The Five Colors Blind the Eye (Daodejing 12)
Annotated translation of ch. 12: the five colors, sounds, and flavors — the chapter that states the book's sense-discipline: the organs are dulled by their own delights, and the sage serves the belly, not the eye. The chapter the commentarial tradition titled 'Restraining Desire.'
Chinese text
五色令人目盲，五音令人耳聋，五味令人口爽，驰骋畋猎，令人心发狂，难得之货，令人行妨。是以圣人为腹不为目，故去彼取此。
Pinyin
Wǔsè lìng rén mù máng, wǔyīn lìng rén ěr lóng, wǔwèi lìng rén kǒu shuǎng, chíchěng tiánliè, lìng rén xīn fākuáng, nándé zhī huò, lìng rén xíng fáng. Shì yǐ shèngrén wéi fù bù wéi mù, gù qù bǐ qǔ cǐ.
Literal rendering
The five colors blind the human eye; the five sounds deafen the human ear; the five flavors spoil the human mouth; galloping and hunting drive the human heart mad; goods hard to come by obstruct the human conduct. Therefore the sage is for the belly, not for the eye — so he discards that and takes this.
Term-by-term notes
- The verbs run one direction: the organ is dulled by its own delight. 目盲, 耳聋, 口爽 — blinding, deafening, spoiling: the chapter’s claim is not that colors are evil but that saturation disables the organ it feeds — the eye full of colors no longer sees, the ear full of sounds no longer hears. The word 爽 is the translation’s trap, and the gloss tradition is explicit: in this text it means injury (the palate deadened by the five flavors), not refreshment — the modern sense would invert the verse. The site’s ch. 2 page holds the book’s co-rising logic; this chapter is its sensory application: the more the organ gets, the less the organ has.
- The escalation ladder. The verse climbs from the senses (color, sound, flavor) through activity (galloping and hunting — the heart gone wild, 心发狂) to possession (goods hard to come by — conduct obstructed, 行妨): five colors, five sounds, five flavors, then motion, then things. The chapter is the book’s economy of attention in one verse — the site’s xinzhai translation (listen with the qi, not the ear) is the same discipline in practice-language, and the sitting pages’ closing-the-eyes is its smallest daily form.
- The belly and the eye. 为腹不为目 — for the belly, not for the eye: the book’s own split between need (the belly — what the body asks for) and desire (the eye — what the display asks for). The line is the chapter’s answer-formula, and the site holds it as the text-level ancestor of the archive’s own rule that practice follows the body’s conditions rather than the mind’s preferred display. The bed question is a small case: the belly’s posture, not the eye’s.
- 去彼取此 — the chapter’s own name. The closing pair (discard that, take this) gave the received tradition one of its chapter titles; the Heshang Gong line titles the chapter 检欲 — restraining desire — the commentarial reading the site registers as the tradition’s own. The verse itself stays concrete: it names the five, five, five, then motion, then goods — the restraint is listed, not preached.
- The connection kept explicit. The site’s Xiao Zhiguan page documents the later sitting manual’s 调五事 — adjusting food, sleep, body, breath, mind — the same five-front discipline organized into a meditation curriculum. Ch. 12 is the curriculum’s classical warrant: the sense-economy the manual administers was first stated here, as verse.
Sources
- Daodejing ch. 12, received text, verified against four independent reproductions that agree (the Zhihu Wang Bi edition with glosses; the Baidu Baike entry with translation; the Shandong University chapter page; the Daodejing.org chapter page — the last in garbled encoding but matching), with the gloss tradition registered from the same sources: 口爽 in its old sense of injury to the palate, not refreshment; and the Heshang Gong tradition's chapter title 检欲 (restraining desire)