The concept of ‘Harmony’ or ‘He’

One central idea not only in the Dao De Jing but in Chinese philosophy broadly that has become a kind of mantra in modern China is the notion of He or Hexie and we translate that in English as harmony, but harmony is not a good translation for He. A much better translation is the idea of optimizing, the idea of maximizing, the idea of getting as much as we can out of the human experience. So the way of thinking that we find in the Dao De Jing is really a characteristic way of thinking that we find throughout the Chinese culture, trough the Chinese experience One way of illustrating this idea of He as optimizing as maximizing is Chinese food.

When you walk around Beijing, you see [Chong Qing] of this kind of food, Langzhou of this kind of food, Shandong, Beijing Xiaochi and so on that the kind of food that you have in Chinese restaurants is an attempt to take a finite number of ingredients and by putting them into different relationships, different textures, different colors, different seasons, different smells, different sounds, that Chinese food is an attempt to get the most out of the ingredients that are available to the human being for our nourishment. So the Dao De Jing is normative. I mean that it wants to tell us what is the best way to achieve a normal, a human normal.

That is what we mean by normative, that it gives us a guideline as to how to live human experience most effectively.