dào
Also rendered: Dao (Transliteration; useful where the sense is specifically philosophical)
Reviewed · 2026-09
At a glance
Both a road and a method, and the texts lean on both senses at once. ‘Knowing the Way’ (知道) is not assent to a doctrine but knowing how to conduct a life; the second chapter’s line about the sage practising it and the fool merely wearing it depends on that.
The graph has 辵, going, around 首, a head: a head going along a road. Everything else — method, teaching, the course of nature — is an extension of that picture.
Which is why 知道 in Suwen 1 is not “to believe that the Way exists”. It is knowing how to go. The people who 知道 do specific things: they eat with measure, work without recklessness, avoid the deviant winds.
Suwen 2 then makes the contrast explicit: 道者，聖人行之，愚者佩之 — the sage walks it, the fool hangs it on his belt.
Passages where the term does real work, with the original, pinyin and English on the same line.
Every rendering below is a decision about which reader is being addressed. There is no neutral option.
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Reading path
This term belongs to Foundations — the five core concepts, in the order the Suwen introduces them.