Returning now to the first line of the Daodejing, all six of the translators can proffer good reasons for choosing the English words they used; their translations are consistent with Chinese syntax and semantics, but without context it is impossible to ascertain which meaning the author of the sentence intended; indeed, we don’t know which of the several contributors to the text wrote the first line. The principle of logical charity is no help in this case—assume that the author(s) do not contradict themselves—because the Daodejing is notorious for being paradoxical: Chapter 56 begins: “Those who know do not speak; Those who speak do not know”, which is clearly intentional, and rhetorically efficacious despite its logical invitation to a charge of tu quoque. It thus makes no sense at all to ask which of the six translations is the correct one, or even the best one, except on the basis of an interpretation of the text as a whole, all six of which currently on offer herein contest the others. Indeed there is a high probability that the author of the line intended the ambiguity attendant on the construal of the second dao, in which case it becomes impossible to give the correct translation in English. One long-time student of early Daoism summed up the matter succinctly: “Reading [it] is an act of creation” (Welch 1971: 11). We will return to the theme of ambiguity—both syntactic and semantic—in §4.2.