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When I began my own attempt at translating the Guodian, several chapters in I found myself pondering on how some of the characters were drawn differently. It seemed odd to me, so I explored the possibility that they were intentionally coded. What started as a spontaneous guess ended up making more sense than seemed possible. In some cases, Bu 不 was drawn with or without a line above it. And this is nothing new. But on a whim I pondered if it could mean Yuan 元 in some cases. As they are mildly similar, from some perspective. As I went along, working from Scott Cook's excellent book, I noticed that many translations of the Guodian LaoZi Bundles replace a great many characters. It seems there is a lack of meaning or sense when the original characters are used. Indeed in some cases there seems to be shorthand in use. And in other cases, it seems that there is no way to identify the original character's graph, or, to place its old, lost meaning. What became incredibly interesting to me, was that by using this code, many more of the original characters just made sense. More to the point - there was a consistent theme that emerged from the text. Chapter to chapter - in the Guodian ordering - the meaning just built up. At least that's what I found. Please see for yourself - my translation can be found here, CC BY ND NC Mysterious Center 2025. It it still a work in progress - The ABC bundles of the LaoZi have been translated. However the C bundle contains another section, called Tai Yi Sheng Shui. There is some question as to whether or not it relates to the Lao Zi chapters by scholars. Because it does not contain sentences we can link to received dao de jing chapters, like the other sections do. However, it appears to also utilize the same code. And its thesis adds to the thesis of the whole. Please note, this is script from the Chu kingdom, before the Qin Dynasty standardization of written script. Word conjunctions cannot be thought of as necessarily holding the same meanings as they did for Classical Chinese that has undergone this standardization. Indeed, in a great many cases we see evidence of unique and creative character compositions. This is a personal project of mine. I shared it with a friend of mine who happens to be a very sensitive reader. Unsolicited, she told me that she thinks I had prior history with this text. So in this way, it is something of a personal transmission, from whatever I remember from before. Considering the above, people will likely have different takes on this. I have no interest in holding scholarly debates. Those who do will need to work that out on their own - please use a different thread. But discussion in regards to following the meaning of this perspective are welcome here. AI was not used in any part of this project. 🙏