“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be. When I let go of what I have, I receive what I need.” Tao Te Ching
Since the Chinese do not use Latin forms of writing, but ideograms to express ideas, there is no uniformity in the words when reproduced with symbols of the Latin alphabet. Thus, Lao Tzu, Tao, Te, King, admit several spellings, such as Lau Tsi, Dau, Che, Ching, etc.
Tao - means the Absolute, the Infinite, the Essence, the Supreme Reality, the Divine, Cosmic Intelligence, Universal Life, Invisible Consciousness, the Unknowable, etc. It never is an individual, a person, as God in Western theology.
Te - can be translated by the path, guidance, revelation.
Ching - matches with book, written document.
Tao Te Ching can be translated as “Book that leads to the Deity,” or “The Book that reveals God”.
In this translation of the text, Huberto Rohden (1893-1981), Brazilian philosopher, educator, theologian guided it in part by the German translators Rudolf Backofen and Werner Zimmerman, version that he considered closest to the original (1).
Since written Chinese uses ideograms rather than letters, every word allows wide possibilities of meaning and variants; remembering that those translators resorted to more than 30 different words to express the sense of the Chinese character for Tao, and they were not interested to reproduce the shape of the word, but the soul of the text, and its context.
According to the ideographic writings, it is more important the feeling, to guess, to sniff out the exact meaning of each symbol than to transliterate the respective ideogram properly. For this reason, readers probably will find terms not found in other translations. The elasticity of an oriental ideogram allows large numbers of variants when expressed by a rigid mechanistic Western word.
In fact, the trouble of almost every translation known - not only in the case of Tao, nor of ideograms – is because the translator usually tries to translate mechanically, word by word, the body of a book, rather than organically interpreting the soul of the book, the essence of the author ideas.
The well-known Italian proverb “traduttore traditore” (the translator is a traitor), is justified in the case of making a mechanical translation, rather than an organic one - as if the thought was something like computer software, and not from a spiritual human entity.
To translate without betraying is a work of a true artist; is not only the act of understanding the idea of the writer, but it is also necessary to feel his soul as well.
“God, Brahman, Yahweh and the Tao - what is meant by this word?
For many, God is a kind of celestial dictator, a person who watches from afar, men and their records of credits and debits, rewarding them or punishing them after death, sending the good ones to eternal heaven and the bad ones to eternal hell.
This primitive infantilism dominates the Christian theologies for more than two thousand years, and although there are large variations of this conception of God, in the background is the anthropomorphic idea that prevails.
However, this concept has nothing to do with Tao.
In his book “Mein Weltbild” – The World as I See It - Einstein beautifully describes three kinds of the conception of God:
1)- The concept of God-machine, among the more primitive peoples,
2)- The concept of God-person, among the Hebrew Old Testament in general and among Christians of all times and countries,
3)- The concept of God-cosmic, professed by a few advanced mystics, whose representatives exceed churches and theologies, and are sporadically among all peoples and all religions.
Einstein enumerates, among the third class, Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza, the first, a pagan, one Christian and one Jew, saying they are brothers in the same faith.
Lao Tse and his concept of Tao could be included in the third group of Cosmo-sapient mystics.
The spiritual elite of Eastern society and the true mystics of the West are the most advanced representatives of the spiritual culture of humankind; they all profess the idea of the cosmic God. They are not polytheist, pantheist or, even monotheist – they are Cosmo-monist.
The monotheist recognizes only one God-person dwelling in heaven. The Hebrews in Moses' time, never got the idea of one God to the world, admitted one God to Israel, the God of hosts. Monotheism never reached the heights of true monism. All monotheist is viscerally a dualist, that is, admits the existence of a transcendent God, a God-person who lives in a remote region of the Cosmos in where man expects to find Him after death.
This concept of encounter with God in a future time and distant space is common to all monotheistic. This dualist-monotheist concept of God gripped from the beginning of Western Christianity, is perfectly understandable, since the first disciples of Jesus came from Judaism. Even today, the Christian theology of the West has not been fully delivered from this heritage. Christian mystics, followers of the cosmic monism, were persecuted, excommunicated, or at least considered suspected of heresy.
When a child thinks in adult terms is no longer a child, and kindergartens rush to expel the foreign element.
The more man finds himself as a Cosmo universal being, he becomes much less unilateral and so much broader, relative to all sides or dimensions is his wisdom. The colourful light of the way of his thinking reveals the colourless light of his divine experience, the origin of all colours.
For the cosmic monist, God is a Unique Reality, the Essence (the Creator, Source) which is revealed repeatedly through the plurality of existences, through its finite (creatures, channels). The creatures are not new realities, but just new manifestations of one Reality; they are the Infinite Essence spreading in finite existences.
Given the omnipresence of the Infinite, is evident that all finite is in the Infinite and the Infinite is present in all finite.
The monism in this way conceived is strictly logical and reveals an exact mathematical precision.
Any philosophy or superior wisdom unfailingly culminates in cosmic monism, equidistant from the separatist dualism and from the pantheism. For the monist, everything is in God, and God is in everything - but everything is not God, either God is everything; the creatures are not separated from God or identical to God.
All true geniuses of the human race thought and felt in terms of cosmic monism, which the brightest example is the Christ of the Gospel.
In addition, how could Lao Tse, the great genius of Chinese wisdom, have thought and felt differently? Through 81 briefest chapters of the Tao Te Ching pounces, like a thread of light, the experience of the Infinite, the Absolute, the One, which manifests itself through the finite, the relative, the creatures.
The wisdom of Lao Tse is typically universal: from the One emanates all the finite, but the finite is part of the Infinite although the One Infinite transcends the entire finite, yet this is inherent in that.
Lao-Tzu’s wisdom is typically universal: from the One, the creatures emanate and they are in the One, although the One transcends all creatures, they are immanent in the One.
The Tao can be considered as the God, the Absolute, the Infinite, the Eternal, the Unfathomable, the One, the All, the Source, the Cause, the Reality, the Soul of the Universe, Life, Intelligence, Cosmic Consciousness, Universal, etc.
If the reader is still not fully identified with the consciousness of the universal cosmic monism of Lao Tse, he will not understand the soul of the Tao Te Ching.”
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(1)- Professor Rohden translated into Portuguese from the German, the book in reference. The considerations above are part of his foreword.
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