The Valley-Spirit Does Not Die (Daodejing 6)
Annotated translation of ch. 6 — the book's shortest chapter, twenty-five characters: the valley-spirit, the mysterious female, the gate that is the root, and the one sentence that describes what a settled sitting feels like.
Chinese 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。
Pinyin
Gǔ shén bù sǐ, shì wèi xuán pìn. Xuán pìn zhī mén, shì wèi tiāndì gēn. Mián mián ruò cún, yòng zhī bù qín.
Literal rendering
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. Thread-thin and thread-thin, as if existing; drawn on, never exhausted.
Term-by-term notes
- The valley. 谷神 — the spirit of the valley, or the valley-like spirit. The valley is the book’s standing image for the empty place that gathers: the bellows of ch. 5 works because it is hollow, and the reversals teach that the low place fills. The valley-spirit is the generative power located in the hollow — the chapter’s first claim is that the source is not a summit but a depth. The xuan-pin glossary carries the term’s full anatomy; this page is the chapter around it.
- The mysterious female. 玄牝 (xuán pìn) — the book’s most explicit maternal image, held in full on the xuan-pin page. Three images in one sentence — valley, spirit, mother — and the received gloss keeps it plain: the source that breeds the ten thousand things, an image of the Way. The site’s creator question reads this chapter as the book’s alternative to a maker: not a designer but a mother, not an act but a birth.
- 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, where the mysteries come out); this one is the only gate named as a root and attached to a mother. Gate and root are the chapter’s one architecture claim: the world comes out of an opening, and what it comes out of is what it grows from — the same two directions the 大块 page documents for the Zhuangzi’s great clod (breathing out the wind, carrying and releasing the forms).
- 绵绵若存 — thread-thin, as if existing. The chapter’s closing sentence is the tradition’s canonical description of the source’s felt quality, and the site’s practice pages use it as the standard sentence for what a settled sitting feels like: not vivid, not absent — continuous, as if existing. It is the direct counter to the beginner’s demand for sensation, which is why the nothing-happens question opens with it: the measured state of the source is barely there, and the falling-asleep question distinguishes it from sleep by exactly this — continuous, as opposed to gone.
- 用之不勤 — drawn on, never exhausted. 勤 is read as 尽 (exhausted) per the standard gloss recorded on the xuan-pin page. The arithmetic is the ch. 22 reversals’ own: what seems barely there is what never runs out. The Zhuangzi’s ladder answers it from the other side — 杀生者不死，生生者不生 (“what kills the living does not die; what generates life is not born,” the Nü Yu passage) — the two books saying the same thing: the source outlives everything it generates, because it is the generating itself.
- Not anatomy. Later internal-alchemy readings locate 玄牝 inside the body; the site does not adopt them, per the boundary kept on the xuan-pin page and the source policy.
Where this passage sits
The book’s shortest chapter and its densest cosmogony — with ch. 1 (the gate where mysteries come out) and ch. 14 (the shape of the shapeless), it forms the site’s set on the book’s non-object: the gate, the mother, and the continuous — three names for the one thing that cannot be named.
Sources
- Daodejing ch. 6 (received text), verified against the Gushiwen teaching edition with translation and gloss, as documented on the xuan-pin glossary page; the gloss there reads 玄牝 as 'the Daoist name for the source that breeds the ten thousand things, an image of the Way' and records the standard reading of 勤 as 尽 (exhausted)