Praising the Mystery
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視之不見名曰夷，聽之不聞名曰希，搏之不得名曰微。此三者不可致詰，故混而為一。其上不皦，其下不昧。繩繩不可名，復歸於無物。是謂無狀之狀，無物之象，是為惚恍。迎之不見其首，隨之不見其後。執古之道，以御今之有，以知古始，是謂道紀。
Look at it, and you do not see it: its name is the Colorless. Listen to it, and you do not hear it: its name is the Soundless. Grasp at it, and you do not get it: its name is the Formless. These three can never be questioned to the bottom, so they blend and become one. Above, it is not bright; below, it is not dark. Endless and unbroken, it can never be named, and it returns again to no thing. This is called the shape of no shape, the image of no thing; this is the elusive, the evasive. Meet it, and you do not see its head; follow it, and you do not see its back. Hold to the Way of old to rule what is here now, and so know the ancient beginning: this is called the thread of the Way.
The Way defined only negatively, by what cannot be seen, heard, or grasped, and named “the elusive and evasive.”
Each name the Way gets here is the name of a sense failing. Even so, the chapter lands somewhere practical: holding to this old, formless Way is how you manage what exists right now.
The pair 忽恍, “elusive and evasive,” recurs through the book as the standard description of the Way's blur, present but never quite caught. Heshang Gong's Song print writes the first half without its heart-radical (忽 for 惚), the same graph doing service for the compound word.
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