Translation
Great accomplishment seems incomplete, its use doesn’t harm.
Great fullness seems dynamic[1], its use doesn’t end.
Great straightness seems bent.
Great cleverness seems clumsy.
Great debate seems slow in speech.
Still surpasses impetuous,
Cold surpasses heat.
Clear and still keeps all-under-heaven honest.
1) big (great) accomplish (become; result) like (seem; as if > if > you) lack (incomplete; be absent; vacancy), his (its; that; such) use (apply <frml> hence) no (not) fraud (abuse; disadvantage; harm). 大成若缺，其用不弊。(dà chéng ruò quē, qí yòng bù bì.)
2) big (great) be full of (have) like (seem; as if > if > you) pouring boiling water on (rinse, flush; rush; clash, important place), his (its; that; such) use (apply <frml> hence) no (not) poor (limit; end; extremely). 大盈若冲，其用不穷。(dà yíng ruò chōng, qí yòng bù qióng.)
3) big (great) straight (perpendicular; just; frank; stiff; directly; simply) like (seem; as if > if > you) bend (bow; crook; subdue; wrong; injustice). 大直若屈。(dà zhí ruò qū.)
4) big (great) clever (deceitful; artful; opportunely; coincidentally; as it happens) like (seem; as if > if > you) clumsy (awkward; dull > my). 大巧若拙。(dà qiăo ruò zhuó.)
5) big (great) argue (dispute; debate) like (seem; as if > if > you) slow (of speech). 大辩若讷。(dà biàn ruò nè.)
6) still (quiet; calm) victory (surpass; wonderful; be equal to) rash (impetuous; restless), 静胜躁，(jìng shèng zào,)
7) cold (tremble (with fear) victory (surpass; wonderful; be equal to) heat (hot; warm; ardent; craze; fad; envious; popular). 寒胜热。(hán shèng rè.)
8) quiet (peaceful and quiet) do (act as; be, mean; support) land under heaven straight (upright; main; honest). 清静为天下正。(qīng jìng wéi tiān xià zhēng.)
I can be content with simple life when it feels dynamic enough. So I suppose dynamic is not such a bad translation for chong or chong cao. Of course that begs the question; how to make a simple life feel dynamic? Certainly not by impetuous behavior, although that is the by-path people often prefer. Like Great perfection, contentment is something that is created in the eye of the beholder.
Second Pass: Work in Progress
Issues:
Line 2: chōng (冲) has two slightly different meanings, differentiated by tone. High tone chōng means: pour boiling water on; rinse; flush; charge; rush; dash ; clash; collide. Falling tone chòng means: with vim and vigor; with plenty of dash; vigorously; (of smell) strong; facing; towards; on the strength of; on the basis of.
To me, they convey much the same feeling: vigor, clash, toward, collide all correlate, and dynamic sums that up for me. In other words, ‘Small’ fullness seems stuffed, without room for dynamic ‘vigor’.
Line 8: Quiet keeps all-under-heaven honest replaces Clear and still keeps all-under-heaven honest. Each character in the dual character qīngjìng (清静) means something slightly different: Qīng (清) unmixed; clear; distinct; clarified; completely; settle, and Jìng (静) still; quiet; calm — basically ‘clear’ and ‘still’ respectively, but together they mean quiet, so I’ll go with the combined meaning this time.
Commentary:
I’ve come to enjoy so much the view that Great perfection seems chipped, Yet use will not wear it out. That Great accomplishment seems incomplete, its use doesn’t harm may be closer to the literal doesn’t make it better. Of course, that goes for so much of this. The meaning you take away is the meaning you give to it. The particular words used are merely go-betweens. Even so, it helps to consider other ways of interpreting meaning. Only a Taoist could truly appreciate President Clintons statement, “It depends on what the meaning of is is”.
Great accomplishment seems incomplete speaks of nature to me. Nature is great accomplishment or great perfection, and it is never finished accomplishing—the process is perfect. You could say nature is a work in progress. If nature is this way, isn’t everything within nature’s realm also a work in progress? The great accomplishment or great perfection that can be described in terms of what it is (or isn’t) symbolizes human hierarchical needs and fears, and our desperate need to ‘pin it down’, have it done with and move on. To paraphrase chapter 1, The Great accomplishment possible to think, runs counter to the constant Great accomplishment.
Great cleverness seems clumsy and Great debate seems slow in speech because they take place at the edge of the unknown. Where known meets unknown is the land of the beginner, not of the ‘accomplished’. An infant learning to walk and talk displays this edge nicely. No other human experience compared to the transition from infancy ‘knowing, yet not thinking one knows’ to the adulthood ‘not knowing, yet thinking one knows’… Like an infant, not a child; Breathing in and out with a place to return to. I find it always fascinating to weigh the discrepancy between who we think we are (superior), and who we actually are (just another of nature’s myriad creatures who happens to be able to think).
Cold surpasses heat puts me in mind of the eternal nature of cold… absolute zero perhaps. The big bang was a hot, hot firecracker, but ‘soon’ cooled and is headed to zero, or? Perhaps from absolute zero the firecracker pops again and off we go. The Taoist word view attempts to see nature as it is. It is ruthless, in an impartial fair-and-balance way, I should add.
I like the idea that Quiet keeps all-under-heaven honest. I’m a little foggy on what that implies, beyond the obvious. The saying, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks” takes the misdirection of speech to the extreme. Seeing anything out-there as anything other that the way will always be something less than completely honest. As chapter 56 puts it, Knowing doesn’t speak; speaking doesn’t know.
Suggested Revision:
Great accomplishment seems incomplete, its use doesn’t harm.
Great fullness seems dynamic, its use doesn’t end.
Great straightness seems bent.
Great cleverness seems clumsy.
Great debate seems slow in speech.
Still surpasses impetuous,
Cold surpasses heat.
Quiet keeps all-under-heaven honest.
First Pass: Chapter of the Week
Among other things, this chapter takes a gentle swipe at so-called objective awareness. What does that mean? Let’s return to beginning. At birth, consciousness exists as a moment-to-moment subjective awareness (and/or visa versa?). With non thinking animals, awareness continues to be subjective throughout life. We, on the other hand, soon associate names and words with our subjective perceptions. Subsequently, we mentally manipulate these perceptual objects in mind-space and presto, we get so-called ‘objective’ awareness. This enables us to think that we know.
Naming something as straight, for example, requires the category of straightness and its counter part bendiness. Both are needed to nail down (‘know’) the distinction. Likewise, if you believe accomplishment is real, then you can’t help but believe its counterparts incompleteness and failure are real also. Perception becomes stuck in a vicious circle choosing one side, the other side, or a confused in-between. Alas, words and names make vicious circles an inevitable characteristic of objective awareness.
Whoa, cycling circles… I’m getting dizzy! Fortunately taking the broader view helps quiet down this circle cycle. Here, Great comes into sight as one begins to notice how opposites produce each other (i.e., off-set, compliment, follow, harmonize with). Naturally, you’ll eventually become capable of not knowing anything,(1) and little more. Hmm… perhaps this is why few are attracted to a Taoist point of view. “Not knowing anything” is hardly an enviable or award-winning accomplishment.
The idea of Great ____(you name it)____ reminds me of the moment I saw garbage floating in a canal in Tokyo and it looked Great. I mean it really looked beautiful. That was the first time I felt Great perfection seems chipped. Up until that moment, I’d always regarded garbage and pollution as something ugly and incomplete (being the neat and tidy freak that I am).
The generally held sense of perfection is a state of being that has an end point; something can be accomplished (or at least work towards). I think of Great perfection, Taoist style, as something that lives in the eye of the beholder. It can’t be made, found, achieved, meddled with, drained or destroyed. It only exists in our point of view. Finding this point of view within myself has been liberating, for it relieves me of the arbitrary and often hypocritical standards of an exceedingly clever species like us. I guess only in a taoist view of life is cleverness not all it is cracked up to be, i.e., when cleverness emerges there is great hypocrisy.
(1) To be fair (and practical) one can’t survive in society ‘not knowing anything’. However, I find ‘not knowing anything’ to be a Great vacation. I find that losing trust in the certainty of differences and shifting faith over to mysterious sameness makes popping in and out of ‘not knowing anything’ fairly easy for the most part.
So how does one go about finding faith in ‘mysterious sameness’? Lose trust in the reality of words. How? I suppose the answer to that is the same as how one loses trust in anyone or anything. Mainly you become aware of the dishonesty, duplicity, and deviousness, and don’t wish to play along anymore. Evidence is all around us – it’s an open secret. Yet we are conditioned from birth to believe, so it is difficult to see what even a infant sees. Correlations may help a few, other wise, your guess is as good as mine.