The Gate of All Subtleties (Daodejing 1)
Annotated translation of the first chapter: the Way that cannot be spoken, the two namings, the two observations, and the darkness twice darkened that is the gate of every subtlety.
Chinese text
道可道，非常道；名可名，非常名。无名，天地之始；有名，万物之母。故常无欲，以观其妙；常有欲，以观其徼。此两者，同出而异名，同谓之玄，玄之又玄，众妙之门。
Pinyin
Dào kě dào, fēi cháng dào; míng kě míng, fēi cháng míng. Wú míng, tiāndì zhī shǐ; yǒu míng, wànwù zhī mǔ. Gù cháng wú yù, yǐ guān qí miào; cháng yǒu yù, yǐ guān qí jiào. Cǐ liǎng zhě, tóng chū ér yì míng, tóng wèi zhī xuán, xuán zhī yòu xuán, zhòng miào zhī mén.
Literal rendering
The Way that can be spoken is not the constant Way; the name that can be named is not the constant name. The unnamed is the beginning of heaven and earth; the named is the mother of the ten thousand things. Therefore: constant without desire, one observes its subtlety; constant with desire, one observes its boundary. These two emerge together and differ in name — together they are called the dark. Dark, and darker again: the gate of all subtleties.
Term-by-term notes
- 道可道 — the founding untranslatability. The first 道 is the Way; the second is the verb “to speak.” The chapter opens the book — and this site’s whole translation policy — by warning that the saying is not the thing: 常道, the constant Way, is precisely what the sayable cannot hold. The dao glossary keeps the term; the zhuang-zhou page records how the tradition turned this opening into a style of talking that never claims to finish.
- The two punctuation debates — both kept. The line 无名天地之始 can be cut 无，名天地之始 (“the nameless — call it the beginning of heaven and earth”: Wang Bi’s reading, per the commentary tradition) or 无名，天地之始 (“the unnamed is the beginning”: the received cutting). Likewise 常无欲以观其妙 vs 常无，欲以观其妙 — “constantly without desire, observe its subtlety” or “the constant-nothing: with desire, observe its subtlety.” Both cuttings are ancient, both are documented in the teaching editions, and the site records both without ruling — the same double-writing discipline used for the 王/人 variant in ch. 25.
- 观其妙 / 观其徼 — the two observations. 妙, the subtle, the unmanifest interior of things; 徼 (jiào), the boundary, the edge where the manifest runs out. The standard glosses (preserved in the commentary transmission) read them as the two directions of the guan: from the empty side one sees the mystery, from the full side one sees the limit. The chapter is the site’s founding text for the observation-word the whole practice tradition later builds on.
- 玄之又玄 — dark, and darker again. The xuan glossary carries the term: 玄 is the dark of depth, not of absence — the two (unnamed/named, or the two observations) share one root (同出而异名) and their shared root is what the chapter doubles. The doubling is the chapter’s own refusal to let the dark be a thing one can finally name — the same recursion ch. 48’s 损之又损 applies to subtraction.
- 众妙之门 — the gate, not the house. The chapter ends at a door. The book’s first page positions itself as an entrance: what the gate opens onto is the remaining eighty chapters. The site’s reading order is built on this modesty — the opening chapter promises access, not arrival.
Where this passage sits
Chapter 1 is the book’s own front matter, and the site treats it that way: the daodejing text page opens here, the xu concept reads its 无 forward into the practice chapters, and the qingjing-jing opening shows the later tradition recasting this chapter into sitting terms. With ch. 25 (the cosmology) and ch. 5 (the physics of emptiness), the site’s DDJ spine now stands complete at both ends.
Sources
- Daodejing ch. 1, received text, verified against multiple editions (teaching editions with commentary, a full-text 81-chapter edition, and the punctuation-variant discussion preserved in the teaching tradition). The chapter's two punctuation debates are documented below