Xuanpin (玄牝)
Xuanpin 玄牝, the 'mysterious female' — the Daodejing's most explicit maternal image: the valley-spirit that does not die, whose gate is the root of heaven and earth.
The term
玄牝 (xuánpìn) — 玄, dark, deep, mysterious; 牝, the female of an animal, the womb-side of the opposition. The term appears once, in ch. 6 of the Daodejing, the book’s shortest chapter:
谷神不死，是谓玄牝。玄牝之门，是谓天地根。绵绵若存，用之不勤。
“The valley-spirit does not die — this is called the mysterious female. The gate of the mysterious female — this is called the root of heaven and earth. Continuous, as if existing; drawn on, never labored.”
Why the term matters
- Three images in one sentence. The chapter stacks its whole cosmogony in twenty-five characters: the valley (the hollow — the tuoyue glossary’s bellows-family and the xu concept’s emptiness, the same low place the ch. 22 translation pairs with fullness); the spirit (谷神 — the inexplicable generative power, the character 神 doing double duty as power and mystery); and the mysterious female — the book’s most explicit maternal figure. The received gloss (kept on this page from the Gushiwen teaching edition) says it plainly: 玄牝 is the source that breeds the ten thousand things, an image of the Way.
- The gate and the root. 玄牝之门，是谓天地根 — the gate of the mysterious female is the root of heaven and earth. The ch. 1 translation holds the book’s other gate (众妙之门, the gate of all mysteries) and the guan glossary holds the watching that happens at it — but ch. 6’s gate is the only one named as a root, and the only one attached to a mother. The site keeps the two gates linked because the book does: one chapter says where mysteries come out, the other says what the source is.
- 绵绵若存 — continuous, as if existing. The chapter’s closing phrase is the tradition’s standard description of the source’s felt quality: thread-thin, seemingly there, seemingly not — and 用之不勤, “drawn on, never labored” (勤 read as 尽, exhausted, per the standard gloss). It is the same arithmetic as the ch. 22 reversals: what seems barely there is what never runs out. For the site’s practice pages this is the canonical sentence for what a settled sitting feels like — the state the falling-asleep question distinguishes from sleep: not vivid, not absent; continuous, as if existing.
- Not anatomy. The term’s history includes later inner-alchemy readings that locate 玄牝 inside the body; the site does not adopt them. The glossary records the received-text meaning (the generative image of the Way) and the source policy applies: physiology claims from later schools are registered on their own pages, not here.
Usage notes
The term stays in pinyin with the gloss “mysterious female”; the valley-spirit line is always quoted in full because the term is only defined by its sentence; the reading follows the received text and the teaching-edition gloss.
Sources
- Daodejing ch. 6 (received text): 谷神不死，是谓玄牝。玄牝之门，是谓天地根。绵绵若存，用之不勤。 Verified against the Gushiwen teaching edition with translation and gloss; the note there defines 玄牝 as 'the Daoist name for the source that breeds the ten thousand things, an image of the Way'