This was probably one of the verses that grabbed my attention all those years ago, and certainly one of the ones that got me into translation work.

The line about the “mysterious female” is sooo enigmatic!

是謂玄牝 shì wèi xuán pìn

Xuán means dark, mysterious, but also deep or profound so it’s an adjective used in context of our sense or how we perceive.
Pìn interestingly is used to denote the female of a species, so it’s not quite correct to translate it as ‘woman’ (especially as there is a character for that). I’ve always wondered if translators have shown their biases here, wanting to try to show the Taoists as Goddess-worshippers, or perhaps to differentiate them from the patriarchal Christianisation in that sense.

But here’s the other interesting thing about this word — it also means a ‘deep gorge’! Given in the previous line there is mention of “the undying spirit of the valley”, it seems obvious to me to go with this translation.

I think like you said @KennysKitchen, this verse is part of the ‘mystic’ stream of verses, so it’s using the metaphor of a valley or gorge as an empty space to draw attention to how to conceive of the Tao. Certainly in the texts from the much later Quanzhen Tao school, this idea of a ‘Void’ is used to explain what there was(?) before existence came into being— because somethingness can only emerge out of nothingness in the same way that only an empty cup can be filled. And this referenced to the next line 玄牝之門 xuán pìn zhī mén which is the ‘gate of the dark/deep gorge’ being where then Heaven and Earth (the original, primal duality) emerged from. The cosmology continues to explain that it’s is this first duality that create the conditions from which all the 10,000 things (the infinite diversity of existence) also emerge.

I think it’s very easy to see how it is the females who give birth to life acts as the model to explain something which by its nature can not be described: the Void. I think the characterisation of The Void as feminine is modeled on human experience, not the other way around. Pregnancy and birth are the actual, lived experiences which these sages then used as the model to explain how the universe works.

What I find really ironic is that it could seriously be argued that here is an example of explicit matrifocal cosmology... and yet China during this period was so patriarchal. I wonder if Taoists were kinda not trusted by Confucianists because their ideas threatened patriarchal culture and rule to a degree?

Anyway, these are my musings.....

Thanks again for holding this space. It’s a pity it always takes me a few days to come across it. The next verse is an important one for medicine...

😊🙏🏽☯️