Benoît Vermander

Empty yet Inexhaustible

Reading the Daodejing with Others

The Laozi/Daodejing belongs to a rarefied class of texts that first strike the reader by their immediacy, their boldness and their concision, before further study leads one to engage in a voyage that progresses from one layer of difficulty to another. These texts arouse a fascination that is constantly renewed. They are endowed with an inner life that nurtures our innermost selves. At the same time, it is simply impossible to comment on the Laozi without referring to the tradition(s) it has generated. There have been, there remain many ways of reading the Daodejing. Still, we can also reduce the multiplicity of these levels to just two: The first level is concerned with “natural processes” considered in their principles, their organicity. On a second level, the very contemplation of naturalness leads to its transcendence. The Laozi meditates on the knowledge of unknowable things; it stands on the borderline between the twin impossibilities of speaking about certain things and remaining completely silent about them.
This book endeavors to read the Daodejing “with others”—with its Chinese commentators, with its contemporary exegetes, with the Pseudo-Denys and Master Eckhart—and, by doing so, it shows this short treatise to be as inexhaustible as the mystery towards which it points.

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“This book is the start of a radically new form of dialogue with Daoism; as such, it requires of those who enter its pages a slow, self-reflective read.” — John Lagerwey