Listening Without Hearing: Sound, Perception, and the Body in the Dao De Jing

Abstract

The Dao De Jing presents the paradoxical formulation, “Listening to it, one does not hear it; it is called xi” (听之不闻，名曰希), raising a fundamental question about sound, perception, and the body: when listening does not necessarily culminate in hearing, what kind of relationship emerges between sound and embodied perception?

Taking “listening without hearing” as its central point of inquiry, this article brings the Dao De Jing’s reflections on sound, sensory perception, and bodily states into a shared conceptual field. It examines how sound comes to expose the limits of perception and, in turn, brings the condition of the body into question. The claim that “the five tones make the ears deaf” (五音令人耳聋) situates sound within a broader sensory configuration encompassing color and the eye, tone and the ear, taste and the mouth, and sensory pursuit and the heart-mind. It reveals a complex relationship between sonic experience and perceptual capacity. “Listening without hearing” and dayin xisheng (大音希声, “great sound is xisheng”) further approach the limits of ordinary auditory apprehension, making the relationship between ting (听, listening) and wen (闻, hearing) itself a question for investigation. From this perceptual limit, the discussion extends to the body. Passages concerning an “empty heart-mind” (xuxin, 虚心), “concentrating qi and attaining softness” (zhuan qi zhi rou, 专气致柔), and “attaining utmost emptiness and maintaining profound stillness” (zhi xu ji, shou jing du, 致虚极，守静笃) suggest connections between modes of perception and bodily conditions articulated through emptiness, stillness, qi, and softness. Chapter 55 offers an especially concrete image of the sounding body: one “cries out all day without becoming hoarse” (终日号而不嗄), a condition described as “the utmost harmony” (he zhi zhi, 和之至). Read alongside yin sheng xiang he (音声相和, “tone and sound harmonize with one another”) and chong qi yi wei he (冲气以为和, “blending qi brings about harmony”), he (和) emerges across sonic, bodily, and relational registers.

This article argues that sonic thought in the Dao De Jing cannot be adequately reduced to an idealization of silence or soundlessness. Its significance lies in the ways sound brings the limits of perception into view and thereby extends the question of listening to the body as a whole and to its modes of relating to the world. “Listening without hearing” thus opens a bodily dimension of sonic experience: listening concerns not only the ear’s perception of sound, but also the body’s capacities to sense, change, and respond. From this perspective, he acquires further significance through the ongoing relationship between sound and the body.