The Way Gives Birth to One (Daodejing 42)
Annotated translation of ch. 42: the Way gives birth to one, one to two, two to three, three to the ten thousand things — every thing carrying yin on its back and embracing yang in front, the surging qi making the harmony. Then the chapter turns to the names kings take for themselves, the reversal of loss and gain, and the old saying taken as the teaching's father.
Chinese text
道生一，一生二，二生三，三生万物。万物负阴而抱阳，冲气以为和。人之所恶，唯孤、寡、不榖，而王公以为称。故物或损之而益，或益之而损。人之所教，我亦教之。强梁者不得其死，吾将以为教父。
Pinyin
Dào shēng yī, yī shēng èr, èr shēng sān, sān shēng wànwù. Wànwù fù yīn ér bào yáng, chōng qì yǐ wéi hé. Rén zhī suǒ wù, wéi gū, guǎ, bù gǔ, ér wánggōng yǐ wéi chēng. Gù wù huò sǔn zhī ér yì, huò yì zhī ér sǔn. Rén zhī suǒ jiào, wǒ yì jiào zhī. Qiángliáng zhě bù dé qí sǐ, wú jiāng yǐ wéi jiàofù.
Literal rendering
The Way gives birth to one; one gives birth to two; two gives birth to three; three gives birth to the ten thousand things. The ten thousand things carry yin on their backs and embrace yang in front; the surging qi makes the harmony. What people detest — orphan, alone, unworthy — the kings and dukes take as their titles. Therefore things may be diminished and thereby increased, increased and thereby diminished. What people have taught, I also teach: the violent do not come to a natural death. This I will take as the father of teaching.
Term-by-term notes
- The generation ladder, read as unfolding. 道生一，一生二，二生三，三生万物 is the book’s only cosmological sequence, and the tradition has always warned against reading it as arithmetic. The Ministry of Education reference entry preserves the standard reading: 一 is the Way’s alias for the undivided (the same 混而为一 the ch. 14 page holds), 二 the division into the two poles, 三 the third that the two produce between them — and the ten thousand things the unfolding of that third. The numbers are stages of differentiation, not a count of entities: the ladder’s point is the sequence, not the sum. The site keeps the reading discipline on the dao page: the chapter describes the Way’s way of producing, not a recipe or a physics.
- The body’s own geography. 万物负阴而抱阳 — the ten thousand things carry yin on their backs and embrace yang in front — is drawn from a standing body: the back is the shadow side, the chest the sun-facing side, and every thing is this double posture at once. The sentence is the book’s most economical statement of its paired view of things, and it names the carrying as universal: no thing is a single pole. The site’s ch. 25 page holds the mother of the claim (the thing that was undivided before heaven and earth), and the qi page the vocabulary: what the things carry and embrace is qi, and the next clause says what it does.
- 冲气以为和 — the surging qi makes the harmony. 冲 is the empty-family’s own word — the same as ch. 4’s 道冲 (the Way rushes, empty) and ch. 45’s 大盈若冲 (the great fullness seems empty) — and here it does the family’s characteristic work: the two poles, surging into each other, produce not a battle but a 和, a blending. The site’s emptiness pages hold the general claim: what the two poles flow into is the emptiness between them, and what comes out is the harmony. The character variant is registered without adjudication: the received text reads 冲, and the h2o-china comparative study reports the Mawangdui silk-text reading 中 (the middle qi makes the harmony) — the two readings stand side by side in the tradition, and both point at the same between-space.
- The names the kings take. 人之所恶，唯孤、寡、不榖，而王公以为称 — what people detest, the kings take as titles: orphan (孤), alone (寡), unworthy (不榖). The sentence is the reversal-logic of the ch. 22 page (the low pole wins: 曲则全) applied to the throne: the ruler who calls himself by the low names is claiming the low pole on purpose — and the book’s next line gives the arithmetic. The king’s title is the chapter’s exhibit, not its doctrine; the doctrine is the next sentence.
- The reversal pair. 物或损之而益，或益之而损 — things may be diminished and thereby increased, increased and thereby diminished — is the book’s general law of which the king’s self-naming is one case, and it belongs to the site’s reversal family: the ch. 22 page (the low pole wins) and the ch. 40 page (反者道之动 — the Way’s motion is reversal). The chapter’s placement is deliberate: the cosmology (one, two, three) is the unfolding half, and this pair is the returning half — what the ladder produces, the reversal governs.
- The teaching’s father is a received saying. The chapter ends by naming its source: 人之所教，我亦教之 — what people have taught, I also teach — and the teaching itself: 强梁者不得其死 (the violent do not come to a natural death), 吾将以为教父 (this I take as the father of teaching). 教父 is the teaching’s head, its beginning (the traditional gloss reads 父 as 始) — the book’s claim is not that it invented the lesson but that it received it, and that the received lesson, not the cosmology, is where the teaching starts. The site’s source-verification tool holds the same instinct as a method: a teaching that names its father is a teaching that can be checked.
- The boundary the site keeps. The generation ladder is the book’s cosmology, and the site registers it as such — not as a claim about physics, biology, or history, and not as a practice instruction. The chapter’s usable content is the two structures it pairs with the ladder: the reversal law (loss and gain trade places) and the received-saying discipline (the teaching begins from what was already taught). The qi page holds the standing disclaimer for the qi vocabulary throughout.
Sources
- Daodejing ch. 42, verified against multiple independent reproductions that agree on the received text (the Baidu Baike chapter page carrying the full chapter with the Liu Xianyin redaction; the mindiver.se full-chapter study carrying the complete chapter text and commentary; the Shandong University chapter page; the Apple Podcasts chapter reading; the h2o-china comparative study; the Taiwan Ministry of Education reference entry on 道生一): 道生一，一生二，二生三，三生万物。万物负阴而抱阳，冲气以为和。人之所恶，唯孤、寡、不榖，而王公以为称。故物或损之而益，或益之而损。人之所教，我亦教之。强梁者不得其死，吾将以为教父 — with the character variant registered without adjudication (冲气 in the received text; the h2o-china comparative study reports the Mawangdui silk-text reading 中气以为和, and 不榖 appears variously as 不谷)