of the yin and yang — male/female, light/dark, glory/modesty — but the knowing and being of them, the balancing act, results in neither stasis nor synthesis ... reversal, recurrence, are the movement, and yet the movement is onward."
Thanks for your literal character interpretation / perspective.