Five Views of Lao Tzu

Lao Tzu, the "Old Master"

 FIVE VIEWS OF LAO TZU

In the late 60s I discovered the Tao Te Ching, a 2500-year-old Chinese text attributed to Lao Tzu, the "Old Master", which forms the basis of Taoist philosophy and is one of the world's most translated books. Over the years I've collected about a dozen versions of this Chinese classic and would like to share five of my favorites here.

"Tao Te Ching" literally means "Way Virtue Book"or "Book of the Virtue of The Way" and its 81 concise chapters concern themselves with eliciting the nature of The Way (Tao) and how and why one might best follow that Way. Tao might also be construed to mean "Nature", both physical nature and especially human nature. The Tao Te Ching tries to capture the unspeakable elusiveness, ambiguity and power of human and physical nature, The Chinese character "Tao" is also  the "-do" in Aikido, Tai Kwan Do and similar oriental martial arts. Spontaneous dance, jazz improv, surfing: each a splendid embodiment of the Tao. Especially surfing.

The popular philosopher Alan Watts never attempted a translation of this ancient Chinese text. But Watts did write a book on Taoism naming it "The Watercourse Way."

Bushido (Japanese): the way of the warrior.

In keeping with the quirky nature of this sacred Chinese text, the Tao Te Ching begins with a pun. The Chinese character "Tao" can mean both "the Way" and "to speak". So the first line of the watercourse way can be rendered "The tao that can be taoed is not the tao." From then on it just gets deeper.

Here I'm posting five different versions of Lao Tzu's first short chapter by five very different translators (including myself).

First up is Ursula Le Guin, a prolific author of science fiction and fantasy, whose NAFAL (Nearly-As-Fast-As-Light) starships and her instant ansible communicator entered the sci-fi canon and has been adopted by other writers. Le Guin's stories, however, are not primarily about hardware but about people, and about cultures depicted in empathetic and imaginative prose. Of the five translators, Le Guin, because of her sympathetic treatment of so many of her fictional people,  seems best positioned to express the human nature of the Watercourse Way.

Taoing

The way you can go
isn't the real way.
The name you can say
Isn't the real name.

Heaven and earth
begin in the unnamed:
name's the mother
of the ten thousand things.

So the unwanting soul
sees what's hidden
and the ever-wanting soul
sees only what it wants.

Two things: one origin
but different in name,
whose identity is mystery.
Mystery of all mysteries!
The door to the hidden.

US postage stamp honoring Ursula Le Guin

When I was working at Memorex in Silicon Valley, on my long drive home to Boulder Creek, I would sometimes stop for hot tub, tea and conversation at Stillpoint, a mountain top retreat center presided over by Gia-fu Feng, who taught Tai Chi and kept the books on his abacus in the early days of Esalen Institute. Gia-fu christened my son Khola at Stillpoint and gave him a Chinese middle name "Shou" which means 'long life". Gia-fu and his wife, physicist/photographer Jane English put together one of the most physically beautiful versions of the Tao Te Ching illustrated with Jane's evocative black-and-white photographs and Gia-fu's hand-drawn calligraphy. Of all five translators (including me) Gia-fu is the only one that spoke Chinese.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of ten thousand things.
Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.
Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations.
These two spring from the same source but differ in name:
     this appears as darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gate to all mystery.

Gia-fu Feng at Stillpoint

 Next up is former Harvard professor and LSD advocate Timothy Leary. I interacted many times with Leary (never got stoned with him) in several different contexts. Leary holds the unusual distinction of being arrested and imprisoned for carrying (a tiny bit of) marijuana INTO MEXICO. Even after drugs Leary was an instinctive academic and wrote lots and lots of books about his experiences with these then-outlawed mind-altering substances. Leary's version of the Chinese classic, Psychedelic Prayers, imagines that the 81 verses of the Tao Te Ching describe the perfect acid trip.

That Which is Called The Tao

Is Not The Tao

 

The flow of energy .  .  .  .  .  .

Here  .  .  .  .  
              It  .  .  .  .  .  .
              Is  .  .  .  .  .  .

Nameless  .  .  .  .  .
Timeless  .  .  .  .  .
Speed of light  .  .  .  .  .

Float  .  .  .  .  .  .  beyond fear  .  .  .  .  .
Float  .  .  .  .  .  .  beyond desire  .  .  .  .

Into  .  .  .  .  .  this Mystery of Mysteries
through this Gate  .  .  .  .  .  of All Wonder 

Dr. Timothy Leary, PhD

My first literary introduction to the Pathless Tao was via The Way of Life by Witter Bynner. Bynner was a Harvard graduate, a scholar and writer who divided his time between Sante Fe, NM and Chapala in Mexico. Bynner was a close friend of D. H. Lawrence with whom he explored Mexico and gathered experiences that inspired Lawrence's novel The Plumed Serpent. Bynner's version of the Tao appears a bit dated compared to Ursula Le Guin's splendid modern rendition, but I first fell under the spell of the Tao through his particular words. And first loves are often our most memorable.

Existence is beyond the power of words
To define:
Terms may be used
But are none of them absolute.
In the beginning of heaven and earth there were no words.
Words came out of the womb of matter;
And whether a man dispassionately
Sees to the core of life
Or passionately
Sees the surface,
The core and the surface
Are essentially the same,
Words making them seem different
Only to express appearance.
If name be needed, wonder names them both:
From wonder into wonder
Existence opens.

Witter Bynner by Rockwell Kent

My own version of the Tao Te Ching is inspired by the crazy paradoxes of quantum theory. Here we have a perfect mathematical representation of the world. But not even the smartest physicist can explain to his kids "what Nature is actually doing" at the sub-atomic level. Nor can we really justify how this unvisualizable quantum reality turns into the ordinary reality we experience every day. I hoped eventually to devise a physics version of all 81 chapters of the Chinese classic, but only managed to compose the very first. To follow the tradition of beginning with a pun, I use the term "quantum state" as a physicist's customary way of representing the invisible quantum world. None of us really know what sort of "reality" corresponds to a quantum state, but a good deal of modern technology (this computer for instance) directly grew out of our increasing ability to manipulate these mysterious mathematical objects.

THE TAO OF PHYSICS

The state you can state is not things-as-they-are
Language, like highway, goes only so far
Unnamed is the Source from which everything springs
Naming gives rise to the "Ten Thousand Things"
Unlooked at: She exceeds what can possibly be
What you get when you look? No more than you see
Yet the world She is One whether looked at or not
Nature's own nature's not something that's taught
But reach out to feel Her invisible flesh
Hear, see and smell: everything fresh!

 

Nick Herbert composed this post

 

 

 

Time Machine Design

Japanese Translation of Nick Herbert's Faster Than Light

Starting from the upper right, and reading downward, the characters are phonetic ta-i-mu, but the ending u goes silent, so this is "time" and is written in English (katakana).

The middle column phonetically reads ma-shi-n, or "machine" again written in English.  The bottom character is the phonetic Japanese particle -no- indicating possession.

The top character in the left column is the verb tsuku- which means "to build", and it is followed by a phonetic -ri, turning it into a noun meaning "construction".

The bottom character on the left is kata (the same word as in martial arts), meaning "form".  The composite tsukurikata means "building instructions".

So the whole thing reads time machine no tsukurikata which literally means "time machine's building instructions" -- Cool!

(translation by Alec MacCall, Santa Cruz NOAA scientist and Celtic musician). Thanks, Alec.

=====================================

How could the ability to signal faster-than-light be used to construct a time machine? Here physicist/programmer Richard Baker shows what you would need to send a signal from the present to the past if your FTL signal was infinitely fast--instantaneous communication as in Ursula LeGuin's science-fiction "ansible". 

Baker starts by considering the rest frame V = 0 and drawing a Minkowski diagram with time increasing in the upward direction and one spatial dimension plotted in the sidewards direction. In this diagram, the speed-of-light limit divides spacetime into two distinct regions: 1) those events that can be causally connected to point P (which are called "time-like") and 2) those events that are causally disconnected from P--called "space-like". In Baker's diagram time-like events occur in the yellow region, which is called the "light-cone", and space-like events occur in the blue region, called the "absolute elsewhere".

If we could send an instantaneous signal from P, it would travel along the white horizontal axis (t = 0) in FIG 1, but it would not go backwards in time. To build a time machine we need to introduce a second reference frame moving to the right at velocity V with respect to the rest frame.

FIG 1 -- Spacetime diagram: Rest Frame V = 0

The fundamental premise of Einstein's theory of special relativity is that space and time look different for observers that are in relative motion. A system of equations called the Lorentz Transformations shows how to translate between the spacetime events as they appear to an observer in the rest frame (V = 0) and to an observer in the frame moving at velocity V.

FIG 2 -- V= 1/4 c Frame as seen in V = 0 Rest Frame

Assume that our moving frame is traveling at 1/4 of the speed of light. This moving frame is bounded by the same light cones but in the rest frame the moving frames time and space axes seem tilted as
shown by heavy blue lines in FIG 2. Now if the observer in the moving frame sends an instantaneous signal to the right--the direction of his frame's motion--it will always go forward in time (as seen from the rest frame). However, if the moving observer sends an instant signal in the opposite direction, it will seem (in the rest frame) to go backwards in time.

One way to remember the direction of this effect is to imagine running on an escalator. If you run UP the UP escalator, all you do is go faster. But if you run DOWN the UP escalator fast enough you can go backwards in time.

The signal goes back in time but it is traveling into the rest frame's elsewhere. To construct a time machine in the rest frame we have to bounce that signal back. This is accomplished with a second frame located at distance D traveling at velocity minus V. We do the "DOWN the UP escalator trick" in this second frame and the signal returns to the rest frame BEFORE IT WAS SENT.

Richard Baker concisely derives the time machine effect for FTL signals which travel instantly. I will follow his example (and modify his diagrams) for FTL signals of finite velocity Z where Z is greater than c--the velocity of light. I will derive the "time machine equation" for all frame velocities V and all FTL signaling velocities Z, but in FIG 3 will show the results for only one frame speed (V = 1/4 c) and three FTL speeds (Z = 2c, 4c and 8c).

FIG 3 -- FTL signals (Z = 2c, 4c, 8c) in the 1/4 c frame--viewed from the Rest Frame

Deriving the time machine equation is a schoolgirl exercise in special relativity. Lorentz transforming into the moving frame, putting in a slanted line representing a signal traveling at velocity Z, then transforming back to the rest frame, it is easy to see that the "time machine factor" F is given by the simple expression:

F = (ZV - 1)/(Z - V)

when Z and V are expressed in multiples of c, F is a dimensionless number proportional to how far back you go in time when sending an FTL signal Z a distance D from a frame traveling at velocity V. Only if F is positive do signals go backwards in time.

The "one-way time-travel equation" is: T = FD

For example if D = 1 light-year and F = 1/2 then T is 1/2 year backwards in time. Since the time machine is not complete unless we bounce the signal back, this number must be doubled.

The "time machine equation" is: T = 2FD

It is easy to see that the time machine factor will only be positive if Z > 1/V. Therefore for a pair of frames moving at V = 1/4 c, the FTL signal must be faster than 4c for the time machine to work. FIG 3 shows three values of Z. For Z = 2c, the signal goes into the future; for Z = 4c, the signal stays at t = 0, traveling neither into the past nor the future. For Z = 8c, the signal travels into the past. Only the last FTL signal is fast enough to build a time machine.

As the speed Z is made faster and faster, the time machine factor F goes to V. Thus the time machine expression T(instant) for instantaneous (ansible-class) signal speeds is:

T(instant) = 2VD

To put these numbers in perspective, we imagine building a time machine that sends an FTL signal from Earth to the Moon and back that arrives at Earth before it was sent. For our moving frames we use rotating disks whose rim velocities are V = 1/4c from which FTL signals can be sent and received at speed Z. To keep the numbers simple, we assume the Earth-Moon distance to be D = 2 light-seconds.

Time Machine operating between Earth and Moon

To operate the time machine we send the FTL signal when the disk is moving in the opposite direction to the motion of the FTL signal (using the DOWN the UP elevator effect) and we receive this signal at a detector moving at the same speed and direction as the sender. When V = 1/4c and Z = 8c, the time machine factor F is 0.129. From the time machine equation we see that the signal will/did arrive at Earth about 1/2 second before it was sent. The signal can be resent N times and progressively displaced 1/2 N second backwards in time but no further back than when the machine was first turned on.

For Z = 8c, the one-bounce time travel is 1/2 second. If the machine were operating in ansible mode (Z = infinity), the time machine factor F is equal to V which in this case is 1/4. Hence in ansible mode the one-bounce time travel interval is 4 x 1/4 = one second backwards in time.

Faster-than-light signaling devices have long been a science-fiction staple, from Ursula LeGuin's ansible to Star Trek's subspace radio. A short review of famous fictional FTL devices can be found here.

Artist's conception of Ursula LeGuin's Ansible FTL communicator