Notes

1 This being the first sentence of the (traditional) text, some translators have tried to get clever about rendering into English the Chinese pun: "way" and "say" both are translations of 道 dào. Thus we can find "The way that can be weighed ...", and so forth. In fact, the ancient pronunciation of 道 dào is "drog" or "dorg", with cognates in both Indo-European and Semitic languages [Mair, p 132]. A translation using English cognates would be "The track that can be trekked ...".

2 This word is usually translated "eternal", but I think "real" captures best why the eternal Tao, the eternal name, are so important.

3 From Victor Mair, pp 111-112:

There would appear to be a contradiction between these two lines because "origin" and "mother" seem to mean the same thing. The editor(s) of the received text accordingly changed "myriad creatures" in the [first line of the two] to "heaven and earth" in order to make it look like there was a difference in content between the predicates of the two lines. Yet both of the Ma-wang-tui manuscripts clearly have "myriad creatures" in both of the lines. ... The real distinction between the two lines lies in the fact that the "nameless" refers to the Tao (the "origin") while the "named" signifies the fecund phenomenal universe ("mother") as it evolves after the primal beginning. Thus we see that although "origin" and "mother" are grammatically and syntactically parallel, they are not semantically identical.

I have kept my literal translation to the traditional text, but changed my idiomatic translation to reflect Mair's point of view, and the Ma-wang-tui texts.

4 My take on the concept of "manifestations". Some translators think of the "mysteries" part of this as the only true way to live, while the "manifestations" part is not worthy of the sage. Others seem to put them more on an equal basis, and the sage should be prepared to do both. I am in the second camp, based on my reading of the following sentence.

5 There is an undercurrent of meaning to this word which refers to a human as the referent, not just an arbitrary object. I make it explicit, because we are not talking about arbitrary objects holding or losing their desires — we are talking about people.