妙道凝玄 The Wonderful Way Holds the Dark
逐句解 Line by line
Without ceasing and without arising, it passes a thousand fathoms and spans all antiquity;
無滅無生 — neither perishing nor being born. It is the Buddhist formula for what is unconditioned, and the emperor drops it in without explanation, trusting his court to know it. 千仞 — a thousand rèn, an old measure of about eight feet, used for the height of cliffs. The pair sets a measure of depth against a measure of time.
seeming hidden and seeming manifest, it carries a hundred blessings and lasts to this day.
長今 — long unto now. Its first character is read cháng, long in extent, not zhǎng, elder or to grow, which is how it reads in the title everybody in this chapter uses for the Tang monk. 若潛若顯 picks up the hidden-and-manifest pairing from the opening. Nothing in this document is introduced that is not used again.
The wonderful Way holds the dark congealed within it, and those who follow where it leads do not know its limit;
凝玄 — congealing the dark, holding mystery in solid form. 玄 is the deep blue-black of a night sky, and by extension everything obscure and profound; it is the word the Daoists built their vocabulary on. So a Confucian emperor praising a Buddhist teaching does it in Daoist language. The novel does that constantly; here the historical document does it for him.
the stream of the Law runs deep and still, and draw as they may they cannot sound its source.
挹 is to ladle water out of something. Doubling it makes the drawing continuous — bail and bail and bail, and you never reach the bottom. The received text of the preface reads 挹之莫測, draw at it and you cannot sound it, where this edition prints the doubled form. It is the second place in this passage where the 世德堂本 departs from the transmitted document. 湛寂 — deep and still, the surface of water that gives nothing away.
So we know: could the wriggling common fool, the paltry and the vulgar, throw himself into the drift of it and be free of doubt?
蠢蠢 — squirming, wriggling. It is the word for insect larvae moving, and the emperor applies it to ordinary people. 區區庸鄙 — petty, common, coarse. Four more characters in the same direction. And the sentence ends on a rhetorical question with no answer given. The whole opening movement has been building a case that the invisible cannot be grasped — and it closes by asking whether an ordinary man could possibly take this in without doubting. The emperor does not say no. He does not have to.
The opening movement closes, and it closes on the reader. Neither perishing nor arising, spanning a thousand fathoms and all antiquity, hidden and manifest at once, deep as still water that you can bail at forever without reaching the bottom.
Notice the vocabulary. A Confucian emperor praising a Buddhist teaching does it in Daoist words — 玄, the blue-black of a night sky and the root of the whole Daoist lexicon, and a Way that congeals mystery. The novel mixes its three religions on every other page; here the genuine seventh-century document does it for it.
And then the question. Could the wriggling common fool — the word is the one for insect larvae — throw himself into all this and come out without doubts? It is asked and not answered, which is the most honest thing in the preface. The emperor has spent thirty lines proving the invisible cannot be grasped, and he is not going to pretend that ordinary people are exempt.