Thirty Spokes Share One Hub (Daodejing 11)
Annotated translation of ch. 11: the wheel, the vessel, the room — three artifacts, each built around an emptiness, and the formula the chapter closes with: being gives the benefit, nothing gives the use.
Chinese text
三十辐共一毂，当其无，有车之用。埏埴以为器，当其无，有器之用。凿户牖以为室，当其无，有室之用。故有之以为利，无之以为用。
Pinyin
Sānshí fú gòng yī gǔ, dāng qí wú, yǒu chē zhī yòng. Shān zhí yǐ wéi qì, dāng qí wú, yǒu qì zhī yòng. Záo hùyǒu yǐ wéi shì, dāng qí wú, yǒu shì zhī yòng. Gù yǒu zhī yǐ wéi lì, wú zhī yǐ wéi yòng.
Literal rendering
Thirty spokes share one hub; where it is not, there is the cart’s use. Knead clay to make a vessel; where it is not, there is the vessel’s use. Cut doors and windows to make a room; where it is not, there is the room’s use. So: being gives the benefit; nothing gives the use.
Term-by-term notes
- Three artifacts, one discovery. Wheel, vessel, room — each is built around its emptiness (当其无 — “where it is not”): the hub hollow, the pot hollow, the room hollow. The chapter’s method is the site’s own emptiness concept in craft-language: the useful thing is the thing that has space in it — and the space is not a flaw but the reason. The useless tree family lives one page away: what has no use for others has room for itself.
- The hub that moves by not moving. 三十辐共一毂 — thirty spokes meet in a center that never turns, and that center is what makes the wheel turn. The hub is the chapter’s hidden portrait of the stillness the practice pages teach: the still center that everything else moves around — paired in the book with ch. 5’s bellows (虚而不屈，动而愈出 — the site’s ch. 5 page): the empty that is inexhaustible.
- The formula. 有之以为利，无之以为用 — being gives the 利 (the benefit, the instrument), nothing gives the 用 (the use). The two words split the gift: what is is the tool; what is not is the working. The chapter’s distinction is the site’s answer to the robber’s question — even the Way is a tool — and its correction of it: the tool works only by its emptiness. Registered, the chapter does not say being is worthless; it says being alone is a hubless wheel.
- The title tradition. The Heshang Gong commentary names the chapter 无用 — “the use of nothing” — the tradition’s own one-word reading. The site’s baoguang page (the storehouse poured-into and ladled-from) and the deep pool are the same image in water and light: the emptiness that works because it is empty.
- The pairings, declared. The chapter is ch. 2’s 有/无 pair applied to objects: what ch. 2 states as co-rising, ch. 11 states as co-working. The site holds them as one argument in two keys — the world’s mutuality (ch. 2) and the artifact’s emptiness (ch. 11) — with the practice implication kept modest: the tradition’s claim is about how things work; whether the human mind is the kind of thing that works by emptiness is the tradition’s own extension, registered as such.
Sources
- Daodejing ch. 11, received text, verified against four independent reproductions that agree (the Zhihu full-text edition; the Jingangjin bilingual edition; the Daodejing.org chapter page with glosses; and the Chinese Text Project's Heshang Gong zhangju parallel, whose chapter title is Wu Yong — 'the use of nothing')
- The received text's own glosses: 辐 (spokes), 毂 (hub — the wheel's hollow center), 埏埴 (to knead clay), 户牖 (door and window), 利 (benefit, instrument), 用 (use); the Heshang Gong tradition titles the chapter by its last word