A first step, and a student still unsure

The notes take up Park Jeong-geun’s 1995 essay on the Daodejing, a piece framed as a first step toward setting the dao aside. The writer comes to it as a student still unsure, and that uncertainty is kept in view rather than tidied away.

Laozi and this essayist are held together in the reading. The notes do not invent a formal English title for the essay; they name the author, the year, and the work on the Daodejing, and they stay with the images the student actually writes out.

A dao that does not distinguish

What they call a dao that does not distinguish is set against the ordinary way of knowing. Knowledge, they write, works by cutting one thing from another: a rose is known against what is not a rose.

Even the claim “there is not,” they add, is itself distinguished from “there is.” To speak of absence is still to draw a line. The true dao, in this reading, would not make that cut.

A kernel without a shell

They also keep the image of a kernel without a shell, and of an emptiness or void. The dao is not treated as a solid object with a surface one can peel.

The notes leave the subject there, before later tables, still with the student’s confusion in hand. The same Korean report, written out more fully, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. Student notes on Park Jeong-geun’s 1995 essay on the Daodejing.

Last updated 15 November 2026