In ch.127 of the Shih chi, the chapter on the ‘Diviners’, we find a line cited from ch. 01 of the Lao tzu, Tao te ching as follows: ‘the nameless is the beginning of the myriad creatures’. As nearly everyone who has any familiarity with the text will recognize, this is a variation from the line as it is now konwn from the Lao tzu text itself, where we have ‘the nameless, the beginning of Heaven and Earth ’, and the Shih chi has been looked upon as the purveyor of sloppy and careless scholarship for nearly tow millennia. With the discovery about ten years ago of the Ma wang tui (abbreviated MWT) silk manuscripts of the Lao tzu dating from around 200 B.C. we are able to see that thisShih chi rendering of the line was neither sloppy nor careless, because in fact it matches in its essential features the MWT version, both the A and B manuscripts of which have Given the evidence of the MWT MSS coupled with the Shih chi form of the line we are inclined to suppose that this was the prevalent Han version of the text, and that the form with the instead of is a later innovation. I will not go into the philosophical significance of the substitution of the former for the latter here, save to say that it is clear that the scope of ch. 01 with ‘myriad creatures’ in this line is restricted to considerations of the terrestrial domain alone, whereas the introduction of the expression ‘Heaven and Earth’ expande the scope to matters terrestrial and celestial both, and the relation between the two. This is a shift of no small consequence and deserves the attention of scholars well versed in the details of Han and Weichin speculative thought.
Cripple Dance based on Tao Te Ching written by Lao-tzu