Chapter Eighty One
| 信 言 不 美 美 言 不 信 善 者 不 辯 辯 者 不 善 知 者 不 博 博 者 不 知 • 聖 人 不 積 既 以 為 人 己 愈 有 既 以 與 人 己 愈 多 天 之 道 利 而 不 害 聖 人 之 道 為 而 不 爭 | True words are not beautiful; Beautiful words are not true. He who has virtue does not argue; He who argues does not have virtue. He who knows is not learned; He who is learned does not know. The sage does not accumulate things – Since through serving people, the more one has; Since through giving to people, one has even more. The Way of heaven benefits and does not cause harm. The Way of the sage acts yet does not strive. |
| ♦True* words are not beautiful; ♦Beautiful words are not true*. He who has virtue does not argue; He who argues does not have virtue. He who knows is not learned; He who is learned does not know. ♦The sage2 does not accumulate [things] – ♦Since through serving people, the more one[self] has; [by means of] Since through giving to people, one[self] has even more2. [by means of] [more more] ♦The Way of heaven benefits and does not cause harm. The Way of the sage2 acts yet does not strive. | Notes Cross-references one who is not virtuous : #27, #49, #62 Way of heaven : #9, #47, #73, #77, #79 no harm : #35, #56, #58, #60, #66 no striving : #3, #8, #22, #66, #68, #73 |
Appendix – Different Layers of the Dao De Jing
While translating the DDJ, I discovered John Emerson’s articles on the possibility of various “layers” within it, based on the presence or absence of certain symbols and “themes” in each chapter. While he was not the first to suggest the presence of multiple layers, of particular interest to me was his comment : “Many of the objections to my method seemed to be objections to the kinds of rough, empirical, non-algorithmic methods best used to disentangle historically confused material.” Having a background in something called pattern recognition, I decided to find out whether or not each chapter could be classified as belonging to these layers based on this purely analytical method.
Emerson tentatively identified Early, Middle, Late, Added (very small) and Post-Guodian layers. By definition, the Post-Guodian layer contains at least chapters 67-81, none of which appear in the Guodian source. Building on Emerson’s work, extensive analysis using pattern recognition methods based on the relative frequencies of the symbols in each chapter indicates that the most self-consistent results are obtained when the DDJ is separated into three layers of chapters :
Early : 1 4 5 6 7 9 10 13 14 15 16 20 21 23 24 25 28 30 31 32 34 35 37 39 41 44 51 52 55 56
Late : 3 8 12 17 18 19 22 27 29 38 45 46 47 48 49 53 54 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66
Post-Guodian : 11 26 33 36 40 42 43 50 67-81
Mixed : 2