The most controversial issue is the sentence break in the first chapter of Tao Te Ching.

0 1 the biggest controversy

The first chapter of Tao Te Ching is "nameless, the beginning of all things; Fame is the mother of everything. Therefore, there is often no desire to see its wonders; There is always a desire to read, so the problem is very big.

About 80% of the books about Tao Te Ching today refer to Wang Anshi's sentence break in the Northern Song Dynasty, and break sentences after "nothing" and "you".

Wang Anshi is a politician himself, with good literature and philosophy.

The ancients didn't have as much information as we read today, because there were not many books, and he sometimes had to be ingenious. Everyone else said so, so I changed the sentence to break.

This change has caused a big problem.

After the reform, everyone thinks that saying "nothing" is more mysterious, abstract and mysterious than saying "yes".

Therefore, it is a great challenge for us to study Tao Te Ching today.

In academic circles, the study of Tao Te Ching is based on Wang Bi-ben in Wei and Jin Dynasties.

Wang Bi lived in the era of Cao Cao, which was close.

The punctuation marks in the Tao Te Ching he annotated are "nameless", "famous", "without desire" and "with desire".

1973, Mawangdui, Changsha, Hunan Province, unearthed the silk version of Tao Te Ching.

It is a version of Tao Te Ching in Han tombs, written on silk books, and divided into version A and version B.

After this version came out, Wang Biben's sentence break was more certain.

Because there were no punctuation marks in ancient times, "Zhi, Hu, Zhe and Ye" were used as the separation.

How to break sentences in the silk edition of Tao Te Ching?

It said, "So, there is no desire, there is desire." .

At that time, this sentence was not "often without desire, often with desire", because the name of Emperor China was Liu Heng. In ancient times, in order to avoid the emperor's taboo, Emperor China later changed it to "often".

It can also be seen that the version of Tao Te Ching in silk is very early, which is considered by academic circles to be the early Han Dynasty.