The Dao Without Name

The word Tao, or Dao, in the pinyin transcription of Chinese which is becoming the new universal standard, is untranslatable. It literally means ‘way’, ‘path’, but, although it is also used in this specific sense, in the Daoist tradition it indicates something much more subtle, which can only be described indirectly. The Daodejing, the fundamental text of Daoism, begins like this:

The Dao that can be spoken of is not the eternal Dao,
the name that can be pronounced is not the eternal name.

Dao therefore alludes to something that is beyond any conceptualization. Any description that can be given of it is necessarily partial and even, in a profound sense, misleading. If we want to somehow convey the aura of the word, we could say that it embraces the idea of ​​the ‘ultimate nature of things’, of ‘source, root, principle,’ of ‘intrinsic movement of the whole’. It is easier to describe it in negative terms than positive ones. The Dao ‘does not act’, but in this non-action everything is spontaneously accomplished. It is ’empty’, but the overflow of this emptiness is the fullness of the universe, the emergence and dissolution of forms. It is an ’empty vessel whose use is inexhaustible’ and ‘the ancestor of myriad beings’. The void, the cavity, the valley, the feminine are some of the metaphors with which we can approach it.

Shantena Augusto Sabbadini is a physicist, philosopher and a scholar of Chinese classics. As a physicist he worked at the University of Milan on the foundations of quantum physics and at the University of California on the first identification of a black hole. In the 1990s he has been scientific advisor of the Eranos Foundation, an East-West research center founded by C.G. Jung and Olga Froebe-Kapteyn in 1933. From 2017 to 2021 he was the Director of the Pari Center. He is the author of Pilgrimages to Emptiness. Rethinking Reality through Quantum Physics, Tao Te Ching: a guide to the interpretation of the foundational book of Taoism and The Original I Ching or Book of Changes: The Eranos I Ching Project.