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Chapter 4

The Tao is not substance, it is inexhaustible activity
Acting does not increase it
As it is unfathomable!
It is like the primordial source of all things.
It blunts the sharp
It clarifies the confused
It dims the bright
It orders the elementary parts [“powder”] (of matter)
It is elusive and yet omnipresent
How could it have been begotten?
It is anterior (and superior) to the Lord of Heaven

Commentary

Insubstantiality (“emptiness”) is emphasized, the pure activity of the Principle, that neither expands nor diminishes it (therefore in opposition both to the theory of “becoming” of the Spirit, and to that of its deterioration through emanation). The Taoist image is also that of a vase that, while turning continually, what it contains remains full and in order to fill itself, still remains empty. “Primordial source” is the abstract meaning of tsung in the text, which is literally ancestor, the original father. If the image is conserved, given the part of the regulator typical of the Chinese head of the family, in the fourth line, following some translations, the idea of an ordering power can also be included. Then a natural connection is established with the four successive lines that are about the action of the Tao.

For Taoist metaphysic, the two last lines are important, where the principle is called “without origin” — wu yuan — superior and anterior to the King of Heaven (the Shangdi), i.e., to the personal God. In this passage a certain circumspect way of expressing itself was emphasized linguistically, due to the part that the Shangdi had in the cult of the State under Chou’s dynasty, when the Tao Te Ching was composed. It is like that through a concern for that conception of exoterism. But in the Introduction, we noted the irrelevance of the personal, theistic and anthropomorphic conceptions of the divine to the primordial tradition of the Far East, taken up in its abstract, metaphysical orientation by Lao Tzu. Chuang Tzu (II,3) makes clear that one can admit the principle of a universal regulator (from which the principle of every unity, family, people, etc. derives through participation) but on condition that one does not make a distinct personal being out of what is intended “as an influence without a comprehensible form”.

Chinese text and literal translation

Chapter 4 (第四章)