Daodejing ch. 10 (shouyi line): Full Translation
'Carrying your bodily soul and embracing the One, can you keep them from separating?' — the Daodejing line behind the shouyi tradition, with the translation problems of yingpo and the One.
Chinese text
載營魄抱一，能無離乎？
Pinyin
Zài yíngpò bào yī, néng wú lí hū?
Literal rendering
“Carrying the encamped soul and embracing the One, can you keep them from separating?”
Term-by-term problems
- 營魄 (yíngpò): the soul-complex, often parsed as 營 (the ying, sometimes read as a variant for 魂 hún — the ethereal soul) + 魄 (pò — the corporeal soul). The compound names the whole embodied psyche: what animates and what anchors. Watson: “Can you keep the soul always concentrated…?” Some editions read 載 as a particle (“Ah!”) rather than “carry.”
- 抱一 (bào yī, “embrace the One”): the single most generative phrase for the shouyi tradition. 一 (the One) is the Dao’s number (Daodejing ch. 39); 抱 (embrace/hold) is a body-metaphor of holding something against oneself. “Embrace the One” is the standard rendering; “hold fast to the One” (Waley) is close.
- 能無離乎 (can you [keep them] from separating?): the rhetorical question form — the chapter is a series of self-checks (the next lines: “can you concentrate your qi and reach the softness of an infant?”). The question-form is the meditation: a checking-in, not a doctrine.
- 無離 (not separate): “separation” here is the scattering of the self — the Taiping Jing tradition later reads shouyi precisely as keeping jing, qi, shen from dispersing.
Traditional usage
This line, together with Daodejing ch. 39 and the Zhuangzi’s “guard the One” passages, seeds the shouyi lineage: Taiping Jing (Han), Baopuzi neipian ‘Dizhen’ chapter (Ge Hong, ~320 CE), and later inner alchemy all cite the “embrace the One” formula as their charter. The term shouyi is the practice family this site documents in its own concept page.
Western misunderstandings
- “One” as monotheism: the One is the unnumbered source prior to duality — closer to a principle of undividedness than to a deity.
- “Can you keep them from separating?” read as metaphysics only: in the practice lineage it is operational — the daily question the practitioner puts to body, qi, and mind.
Recommended rendering (this site)
“Carrying the embodied soul and embracing the One, can you keep them from separating?”
Sources
- Daodejing ch. 10, received text; cf. Taiping Jing shouyi chapters; Baopuzi neipian 'Dizhen' chapter