Gate of All Mysteries is a two-year (ten minutes per week) close reading of the Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) — the ancient Chinese text that gave us the idea of the ‘Dao’ (‘Way’), and a text so compressed and cryptic that every translation is a seriously filtered interpretation. I will guide you through a reading of it in its original Classical Chinese.
No knowledge of Chinese is required: the chapters are short, and each post walks through the Chinese text character by character — what each word means, how the grammar works, what the philosophical issues are, how other translators have interpreted things — and invites you to arrive at your own reading rather than relying on another person’s interpretation.
Once we commence with the first chapter, a new post will appear every Friday.
The Daodejing consists of 81 short, self-contained philosophical poems, and historically they sometimes circulated in different orders. So you don’t need to start at the beginning — pick any chapter and see what it has to tell you.
Here are the key posts you may want to read first to provide context:
A Primer on Classical Chinese and Pinyin (coming 5-June)
The Warring States & the Hundred Schools (coming 19-June)
And many posts will also reference these pages:
The Table of Contents is here.
About the Title
The title for this project, “Gate of All Mysteries,” comes from the final four characters of Chapter 1:
衆妙之門
zhòng miào zhī mén.
[multitude/all] [subtlety/wonder/mystery] [’s] [gate].
The words zhong 衆 and zhi 之 are straightforward enough, but in the lexicon I discuss men 門 and miao 妙 in some detail.
