Favor and Disgrace Both Startle (Daodejing 13)
Annotated translation of ch. 13: favor and disgrace both startle; honor great trouble as your own body — the chapter about the self that has trouble because it has a self, and the body held lightly enough to be trusted with the world.
Chinese text
宠辱若惊，贵大患若身。何谓宠辱若惊？宠为下，得之若惊，失之若惊，是谓宠辱若惊。何谓贵大患若身？吾所以有大患者，为吾有身；及吾无身，吾有何患？故贵以身为天下，若可寄天下；爱以身为天下，若可托天下。
Pinyin
Chǒng rǔ ruò jīng, guì dà huàn ruò shēn. Hé wèi chǒng rǔ ruò jīng? Chǒng wéi xià, dé zhī ruò jīng, shī zhī ruò jīng, shì wèi chǒng rǔ ruò jīng. Hé wèi guì dà huàn ruò shēn? Wú suǒyǐ yǒu dà huàn zhě, wéi wú yǒu shēn; jí wú wú shēn, wú yǒu hé huàn? Gù guì yǐ shēn wéi tiānxià, ruò kě jì tiānxià; ài yǐ shēn wéi tiānxià, ruò kě tuō tiānxià.
Literal rendering
Favor and disgrace both startle; honor great trouble as your own body. What does “favor and disgrace both startle” mean? Favor is the lower thing — getting it startles, losing it startles: this is called favor and disgrace both startling. What does “honor great trouble as your own body” mean? The reason I have great trouble is that I have a body; when I have no body, what trouble do I have? Therefore: one who honors the body as the world may be entrusted with the world; one who loves the body as the world may be given the world in trust.
Term-by-term notes
- The first line’s double diagnosis. 宠辱若惊: the chapter’s opening claim is that both directions startle — the gift and the blow — and the Guangming study (registered in verification) notes the chapter is the source of two surviving idioms at once: 受宠若惊 (overwhelmed by favor — the startled half) and 宠辱不惊 (unmoved by either — the cured half). The modern language kept both the illness and the prescription from one verse, which is why the site’s translation keeps 若惊 as “startle” throughout: the flinch is the term.
- 宠为下 — the reading the editions split on. The received Wang Bi text reads 宠为下 (“favor is the lower thing” — the subordinate’s state, the one who receives favor), and the collation records the variant 宠为上 in later editions. The site registers both without adjudicating, per its variant discipline, and notes the received reading’s sharper edge: the whole startle-response belongs to the lower position — the favored one is startled precisely because the favor is not his own.
- 无身 — the trap the whole chapter is. 及吾无身，吾有何患 — and here the commentary tradition, quoted in the verified study, does its most important work: 无身 is not body-elimination (the Guangming study registers the Feng Youlan reading — no-self, selfless, 至人无己 in the Zhuangzi’s phrase — and rebuts the Ren Jiyu literal reading, which would contradict the book’s own 长生久视 of ch. 59). The site’s wu-sang-wo page holds the Zhuangzi twin of the same move: what is lost is the me, not the body — the grammar of 吾丧我 preserves the subject precisely because the loss is of the possessive self. The chapter’s own proof is in its final couplet: the body is to be honored and loved — just held for the world rather than for oneself.
- The counterfactual, not the prescription. 及吾无身 (“when I have no body”) is the chapter’s conditional, and the site keeps it conditional in translation: the verse does not command self-removal; it names the condition under which trouble ends. The ch. 7 translation holds the same logic in the book’s own practice-form (后其身而身先，外其身而身存 — put yourself behind and you come out ahead), and the Guangming study explicitly links the two chapters. The site’s illness question draws the practical line from the same source: the body is not the enemy of the practice; it is the instrument the chapter finally entrusts with the world.
- The trust formula. 贵以身为天下，若可寄天下 — the closing couplet is the chapter’s real subject: the body, held lightly and completely, is the qualification for holding anything. The site keeps the word order’s point (the body is honored as the world — the scale of the honor is the world’s scale), and registers the silk-text variant (贵为身于为天下 — honoring the body in working for the world) as the earlier reading of the same formula, not a different doctrine.
- The word’s later life. The pair 宠辱不惊/受宠若惊 survives in the modern language with the chapter’s sense intact — one of the book’s least-drifted idiom exports — and the site notes the asymmetry: the language kept the startle (the illness) and the unstartled (the cure) but dropped the middle term, 无身, which is where the chapter’s work is done.
Sources
- Daodejing ch. 13, verified against four independent reproductions that agree (the Mawangdui silk A text with the received-text collation at 6dsy.cn, which records the variant 贵为身于为天下 for the received 贵以身为天下; the Shandong University chapter page with the received text; the Qstheory reprint of the Guangming Daily study of the chapter by Zhang Jing, carrying the Gao Heng, Chen Guying, and Zhang Songhui interpretations and the Feng Youlan reading of 无身 as no-self/selfless rather than body-elimination, with the Ren Jiyu counter-reading noted and rebutted; and the Daodejing.org chapter page), with the two idiom records 宠辱不惊 and 受宠若惊 registered from the same Guangming study as both deriving from this chapter