Tao te Ching: Power for the Peaceful 9781506469867, 9781506469874

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Tao Te Ching

Tao Te Ching

Power for the Peaceful

☯

A new translation

by

Marc S. Mullinax

Fortress Press Minneapolis

TAO TE CHING Power for the Peaceful

Copyright © 2021 Fortress Press, an imprint of 1517 Media. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Email [email protected] or write to Permissions, Fortress Press, PO Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440-1209.

Unless otherwise indicated, scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture quotations marked American Standard Version are from the American Standard Version.

Scripture quotations marked The Message are from THE MESSAGE, copyright © 1993, 2002, 2018 by Eugene H. Peterson. Used by permission of NavPress. All rights reserved. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers, a Division of Tyndale House Ministries.

Scripture quotations marked New International Version are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by

Biblica, Inc.™

Scripture quotations marked Amplified Bible taken from the Amplified® Bible (AMPC), copyright © 1954, 1958, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1987 by The Lockman Foundation Used by permission. www.Lockman.org.

Cover design: Rob Dewey

Print ISBN: 978-1-5064-6986-7 eBook ISBN: 978-1-5064-6987-4

For Hazel, through whom Tao shines

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Pragmatic Tao

Tao Te Ching: Power for the Peaceful

Afterword

Notes

Selected Bibliography

About the Author/Translator

Acknowledgments

This long journey of ten thousand translation miles started in 1974 when my East Asian history professor Jim Lenburg introduced me to Tao Te Ching in a college course on Chinese history. A few years later, when I first taught and lived in Korea, Ms. Woo Geum-Ok () was my classical Chinese teacher, and I am especially indebted to her patient insistence on quality work. There, I first taught Tao Te Ching, using my newly acquired Chinese character work in the class. Since then, I have read and taught this text in Daejeon and Seoul, South Korea, and Mars Hill, North Carolina, USA.

Over the years, Tao Te Ching “translated” to me a worldview and spiritual reality different than what I encountered anywhere else. Finally, in 2017, I began to translate Tao Te Ching for my context, at a time when I took on new leadership at Mars Hill University. I was joyfully engaged—riveted—by this text that kept offering timely reminders of the wonderfully subversive power of Wuwei and yin-yang balance when serving the faculty during a hard transitional time.

I offer first my deepest thanks to my partner, Grace, for helping me find the space and time for this good work. The following people have read early drafts and made edits, corrections, and contributions both notable and careful: Sharon Bigger, Virginia Bower, Brian Graves, Glenn Graves, John Gripentrog, Beth Honeycutt, Jimmy Knight, Stephanie McLeskey, Allen Mullinax, Dale Roberts, Seamus Robertson, Nancy Hastings Sehested, Mahan Siler, Bryony Smith, John Snell, and Walter Ziffer. Chad Holt’s critiques have been especially fermentive and led directly to the “Notes and Reflections” becoming a key part of this work.

Rebecca Gahagan offered needed hospitality and reflective space to bring this effort to completion. Thank you.

I am deeply indebted to Joyce Hollyday’s careful copyediting. Her work has rendered every paragraph clearer to read and easier to grasp.

Fortress Press’s vision and mission have taken this work across the finish line. At once professional and understanding in approach, Will Bergkamp’s vision for this work has enlarged my own understanding of the relevance and power for peace that Tao actually conveys to readers today. I am deeply indebted to his imagination on how Tao engages us on so many levels. Thank you. Elvis Ramirez and his team of copyeditors were also deeply involved. Their efficient competence has astounded me again and again.

The individual efforts of this great cloud of witnesses and partners have rendered this a truly collective work. If any imprecisions or mistakes remain, I have managed to achieve them singlehandedly.

Introduction

The Pragmatic Tao

These are living teachings, discussions to be had, not just ancient riddles preserved in a jar.

—Seamus Robertson

It is not far . . . it is within reach,

Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know,

Perhaps it is every where on water and on land.

—Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Tao still speaks. After 2,500 years and hundreds of translations, this text remains a lively source for thriving and living wisely today, when so many other spiritual

traditions have diminished. Those who grasp Tao achieve the utter limits of human achievement.

However, the perception lingers that Tao Te Ching is a near-inscrutable text for mystics to read and consider within the privacy of one’s home life—that It is not the best of guides for public affairs, cultural critiques, business ventures, or even scientific endeavors. I have often felt this artificial spiritual split. However, this scripture’s real value comes when we perceive Tao at work in, influencing, and having a say in the everyday and everything, uncensored by false dichotomies between private and public or esoteric and nonmystical.

Living with and teaching this text for four decades, I have found the study of Tao ever my touchstone and spiritual magnetic north. Tao has been my return to clarity in frenetic or uncertain times. Tao has been a minder and reminder of patience, not-competing, letting go, and not working my ego, Tetris-like, into every endeavor. I have learned to open up Tao Te Ching in any setting—from the boardroom to the caucus hall to the classroom to the streets. And I suffer when I do not. In other words, this translation comes to you from one convinced of Tao’s abiding reality and claims upon our times, whether turbulent or relatively peaceful. As traditional religions’ influences decline due to their civil wars within and uncivil wars without, can we hear a 2,500-year-old voice of bold wisdom that is both timeless and unique in Its teachings and resonant with the world’s wisdom traditions?

If Tao is indeed Tao, and if all creation derives Its very existence and first impressions from Tao, then Tao concerns everything. Tao is not to be pickled, preserved, and isolated on the shelf. There is something here, articulated centuries ago in China, that merits our attention still.

Tao is neither tame nor retiring. Tao is as subversive as anarchy, as creative as a womb, and as unpredictable as what you will dream tonight. Tao is patient, but It is a slow trickster, ever posing Its doubting question of “Oh, really?” to

everything our safe worldviews have nailed down and rendered predictable. Like a steady drip-drop of water over eons, Tao has something to bring to our rocks of injustice and inhumanity, to our walled divisions. As these are not natural, Tao works to restore original nature, original harmony, original blessing, and original justice.

Consider Tao both smart and wise; there is no part or particle of the universe It has not already permeated. Tao is All. Tao is in All. Do we—when we consider “What is real?” and “How should we wield power?”—assert with a fundamentalist’s assurance the same tired certainties that only maintain our separation from others, our poverty, and our lack of harmony? Could it be because we have forgotten Tao? Might our separation from Tao be unnatural and thus avoidable?

This translation is dedicated to bringing attention to oft-unheard strains of Tao’s power and work. First, Tao is peaceful, and that in two ways. One is “inner climate control.” When we are confronted with uncertainties or dilemmas, do we not often resort to chaotic thinking or to micromanaging matters more than ever? We project our fears onto the future and hold on to past narratives, and so the present is not in our conscious thoughts. However, only in the present moment is peace available. Cooperating with Tao in the now, the here, and the this brings the reassuring narrative that one is in sync with the blueprint of the universe.

The other seldom-heard strain is peace in the world. I enumerate in my translation and commentaries how Tao began all things, and Tao’s Virtue maintains them. The world is built with, operated by, and maintained for peace. In unsubscribing from these “factory settings” of original peace, we permit these always-unnatural preconditions of dis-ease and violence: isolation, tribalism, competition, misunderstanding, enmity, and selfishness. These preconditions can be understood like a physician seeing in one’s blood work an early indicator of impending disease. Violence or war—when wisely understood—are treatable. We wage peace by understanding and following Tao. Just one person following Tao can affect the culture around that person.

This translation also focuses heavily on the power of Wu-wei, which often conveys the meaning of “no-action,” yet it is also intentional nonaction, nonmeddling, and not working oneself into a lather for competitive or egotistical purposes. Wu-wei is wise, active, noninterfering cooperation with the Way of the Universe—yet another way that Tao is power for the peaceful. Not going against the grain of the blueprint of Nature means one is more at rest, at peace, and in sync with the world.

Another theme in my translation and reflections is that if one is in sync with the Universe, then one is out of sync with—going against the grain of—the way the world has become: competition-riddled, ego-driven, and compassionless. I will try to persuade the reader that to follow Tao makes one a “misfit,” or consciously countercultural, in order to expose anti-Tao, unjust processes and to “re-verse” them with wiser and more just narratives. Practicing oneness with Tao will make one a misfit in the chaotic world, to the extent that it actually becomes painful to live chaotically. To live in accord with Tao is peace. Let the reader understand, however, that being so misfitted for the chaotic world means one travels by another rhythm, speaks another fluency, and hears another drum cadence for living. This, for sure, is a lonely, or lone, path. One will find comrades along the Way, but not crowds (Verse 20 attests to this). For living with Tao is a countercultural practice in a world that has forgotten its original ties with the Way, a practice set by an older, wiser, and more generous standard.

Finally, when the above paragraphs are considered, and as will become clearer in the second half of Tao Te Ching’s text, Tao practice is training for a different sort of leadership: servant leadership. This leadership is not like the kind we are accustomed to today: ego-driven, competition-measured, and fear-sustained. It is an attractive, winsome, and ennobling leadership style so lacking today.

These individual paths—peace, Wu-wei, mis-fitting, and leadership—come out from a single Path (one translation of “Tao” is “path”) we are meant to travel on

the way to living well. Tao is our original “way.” Following Its natural path makes one at once whole yet also dissimilar from mainstream culture. I will demonstrate the stark differences that practicing Tao makes—in oneself and in the world at large. In this translation and reflections I will show how Tao is very much indeed “power for the peaceful.”

Tao still speaks, even as traditional Western religions are losing their numbers and their luster as sources of fulfillment today. Often our forms of modern religiosity are more like identity tags or political platforms than sources of spiritual experience, deep wisdom, and wise, ethical ways of thriving. Moreover, our cultures are informed by fewer traditions that emphasize cooperation, listening, compassion, and ego-reduction. And yet spiritual seekers still hunger for nonclichéd wisdom that does not blink in the face of hard questions like those we face today. In this context, in a period of religious decline, I translate and offer an ancient source of wisdom and action. This ancient text—without a “church,” “pope,” or political agenda—still speaks, informs, consoles, and motivates.

Worldview and Views of Human Nature in Taoism

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

—Albert Einstein

With our thoughts we make the world.

—the Buddha

The worldview that generated Taoism is different from most worldviews of people reading this text today. A worldview is one’s habituation and acculturation acquired after birth, through culture and exposures to others, which gives one the set of expectations, rules, and norms for living in that culture. A worldview is a “map” of whatever a culture considers relevant in the world and how to negotiate that culture efficiently. Worldviews excel in making the ordinary processes of that culture seem normal and unquestioned. They normalize the status quo. They reinforce current existence as “normal” and “as expected” through movies, music, pop culture, competitive-market capitalism, and ever-present militarism as the go-to answer for problems. Worldviews operate silently, in the background, like the operating systems of computers, which we never notice until something goes wrong. A worldview’s major task is to keep one’s interruptive critical thinking and questions unthought and unasked, to make it feel natural that there are no good courses of action or life outside the ones it provides. Few people understand that they have a worldview until it is challenged, because to participate moment-by-moment in a worldview (as we all do) is to vote for its continuance. Nothing in the worldview would alert its subscribers that its lens is out of focus, and a corrective lens is needed.

In the West, worldviews are usually dualistic and binary, zero-sum views of how life is to operate. For example, there is good, which is to fight evil; both want to win, but only one can (and should!). This struggle is portrayed as an “all against all” endeavor. Exhibit A of this worldview would be the unquestioned cultures of violence, which normalize violence as the only solution for “evil” problem situations. Even violence itself, our worldviews inform us, can only be countered with violent means—when it is the worldview itself that underwrites that violence!

To their misfortune, Western religions also express inherently dualistic worldviews. Their widely used Manichaean vocabularies of saints and sinners, angels and demons, God and Satan, and Heaven and Hell all imply an unfriendly

world full of conflict, in which no one in these pairs of categories would befriend the other. These views imply there is a power in charge and the rest of us are under that power.

Not so in the Taoist worldview! It operates with a different rhythm. At its fundamental baseline, the Taoist worldview is whole, holistic, and a necessary, invaluable corrective to views of the world as split into two warring camps. Nothing is alien to Tao. The Taoist yin-yang image (☯) symbolizes this best, rendering its nondual purpose visual: in every thing one may discover a “seed” of its complement. Within everything we might see first as light, high, right-side, performative, giving, peaceful, cooperative, silent, and so on, its nonopposing contrasts or complements also abide: dark, low, left-side, spectative, receptive, energetic, competitive, and noisy.¹ The reverse is also true. In every one of the latter complements, there are elements and traces of the former, regarded as necessary complements . . . to be embraced, not battled.

Appreciate these complements as twins; to merge them or have them in dialogue is peace, not struggle. Complements make for trouble only when misunderstood as adversaries or dismissed as isolated stand-alones. However, understood correctly, to be whole, entire, perfected, or completed means that one has done the hard work of integrating both sets of complements . . . not in a winner-takeall dualistic mindset, but seeing each set “shaking hands” with the other. Think of every thing as containing its inverse, converse, or reverse. Like a coin needing both sides, a magnet requiring two poles, or a person with a front and back, an inside and outside, yin-yang speaks to the necessary fusion of the entire whole within itself. Nothing is alien. My shadow side is as necessary to me as breathing in and out—another yin-yang complement. Lesson one: Maintaining a balance of yin and yang is the very source for peace that Tao provides. Balanced, one is peaceful; but unbalanced, one is never so. Lesson two: Knitting these complements together in one’s life is key though the practice is unusual in our culture—one can be branded a “misfit”—but to do so is to alter one’s perspective, ever-examine one’s life, and thus change the world. Friendship with Tao is quiet, but it is also a participation in a worldview resistant to the norms and processes of an unexamined culture that is unable to know either peace or when enough is enough.

Human nature, in Taoism’s worldview, is already perfected and complete. There is nothing “wrong” with us. As with most Asian wisdom traditions, human nature is not originally sinful or chaotic; it is not something to “fix,” with an alien idea or person coming to one’s rescue and doing spiritual battle to exorcise evil powers. No, each power or particle of creation begins right where it needs to be, doing what it needs to do, and already whole. Original harmony, creative peace, and quieting silence are all “baked into” creation. Every particle or human can be a wise teacher for every other because Tao, the source of every thing, remains in all generally and in each particularly. This has tremendous implications for how one sees Tao, understands Its workings, and how all creation (including the human being) is originally cooperative and originally structured for peace.

This translation of Tao Te Ching and the worldview It expresses—let me be clear —work differently from modern and Western views of the world. The Taoist worldview is very strange to one who has grown up in the West or in capitalist culture. I shall make many references to the implications of worldview and human nature in my “Notes and Reflections” after each verse.

Etymological and Source Matters

The translator’s aim is the best possible failure.

—John Ciardi

Also in the “Notes and Reflections” associated with each verse, I shall supply generous etymological and historical dimensions of the received text to demonstrate the Taoist worldview to modern readers. I start now with Tao, Te, and Ching.

The Chinese character Tao () contains the radical/root of “to walk” connected to the character for “head.” It conveys elements of these meanings: morality, resolute direction, alignment, to explain, and a road or a path. It also links to the abilities to consider critically and govern justly. The left-hand side of the character——indicates the act of resolutely walking a path. The right-hand side of the ideogram——depicts a male human head, with hair tied in two top-knots (a historically common practice in East Asia.)

Combining with , the concept of (Tao) forms, suggesting a wise teacher who has already trodden a path and now can lead by example. Tao refers not just to superior leadership but also to its accompanying “path” for living with optimum wisdom.²

The Chinese character for Te is , translated most often as “virtue,” “character,” or “moral power.” Te’s top-right sector means “straight” or “flawless,” which rests on the “heart-mind” character. Te’s character’s root or radical, on the left, means “walking forward.” So Te suggests proceeding with a straight heart-mind, or flawless action proceeding from one’s psychic center. When integrated with Tao, Te turns Tao’s blueprints into deeds and wombs into fulfillment.

The Chinese character for Ching is , meaning “scripture,” “book,” or even “classic text.” The earliest documented meaning of is “to weave,” suggesting an entwining process whereby the classic Chinese texts and their commentaries were woven into the culture’s history.

Ancient Manuscripts of Tao Te Ching

In its ancient form, Tao Te Ching came in two main sections without the current 81 verse divisions: one continuous section that included the now-canonical Verses 1–37 and another that contained Verses 38–81. The first 37 verses focus more upon Tao and its way in the world. The second half has a Te, or “Virtue” focus, even though in both sections, Tao and Te interact and naturally integrate. For now, consider Tao as the blueprint of the universe and Te as the executor of the processes that brings the blueprint into reality.

Our earliest and most trusted versions of the Chinese text include commentaries and date back about two thousand years. Three principal Chinese versions of Tao Te Ching have survived, each named after an early commentator on the text:

1. One early version is named after commentator Yan Zun, who died in 10 CE, about the time of Tao Te Ching’s initial popularity. We have only a portion of this version today, most of which is commentary to the work of Te in Verses 38– 81. 2. Another is named after Heshang Gong (nicknamed the “Riverside Elder”), who thrived in the first century CE. The versions we have contain an introduction written in the third century CE by Ge Xuan. This version is made distinct by his many attempts to explicate the text for readers wanting to make practical use of Tao Te Ching, so it became a popular guide to meditation training. I have sought Heshang Gong’s spirit in my translation and “Notes and Reflections.” 3. The Wang Bi version has more confirmable origins than the two above. Wang Bi (226–249 CE) was a well-known philosopher and commentator on Tao Te

Ching and I Ching. He lived in a period when elite leadership in China began to shift away from Confucianism toward Taoism. He is known for his attempts to maintain a conversation between Confucianism and Taoism and to show early readers how the two traditions were not natural adversaries. Although he lived only to age twenty-three, his text has become the most used in the nearly two centuries of Chinese-to-English translation.

This translation also relies on Wang Bi’s work. When there are alterations or places where the other two versions (or even later versions not discussed here) carry import for this translation, I will reference these in the “Notes and Reflections” below each verse.

Wu-Wei: Tao of Social Justice?

Wu-Wei: conscious non-action . . . a deliberate, and principled, decision to do nothing whatsoever, and to do it for a particular reason.

—Esther Inglis-Arkell

As on the mat, so off the mat.

—Rev. Abbess Teijo Munnich, Great Tree Zen Temple

I didn’t come here to chill. I came here to rock.

—Michael Franti

Scholars often cast Tao Te Ching as a political text or a guide for rulers. However, I have worked this translation with the theory that this obviously interior, personal, and mystical text also contains the greatest truths for our public, political, social, economic, communal—as well as private—survival. We are the poorer when we leave this text neglected in the presence of rampant injustice, insidious racism, increasing poverty, and dominant-empire thinking that valorizes war and justifies violence and inequality—often with the defense that “this is just the way it always is.” The corrective for all these off-the-Tao ways is singular: justice. If what is natural is also originally just and peaceful, then Tao is naturally and unapologetically just peace.

Several misconceptions need reexamination. First is the idea that Tao is passive, and those who practice it should be passive too. This not-quite-right idea often comes through literal translations of Wu-wei as simply “nonaction.” Translators forget that Taoists seek not to retreat from life but to advance, becoming an intentional social misfit. Taoists “retreat” (yin), yes, but only from certain kinds of living and thinking, in order to “advance” (yang) toward others. Wu-wei is so much more than a simple negation (“nonaction”), but that is a good start.

Wu-wei is best phrased as “noninterference” or “nonmanipulative steering.” One is to engage the world actively, but not with one’s thumb on its scales. Wuwei is a very practiced steering for the Taoist, a skill deepened by long practice. The adept car driver anticipates curves and turns, but the novice is more likely to oversteer or turn at the wrong time or place, with perhaps calamitous results. The Tao way to drive gently anticipates the turns and executes them at the right time without overthinking or overanticipating. Doing anything else ends badly. Wu-wei is noninterfering action, perfectly timed to promote peace and prevent

injury.

Wu-wei is Tao Te Ching’s most seminal worldview principle. It is less concerned with practicing traditionally patriarchal approaches to life and its problems, in which the masculine worldview tends to see, address, and then fix by manipulation, “mansplaining,” and heroic problem-solving. Instead, the Taoist leads with countercultural feminine strengths: noninterference, openness, womblike receptivity, pausing instead of advancing, and attention to process instead of result. Wu-wei is a state of heart and mind. As Verse 28 says, Wu-wei “couple[s] masculine ways with feminine methods to be the never-ending cradle of the world.” It is the wisdom of knowing how, not just knowing that.

The Chuang Tzu³ contains a famous passage in which a butcher tells his master, the king, how he cuts up an ox. At first, he confesses, he suffered greatly, overthinking his tasks and dulling many knives in the process. But after years, his instinct now takes over and, he says, “my senses stand still, and my spirit acts as it wills.”⁴ His knife never dulls. That is Wu-wei, and it is not inactive, but precise and active energy, expressed in wise ways.

Other examples of Wu-wei: (1) A key in a sticky lock. Forcing the key is often our de facto course of action; however, the key is liable to break off in the lock. Instead, jiggling the key to find the “sweet spot” is a proper Wu-wei course. (2) A sailor trying to make forward progress in a strong headwind. Pointing the sailboat directly into the wind would mean going backward. But just turn the rudder at alternating forty-five-degree angles to the headwind—known as “tacking”—and progress is assured. (3) A swimmer getting caught in an ocean riptide. The way to lose one’s life is to struggle against the current. Safety lies in going with the tide’s flow until it carries one outside its power and then swim home. Less doing, more cooperating. (4) Finally, a recent novel about the hidden power of trees framed my understanding of Wu-wei thus: “The best and easiest way to get a forest to return to any plot of cleared land is to do nothing—nothing at all, and do it for less time than you might think.”⁵

The practice of Wu-wei is the practice of social justice and, therefore, of peace. First, practicing Wu-wei, the Taoist becomes a misfit in society’s view, but one who practices the right kind of maladjustment: a discontent with injustice. This Wu-wei practice is one that brings one back to original peace, tending to make one a countercultural misfit, for one cooperates with a different energy than that which created injustice. The Taoist takes on a preparation of a different order. He is counterculturally feminine. He receives, gets in touch with his inner womb, lives with the nonanalytical, and processes all experience (social, private, good or bad) as his training. The Taoist harvests these processes, which he reinvests in the wise revisioning of the world. This is how the world changes. Peaceful change in the world, or softening anyone’s hard-set attitudes, has never happened through direct confrontation. Wu-wei transforms situations by another, quieter wisdom.

The Wu-wei teachings ask us to realize how the fruit produced from pushing and straining against the grain is often the opposite of one’s intentions. “Lao Tzu’s law,” as one scholar phrased it, is “the consequences of pushing for something often will include elements that amount to the opposite of what is pushed for.” Preparing for righteous war, for example, has never worked out as planned, because we do not consider the unintended consequences. Fighting an “enemy” with self-righteous certitude often ends up energizing the enemy all the more. For in our pushing, we integrate our egos and control-freaking tendencies, however latent, providing more oxygen for the “enemy.” All our do-goodery intentions have their disruptive energy, too, for let us acknowledge this: When one wants to confront someone else’s flaws, remember it is your own flaws that are first triggered. Essentially, we project onto “the other” our own defects and merely attack someone’s perceived shortcomings with our actual defects. Such unexamined actions produce only bad reactions. Wu-wei teaches a less insane way to change the world.

Second, Taoists are depicted as societal dropouts who reject activity or activism in favor of perpetual silent meditation. This is a helpful image as far as it goes, which is not that far. Taoism is whole and entire, not binary in Its worldview.

There is no private versus public, spirit versus material, Heaven versus Hell, or any other hard dualism. No, what we consider in our Western worldviews as closed-off dualist categories are in Taoism not hermetic, but categories that leak into one another, like flavors in cooking. The yin-yang symbol suggests the public incorporates the private, and vice versa. Nothing in itself is alien to Tao. With nothing suppressed, the Taoist is uniquely prepared to lead.

Finally, Taoists do not emphasize results as much as developments and process. With all in flux, each “result” fuels the next set of changes. Results are more like “karmic fertilizer” than fruit. Taoists therefore do not so much push aside as dig deeper. Tao grows with deeper roots, not through displacement or supplanting. One of the key takeaways from Taoism is that pushing aside and manipulating dam up Tao’s flow and divert Its energy away from the common good. If so, then the consequences for Tao upon social justice are profound. For starters, Wu-wei may mean that when addressing social injustice, merely to expose it is enough “action” to cause it to expire from the exposure. One powerful example of this was in the 1960s civil rights struggle. The nightly television news’ exposure of racist state agendas—water cannons, truncheons, and attacks by dogs—led directly to massive changes in voting, housing, and attitudes.

We often portray social justice work as moral courses of action to rectify perceived injustices. Yes, many injustices are more than just perceptions but actual evils. However, what do we miss if we engage in campaigns and programs to redress evils only after they arise (like violence or war), when they actually can be steered and mitigated before they emerge? Social justice activists want to “change the world,” which is noble. However, it assumes that we can “get” the fine-grained view of the world as it is, in our short spans of life, and fight the injustices coming to attention in that moment. As if climate change, poverty, and war are problems of only the last fifty years. Human ways of knowing are developing intelligences, mixed up with eons-long, other-than-human cyclical patterns. Social justice infused with Tao takes the long view, with perspectives longer than our life spans. Slow is wise.

Maybe all we need is a good diagnostic Taoist worldview, seeing that perhaps the best we can do is, in journalistic fashion, expose what is anti-Tao and observe it shrinking from the publicity. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” Theodore Parker said in an 1853 sermon.⁷ This is a call for revolutionary patience. The “Taoist virtue” (Tao te) is patience, which is not popular in our age. Tao does change history, but with diagnostic wisdom generated in a different context and rhythm that generated the problems It addresses.

Readers of this translation and commentary will see my numerous attempts to help us understand the Taoist view of history. Like the parables of Jesus, the sayings of Confucius, the Buddha’s dharma, and the great dialogues in Hindu texts, Tao—as ultimate reality—reforms and transforms. It is hardly a text to leave at home!

Context Collapse

Historical Note and Disclaimer

We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.

—Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

My translating Tao Te Ching and your reading it are historical oddities. In short, we have been heavily influenced by the rather alien ways we see this text compared to, say, how Taoists in China today see it. The latter do not isolate the text translated here as we have done for the past two hundred years: as a standalone, heavily philosophized, classroom-friendly manuscript, one antiseptically scrubbed clean of its colorful history and popular Taoist sentiments. That is, Westerners reading just Tao Te Ching here get no sense—none!—of the numberless ways that this most essential Chinese wisdom text has emerged from and integrated into the popular mind throughout Chinese history.

Without a contextual understanding, we will miss out, for example, on how popular Taoism emphasizes healthy lifestyles for long life and that whatever one consumes either preserves or drains the body’s energy. Do we see the single Tao Te Ching “star,” yet miss the larger Taoist “constellation” containing Chinese medicine, feng shui, the search for immortality, martial arts, and even enhanced sexual energy?

China is Tao’s first home. You and I are guests at best. Every English version of Tao Te Ching is a translation pulled from its Chinese context and force-fitted (as in Greek mythology’s Procrustean bed) into our own. As with this current translation, Tao Te Ching in the West stands alone without scaffolding reference to preexisting works such as the I Ching, the Chinese classics of history and poetry, the Confucian Analects, books of ritual, The Art of War, and their commentaries.

We have Matteo Ricci (1552–1610 CE) to thank. An Italian Jesuit in the court of the Chinese kings, he dedicated himself to making Christianity appetizing to the Chinese intelligentsia and, as a side effect, rendering the upper classes’ versions of “Chinese wisdom” palatable to his peers in the West. Ricci’s legacy was furthered by Scottish sinologist and missionary James Legge (1815–97), who performed for a curious, searching, and philosophically minded West the service of isolating the Taoist text we know as Tao Te Ching as a stand-alone work. It was esoteric enough to lure the curious and translatable enough to persuade a nonscholarly but inquiring Western mentality that this text was all we need to know about Taoism.

It is as if Legge brought home one beautiful bird from China and housed it in a zoo where many people came to see, report about, and even make popular this one imprisoned bird for the masses—even after it died. And we remain convinced that this one bird is all we need to know about Chinese exotic birds.

Translated more than any other sacred text save the New Testament, Tao Te Ching’s history in the West is a curious isolation of one text, scraped clean of historical influence, uninfluenced by and out of conversation with Confucianism, the Chinese poetry tradition, the various Chinese dynasties in the past two millennia, and even Mao during the twentieth century. If we read only Tao Te Ching as a “timeless text,” we will know very little of Taoism’s long lineage or the times, traditions, rituals, and worldviews that produced It. I address some of

this context collapse in my translation and reflections.

Of course, one may read my translation with great profit for personal growth and living intentionally. However, if Tao speaks to you, I hope you sink roots into Taoist traditions themselves. Get to know the cultures that began and then shaped the first understandings of Tao. Learn other Taoist priorities besides the practices of silence and noncompeting. Come to realize that even without an equivalent to a pope or Mecca, millions regularly take part in Taoist activities and rituals.⁸

Finally, a few housekeeping tasks: First, I capitalize certain words, such as Tao, Virtue, and Wu-wei. The reader should know that these are not only key words in Taoism but directly translated from the text, not implied. Second, I have employed a diverse chorus of religious texts, poets, philosophers, and others to enter into a discussion and be commentary for these verses. These I place just below each translated verse. Third, the verses’ titles are my own. The earliest Chinese versions of Tao Te Ching contain no individual verses, so no verse titles. However, a tradition arose among both Chinese and other language renditions of entitling verses, which I have followed. Let the reader understand, however, that originally, Tao Te Ching was one long poem, which has come down to us in eighty-one parts or verses.

Finally, let us address pronouns. Chinese is less strict on gender identification than English. When it became impossible to render a verse in gender-neutral terms, I alternated male and female pronouns in the translation. In addition, when adding the voices of similar wisdom from around the world, I have tried to adjust gender-specific language in these texts as well (such quotes have been marked “altered”). As Tao Te Ching is one of the most powerful femininesourced texts in the world, it seems fitting to give “her” every chance to be heard.

Marc S. Mullinax

Asheville, North Carolina

Fall 2020

Tao Te Ching

Power for the Peaceful

The Taoteching is one long poem written in praise of something we cannot name, much less imagine.

—Red Pine, introduction to Lao Tzu’s Taoteching

1

Tao’s Way

I Any track one can walk is no path for the eternal Way. Any name one might borrow for Tao cannot summon It; names are just sounds for ordinary things.

II Before paths or words, Tao began all there is, but to start the naming—trying to tame It—begins a never-ending logorrhea powered by ego and desire, leading one astray.

III Not-desiring is the only way to glimpse this mystery. Desiring, all one sees are husks and appearances.

IV But both desiring and not-desiring are twins birthed in the same darkened mystery: through this dark lies the path to all wisdom. This is Tao’s style.

The best things can’t be told, the second best are misunderstood.

Heinrich Zimmer

I do not know it . . . it is without name . . . it is a word unsaid,

It is not in any dictionary or utterance of symbol.

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Since you saw no form when the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire, take care and watch yourselves closely, so that you do not act corruptly by making an idol for yourselves, in the form of any figure.

Deuteronomy 4:15–16

To whom will you liken me and make me equal, and compare me, as though we were alike?

Isaiah 46:5

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the Earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

Isaiah 55:8–9

Part of her had been diminished by being named.

Frederick Buechner, The Final Beast

Do not seek God’s name, for you will not find it. Everything with a name is named by someone stronger, so that one might call and the other obey. Who then has named God? “God” is not God’s name, but an opinion about God.

Sextus

Notes and Reflections

The Chinese text contains about five thousand characters, but every one is but commentary after these first fifty-nine. So we start with this mystery: In the beginning is the silence. Tao needs no language to do Its work, for Its syntax is silence. We discover Its work in unregistered fluencies. About which we cannot know, practice silence. While speaking, one can hear little. Language is not simple enough for Tao; therefore, It is expressed best unclothed with interfering words. In this verse, we are asked to trust and to listen, not to control by defining. Have we ever been able to trust and control at the same time? To “enword” Tao is to begin the gravest of partisan attempts to bring rational understanding (control) to Tao—a task as impossible as it is foolish. The reason we might give name or voice to Tao is that we do not listen. To give a voice is to give but one name, out of a multitude of names, to that without name. When that one name becomes the name, the only name, a fundamentalism begins. Much better to practice silence about what cannot be known with certainty than to speak and declare an ignorance that can turn into a certainty.

Tao has no proprietary language of Its own. Therefore, to speak about It, one must borrow language that is incapable of knowing or situating Tao. Thus all description about Tao has to pretend correctness and concreteness—wink, wink. Fundamentalist ways do not understand this wink. Tao’s style is inscrutable, and all we are left with is an urge to show the Way with “the best possible failure.” All languages suggest but fail to deliver on their suggestions: the word fire does not warm or burn a thing. Language’s power is suggestive, never certain.

What to do with all this suggestive power? Practice silence, which carries its own delicate eloquence. Remain sensitive to Tao by paying wordless attention to the ordinary course of things. Moses, in Exodus, confronted—barefoot—his god.

He asked for the divine name, but all he got was an indefinite “I am who I am . . . I will be what I will be.” However, Moses took this imprecise definition and created a liberation and religious movement. Those with ears would do well to listen.

So what is Tao’s “sound,” if not human sputtering? Bees humming about the garden. The brilliance of flowers. Colors of autumn. The soundscape of the forest. The water’s drip-drip-drip bringing inevitable change in hard places. The pain cries of a birthing mother and her baby’s first mewl. Even cries of lament or feet marching for justice are Tao’s sounds. Whatever voices arise from the Earth, and however they are accented, are Tao’s sounds. They are Its creeds, Its confessions, and we may learn their fluencies. With no language-sound or visible path, Tao is discovered in the word-silence, just by walking along the Way Itself.

Finally, in the words all there is in the Chinese text is the oft-used phrase (used twenty times in the entire Tao Te Ching text) for “the ten thousand things” ( ). It is a Chinese way to point to awareness of the infinite number of things. Others translate this phrase as “the created order” or “all things under Heaven”: attempts to distinguish the innumerable manifestations of Nature from the singleness or unity of Tao.

2

Distinctions Promote Contention

I Everyone knows how our discriminative minds frame things in pairs that seem interdependent. Awareness of the beautiful leads one to frame the ugly at the same time. Push leads to pull. Calling out the good creates headspace for the bad.

II Likewise, is and is not arise together. We relate easy and difficult together because they seem naturally paired. The same for short and long. High things seem high only when one points out the low. The same for front and back, and superior and inferior. The past implies a future. And so on. Once aroused, these dyads never stop!

III Therefore, the Sage practices noninterference (Wu-wei) with the natural in her daily life. She silences the urge to define. Situations arouse attention, but she declines to confront, allowing natural processes to proceed without interrupting or possessing. She understands how things naturally and mutually arise without the need to control. She knows the secret to how things last.

It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man’s hand and the wisdom in a tree’s root: they all arise together. My name, and yours, and the true

name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name.

—Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

The Great Way is not difficult

for those not attached to preferences. . . .

To set up what you like against what you dislike

is the disease of the mind.

Seng-ts’an, Hsin-Hsin Ming, translated by Richard B. Clarke

Black . . . and blue

And who knows which is which and who is who.

Up . . . and down,

And in the end it’s only round ’n round.

Haven’t you heard it’s a battle of words?

Pink Floyd, “Us and Them”

Notes and Reflections

This verse speaks to a mutual arising (arousing) of things in the discriminating mind, like sheep with shepherds, senses coupling with sensed objects, mind joining with thought, the “bad” balancing out the “good,” pain longing for pleasure, light needing a contrasting dark, and death coupling with life. This production of distinctions, however, leads to false, impoverished dualisms that are not eternal. To be clear, Tao celebrates the binaries of yin and yang, of mutually interpenetrating things like waves and the ocean or bees and flowers. This celebration, however, is more a dance of inseparables and less the Western dualism of warring passions where one must take an uncompromising side that must conquer the other, and at all costs. Such separations and distinctions are artificial and render no benefits except to partisan thinking. Why put the “ten thousand things” into contrived contests? This is the beginning of a disturbed mind.

This verse introduces Wu-wei () for the first time in Tao Te Ching. is a particle of negation; connotes action, pursuit, and engagement. Translated here as nonmeddling or noninterference (and later as nonpursuit), Wu-wei is translated most often as no-action, not-doing, natural acting, or other terms suggesting egoless or forceless action. However, Wu-wei is not a signal to avoid or be lazy, not to influence or anticipate, nor be passive for passivity’s sake. Wuwei is simple, uncontrived steering without clinging to ownership of either the action or its fruits. It is merely focused action without attachment to any desired outcome. A cart’s wheel is just going to make tracks; that is all. Wu-wei is Taoism’s core competency, the fruit of which is peace precisely because it has no ego-assisted agenda. See my introduction and other verses that speak to Wu-wei: 3, 11, 29, 37, 43, 47, 48, 63, and 64.

Finally, we see the first instance of what I am translating in this work as “Sage”: , which appears in Tao Te Ching thirty times. The word is used as an exemplar of ethical Taoist sensibility and literally translates as “one who is holy,” or “of high character.” This is not the same as the Confucian Analects’s use of junzi ( ), which is also translated as “sage.” In Confucian thought, junzi signifies one consummately capable of wise and ethical behavior.

3

The Secret to Harmony

I Not elevating status—moral or material—diminishes competition. Not labeling objects as treasures or valuables minimizes theft. Not awakening appetites maintains the original heart-mind stillness.

II Thus the wise ruler does not lead by filling people with partisan, fake desires. He would rather model the peaceful heart-mind that calms chaotic desires. Nourishing bellies—not ego-heads—is the better way to strengthen character. He teaches a simplicity that eschews mindless acquisition in favor of contentment in the simple and necessary. This deep practice of simple necessity (Wu-wei) is the secret to harmony.

If we are at war with our parents, our family, our society, or our church, there is probably a war going on inside us also, so the most basic work for peace is to return to ourselves and create harmony among the elements within us. . . . When there are wars within us, it will not be long before we are at war with others, even those we love.

Thich Nhat Hanh, Living Buddha, Living Christ

Social media has colonized what was once a sacred space occupied by emptiness: the space reserved for thought and creativity.

Mahershala Ali

Notes and Reflections

I use heart-mind because the Chinese character () actually translates as a single spiritual place, but in English, we need two words to translate its depth. Most translations use either “heart” or “mind.” However, it is both-and. In binaryheavy Western worldviews, one can often overhear, “My mind tells me one thing, but my heart tells me another,” but this would be a foreign concept in East Asian thought. To the Taoist, to speak of the heart-mind is to reference one’s unified psychic center.

This verse hints at an empty center, or womb, devoid of desires and ego. With its potential for all manner of goodness, simple necessary action arising from this ego-empty place anticipates the distinctive feminine/mothering image of Verse 6. The radical silence referenced in Verse 1 correlates conceptually to the radical emptiness of a “peaceful heart-mind.” Radical emptiness gives birth to every goodness and peace.

In contrast, however, our lives today are not empty and are hardly radical, centered, or silent. We are off-balance, grasping, competing, comparing, discriminating, divided within and without, and unaccepting. We are always in search of that elusive “more,” but we seldom recognize when enough is enough (see Verse 46). Might not this text, which has been around centuries longer than our versions of capitalism, greed, and competition, offer much-needed correction? How shall we learn that a certain sort of “winning” is actually losing? Or that high status does not equate to being at ease? Might there be a happiness not sourced in greed and ownership?

The more beholden one is to society, the less one can know the truth or

distinguish the true from the fake, leading to disquiet and chaos. A simple relationship with truth is a radical act of revolutionary resistance and the way to peace.

4

Without Origin

I Tao presents as empty, dark, and complete potential, the inexhaustible womb of everything. How very deep is Its emptiness. How ancestral.

Tao blunts every sharp edge. It untangles every knot. Its brilliance merges deep in the dusty world, beyond our fat-fingered words and ways to frame It. So profoundly hidden, still, and clear, It hardly appears, but that is the way It is.

II I have no idea whose offspring It is. Consider It the ancestor of the gods.

Neither this body am I, nor soul,

Nor these fleeting images passing by,

Nor concepts and thoughts, mental images,

Nor yet sentiments and the psyche’s labyrinth.

Who then am I?

A consciousness without origin,

Not born in time, nor begotten here below.

I am that which was, is and ever shall be,

A jewel in the crown of the divine self,

A star in the firmament of the luminous one.

Rumi

Since before we were anatomically modern, humans have been making journeys into darkness to make and find meaning.

Robert McFarlane

To whomever emptiness is possible,

All things are possible.

To whomever emptiness is not possible,

Nothing is possible.

Nagarjuna, Refutation of Objections, verse 71

Notes and Reflections

In this verse, Tao’s nature is linked to three characters with the Chinese radical for water (): ch’ung (, “empty”), yuan (, “bottomless, abyss”), and chan (, “serene, profoundly still”). Before this long Tao poem is over, Tao will become closely associated with both water’s power and the depths to which water goes to do its work (see Verses 8, 32, and 78). For now, notice how this verse associates emptiness and serenity with Tao, which renders Tao virtually unseen.

Again, Tao is silence, empty, emptying out. So unmodern! What happens when we empty instead of fill, give instead of receive, love out instead of hate within? Ask a Quaker, whose practice in the presence of God is silence. Perhaps you may be ready for this change, from words to wordless, or from noisy to stillness. It will not be easy, and it can be lonely, but it is a path of peace accompanied by power, depth, and creativity.

5

The Function of Emptiness, Pt. 1

I Heaven and Earth cultivate no preference for outcomes. They regard creations as straw dogs.

II The Sage likewise cultivates no preference. She regards all people without favoritism, as if they were straw dogs.

III Tao functions like an emptied center between Heaven and Earth, acting here as a bellows to stoke fire or there as a flute to sound music. One can never exhaust these emptied spaces of their variations and gifts. What will run dry is chatter trying to reckon with this mystery. Where is your place? In this silent center.

Are you looking for me? I am in the next seat.

My shoulder is against yours.

You will not find me in the stupas, not in Indian shrine

rooms, nor in synagogues, nor in cathedrals:

not in masses, nor kirtans [chants set to music], not in legs winding

around your own neck, nor in eating nothing but

vegetables.

When you really look for me, you will see me

instantly—you will find me in the tiniest house of time.

Kabir says: Student, tell me, what is God?

He is the breath inside the breath.

Kabir, “Are You Looking for Me?”

Between the silence of the mountains and the crashing of the sea

There lies a land I once lived in

And she’s waiting there for me.

The Moody Blues, “Question”

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.

Philippians 2:5–7

Notes and Reflections

There is much to unpack. “Straw dogs,” used the first of two times in this verse, refers to ceremonial objects used in sacrifices, perhaps when praying for weather changes. No one attached any sentiment to them, so after the sacrifices, they were either trampled underfoot or burned.

The first line no doubt sounds alien, because “Heaven and Earth” appear as anthropomorphic deities. However, nothing in Tao is ever understood as we today understand gods—as anthropomorphic reflections of self, which selfassure us that our gods not only look like us but share the same loves and hates we do. So the following declaration may come as a shock to holders of Western worldviews: Tao does not love you! Tao is ever-described in impersonal terms with no preferences, or as fate without a choice. Why? Infecting Tao with one’s anthropomorphic preferences is the “gateway drug” to desire and control. Preference is a human attribute, and our unmanaged preferences, if we are honest, bring us the most grief. So in this verse, we find yet another proclamation in this poem about Tao’s inscrutable nature.

This verse first introduces ,¹ or ren (“no preference” or “cultivate no preference”). When originally placed here, ren had not yet ascended to be one of the five “official” Confucian virtues that it would become. Confucians translated ren as “humaneness.” (See the notes on Verse 8 for more on this Confucian understanding of .) Before Confucianism appropriated the concept, ren meant “near” or “akin to,” suggesting behavior one uses to treat one’s own family. This is perhaps why the Confucian tradition used the word ren as the base of its ethical code: to treat others the same as one would one’s own family. Again, this Taoist use of ren predates the Confucian context in which most Chinese readers today would understand it.

Otherwise, Tao Te Ching texts usually imply an anti-Confucian bias. Taoism viewed Confucian morality as a synthetic arousal of public propriety, which violated the inner spirit of Taoism’s understanding of goodness as more natural and inherent, needing no public “cultivation.” See in Verse 18 how Confucianism and Taoism conflict in almost open argument. However, Verse 5 is not one of those conflicted places; it demonstrates a kind of unity or sympathy in ancient Chinese philosophy.¹¹

Finally, the concept of “no preference for outcomes” has a spiritual cousin in the Catholic faith. This indifference is a major theme in the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, which prepare adherents for a life of freedom from unnatural desire: “Another word for indifference is freedom. Ignatius says that to make good decisions, we must try to be free from personal preferences, societal expectations, fear of poverty and loneliness, desire for fame and honor, and anything else that stands in the way of the choice that will best serve God and bring us true happiness.”¹²

Section (iii) is a great preparation for Verse 6, one of Tao Te Ching’s most important. Can we wrap our heart-minds around the Taoist assertion that emptiness is everything’s source? For more, read on.

6

The Womb of Everything

I The Valley Spirit has always endured; she is deathless, subtle, and countercultural, always pulsing and creating. You might name her Inscrutable Mother.

From her womb every creation flows. Ever-presenting yet never twice the same, your use cannot drain her.

The following poem from Hebrew scripture describes Hokmah ( ), the divinefeminine personage of Lady Wisdom, who plays a key creative role in creation:

I was brought into being a long time ago,

well before Earth got its start.

I arrived on the scene before Ocean,

yes, even before Springs and Rivers and Lakes.

Before Mountains were sculpted and Hills took shape,

I was already there, newborn;

Long before God stretched out Earth’s Horizons,

and tended to the minute details of Soil and Weather,

And set Sky firmly in place,

I was there.

When he mapped and gave borders to wild Ocean,

built the vast vault of Heaven,

and installed the fountains that fed Ocean,

When he drew a boundary for Sea,

posted a sign that said no trespassing,

And then staked out Earth’s Foundations,

I was right there with him, making sure everything fit.

Day after day I was there, with my joyful applause,

always enjoying his company,

So my dear friends, listen carefully;

those who embrace these my ways are most blessed.

Blessed the man, blessed the woman, who listens to me,

awake and ready for me each morning,

alert and responsive as I start my day’s work.

When you find me, you find life, real life.

Proverbs 8:22–30; 32–35 (The Message)

Notes and Reflections

The mere twenty-five characters of this verse pack much meaning and are difficult to translate. Less descriptive than poetic, they stimulate more wonder than certainty about Tao.

However, what is clear is the utterly feminine grounding of Taoist spirituality. Before there is any thing, there is the feminine. The feminine is the source of all life. Her never-ending concave emptiness of a womb began all there is.

7

Endurance Practice

I Heaven is eternal, and Earth is everlasting.

What is their secret?

How do they endure?

Not having to live for themselves, they live long.

II Lighten your ego to live wisely.

Leave self behind to move forward.

Find yourself . . . fulfilled in others.

These are the practices of endurance.

Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to finding yourself, your true self. What kind of deal is it to get everything you want but lose yourself? What could you ever trade your soul for?

Matthew 16:25–26 (The Message)

Those who live for themselves fight with others. Those who don’t live for themselves are the refuge of others.

Wang Bi

To feel life is meaningless unless “I” can be permanent is like having desperately fallen in love with an inch.

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

Notes and Reflections

The object of this teaching is selflessness. Self, when surrounded by self, brings a heaviness to living. Magic flees. How boring to live only for ourselves, with neither the creativity nor the courage to explore any other way. When one does not have achievement of one’s individual self on the mind, leaving one’s mind as the originally silent empty womb that it is, there is freedom from all the worries associated with the ego’s false need to achieve. One can more clearly live for others and others’ peace when one’s own endless path of achievement is exposed as the false goal of existence.

Of course, new mothers may easily discover selflessness. But what about the rest of us? How do we reachieve spontaneity, move about freely in our lives, escape our self-wrought mental prisons of habit, and not worry about coloring outside society’s strict lines? I think answers can be found in this simple verse! Live for others. Lighten the ego. Leave the self aside. Find fulfillment in others instead of in oneself.

Yes, this is as countercultural as it is unpopular. But you know people like this. Have you found yourself secretly envying them or wondering how they do it? This verse, as well as Verse 8, is an ancient blueprint for living; they are off-theshelf-ready for anyone’s testing and practice.

8

What Would Water Do?

I How does one live with unparalleled excellence? Be like water.

Water brings benefits to all living things. Without thought or contention, water seeks the lowest places that others avoid and there finds the way . . . like Tao.

II Dwell in lowly settings.

Tune the strings of your heart-mind down in the fathomless places.

There, earn a masters in Humanity.

Speak simply.

When governing, practice skilled fairness.

In daily work, practice competence.

From such skills, one will know the timing for every justice.

III What would water do? Stay low. The wise do not strive, attracting neither enemy nor error. Win-win.

Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. . . . Remember you are half water. If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.

Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.

Bruce Lee, A Warrior’s Journey

As the water shapes itself to the vessel that contains it, so a wise person adapts himself to circumstances.

Attributed to Confucius

You become great by accepting, not asserting. Your spirit, not your size, makes the difference.

Luke 9:48 (The Message)

Under the rocks and stones, there is water underground.

Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime”

Notes and Reflections

As already noted in Verse 5’s “Notes and Reflections,” humane is written as , or ren, signifying “humane virtue.” Humane, from humus (Latin, signifying the point at which compost becomes earth), is English’s etymological source for “humility,” “human,” and “humbled,” all of which signal low places. Ren is one of the five top moral attitudes in Confucianism, and this our author Lao-Tzu, a contemporary of Confucius, knows! Therefore, ren’s placement here is perhaps intentional, serving first to enhance and amplify its Confucian use and then to shift it into a nuanced understanding for Taoist thought. What is this nuance?

While not explicitly written here, Wu-wei is our model. Wu-wei is noninterfering motion, not merely passive nonaction. To know Wu-wei, study water. As with water, our natural place is to serve in low places, changing things from below. Good leaders know this, and they know how competition, meddling, and monkeying around with things are unnatural interferences from above.

Tao Te Ching satirizes competitive power as it is widely understood and practiced. Most people have been taught to hate being on the “bottom” of things —of history, in an organization—and so compete to rise. After all, it seems that our leaders have done this: escaped the bottom and “risen” through the ranks to be the single, obvious point of a pyramid. But this is a scheme to the Taoist. Competition tends to malign others and, worse, disassociates one from their true or inner self. The further we remove ourselves from our nature, the less good, the less happy, and the less integrated we are; we show ourselves in actual rebellion against Nature. What conditioning keeps us from practicing this obvious truth?

Think of water as creation’s bloodstream, serving every cell without premeditation, hindrance, or calling attention to itself. To link life’s skills (and Tao) with water’s ways bespeaks Tao’s hidden processes, truth, and power, anytime and everywhere.

9

Early Retirement

I A cup filled past the brim is waste, and a knife oversharpened loses its edge.

II Fill a space with too much gold or jade, and who can guard it?

Overwork yourself with honor, status, or pride, and how do you avoid ruin?

Too much of anything leads straight to meddling chaos.

Early retirement is Heaven’s nature.

You are rich in proportion to the number of things you can afford to let alone.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden (altered)

What good would it do to get everything you want and lose you, the real you?

Mark 8:36 (The Message)

Surrounded by treasure, you lie ill at ease; proud beyond measure, you come to your knees.

Witter Bynner, The Way of Life, according to Lao Tzu

When the time comes, just walk away quietly and don’t make any fuss.

Banksy, The Art of Banksy, Unauthorized-Private Collection

Let it be, let it be

Let it be, let it be.

Whisper words of wisdom, let it be.

The Beatles, “Let It Be”

Notes and Reflections

Contemplate two examples from Nature: moon and sun. When a moon waxes to its fullest extent, it does not continue or prolong waxing, but wanes. The sun, upon reaching its midday apex, can do nothing but descend. (This is yin and yang in easy-to-see action.) Imagine either sun or moon refusing to back off. This is the lesson of “too much.”

Readers with strong commitments to capitalism will not like this verse. The gospel of capitalism is always-more, overwork, and competition. Its anthem is “Never too much.” If we took this verse seriously, capitalism as we know it would collapse. Gold and jade may seem nice, but their owners must invest in safety deposit boxes, insurance, and security. The worry-industrial complex we develop about riches is not considered an “investment,” but the amount of energy we put into worry is no less an investment than security guards. With less room for ego, there is more room for others. See Verse 10’s warning on such investments. Consider how, without these investments, we are freed up to see people as more important.

10

The Tax on Ownership

I Just as you carry your Self in your body, can you see all things as One?

Focused as you are in all your solidified power, can you summon up the soft suppleness of being newly born?

As attentive as you are to self-cleansing, can you see life itself as stainless?

II As care-full as you are for people, can you lead without the usual self-calculus of being in charge?

As you enter or leave mighty Heaven’s gates, what are the chances of doing it without a swollen ego?

As knowledgeable as you are of all business in the four directions, can you know nothing for a change?

Consider how the midwife assists as she begins and nourishes life. She does not own.

Deep Virtue’s way leaves neither trail nor fingerprints. Use, do not own.

Ownership is a tax.

The perfected one employs the mind as a mirror.

It grasps nothing, it refuses nothing.

It receives but does not keep.

Chuang Tzu, translated by James Legge (altered)

The wild geese do not intend to cast their reflection,

and the water has no mind to retain their image.

Alan Watts, Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life

If you start seeking, then we know you are unable to see. . . . As soon as you seek, it is like grasping at shadows.

Yuanwu Keqin, Zen Letters: Teachings of Yuanwu, translated by Thomas Cleary

Rather than trying to become a buddha, nothing could be simpler than taking the shortcut of remaining a buddha!

Bankei, Bankei Zen, translated by Yoshito Hakeda

The false serpent persuaded Adam that he must still do something to become like God . . . to make himself what God had already made him. That was the Fall of man.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Cost of Discipleship

Notes and Reflections

There is a quality here, often overlooked, found in bringing the ego to a retiring halt. The person most disabled to see is the one who has calculated to be in the spotlight. Thinking the spotlight is a good thing, however, they do not realize that while in it, one cannot see a damned thing. They know not even the extent of their unknowing.

This quality of retiring Virtue (in the next-to-last line of this verse) is the Te in Tao Te Ching. One might further understand Te by inspecting its Chinese character, , as presented in the introduction. Verse 51 is a good commentary for the midwife image: Tao mothers all life-forms, Te stewards them.

Additionally, Te is a thing’s quality or core essence, and its result is what things naturally do, like a flower appearing at the top of the stem. Te is the refusal to use the power at one’s disposal as one’s own privileged commodity. It is an unforced, unvarnished, and inherent quality—just doing what one does without affect or playing to the crowd. Te is when the eye sees, but not so powerfully as to see the eyeball itself. When the ear hears naturally, it does not hear its own parts. We all have Te naturally, although Te cannot be owned.

11

The Function of Emptiness, Pt. 2

I The hub of a cart wheel has an empty center, which is more important to movement than those thirty spokes radiating from it. The hub’s empty center is its sole functioning part.

II Fashion a bowl all the day long,

but its inner emptiness, not its outer art, gives it its function.

A house’s empty center makes it livable.

Likewise, the empty center of a window or doorframe—what’s not there—adds function. Otherwise, how would you get home?

Form has its place, but emptiness serves.

Become nothing, And He’ll turn you into everything.

Rumi, A Garden beyond Paradise, translated by Jonathan Star and Shahram Shiva

The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Terre des Hommes

Look at this window: it is nothing but a hole in the wall, but because of it the whole room is full of light. So when the faculties are empty, the heart is full of light. Being full of light it becomes an influence by which others are secretly transformed.

Chuang Tzu, translated by Thomas Merton

This Body itself is Emptiness and Emptiness itself is this Body.

This Body is not other than Emptiness, and Emptiness is not other than this Body.

Heart Sutra, translated by Thich Nhat Hanh

A day of Silence

Can be a pilgrimage in itself.

A day of Silence

Can help you listen

To the Soul play

Its marvelous lute and drum.

Is not most talking

A crazed defense of a crumbling fort?

Hafiz, I Heard God Laughing, translated by Daniel Ladinsky

A builder looks for the rotten hole

where the roof caved in. A water carrier

picks the empty pot

Their hope, thought,

is for emptiness, so don’t think

you must avoid it. It contains

what you need.

Rumi, “Craftsmanship and Emptiness,” translated by Coleman Barks

Notes and Reflections

This verse is a crucial commentary on Verse 6, on the feminine power of emptiness. See in your mind’s eye a spoon or a cello: the hollowed-out space is the functional part. “Less” is the ancestor of “more.” Emptiness precedes a populated space. Feminine emptiness precedes every male. “Nothing” happens before “everything.” Every meditator knows this, that one must “empty out the garbage” of the mind—not to refill it, but to maintain its silent emptiness.

Capitalism would not care for this verse either. “Nature abhors a vacuum” is our rationale to fill space that is already useful: occupy a continent, cut down a forest because it’s “nothing,” and even leave a radio or television on as background, filler noise. Our worldview’s usual urge is to hoard and to fill vacuums with “stuff,” perhaps because we are uncomfortable when empty and silent.

This verse is about the power of nothing, or emptiness. Do, think, plan nothing —no-thing, not-a-thing—for a change. It’s about creating a mental, psychic womb, one full of silent nothingness. This is the “function of emptiness” of Verse 5, where an empty bellows is the creative womb/force. Taoists would have us pay close attention to nothing. No thought, no words, no screen, no ego, no action—here is the beginning of raw creativity, unanchored imagination . . . and usefulness. The spiritual practice of no-thingness is called meditation in some faiths, but Wu-wei in Taoism. Emptying oneself of babble to give room for a new fluency of Wu-wei activity is a foundational pillar of Taoism . . . or any other discipline, be it spiritual, musical, or athletic.

12

Focus on Mindfulness

I Mindlessly regarding the five customary colors leads to color blindness.

Mindlessly hearing the five customary sounds muffles one’s ability to listen.

Mindlessly tasting the five customary tastes dulls the tongue.

Excess wastes energy and yields only unnatural and dehumanizing things.

Unguided by heart-mind nature, mindless attention leads only to insane choices.

II Thus only mind-full needs—not mindless desires—guide the Sage. Focused thus, one knows exactly when to let go, and when to hold on.

The Bromide does his thinking by syndicate. He follows the main-traveled roads, goes with the crowd. In a word, they all think and talk alike—one may

predict their opinion upon any given subject. They follow custom and costume, they obey the Law of Averages. They are, intellectually, all peas in the same conventional pod, unenlightened, prosaic, living by rule and rote.

Gelett Burgess, Are You a Bromide?

Prior to the advent of brain, there was no color and no sound in the universe, nor was there any flavor or aroma and probably rather little sense and no feeling or emotion. Before brains the universe was also free of pain and anxiety.

Roger Sperry, Evolution of the Human Brain

The most insidious thing about bondage was how easy it was to grow accustomed to it.

George R. R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.

Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

All language can register is the slow return to the oblivion we call health when imagination automatically recolors the landscape and habit blurs perception and language takes up its routine flourishes.

Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

Notes and Reflections

Translators have been uncertain whether the three mentions of “five” refer to a literary device to indicate “many,” or whether “five” refers to an actual number corresponding to the five traditional elements in Chinese thought. Both could be true here, but I choose the latter emphasis. Here’s why.

The five colors of ancient China (green/blue, red, yellow, white, and black) corresponded to the five traditional elements (wood, fire, earth, metal, and water, respectively). The five sounds (la, so, mi, re, do) and the five flavors (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and spicy-hot) corresponded to these same elements. The Taoist worldview held that, when vocalized or chanted, the sounds brought harmony and healing to the various organs of the body: xū (wood/liver), hē (fire/heart), hū (earth/spleen), sī (metal/lung), and chuī (water/kidney).

A chaotic mixture of colors, sounds, and tastes, especially if coupled with a mindless (“customary”) and materially oriented life, would stand in the way of Tao awareness and inner clarity. Taoist virtue, as we saw in the previous verse, stems from simplicity and emptiness. Taoism distrusts the senses, which it considers the gateways to distractions (for more, see Verse 53).

Counterculturally, Tao calls us to “sandpaper” our senses (as a safecracker sandpapers his fingers) to sharpen receptivity. How? Practice the unaccustomed. Practice intentional mis-fitting. Fall in love with the unpopular. Pursue peace in uncommon ways, with uncommon people. These remain declarations of unhindered freedom from categories, expectations, and predigested answers, because while Tao cannot be spoken, neither can It be silenced. With practice, It can be heard. And that is a good sign of hope.

13

Fleeting Sensations

I Be equally startled by both dishonor and by honor: each hinges on our sense of self . . . our body. High status dismays one as much as sorrow, and both are temporary fruits of ignorance.

II What then is meant by honor and dishonor equally causing one to startle? To gain or hold on to honor and praise is a sordid affair. Even though temporary, gain and loss are unsettling. Either way, you lose your grounding. So stay alert.

III Why do gain and loss equally afflict us? We have a body, and are everconscious of its fleeting sensations of both great blessing and great suffering within it. You know this!

IV The trusted leader loves her body as she loves her world. Knowing she cares for both, we are assured her judgments are trustworthy and wise.

The First Noble Truth is the existence of sorrow. Birth is sorrowful, growth is sorrowful, illness is sorrowful, and death is sorrowful. Sad it is to be joined with that which we do not like. Sadder still is the separation from that which we love,

and painful is the craving for that which cannot be obtained.

The Buddha

He who experiences the unity of life sees his own Self in all beings, and all beings in his own Self, and looks on everything with an impartial eye.

The Buddha

I’m nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody too?

Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell!

They’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!

How public, like a frog

To tell your name the livelong day

To an admiring bog!

Emily Dickinson, “I’m Nobody! Who Are You?”

From time immemorial we have been addicted to the self that loathes suffering and loves the causes of suffering.

Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, What Makes You Not a Buddhist

Notes and Reflections

Six times does this verse mention (shēn), suggesting “body,” “self,” “person,” or “sense of self.” This meaning of self predates the European Enlightenment, so it is not an idea on which one can scaffold human rights or base a government on equality of persons. Instead, shēn is the locus of suffering. Couple this idea in Taoism with Buddhism’s First Noble Truth, that life is suffering, and you are set to understand the absolutely radical connection made in part (iv) of this verse. The leader who understands how she suffers in her own person/body is empathetic enough to understand how suffering permeates the world. To understand and then love oneself is to do the same for the other, the world. Seeing them as concomitant tasks makes this verse utterly revolutionary for leaders.

One never earns power by ostentatious self-sacrifice of our bodies, but in quiet somatic vulnerability to the world. Through our bodies, we learn compassion for the world. To live with Tao is radically subversive; It is a path on which one is unlikely to be seduced by the false footholds of gain or loss. Virtue is the fruit of this peculiar subversive path.

The result? Virtuous leadership. Trust not in that which is ego-driven; trust instead in the one who regards what happens in her world, and in the larger world, as synchronous events. In such a calculus, compassion activates.

14

Living the Inconceivable

I One can look for the invisible, but never discover it.

One can listen out for the soundless, but never hear it.

One may try to grasp the immaterial, but never touch it.

We possess no inquiry into these three.

II This subtle trinity of unknowing is the nature of the One. While on its surface this One is unclear, it is knowable at its depths. But just to stand before, or follow after, gives one no advantage of discovery. All named things emerge from it, but it is ever nameless.

III Live in the ever-evolving ancient Tao so one may appreciate timeless Tao on this very day.

If you can understand it, it’s not God.

Saint Augustine

Hope sees the invisible, feels the intangible, and achieves the impossible.

Anonymous

If you use your mind to study reality, you won’t understand either your mind or reality. If you study reality without using your mind, you’ll understand both.

Bodhidharma

The Holy Land is everywhere.

Black Elk

In order to arrive at possessing everything, desire to possess nothing. In order to arrive at being everything, desire to be nothing. In order to arrive at knowing everything, desire to know nothing.

Saint John of the Cross

Notes and Reflections

Nine times (about every tenth word) does this verse proclaim “not” (). So Tao is not revealed by positive statements, but rather in what cannot be expressed. Thus Its form is untamable, inexplicable, and we know it only by practicing “not.” For the Hindu, this “not” is the practice of neti-neti (“not this, not that”), regarding every material or named thing under Heaven as insufficient to uncover or unmask Brahman, the predivine uncaused cause, or unforced force. Neti-neti is a spiritual practice to have no-thing stand in for or represent Brahman. For the Jew, the commandment not to have a graven image for g-d means to keep the “gd space” free and clear of any created, material, or word association (a commandment very close to the central tenet of Verse 1—that Tao cannot be named or sounded). There is a little-known apophatic tradition in Christianity, one that denies the efficacy of positive statements about God (such as “God is love” or “God likes ethical behavior”) to provide adequate knowledge of the Divine. Instead, God-talk means saying what God is not, because God lies so far beyond—and free from—human understanding, logic, or language. “God is not finite,” “God is not known,” and “God is not male” would be some apophatic rejections of a God who is comprehensible. Tao, like God, is unknowable. For a review of this teaching, see Verses 1, 5, 9, and 11. Human tools cannot unscrew the inscrutable.

15

Original Patience

I Ancient masters excelled in mystery and discerning elusive wisdom. While it is impossible to retrace their exact knowledge, one may distill their traits:

II Unhurried, like when one crosses a frozen rocky stream,

Vigilant, like when one senses dangers from all sides,

Reverent, like an honored guest,

Relaxed and fluid, like thawing ice on the move,

Simple and pure, like the virgin texture of the beginner’s mind,

Accepting and empty, like a valley or cave.

III Meditate on this: How does muddied water, when left alone, gradually clear?

Can we too practice clarity by stillness alone?

Can we too maintain our original nature of serenity and silence throughout life?

Follow Tao to remain empty but accepting,

so even when ancient, one is never exhausted . . . or unfulfilled.

Adopt the pace of Nature: her secret is Patience.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Education”

By means of tranquility, the murky becomes clear. By means of movement, the still becomes alive. This is the natural Way.

Wang Bi

After you have cultivated yourself with silence, you know the confusion of an abundance of words.

Hung Ying-ming, Master of the Three Ways 1.32

The heart cannot be made pure, but if you avoid the muddying elements purity will appear on its own.

Hung Ying-ming, Master of the Three Ways 1.150

The quiet is quieting. There are answers in the silence.

Gordon Hempton

To be teachable is a thing that ages not with age.

Aeschylus

Notes and Reflections

We are at a loss to figure out what the wisdom of the ancients entailed. However, the text outlines the timeless practices of this wisdom. Wisdom is not difficult to attain, but it takes time and work. Thus Tao is know-how into how things are developing and in process, not a surface know-that. Learning to know and to be wise means to “adopt the pace of Nature.”

For the clearing of muddied water, I recommend as commentary the four-minute video entitled “Just Breathe” by Julie Bayer Salzman and Josh Salzman (Wavecrest Films). Only the emptied hand, lung, pocket, ship, womb, room—or mind—can be put to use . . . any use at all. See Verses 5 and 11 for this theme’s reinforcement.

16

The End of Fear

I Pledge allegiance to unlimited emptiness.

Dedicate yourself to uncompromised silence.

II Notice how the ten thousand things arise

but also how each returns to its root.

This return to root is the start, finish, and fruit of tranquility.

It is the “why” of Tao, the purpose of Eternity.

Have this permeate your mind, and become enlightened.

But stay ignorant and one’s future is chaos and disaster.

III When you align with your eternal source, your life evolves into

acceptance of all, that overlays onto the

dignity of all, that borders with

Heaven, the source of all, that follows

Tao, which is eternal.

When you are aligned thus, fear never comes near.

Now this, O bhikkhus [“monks,” in the early Theravada tradition of Buddhism], is the noble truth concerning the destruction of suffering: Verily, it is the destruction, in which no passion remains, of this very thirst; it is the laying aside of, the being free from, the dwelling no longer upon this thirst.

The Buddha, teaching on the Third Noble Truth, the destruction of desire, or Nirvana

When a man is always occupied with the cravings of desire and ambition, and is eagerly striving to satisfy them, all his thoughts must be mortal, and, as far as it is possible altogether to become such, he must be mortal every whit, because he has cherished his mortal part. But he who has been earnest in the love of knowledge and of true wisdom, and has exercised his intellect more than any other part of him, must have thoughts immortal and divine. If he attains truth, and insofar as human nature is capable of sharing in immortality, he must be altogether immortal; and since he is ever cherishing the divine power, and has the divinity within him in perfect order, he will be perfectly happy.

Plato, “We Are a Heavenly Flower,” Timaeus 90a–d, translated by Benjamin Jowett

Notes and Reflections

Here is Tao Te Ching’s primary statement about peace, although that word is not actually a part of this verse. Instead, we have emptiness, silence, root, purpose, source, acceptance, and aligned. These are not alien forces coming to us from the outside; they lie naturally within all creation. While we all recognize how our lives can become seething cauldrons of chaos and turmoil, this is not our original nature. When we are not at peace, then competition, leading by ego, and seeing ourselves as isolated from or alienated against others and this world arise as unnatural ways of living. These lead to colonization of self with schemes of violence against self and against others. However, as one’s source and home base, friendship with Tao is ever the reminder of where one belongs. From Tao’s empty womb, with Its Wu-wei reverse thinking, come the constant prompts of our call not to “fit in,” to practice mis-fitting (or intentionally adapting poorly) to the siren calls of unnatural ways of living, unjust systems, and nonpeaceful ways. This path of dissent is the path of transformational living. Tao is the original power for original peace; practicing mis-fitting is the most humane and human ritual we can do, to remember who we really are.

The enlightened peace promised here comes through practice, not by accident or isolated incident. It is not some nugget of wisdom that just enters through the ears and then you can talk about it. As part (iii) indicates, this enlightenment is a constant practice of aligning with the Way (Tao) the universe arose and operates. In the Tao worldview, the person is no different from the makeup of the universe. Chinese wisdom is rife with assertions that human nature is nothing other than the nature of the universe. Tremendous fear-reducing confidence resides in knowing that you and the universe operate from the same ancient playbook, sharing the same operating system.

The specific lesson here compares well to waves on an ocean. Relate each wave to someone’s or something’s span of life. Each wave/life arises from the ocean water, and to the larger ocean it returns. No calculus exists by which one wave/span is estimated better or judged more valuable than any other. Whether that wave thinks more of itself or makes more an ego-show of itself . . . it does not matter. The wave was once not, then is for a while, then is not again. It has no past or future, just a present moment. Meditating on this yields wisdom.

17

No Traces

I The best leaders leave no trace of their governing among the people.

The second best are known by the love of the people.

Third best are obeyed through fear.

Then come the despised and reviled.

II It is obvious when a person does not trust himself; he hardly inspires others’ trust.

III The leader’s words are few, but each is priceless. Whatever she promises is a done deal. After her accomplishments, everyone says, “It all happened naturally.”

Thinking unavoidably destroys the immediacy of life, once it is begun. The question is whether a higher immediacy can be re-established.

Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought

The junzi [sage] wishes to be slow of speech and quick in action.

Confucius, Analects 4.24, translated by Robert Eno

Notes and Reflections

Verses 17, 18, and 19 carry forward the same theme and are read profitably as one unit. Remember that each of the eighty-one verses of Tao Te Ching begins an artificial break in this text, divisions made long after an original text appeared.

Tao is trackless because It is wholly integrated in creation; It is everywhere one turns. People’s love, or fear, or even despising of It only shows Tao’s truth and reality—and the distance of people’s separation from Tao. While Tao is an immediate matter of trust, It is best forgotten and never thought about. Once Tao gets popular, regarded as a pop-culture commodity to consume, trust in Tao declines. When Tao becomes a mere conversation piece, people lose touch with It. Notice in the next two verses how Tao is best (when) forgotten.

Notice the popular quote, “It all happened naturally.” Here is the first instance of zìrán (), or “self so.” Zìrán describes a primordial state of nature, full of spontaneity and creativity. We see this theme four more times in Tao Te Ching, most notably in Verse 51’s “spontaneous responses,” and 64’s “return to their natural selves.” There is nothing simpler or more basic than this uncontrived natural state, where nothing artificial has infiltrated.

18

Triggers

I When people desert great Tao, they settle for thinned out rules. Spiritless concepts of morality and self-righteousness—even shrewdness—arise as substitutes.

Similarly, when cleverness and cunning become virtues, it is only because artifice and hypocrisy have triggered them.

II When family systems fail, watch how exhortations of “filial piety” and “family values” become popular! Patriots and loyal ministers shout out their importance only when they feel that decay threatens their nation.

I am convinced that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

When water accumulates, it breeds predatory fish. When earth accumulates, it

breeds cannibalistic beasts. When rites and duties become decorations, they breed artificial and hypocritical people.

Liú Ān, The Book of Leadership and Strategy, translated by Thomas Cleary

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

Krishnamurti

Trying to suppress delusion is delusion too. Delusions have no original existence; they’re only things you create yourself by indulging in discrimination.

Bankei, Bankei Zen, translated by Yoshito Hakeda

The ways of the world become daily more artificial. Hence we have names like wisdom and reason, kindness and justice, cleverness and profit. Those who understand the Tao see how artificial they are and how inappropriate they are to rule the world. They aren’t as good as getting people to focus their attention on the undyed and the uncarved. By wearing the undyed and holding the uncarved, our self-interest and desires wane. The undyed and the uncarved refer to our original nature.

Chiao Hung

Notes and Reflections

Four of the twenty-six characters in this verse are (arise), translated here as “triggered” or “become popular.” This verse is likely a reaction of natural Taoism to the “cut flowers” offered by Confucian culture. While both understood Tao as their source, Taoists felt creation’s original pristine order (Tao) was corrupted by a masquerading, synthetic “tao” that meddled, and Confucians, said Taoists, disregarded spontaneous Nature when they considered the human arrangements in society. “Filial piety” does not have to be taught; it is something we naturally do. So the reference to “family systems” is a broadside against vacuous family ritual without a corresponding natural family love. Confucian filial relations remain to this day the cornerstone of most East Asian societies, though some see these relations more as requirements (“You must love me”) than natural love. That a pillar of Confucianism shows up here could mean ancient Taoists felt the “trigger” of an unnecessary Confucian ritual in their day.

When a society forgets silent, calm Tao so that that society’s world-wise codes of wisdom gradually displace Tao, a crucial simplicity and balance are lost. Natural trust in the Way things are disappears, and shouts of those wanting a return to “the good old days” (that never were in the first place) begin to shape the culture. The culture’s decay “triggers” certain individuals or groups to nostalgia. By emphasizing “unacceptable” behavior more than that which is “acceptable,” they seek to ratchet society to their liking. But their methods— usually “ends” justifying any “means”—become obstacles by introducing too much yin or yang.

Modern correlations include (1) the rise of political correctness when used as a means to a preconceived end; (2) when trust in the mission of a nation decays, or its path toward the future grows uncertain, patriots come out of the woodwork,

attempting to colonize a forgetful nation; and (3) when a society feels itself to be in chaos calls for order, stability, and national purity (via anti-immigration sentiments, for instance) are the media’s favorite subjects. The ways of becoming unbalanced are numberless. What these ways forget is that Tao’s utterly revolutionary simplicity does not need an artificial overlay of morality or ritual.

In the Taoist worldview, opposing via (a seemingly moral) pushing-against is a perverse but quite assured way to maintain and even strengthen that which one opposes. Declaring wars on drugs or terrorism—the declaration being the sure sign that Tao is neglected—often sets the conditions for more of each. And in return, those who declare “War!” morph into mirror images of that which they claim to fight. These ideas continue in the first section of the next verse.

19

Necessary Interruptions

I Interrupt sanctified holiness and forsake sophistication. People are one hundred times happier without these contrivances.

Interrupt the “rules” of family devotion and discard those exhausting ancestral duties. People will naturally recover what family means.

Interrupt cunning and forget profit. Notice how theft diminishes.

These three interruptions are but a beginning. Your goal is peace in your essence. Here is what’s next:

II Discern the simplicity of everything, like raw silk.

Embrace the uncomplicated and unvarnished nature of things, like an uncarved block of wood.

Become smart by reducing self-interest and control.

Practice wise self-interruption, and break the complication habit.

When we give up the study of phenomena and understand the principle of noninterference, troubles come to an end and distress disappears.

Su Ch’e

The prophet’s vocation is to interrupt the status quo.

Shane Claiborne, Jesus for President

Systems must be designed primarily for the elicitation of disbelief and the celebration of surprise.

Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell

People don’t do right because of the fear of God or love of him. You do the right thing because the world doesn’t make sense if you don’t.

Dorothy Allison, Bastard out of Carolina

Notes and Reflections

Gain by abandoning and advance through interruptions. What does this counterintuitive wisdom mean and entail? Intentional desertion is meant here. Used here four times, translates as “interrupt.” Its etymology implies surgical severing, an intentional discarding of those rituals, actions, attitudes, and behaviors with no future. This includes a careful, long-term winnowing process, a holy diminishment, because there are things to abandon before we can save what we love. How often do we set aside native virtues for painted fruits and exotic add-ons! The Buddha said that to insist upon carrying the spiritual raft that got you to the shores of Enlightenment (that is, to worship the raft) is the wrong emphasis. It would be honoring the finger pointed to the moon more than the moon itself, or finding more enjoyment reading the recipe than savoring the meal. Are not such illusions the source of much misplaced energy and suffering?

In this verse’s last section, the “unvarnished” and the “uncarved” refer to our original good natures, which we have—mindlessly—overlaid with preconceptions, sacred cows, self-interest, and control. A Taoist question: What if we are already complete, conceived and born whole, with nothing to add? Read on. . . .

20

Nowhere to Turn

I Spend no more time crazy-thinking about useless, never-ending nonsense. You know, those infinitesimally subtle differences between “yes” and “yeah,” or artificial lines in the sand between good and evil.

II Why should I be colonized by others’ dread? Ah! Where does such a path end?!

III I watch the multitudes lustily pursue their merrymaking feasts, or ascend to a high place from which to view the spring festival. Alas, I alone seem inert, oblivious, essentially a baby who has not yet learned to smile. I am disconsolate and desolate, belonging nowhere. But the multitudes seek to spend their surplus, even as I appear as a loner with nothing. My heart-mind is that of a simpleton; what mind I have is confused indeed!

IV Ordinary people seem to act purposefully, but my obstinate and thickheaded mind is all I know. They appear savvy, yet I feel muddled, like flotsam adrift on the sea. I have no place or refuge in their efficient, convenient world.

Because I cherish sustenance only from our great Mother-Tao, I feel my utter difference from others.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is.

William Butler Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”

It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves . . . how worn and dusty, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

My opinion is that you never find happiness until you stop looking for it. My greatest happiness consists precisely in doing nothing whatever that is calculated to obtain happiness.

Chuang Tzu, translated by Thomas Merton

Only humans . . . cultivate unnecessary habits, take pain for pleasure, take poison for medicine. Greedily and gladly following their desires, they chop at the root of life. Eventually their vitality and spirit wear out . . . just as a lamp goes out when the oil is gone. . . . They will come to the brink of extinction.

Liu I-Ming

All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. . . .

If one’s thoughts are unsteady there is ignorance of the true law, the mind is troubled, and knowledge will never be perfect.

If one’s thoughts are not dissipated, one’s mind is not perplexed, for one has ceased to think of good or evil; there is no fear for the watchful.

Dhammapada, stanza 1, translated by Max Müller (altered)

Notes and Reflections

In this, the most autobiographical of the verses, six times the author uses (I alone). This phrase asserts the aloneness, and even loneliness, of the follower of Tao. To contrast this aloneness, the text is a lament about the culture’s hapless dislocation from its Home Base, Source, or Tao. The “spring festival” was an annual fertility play or rite. Implied in this verse is that every culture or state can brainwash its citizens into a “don’t worry, be happy” sleepwalking state. This verse is a call to count the cost of following Tao and the loneliness of carrying forward a mis-fitting Taoist worldview. Adjusting to the popular culture, however incrementally, is antithetical to and weakens resolve to live with Tao.

In 1919, Dwight Goddard wrote as translation only the following in his severely abbreviated sections (iii) and (iv) of this verse: “It is one of the most pathetic expressions of human loneliness, from lack of appreciation, ever written. I [have] omitted [it] here.” He just could not translate this portion because of the sadness arising from this passage.

What is at stake here? Uninterrupted desires are the waters in which we drown. It was thought in some wisdom traditions of China that too much pleasure-taking unbalanced and diminished a household. Pleasure seduced the pleasure seeker into suffering. Later, we will see Verse 46 bluntly treat desire-chasing, advising the avoidance of “two extreme imbalances: the trap of always being lured but never knowing satisfaction, and the curse of every craving totally satisfied.”

Here, Tao Te Ching is frank in its purposed interruption of our conventional selves. We are invited to stop being in thrall to our normal thoughts. Our goal is to become misfits . . . the balanced Wu-wei misfits we were born to be. It

assumes we can lose our original minds listening to the milk-and-honey tunes of the culture’s Pied Pipers, to pursue the ten thousand things that easily consume us. The anxious mind cannot understand Tao’s Ways. Luxury, status, pleasures, seeking approval (“likes” on social media) evaporate quickly, yet in their shallow waters, we can easily drown.

21

How I Know

I Following Tao brings out one’s natural capacity for highest Virtue.

What is this Tao?

It is entirely nonconceptual.

Its essential nature is known only by Its latent forms and elusive feel.

How very hidden and obscure is Its essence and core!

Yet within this latency lies Its core life force.

Since ancient times, until today, Tao’s effects have never been absent. We bear witness to how Tao causes and charges all things.

II How do I know this? Intuition! Tao is always leaving a quiet tracing of Its ways.

Tao has no form. Only when it changes into Virtue does it have an expression. Hence Virtue is Tao’s visual aspect. Tao neither exists nor does not exist. Hence we say it waxes and wanes, while it remains in the dark unseen.

Su Ch’e

In the gap between thoughts, nonconceptual wisdom shines continuously.

Milarepa

“Sometimes,” said Pooh, “the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.”

A. A. Milne, Winnie-The-Pooh

And now here is my secret. It’s quite simple: One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Jesus said, “It is I who am the light (that presides) over all. It is I who am the entirety: it is from me that the entirety has come, and to me that the entirety goes. Split a piece of wood: I am there. Lift a stone, and you will find me there.”

Gospel of Thomas 77

What living and buried speech is always vibrating here . . . what howls restrained by decorum.

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Notes and Reflections

This verse’s first sentence completes the mysterious emphasis of Verse 20: purity of heart-mind strengthens when one follows one thing, however countercultural or unpopular. Te () in Tao Te Ching is that “one thing.” Translated most often as “virtue,” “character” and “power,” whatever is Tao is undiscoverable without one’s commitment to Te. Here is only the second appearance of Te, first introduced in Verse 10 above. However, Te fits with Tao as two wings of a bird, which cannot fly with just one. Tao is our heart-mind, and Te is our body. We wise up to Tao through Te and learn Te through Tao. The knower and the known so interpenetrate that they are inseparable. Tao is the Way, yes, and Te is the walking of It. This is how heart-mind knows something to be true, because truth and its practice borrow from and mutually strengthen each other. In a mature, wise person, which is prior: their truth or its practice? Who can tell?

One of the ancient Taoist texts, known as Wawangtui, adds in (i) that the moon’s waxing and waning is a way to demonstrate the “nonconceptual” and “latent forms and elusive feel.”

22

Emptying Brings Completion

I The humbled have a foretaste of completion.

The twisted alone will understand the straight.

Only the exhausted find renewal.

When you have little, you will gain much.

Have too much and lose your way.

II Therefore, the Sage clings only to the One, even as he models it for everyone.

Not focused on self, all know him.

Not focused on being right, all see him as a model.

Not needing to show off, his success is ensured.

Not a glory seeker, his glory lasts and lasts.

Not a disputer, the Sage has cultivated no one under Heaven to dispute against him.

III Ancient wisdom held that those who surrender are thereby made whole and endure. Is this just empty talk? No, wholeness belongs to these.

Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; and the uneven shall be made level, and the rough places a plain.

Isaiah 40:4 (American Standard Version)

The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, translated by George Long

Think in patterns of the Tao, and your spirit will travel far.

Liu Hsieh

My grandmother believed that knowledge and wisdom were two separate things entirely and not even closely connected; she thought it possible that knowledge could sometimes be the bitter enemy of wisdom.

Fred Chappell, Brighten the Corner Where You Are

Notes and Reflections

Section (i) above is an apt—and less pessimistic—commentary on Verse 20.

The last line of section (ii) is worth a slow look. Committed to not striving or competing, and without a dispute to the Sage’s name, he presents no target for others to dispute with him. His record of activities has no mention of being an argumentative disputer. He merely does his work, and that’s all. Siddhartha Gautama left his palace to wear the beggar’s robe. Socrates followed the guidance of his oracle. It is to the humility of both Confucius and Jesus that their followers point with the most satisfaction: to be meek is to inherit the Earth. Those who practice humility suffer no real harm, for humility-practice is the essence of becoming whole.

Practicing this verse means to understand from the inside these well-known quips: “Less is more” and “Nothing is everything.” It’s a countercultural understanding, but Tao’s followers are not afraid to be misfits, for they already understand the powerless desolation of “having it all” and how no-thing is the sacred gateway to everything. The humbled are uniquely prepared for greatness because they expect nothing less.

23

Building Trust

I Notice Nature’s spare ways:

Fierce squalls do not last the morning.

Cloudbursts do not last the day.

How do such things come to be? This is Nature at work!

So if Nature does not force things to last,

how much less so for human affairs?

II So in conforming to Tao in one’s daily activities,

what happens is that in adjusting, one identifies with Tao.

In conforming to the Virtue-Power in daily life,¹³

what happens is that, in this alignment, you and Virtue-Power are one.

III Identify with Tao to trust Tao’s embrace.

Identify with Virtue-Power to embrace its straightforward character.

Identify with renunciation to learn how even losses are welcomed joys.

Without living into these trusts, how can one live as trustworthy?

Thou canst not travel on the Path before thou hast become the Path itself.

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Voice of the Silence

As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.

Goethe, Faust

The Sage’s words are faint, and his deeds are plain. But they are always natural. Hence he can last and not be exhausted.

Su Ch’e

We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.

Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan

Notes and Reflections

The Chinese character to notice is t’ung (), used here five times. Its various meanings include “is one with,” “becomes one,” “resembles,” “aligns,” and “identifies.” These are long-term spiritual practices, never one-off activities every now and then. In building alignment with Tao and Te, a long-term relationship is assumed, one built ever upon the by-product of this singly long career: trust. A lifetime of self-trust means that, come success or failure, one is ever and always complete. Trust upon trust: that’s the Way. Can you rest in the truth that Tao is meant for you, and that you come out of Tao like the leaf emerges from a tree? This is the beginning of trust, and being trustworthy.

24

Leads to Nowhere

I Standing on tiptoe leads to tottering.

Straddle-legged, one cannot walk.

Playing to the gallery is not an enlightening practice.

Crowing one’s own opinions is no way to distinction.

Self-elevation brings no merit.

Self-praise has nothing to offer others.

II From the standpoint of Tao, these reckless desires

are so much rotten food, parasites, or body tumors.

Detestable!

Tao has no home in these!

To tiptoe is to lift the heels in order to increase one’s height. To stride is to extend the feet in order to extend one’s pace. A person can do this for a while but not for long. Likewise, those who consider themselves don’t appear for long. Those who watch themselves don’t appear for long. Those who display themselves don’t shine for long. Those who display themselves don’t flourish for long. Those who flatter themselves don’t succeed for long. And those who parade themselves don’t lead for long.

Wu Cheng, Tao-te-chen-ching-chu, an early commentary on Tao Te Ching, translated by Red Pine

It’s terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfill other peoples’ expectations. They produce their worst work when they do that.

David Bowie

The Paradox of our times

Is that we have taller buildings, but shorter tempers

Wider freeways, but narrower viewpoints

We spend more, but we have less

We have bigger houses, but smaller families

More conveniences, but less time. . . .

We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values.

Bob Moorehead, Words Aptly Spoken

Notes and Reflections

This is a lesson in the desolation of artifice. Anything other than natural action leads one nowhere, because one cannot sustain the unnatural for very long. How does one know the artificial has overtaken? By one’s sheer exhaustion at leading a pretend life in blind pursuit of reckless desires. Could one ever trust a leader so dedicated to their own exhaustion?

What are modern corollaries to standing on tiptoe, walking straddle-legged, and playing to the gallery? Working overtime to impress. Impersonating someone else. Being anywhere else than in this moment and space. Metaphorical question: Looking back reflectively on life, how much have we fought for the right of “our” sandcastle—surrounded as it is by a forever restless sea—to remain forever intact?

25

Greatness Everywhere

I Mysterious but complete, preexisting the universe, arriving soundlessly and formless, alone It endures without change.

II Whole, complete, untiring, and flowing through everything, It may be considered the universe’s womb.

III If forced to name this, I utter the sound Tao, or worse, the Way. Reluctantly, I describe It with the word great. It alone functions everywhere, calling all things back to their single-source Home.

IV There is not much else to say, except to name four amazing things: Tao, Heaven, Earth, and anyone connected with Tao. In these four, the Universe demonstrates Its greatest traits.

V Know your interconnections: Human beings come from Earth, Earth’s patterns entwine with Heaven’s, Heaven roots in Tao, Tao’s blueprint is Nature itself.

Knock on the sky and listen to the sound.

Jianzhi Sengcan

I am an acme of things accomplished, and I am an encloser of things to be.

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it. . . . As the moon changes yet is one, so we are virgin, wife, mother, grandmother.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

Eden Phillpotts, A Shadow Passes

Moonlight floods the whole sky from horizon to horizon. How much it can fill your room depends on its windows.

Rumi, Teachings of Rumi, translated by Andrew Harvey

All over the sky a sacred voice is calling your name. . . . At the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit. And that center is really everywhere. It is within each of us.

Black Elk

Wherever you go, you will find your teacher, as long as you have the eyes to see and the ears to hear.

Shunryu Suzuki Roshi

Everything that is in the heavens, on Earth, and under the Earth is penetrated with connectedness, penetrated with relatedness.

Hildegard of Bingen

Notes and Reflections

If there is a creation account in Tao Te Ching, here it is in (i) and (ii), and a feminine story at that! The human portion of this account is in (v). The part to remember is not that the “human” is several levels separated from Tao, but how all—humans, Earth, Heaven, Tao, and Nature—share a single pattern. This connection of Tao with every thing permeates all these levels.

The way this works etymologically is interesting. In the last section, we see the Chinese verb fa, or , employed four times, providing an exclamation point of emphasis at the end of this creation account. Fa’s meanings include “law,” “follow,” “emulate,” “take after,” and “patterns itself after.” It is an optimistic word placement because Tao, never without a witness to itself, so circulates through all creation that we do not have to reinvent “the Way” to live. All the states of creation, all the capitalized nouns in (v)—Human Beings, Earth, Heaven, Tao, and Nature—are long-established patterns, discovered everywhere. The English words I use in (v)—come from, entwine, roots, and blueprint— augment and seek to amplify the variations of this single verb fa, describing Tao at work everywhere even before you and I arrived.

26

Foundation Matters

I The substantial stills the restless.

Stillness quietens disquiet.

II Therefore, a wise Sage may journey all the day long but never abandon her inner composure. Even while visiting spectacular panoramas, nothing interrupts her inner calm.

III So . . . when commanding ten thousand war machines,

why would a ruler behave in a flippant manner?

Balance lies deep. Lose your roots and you lose your footing.

Stay grounded.

The Master said: If a junzi [sage] is not serious he will not be held in awe. If you study you will not be crude. Take loyalty and trustworthiness as the pivot and have no friends who are not like yourself in this. If you err, do not be afraid to correct yourself.

Confucius, Analects 2.17, translated by Robert Eno

Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again.

Anaïs Nin

The quieter you become the more you can hear.

Ram Dass, Be Here Now

If you treat your body as unimportant you risk insanity, or inanity.

Ursula K. Le Guin, commentary on Verse 26, Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching

Notes and Reflections

This is a verse for mis-fitting, countercultural people who find themselves as natural leaders because of their alternative schooling in Tao. We know how easy it is to lose balance, emotional equilibrium, and stability. The paths to instability and being off-balance? Trying to “have it all,” trying to maintain shallow roots in many places, paying allegiance to more and more. Here is the open secret: being grounded in one substantial energy—Tao—is the path to this peace. Concentrate on the One Necessary Thing and fiercely to that! Needless allegiances are recipes for mental disruption, internal civil wars, and divided heart-minds. What futures can these promise?

27

Excellence 101

I True pilgrims leave no trace of their passage.

Truth speakers leave nothing unanswered.

The truest planners calculate without the baggage of preconceptions.

The best door shuts securely without a lock.

The best binder needs no knot for his rope to fasten.

II Likewise, Sages excel in saving others; they abandon no one.

Skilled in goodness, they care for all things

by just following their inner light.

III Therefore, the skillful search out the unskilled anywhere,

and the unskilled find the skillful everywhere.

Why—and how—does respect go both ways, so the “unskilled” and the “skillful” knot together?

This is the riddle at the core.

Though himself unable to forget the world, the Sage is able to let the world forget him.

Su Ch’e

Those who treasure the Way fit in without making a show and stay forever hidden. Hence, they don’t leave any tracks.

Wang Zhen

When you entertain evil thoughts like hostility and hatred, there is no joy in your heart and you are a nuisance to others. On the other hand, if you develop

kindness, patience and understanding, then the whole atmosphere changes.

The Dalai Lama, Awakening the Mind, Lightening the Heart

It doesn’t matter what activity anyone chooses. If you take any activity, any art, any discipline, any skill, take it and push it as far as it will go, push it beyond where it has ever been before, push it to the wildest edge of edges, then you force it into the realm of magic. And it doesn’t matter what you select, because when it has been pushed far enough it contains everything else. I’m not talking about narrow specialization. I’m talking about taking one thing, however trivial and mundane, to such extremes that you illuminate its relationship to all other things, and then taking it a little bit further—to that point of cosmic impact where it becomes all things.

Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

I don’t shine if you don’t shine.

The Killers, “Read My Mind”

Notes and Reflections

The character for “skilled,” shan (), relates to “adeptness,” “excellence,” being in “accordance with Nature,” and “kindness.” It is used eleven times in this verse of ninety-one characters, or about one word in every eight. I have translated it as “true,” “truth,” “truest,” “best,” “excel,” “skill,” and “skilled” to show how manifold and important this quality is. Shan is a leading habit of Tao-followers. This usage reminds one of Will Durant’s riff on Aristotle: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”¹⁴

Habits are the hidden resources of wisdom for those on the Way. Yes, habits can be destructive, but here I mean the unconscious habit formation of Taofollowing. Such habits leave “no trace” because they are innate and leave no toxic waste behind. Without conscious calculation or preconception, one’s Taohabit points one naturally toward truth. Habits are not enslaving or mindless activities but capacity-building paths to liberation and enlightenment, and not just for oneself but for any society into which the Taoist integrates. One person does change the world.

28

Integrity

I Couple masculine ways with feminine methods to be the never-ending cradle of the world. Be that cradle, and ancient Virtue never abandons you. You never deviate from your original wisdom and newborn innocence.

II Couple brightness with darkness to know Heaven’s constant pattern. Model this pattern, and Virtue never ceases restoring you to your original boundless state.

III Couple splendor with humility to become Heaven’s womb. Like an uncarved block of wood, you return to your natural luminous state, and so become any sort of vessel for every need. You cannot lose.

IV Naturally, without artifice, Sages use the simplest to bring out the greatest.

May I walk in the path of the low valley.

2 Nephi 4:32

Deep inside, our integrity sings to us whether we are listening or not. It is a note that only we can hear.

Rachel Naomi Remen, My Grandfather’s Blessings

Deep inside us is a wilderness. We call it the unconscious because we can’t control it fully, so we can’t will to create what we want from it. The collective unconscious is a great wild region where we can get in touch with the sources of life.

C. G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self

The anima is a personification of all feminine tendencies in a man’s psyche . . . thus, the animus is the personification of all masculine tendencies in a woman. Beginning in childhood, we create our gender identity and roles (consciously or unconsciously) by enhancing the qualities which characterize our gender, and repressing or suppressing the qualities which characterize the other gender. But those repressed or suppressed qualities are still within us—the feminine qualities within the man and the masculine within the woman.

C. G. Jung, Man and His Symbols

If I ever become a Saint—I will surely be one of “darkness.” I will continually be absent from Heaven—to light the light of those in darkness on Earth.

Mother Teresa, Come Be My Light

Now that I look back, it seems that in all that deep darkness a miracle was preparing.

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

Notes and Reflections

This verse spotlights often-neglected qualities (the feminine, darkness, and humility) as the most integral ingredients in the recipe for harmony. Wu-wei’s operations depend on the complementary integration of the yin-yang “twins”— the obvious and the neglected—otherwise, there is no wholeness or harmony. As the end of Verse 27 attests, simplicity is a profound integration of the both/and— both the obvious and the neglected—that sponsors an artless freedom. Separating the world into either/or dualities and arrangements is a false and needless complexity . . . the pseudowomb from which every disorder, war, and scheme of ignorance proceeds. Lesson: the practice of original nonduality is the highest form of consciousness, and one’s greatest tool to change the world. When one knows the truth about oneself, there is less separation from one’s shadow, which leads to more peace. A person at peace has a powerful mis-fitting counterstory to see correctly and then lead this violent world into mending peace.

Compare this to how vision requires two eyes to see depth. To shut down one eye, or one ear, or even one side of the brain, you lose a natural depth. In leading, it is good to have a “Team of Rivals” conception of leadership. What one eye, ear, or leader cannot detect, its counterpart can, for each contains its unique deficits. This is Carl G. Jung’s message above. Like a yin-yang symbol, each part of the whole contains complements for the other parts. Problems and solutions are of a single piece.

One last example: Magnets point one to true north from wherever you stand only because they integrate both north and south without partiality. See Verse 56’s “profound sameness” as further commentary.

In the last section, consider this example of Wu-wei in action: In 2009, Oakland resident Dan Stevenson was upset that his street had become a magnet for garbage dumping and petty crime. So on his chaotic (yang) street, he simply installed a concrete Buddha statue (yin) he purchased from the garden department of the local hardware store. Within months, local Vietnamese Buddhists assumed ownership of the statue, decorating, painting, adorning, clothing, and even housing it there on the street side. The garbage dumping stopped, and crime dropped 82 percent. Dan did nothing but install one statue.¹⁵ Remember this when considering Verse 29.

29

Rhythm

I Because Tao shapes Nature, all things under Heaven run by a sublime, spiritual rhythm. Can you improve it? It is doubtful. Meddling only blocks Tao’s flow. Control is another name for lose.

II All things have their right-time right-place rhythms:

Being ahead and being behind.

Being in motion and staying still.

Waxing and waning.

Success and even failure.

III Sages live simply, without overthinking. They reject rhythm-breaking

extremes, extravagance, and indulging.

A Taoist story tells of an old farmer whose horse ran away one day. Some neighbors came around to visit after hearing this. “Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically.

“Maybe,” said the farmer.

The next morning the runaway horse returned, bringing with it a dozen other wild horses. “How wonderful,” the neighbors exclaimed.

“Maybe,” the farmer replied.

That afternoon his son, attempting to tame one of the wild horses, was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors came again to show their sympathy for his misfortune.

“Maybe,” answered the farmer.

The next day, military officials suddenly came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. “Congratulations!” the neighbors exclaimed. “Things have turned out wonderfully!”

“Maybe,” said the farmer.

Traditional Taoist story

When you are new at sheep-raising and your ewe has a lamb, your impulse is to stay there and help it nurse and see to it and all. After a while, you know that the best thing you can do is walk out of the barn.

Wendell Berry

Plants and trees first flower and then produce fruit, each in its season. This is why they can live a long time. If they miss their season, this is a foresign of death, because it is abnormal.

Liu I-Ming, Awakening to the Tao, translated by Thomas Cleary

There’s an opportune time to do things, a right time for everything on the Earth:

A right time for birth and another for death,

A right time to plant and another to reap,

A right time to kill and another to heal,

A right time to destroy and another to construct,

A right time to cry and another to laugh,

A right time to lament and another to cheer,

A right time to make love and another to abstain,

A right time to embrace and another to part,

A right time to search and another to count your losses,

A right time to hold on and another to let go,

A right time to rip out and another to mend,

A right time to shut up and another to speak up,

A right time to love and another to hate,

A right time to wage war and another to make peace.

Ecclesiastes 3:1–8 (The Message)

Notes and Reflections

Though this verse does not contain the phrase, its concern is Wu-wei, or doing things in a thought-less, natural—even spiritual—rhythm. For example, after becoming a “natural” bicycle rider, overthinking one’s bicycling skills while trying to ride will lead to injury. Why did the Impressionist painter Claude Monet refuse cataract surgery in one of his eyes? To “fix” the eye with surgery would mean he would not be able to “see” with his native impressionistic habits and skills. Wu-wei uses one’s unconscious and intuitive capacity to guide righttime/right-place behavior.

30

Proportionate Action

I Rule with Tao and you lose the need for military stratagems. Learn how causes and effects are proportionate and why military strength quickly boomerangs on you.

II Wherever armies pass, they leave behind only harvests of entangling briars. After their campaigns, what is left? Only misfortunes and famine.

III The good strategist, understanding as she does the balance of cause and effect, cooperates with Tao to do only just enough to accomplish her goals. Then she stops.

She does not overtighten things to get results.

She does not practice arrogance to accomplish.

She does not need violent means to underwrite peace-minded ends.

Non-Tao practices end only in quick decay; no future here.

Think! Has a truly innocent person ever ended up on the scrap heap? Do genuinely upright people ever lose out in the end? It’s my observation that those who plow evil and sow trouble reap evil and trouble.

Job 4:7–8 (The Message)

These violent delights have violent ends.

William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

Lean not on your own understanding, but yield yourself to divine guidance, and your paths will be made straight.

Paraphrase of Proverbs 3:5–6

Ji Kangzi asked Confucius about governance, saying, “How would it be if I were to kill those who are without the dao in order to hasten others towards the dao?”

Confucius replied, “Of what use is killing in your governance? If you desire goodness, the people will be good. The virtue of the junzi [sage] is like the wind and the virtue of common people is like the grasses: when the wind blows over

the grasses, they will surely bend.”

Confucius, Analects 12.19, translated by Robert Eno

Notes and Reflections

The original text here and in Verse 31, some authorities say, has been sown with commentaries by others. This verse continues the theme of Verse 29, in which ego-assisted schemes interfere with the natural flow of the universe, with results ranging from failure to catastrophe. Military action is only one such scheme. Leaders governing with Tao anticipate unintended consequences skillfully, such as the landmines that keep on exploding for decades after war’s end.

Readers can understand this “Taoist karma” concept. Who has not been caught up by unintended consequences that, with a little more planning or insight, could have been avoided?

31

Right or Left?

I However winsome or winning, weapons of war never bless. They are just cursed to the core, and provide no sanctuary for the Tao-follower.

II In ordinary life, the nonbelligerent ruler honors his left, from whence he receives counsels of peace, but in times of war, he becomes a right-honoring warrior, taking and giving war counsel.

III Weapons are evil, though, and not a Sage’s tools. He uses them only in unavoidable and extreme necessity, hardly with joy and rejoicing. To celebrate conquest is no different from showing glee at funerals—hardly a fruitful way to flourish in the world!

IV Thus the left is for festive occasions and for minor commanders.

The right is for calamities, death, and chief generals.

Whenever slaughter occurs, it is a tragedy to be met with lament and dirges.

A funeral march is hardly a victory lap.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.

Martin Luther King Jr.

In the operations of war, where there are in the field a thousand swift chariots, as many heavy chariots, and a hundred thousand mail-clad soldiers, with provisions enough to carry them a thousand li, the expenditure at home and at the front, including entertainment of guests, small items such as glue and paint, and sums spent on chariots and armor, will reach the total of a thousand ounces of silver per day. Such is the cost of raising an army of 100,000 men.

Sun Tzu, The Art of War, translated by Lionel Giles

The greatest victory involves no fighting.

Sun Tzu, The Art of War, translated by Lionel Giles

Even the best weapon is an unhappy tool.

Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching, Verse 31, translated by Ursula K. Le Guin

Notes and Reflections

The word for “cursed” (, wu) has this simple etymology: something “deformed” or “inferior” () has literally come over (or overcome) the “heartmind” (). Wu signifies a “deformed heart.”

There is considerable scholarly discussion about this verse’s authenticity, order, and interpretation. Because Tao is associated with peace and wholesomeness, questions may arise in readers’ minds about the relationship between Tao and war. Rather than proof text a one-sided view from a stand-alone reading of just one verse, perhaps a holistic reading of Verses 29–31 is a better course.

Readers should remember that in its original text, Tao Te Ching was one long poem, not divided into eighty-one smaller verses. We have seen evidence of this already: Verses 17–19 can be read together profitably. Modern translators should consider how divisions in this long poem, cut long ago into this “uncarved block” of a text for reasons perhaps unknowable, may provide unintended interpretations in the text’s future. This translator cautions: let Tao Itself speak to our culture or worldview, instead of the other way around.

The references to left and right have a historical basis. Chinese state rituals had a circular or circumambulatory element to them. In peacetime, these rituals had a left-turning or counterclockwise orientation. To distinguish war from peacetime, the same rituals in wartime were right-turning, or clockwise.¹ These may also reference left-leaning yin (often depicted as vulnerability) and right-leaning yang (aggression).

32

Flow

I Nameless Tao always flows.

II Tao manifests Itself subtly and behind the scenes. No one ever masters It.

Were rulers able to submit to Its potency, their realms would fall into their primordial and natural peace-rhythms. They would see Heaven and Earth partner. The people would experience life as a sweet dew falling, because their actions harmonize altogether naturally.

III However, once rules or distinctions start, the naming of things begins. Once the cataloging has begun, who can stop the labeling merry-go-round? Knowing when to stop making distinctions prevents an endless exhaustion.

IV Picture this: Tao to this world is what the ocean is to every flowing droplet of water.

We should seek not so much to pray but to become prayer.

Saint Francis of Assisi

To discover the Tao, nothing is better than embracing simplicity.

Wang Bi

I think it is very useful to know ourselves, but when we start naming and labeling, that is dangerous, that gets problematic. It negates that things are always changing. Besides, it’s hard to pin a label onto something that’s always moving.

Ani DiFranco

He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

Ecclesiastes 3:11 (New International Version)

Notes and Reflections

The way to change the world is to stop fixing (I mean, fixating on) it. Stay curious. Use care when merging your ego into solutions. Rest. Be patient . . . for a change. This rest is training too. Inactivity is a practice. The goal of training thus is innocent and sincere spontaneity, which is hardly possible in a practice of nonstop thoughts.

See the first line of Verse 66 for commentary on the greatness of submission as demonstrated by water. A lake or ocean lies low in the world but receives everything. All things emerge from and flow back into Tao as their source. This is a good image for those in leadership training.

33

The Way to Endure, Pt. 1

I Understanding others is intelligent.

Understanding oneself is enlightened.

Conquering others shows off one’s force.

Conquering oneself shows one’s authority.

The one content with sufficiency is truly wealthy.

And the one who acts resolutely is already successful.

II Centered in one’s original belonging place, one endures.

Even in dying, one does not perish.

When I seek nothing from without, but vigorously attend to myself, there is nothing which can interfere with my will.

Su Ch’e

For if that which you seek, you find not within yourself, you will never find it without.

Wiccan Charge of the Goddess

It is foolish to think that we will enter heaven without entering into ourselves.

Teresa of Avila

Declare your jihad on thirteen enemies you cannot see—egoism, arrogance, conceit, selfishness, greed, lust, intolerance, anger, lying, cheating, gossiping, and slandering. If you can master and destroy them, then you will be ready to fight the enemy you can see.

Al-Ghazali

One who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and one whose temper is controlled than one who captures a city.

Proverbs 16:32

Animals die, friends die, so will you. I know one thing that never dies—the judgment on a dead man.

Havamal, Old Norse collection of proverbs

Notes and Reflections

Understanding () in the first lines above is constructed from the radical for “straight,” plus the character for “mouth”: thus a straight-talker. The characters that make up intelligent (), also in the first line, are similar, but intelligent has an added “sun” () beneath. Enlightened () in the second line combines the “sun” () and “moon” ()—light that guides both day and night. This progression of radicals and parts of the Chinese characters, I feel, was intentional, to construct a bright line of connection between understanding and enlightenment.

Leaders of movements and their followers have a prime obligation to follow an ancient wisdom, variously sourced, to Know thyself! Why? Because one will become the butt of jokes, the object of scorn, and maybe even the recipient of violence. The number-one way to become this target is to stay self-defensive about one’s ego. Instead, stay cool! How? Know thyself—shadow sides included —and one already knows one’s best and worst, so slings and arrows from the outside have no target to hit.

This imperative to know thyself is not just a college or youthful endeavor. The wise in every age, from Socrates to Jesus to Frederick Douglass, understand how each day presents challenges that, if we do not know our inner self, can be disastrous. The Japanese war commentator Sun Tzu phrased it thus: “So it is said that if you know others and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles. . . . If you do not know others and do not know yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.”¹⁷

34

Quietly Flowing

I Great Tao flows in every direction, brooding over and permeating the universe’s every particle, all of which depend on Tao. Without noising Itself about or making a scene, Tao disappoints not even one particle.

II Not needing to be in charge, and with no other desire, Tao devotedly nourishes the universe’s every speck. Each one has its home in Tao, yet Tao does not boast ownership. Many may regard Tao as insignificant, but It is actually great because It never claims greatness for Itself.

III Not ambitious for greatness is Tao’s greatness . . . and secret.

Know this from waters’ flow—

those by rocks and pools—

such rills and becks gush noisily,

great waterways flow quiet.

When unfilled make noise, but are silent when full,

the fool is like the pot half-filled,

the wise one’s like a lake that’s full.

Sutta Nipata 3.11, translated by Laurence K. Mills

If you go out for several hours into a place that is wild, your mind begins to slow down, down, down. What is happening is that the clay of your body is retrieving its own sense of sisterhood with the great clay of the landscape.

John O’Donohue, Walking in Wonder

Ecology holds that an environmental setting developed over millions of years must be considered to have some merit. Anything so complicated as a planet, inhabited by over 1.5 million species of plants and animals, all of them living together in a more or less balanced equilibrium in which they continuously use and re-use the same molecules of air and soil, cannot be improved by aimless and uniformed tinkering.

E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful

When the Tao becomes small, it doesn’t stop being great. When it becomes great, it doesn’t stop being small. But all we see are its traces. In reality, it isn’t small, and it isn’t great. It cannot be described. It can only be known.

Wang P’ing

Unless all existence is a medium of revelation, no particular revelation is possible.

William Temple, Nature, Man and God

Notes and Reflections

The character for flows () contains the “water” radical () on the left. The right side of the character means “to cascade” so the sense here is of water brimming up and spilling over, giving life and nourishment to all existence. As we have seen (Verses 8 and 32) and shall see (Verses 43 and 78), water is an important Taoist image. Seeking the lowest level, remaining out of sight, the water table nourishes all life, and water’s soft drip-drip-drip wears away the hardest substances.

“Not needing to be in charge” is quite the challenge for any power or authority, no matter the day or place. Graceful power, operating without the need to be owned, or to win someone’s praise and attention, is power’s task . . . and its test. To fail at this one simple yet difficult charge means to shape power for personal privilege. History’s graveyards are full of examples of someone desiring to use power—meant as an eternal resource for all—as a means of fleeting glory for a few.

35

Inner Force

I Discover and abide in your true peaceful Nature. It is your inner gravitational force; all things under Heaven position themselves around you in abundant peace and without harm.

II Fleeting interruptions of music and feasts may sidetrack passing seekers, but Tao does not attract like that. It seems tedious and bland to such seekers, and they leave disappointed, ignorant of Tao that is:

Sightless to the eye, yet insightful,

soundless to the ear, but resounding, and

endless in use.

God’s kingdom is like a treasure hidden in a field for years and then accidentally found by a trespasser. The finder is ecstatic—what a find!—and proceeds to sell everything he owns to raise money and buy that field. Or, God’s kingdom is like

a jewel merchant on the hunt for excellent pearls. Finding one that is flawless, he immediately sells everything and buys it.

Matthew 13:44–46 (The Message)

As people who do not know the country, walk again and again over a gold treasure that has been hidden somewhere in the Earth and do not discover it, thus do all these creatures day after day go into the Brahma-world (they are merged in Brahman, while asleep), and yet do not discover it, because they are carried away by untruth.

Chandogya Upanishad 8.3.2, translated by Max Müller

Where is Tao? Nowhere it is not to be found. . . . It is in the ant. . . . It is in the weeds. . . . It is in this turd. . . . Tao is great in all things, complete in all, universal in all, whole in all.

Chuang Tzu, translated by Thomas Merton

Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.

Walt Whitman, introduction to Leaves of Grass

Notes and Reflections

In translating “inner gravitational force,” I draw on the Chinese tradition that understands people of moral power, like forces in Nature, have their own “gravitational” fields. They attract just by who/what they are. Virtues “clump” together like a handful of magnets. Confucius’s Analects elucidates this best: “The Master said: When one rules by means of virtue it is like the North Star—it dwells in its place and the other stars pay reverence to it.”¹⁸ In this Confucian text, “virtue” (te) is the same Chinese character as in Tao Te Ching—the “Book of the Way and Its Virtue.”

This moral gravity force is similar to Hinduism’s “Indra’s Net,” in which every thing interconnects and interdepends, each with its own “inner gravitational force” that situates it in harmonious tension.

36

First Things First

I To expand, first shrink.

To strengthen, know weakness.

To promote, understand rejection.

To be endowed, know deprivation.

II Subtle Enlightenment is this:

The pliable outlasts the inflexible, and

the gentle and soft last, while the strong and the hard fade.

III Take a lesson from deep-dwelling fish, who thrive only in the hidden depths. Force and power should likewise stay hidden.

So you want first place? Then take the last place. Be the servant of all.

Mark 9:35 (The Message)

The first will be last and the last will be first; the times they are a changin’.

Bob Dylan, “The Times They Are a-Changin’”

Moment after moment we should renew our life, we should not stick to old ideas of what life is, or what our way of life is. . . . If we always stick to old ideas and always repeat the same thing over and over again, then we are confined in our old way of life.

Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

Be like a fish submerged in the depths, like a turtle in the mud. Then criticism and praise do not reach you, calamity and fortune do not affect you. You live spontaneously without seeking life, you avoid death by not bringing on death.

Liu I-Ming, Awakening to the Tao, translated by Thomas Cleary

Notes and Reflections

Basic to healthy life is the yin-yang exchange process. To inhale means to exhale. To live in clarity and simplicity means first getting rid of stuff. To be fully male, or female, one must make room for the other sex in one’s psyche (for more, see C. G. Jung). Walt Whitman suggested why this is so: “I am large, I contain multitudes.”¹ There is nothing in a caterpillar that predicts a butterfly. But to edit out surprise or to censor a caterpillar’s future means nothing changes.

A sure way to find your “multitudes” is to empty out. Give up preconceptions, prejudices, distractions; get rid of the unnecessary . . . any “barnacle” that slows down your ship. To the extent that when we first become empty, or die to the needless, then we live fully and then earn the right to lead. An airplane can only take flight from a cleared runway.

Translators have been fascinated by (subtle enlightenment) and tried many phrasings to capture its essence: “hidden enlightenment” (Isaac Winter Heysinger), “hiding the light” (James Legge), “concealment and enlightenment” (Isabella Mears) “dimming one’s light” (Arthur Waley and Tormons Byrn), and “making the obvious obscure” (Jonathan Star). To be seemingly trivial, yet a critical and constituent part of wisdom, is a theme in every enduring religious tradition.

How to make this subtlety applicable? As we have seen as recently as Verse 35, wherever you are is your entry point to life. Call it whatever you want—karma, life circumstances, free will, or fate—can one trust in the way things are, trust that every situation or context provides every iota of informational power necessary for the living of that moment? Buddhists regard karma (one’s record

of action) as a syllabus for the present moment. The critical edge of existence here, of experiencing fully the current moment now, carries within it all one’s karmic force, so that one’s karma is the curriculum for living in this moment. And how one embraces this schooling moment provides the karmic possibility for how one is to experience all other moments to come. In other words, one’s quantity of karma from one’s past provides the quality of life now. How we invest this moment with awareness affects every future moment. Living with awareness, putting in good seconds leads to good minutes . . . hours, days, years, lifetimes. One’s future will look exactly like one’s past. Whatever we practice, we harvest.

37

Natural Action

I Tao does not use action to accomplish; It is the ground of action itself. Nothing is halfway accomplished.

II Only after leaders finally accept this principle does the world turn around to Its natural state. Of course, old habits of “acting busy” die hard, but perish they do when exposed to the Unnamable and Its simplicity.

III Dedication to this simplicity loosens old habits. Without the turbulence of these old desires, original stillness reigns. Peace just settles in, naturally.

Suppose we did our work like the snow, quietly, quietly, leaving nothing out.

Wendell Berry, Leavings

For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.

Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is most likely to be correct.

William of Ockham

I said, “Who am I to blow against the wind?”

Paul Simon, “I Know What I Know”

The world has become a habit. Nobody would believe in the world if they hadn’t spent years getting used to it. We can study this in children. They are so impressed by everything they see around them that they can’t believe their eyes. That’s why they point here and there and ask about everything they lay their eyes on. It’s different with us adults. We have seen everything so many times before that we take reality for granted.

Jostein Gaarder, The Solitaire Mystery

Notes and Reflections

The word in (ii) for “turn around” () contains a conceptual link with Jesus, who spoke about the metanoia (μετάνοια, “turning around” or, more commonly, “conversion”) of the new person once they realize their old ways lead only to ruin. Still shooting yourself in the foot? How much of it may be from old habits and hardened thought patterns? Still defining “progress” from older mindset habits? Here is the secret: Get out of your own way and into Wu-wei. Things were originally quiet, but we have made it all noisy through custom and habit. Remove the noise—let it die. When it dies, hear ancient harmonies anew.

Reminder: all the verses from 1–37 primarily focus on Tao and Its ways in the world. Starting with Verse 38 and continuing to the last verse, Te is the focus, although both Tao and Te cannot be separated; they are always joined with each other. (See Verse 51 for a critical awareness of the natural inseparability of the two.) One ancient work, the Mawangdui text discovered in 1973 in a Chinese tomb sealed in 168 BCE, had the two sections reversed: first came 38–81, and then 1–37. However, most translators do not follow that ordering of verses.

38

Character and Its Pretensions

I Highest Virtue is alive only when unselfconscious.

It is dead when it becomes expedient and profitable, a reward or merely a means to an end.

II Superior Virtue is alive when it seems inactive; it works in the background, leaving nothing undone.

It is dead in mindless activity that leaves behind a slapdash job.

III Superior Virtue is alive when it has no motive.

It is dead when infected with ulterior designs and schemes.

IV Superior compassion expects no results, while

common righteousness acts only with results in mind.

Most people act with motives of fame or power. Moreover, if they do not get these, they often redouble their efforts, getting downright forceful about it.

V When Tao is lost, people settle for mere uprightness.

When uprightness wears thin, people settle for shallow kindness.

When kindness dries up, people cry out, “Justice!”

No justice? People look to respectability as a stand-in, but it is just a husk.

VI While fortune-telling or future-forecasting may be all the rage,

they are hollow substitutes leading to confusion and witlessness.

VI Therefore, the person grounded in the depths does not drink from opinions. He stays centered at the root and lets the unrooted take care of itself. He avoids the outer to live in the inner root.

When power is scarce, a little is tempting.

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

There’s no better way to neutralize an organization than to give it respectability.

Will Campbell, Brother to a Dragonfly

The smaller the big, the bigger the small. There is a point when pattern becomes motion. The onlyes power is no power. It’s the not struggling for power thats where the power is.

Russell Hoban, Ridley Walker (all grammatical irregularities in original)

We cannot know the great things of the universe until we know ourselves to be great things. . . . I once heard this Hasidic tale: “We need a coat with two pockets. In one pocket there is dust, and in the other pocket there is gold. We need a coat with two pockets to remind us who we are.”

Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach

Notes and Reflections

The main emphasis of this verse is that Virtue (Te) is Tao made visible, or Tao at work. Eight times the character for Te shows up in the first twenty-seven characters of this verse.

Applications are manifold. Sections (i–iv) reemphasize Tao’s usually misunderstood powers: hiddenness, the quiet power of Wu-wei, noncompetition, and nonegotistical motives. In (v–vi), the text shows how, when these hidden powers are neglected, people begin to settle for second best. Societal chaos begins. So the last section (vii) is a concluding commentary to link (i–iv) with (v–vi): Trust your original rooting. Do not settle for less. Tao will outlast any “flavor-of-the-month” scheme. Twelfth-century German Christian mystic Hildegard of Bingen would agree; she taught how an interpreted world is not home. If you want to see your own light, take back your own listening and find your own voice.

We have seen this message before: when “Virtue” is lost, people go after weak substitutes. Fake-virtue has many masquerades in society, which this text addresses. In perhaps this an-cient text’s most withering slight against Confucianism, in (v), we see the cardinal Confucian virtue, “humanity” (, ren), used as the ersatz, watered-down stand-in virtue (lowercase v) that emerges only when Te is lost and forgotten. Make no mistake: Confucian ren is no match for Taoist Te.

There is one more anti-Confucian swipe here: in (vi), “fortune-telling or futureforecasting” may suggest the I Ching’s augury methods to some readers, but it is more likely that Taoists suspected these futurology gambits popular in the

Confucian culture of the day.

39

Meditation on Humility

I The One provided these benefits a long time ago. Each beneficiary points uniquely to the One in its natural way.

II Heaven’s benefits were transparency and purity.

Earth’s benefits were stability and peace.

To the spiritual was given divine power.

Valleys’ benefit was abundance.

All created things’ benefit was life force itself.

Rulers’ benefit was the ability for Tao to flow through their ruling and so keep everything balanced.

III Without its transparency and purity, I fear Heaven would split apart.

Without its stability and peace, I fear Earth would crumble.

Without divine power, I fear the spiritual would wither.

Without their abundance, I fear valleys would dry out.

Without its life force, I fear creation would go extinct.

Without Tao’s wisdom permeating their ruling, I fear rulers too would come to a bad end.

IV Can you see how greatness is rooted in subtleness, and how every lofty thing has its source in the lowly? Is this not why true rulers feel themselves helpless and orphaned whenever they connect with their humble subjects? Similarly, there is no “carriage” without its unsung parts, such as wheel, harness, and axle.

V Rather than wear jingling trinkets of jade, be unbreakable stone.

Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be played on; it is all dissipation. Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly

lights. The shadows of poverty and meanness gather around us, “and lo! creation widens to our view.”

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Humility is not thinking less of yourself; it’s thinking of yourself less.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

When pride comes, then comes disgrace; but wisdom is with the humble.

Proverbs 11:2

People living deeply have no fear of death.

Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin

Notes and Reflections

No matter the times, or who leads, there remains an original Oneness, the abundance of which fills every good hunger and thirst. Every created thing is part of this One. Connected with Tao, even one’s “unsung parts” carry the same quiet grandeur as all Nature described in the first three sections. No place or particle is unconnected to the One; nothing is any further distant from Tao’s influence and virtue than any other thing. This is something to stand in awe of.

Let me be clear. No matter where you are, or what you are doing, there is no place that is not Tao-connected. One may join the “Tao dance” from one’s current location. From Tao’s timing, it is never too late; all the “dirt” you find yourself in—from the clay of one’s body to the messiness of life—can be turned into pottery.

40

The Converse Way

I Tao’s motion is converse: Returning to and not advancing from, taking the retreating way. When weak, Tao is most useful.

II Latency, not blatancy. Everything that “is” was once nothing—pure potential.

The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.

Matthew 13:33

The pure always come from that which is stained. The bright is forever born from the totally dark.

Hung Ying-ming, Master of the Three Ways 1.24

Notes and Reflections

Here is a testimony to the power of weakness. In growing a team or network of activists or socially conscious people, do not forget the latent ones. Rather than lead or develop the blatant—the obvious—instead, look to your potential, in the margins, in the as yet undeveloped or unborn. As Isaiah the prophet said, “A little child shall lead them” (Isa. 11:6). Meditate on that as you preview Verse 55.

How might such a child (or untested one) grow into a leader? Leadership training programs for future leaders are rare. Instead, like the young kid David in Hebrew scripture, a situation arose in which his own latent, unobserved, and untested power was called forward, and a little while later, Goliath was no more. David’s story rhymes with these teenagers: Joan of Arc, Malala Yousafzai, Antigone, Mother Mary, and Greta Thunberg. No one said it couldn’t be done, so I did it.

Adult common sense takes us only so far! Where lies the unobvious? What are we not seeing? Think conversely. Surprises are everywhere for those prepared to see!

41

Infinite and Infinitesimal

I When a diligent person listens to Tao, she diligently practices Its teachings.

When a middling person listens to Tao, he practices It with middling effort.

When an unskilled person listens to Tao, she ridicules It as unskilled drivel. Her mocking, however, only confirms, Yep, that’s Tao.

II Thus the following expression:

At Its most incandescent, Tao seems dark. Its smooth track resembles a directionless and obstacle-laden path. For every step forward, two steps back.

Its supreme Virtue appears empty like a valley, and Its clarity like a concealing fog.

Tao’s liberal Virtue presents as tight-fisted or lacking, and Its strength seems like something shabby, even stolen.

Substantial truth appears like something soiled or contaminated.

III Consider, if you can:

• a square without edges?

• the greatest implement without a use?

• the most sublime music remaining on the page?

• or the perfect model without form?

Hidden Tao goes about anonymously. Therefore, It alone knows how to complete every thing.

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Our world hangs like a magnificent jewel in the vastness of space. Every one of us is a part of that jewel. A facet of that jewel. And in the perspective of infinity, our differences are infinitesimal. We are intimately related.

Fred Rogers, commencement address, Dartmouth College, 2002

Our psyche is set up in accord with the structure of the universe, and what happens in the macrocosm likewise happens in the infinitesimal and most subjective reaches of the psyche. For that reason the God-image is always a projection of the inner experience of a powerful vis-à-vis.

C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections

The power of true center must be the most frequently mislaid artifact of human wisdom. It is as if the same message keeps washing ashore, and no one breaks the bottles, much less the code.

Marilyn Ferguson

Notes and Reflections

Sometimes, as here, the text begins with obvious, head-nodding truths. Then as the text begins to build its case, we get deeper and deeper into the mysterious world that created the text in the first place. By the time we get to its final section, we can get lost.

What may we accept from this verse? Tao’s unity and power are expressible neither in practicality nor convenience. Tao only points to and draws us into mystery. A mystery is something we can never interpret, but it is a power that ever shows itself in different and multiform ways. We never tire of a mystery (such as love), but we do become jaded with things that become popular and common (like corny love songs). Tao is not an “insert tab A into slot B” schematic of assembly instructions; it only points to mystery. The question becomes, Can we practice mystery? Start with the four conundrums in section (iii). Who, or what, do they bring to mind?

42

Foundation of Teaching

I Tao births Unity. Unity births complements. Complements birth triads. From these come all things.

II Carried forward by Yin, and embraced from behind by Yang, all things increase and decrease in harmony.

III People hate most being solitary, desolate, and hapless. Royalty and nobility rarely see these problems.

IV When your fate may be only to gain by losing, or to lose by gaining, I only pass along this revered and well-known lesson:

Tyrants and the violent are unnatural. They die as they have lived.

V This is the foundation of my teaching. Begin here.

We two being one, are it.

John Donne, “The Canonization”

I am a part. I shall be discontented with none of the things which are assigned to me out of the whole; for nothing is injurious to the part, if it for the advantage of the whole.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, translated by George Long

Enantiodromia is a Greek word meaning that whatever goes to its ultimate extremity will revert to its opposite. . . . What this means is . . . whenever the Yang reaches its extreme expression it changes into Yin and whenever the Yin reaches its extreme expression it converts itself into Yang. This is harmony.

W. A. Sherrill and W. K. Yu, An Anthology of I Ching

This chapter demonstrates the “interplay of energy” of yin and yang by showing how low and high, winning and losing, destruction and self-destruction, reverse themselves, each returning into its seeming opposite.

Ursula K. Le Guin, commentary on Verse 42, Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching

Heaven and Earth are unable to go one day without harmony;

The human heart is unable to go one day without joy.

Hung Ying-ming, Master of the Three Ways 1.6

Notes and Reflections

The concepts of yin and yang permeate Tao Te Ching; however, this verse’s mention of them is the only time the two words appear in the eighty-one verses.

What are yin () and yang ()? One of the central tenets of Taoist philosophy is the principle of polarity—or opposites—portrayed by the concepts of yin and yang.² According to traditional Chinese symbolism, yin and yang represent the shady (north) and sunny (south) sides of a mountain and, by extension, all paired existence in complementary relationship. Like two sides of a coin that are hardly antagonistic toward the other, yin and yang are interconnected poles of Nature that cannot be separated from—they need—one another. Though “opposite,” they are interdependent and mutually arising, meaning one cannot exist without the other. Think of a magnet that needs both polarities, or music that requires ever the shortest pause between notes to make the melody instead of a slurry of undistinguishable tones.

With yin and yang as complementary parts of a whole, to exclude one means to upset Nature’s balance. What results is diminished capacity, restricted adaptability, and in many cases, physical or emotional illness. From the Taoist perspective, to be whole and follow Tao we must be willing to accept our dual nature and integrate our complementary opposites. This is a journey in which we may gradually realize how so much about us is hidden and nonobvious, yet such concealed parts of our lives play key roles.

Jungian psychology appreciates this complementarity of opposites. A healthy member of one sex needs to understand how the neighboring sex is also a constituent part of him or her. This is hardly a contest or civil war; a healthy

person weaves his “opposites” together for unity.

In (iii–iv) we see an application of yin and yang. What do people hate most? It is the one-sided life that comes from embracing only yin or only yang. So by their resistance to yin’s or yang’s complement, they resist what they believe to be alien to them, but in reality, they resist a part of themselves and drift toward aloneness and alienation.

Finally, for this discussion, consider zero and one. “Zero” was an invention— more than once—of the Egyptians, Hindus, and in pre-Columbian America. It is a necessary no-thing, yet it lies at the root of all math. And yet, when coupled with “one,” it is the foundation of every digital transaction. The mutual interaction of zeros (no-thing) and ones (some-thing) produce a revolutionary new and universal digital language.

43

Weak Force

I Using only its flexibility, the softest overcomes the hardest.

By not resisting, the most insubstantial permeates the most substantial.

II Its lessons are wordless; its accomplishments do not meddle (Wu-wei). Seldom do people realize this advantage, which they may learn simply by observing!

There is a crack in everything.

That’s how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”

Jesus was placed before the governor, who questioned him: “Are you the ‘King

of the Jews’?” Jesus said, “If you say so.”

But when the accusations rained down hot and heavy from the high priests and religious leaders, he said nothing. Pilate asked him, “Do you hear that long list of accusations? Aren’t you going to say something?” Jesus kept silence—not a word from his mouth. The governor was impressed, really impressed.

Matthew 27:11–14 (The Message)

For wisdom is more mobile than any motion; because of her pureness she pervades and penetrates all things.

Wisdom of Solomon 7:24 (New Revised Standard Version, with Apocrypha)

Sunlight has no substance, yet it can fill a dark room. Thus what doesn’t exist enters what has no cracks.

Wang Tao

Notes and Reflections

Many interpreters, anticipating Verse 78, insert its words here—water (for the “softest”) and stone (for the “hardest”)—though this verse contains neither word. Even so, it is helpful to be mindful of these two forces as helpful “mental inserts” here.

What does water do (Verse 8)? Water moves ever downward until balance occurs in the water table. Water erodes the high place to fill up the low place. It wears down the rock, without haste or publicity. So too, Virtue’s power lies/works perfectly in its secret, dark operations.

What might be our own correlate to water? What “weak force” do we carry, what spirit have we that permeates and overcomes? Love? Compassion? Vulnerability? Strong force against strong force is an expensive way to contend and has never been inwardly convincing. However, weak force enters any space and creatively transforms and completes. Like an invisible flower’s scent on the trail, the slightest loving force leaves changes all around. The invisible permeates the visible.

44

The Answer to the Test

I Questions:

Reputation or life? Which has the longer future?

Body or wealth? Which would you give up first?

Gain or loss? Which distresses more?

II Discussion:

Extravagance is the purpose of love; generosity is the reason for wealth.

The more you hoard privilege, the more you want it. Is this serenity? Is it worthwhile?

III Solution:

You have it all, even now. A contented life is not a deprived one.

Keep cool. To the extent you can, interrupt your nonsense; you will never live disgraced.

You will be forever safe and always at home.

To be able to separate one’s self from all affections is the path of tranquility.

Lu Hui-neng

You can only lose what you have never had.

Jorge Luis Borges

The more we have the less we own.

Meister Eckhart

They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold; and I deem them mad because they think my days have a price.

Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam & a Tear and a Smile

The more one would amass wealth, the more one harms what one wishes to enrich.

Lu Hui-Ch’ing

The cultivation and expansion of needs is the antithesis of wisdom. It is also the antithesis of freedom and peace. Every increase in needs tends to increase one’s dependence on outside forces over which one cannot have control, and therefore increases existential fear. Only by a reduction of needs can one promote a genuine reduction in those tensions which are the ultimate causes of strife and war.

E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful

Notes and Reflections

The three sections above include headings added by this translator. Entitling the three sections “Questions,” “Discussion,” and “Solution” should aid those educated in the Western tradition. From a Taoist perspective, a contented person is a most radical and dangerous person. Why? She can be content in any situation, while the popular culture—through advertisements and a million subliminal seductive messages—would have her not be content. A contented person cannot be bought for any price. This consciousness of being a “contented misfit” in a society that values people fitting in like sheep is perhaps the reason you have read this far. You are looking for something, for peace in this present life, and that is good.

For more on the sacred power of interruption, see Verses 19 and 20.

45

Disguised

I Even in great perfection, though surface blemishes appear, function is never impaired, nor usefulness exhausted. Even if great abundance appears empty, when used, it is bottomless.

II So great things appear in caricature.

Great skill veils itself as bumbling.

Great eloquence begins as spluttering.

III Activity ends the cold. Stillness stops the heat.

All creation begins in original quietness;

perfect stillness and serenity govern creation.

God writes straight but with crooked lines.

Portuguese saying

Educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite.

Novalis, The Experience of the Foreign

The inchworm’s bending is how it seeks to extend.

I Ching

Nan-in, a Japanese Zen master during the Meiji era (1868–1912) received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen. Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor’s cup full, and then kept on pouring. The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. “It is overfull. No more will go in!”

“Like this cup,” Nan-in said. “You are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”

Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen and Pre-Zen Writings

Do not defile your heart by seeing the world that God created as impure. The Lord of the universe is in the form of the universe. That which you see is pure.

Muktananda, Mukteshwari 2.89

Notes and Reflections

Though the characters yin and yang are not present, they reverberate throughout this verse. First, our natural inclination is to treat the “great” with respect, the “skilled” with deference, and the “eloquent” with awe . . . because these seem like desirable ends. Few stop to deliberate how greatness, skill, and eloquence are more processes than goals, because our Western worldviews are not patient enough to view the “caricatures” as greatness, nor bumbling as a tool of the skilled, nor how eloquence contains spluttering. Jesus’s ideas of strength through weakness, or love for enemy, correspond to this verse’s intent. Achilles does have his heel; he needs it, or else he would not be Achilles. Among us, the truly great still walk, though with limps and wounds.

Yin and yang seem mutually incompatible. To attain their climaxing points, both, however, advance by increments, a principle that implies a steady progression over a long span of time. By such a protracted process, cold may be changed into heat and high into low. (One’s breathing in and out is just a shortened process to help teach this principle.) Tao Te Ching teaches that seemingly opposites are not meant to be sundered but are part of a process whereby balance occurs in a natural, intertwined way.

See the next verse about the right timing for increasing and withdrawing.

46

When Enough’s Enough

I When the world syncs with Tao, horses live on farms.

But in a world out of sync with Tao, horses train for war in the cities.

II Two extreme imbalances: the trap of always being lured but never knowing satisfaction, and the curse of every craving totally satisfied.

III Balance: to know when “Enough’s enough” is enough.

Take care! Protect yourself against the least bit of greed. Life is not defined by what you have, even when you have a lot.

Then [Jesus] told them this story: “The farm of a certain rich man produced a terrific crop. He talked to himself: ‘What can I do? My barn isn’t big enough for this harvest.’ Then he said: ‘Here’s what I’ll do: I’ll tear down my barns and build bigger ones. Then I’ll gather in all my grain and goods, and I’ll say to myself, Self, you have done well! You’ve got it made and can now retire. Take it

easy and have the time of your life!’

“Just then God showed up and said, ‘Fool! Tonight you die. And your barnfull of goods—who gets it?’”

“The Story of the Greedy Farmer,” Luke 12:15–20 (The Message)

We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?

Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America

In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants and the other is getting it.

Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan

Notes and Reflections

The tragic Greek myth of King Midas is this verse’s object lesson. Midas’s craving was granted: everything he touched turned into gold . . . including his food, drink—and his daughter!

When asked once, “How much money is enough money?” John D. Rockefeller replied, “Just a little bit more.”

Untamed desire has a poverty all its own. The idea of “being lured” from one’s original balance suggests the useless flapping of a bird, caught in a trap of misery-making anxiety, of always desiring “more.” Thus lured, one will ever see roadblocks instead of portals, hear white noise instead of music. We tend to get exactly what we prepare ourselves to get.

47

As Within, So Without

I Without stirring from your room, you can open doors of understanding to the ways of the world.

Without looking out your window, you can see Heaven’s Way.

II The more you stir about, the less likely you are to know. The Sage knows enough without walking about. He does not need to look to understand perfectly, nor does he need to act in order to succeed.

Though sitting still, he walks far; though lying down he goes everywhere.

Katha Upanishad 2:20–21

A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still.

Richard Powers, The Overstory

Neither shall they say, Lo, here! or, There! for lo, the kingdom of God is within you.

Luke 17:21 (American Standard Version)

You can only learn what you already know.

Sufi saying

’Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free

’Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,

And when we find ourselves in the place just right,

’Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gained,

To bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed,

To turn, turn will be our delight,

Till by turning, turning we come ’round right.

Elder Joseph, Simple Gifts

Notes and Reflections

The Beatles used this verse in their 1968 song “The Inner Light,” which was the B-side to their single hit “Lady Madonna.”

This verse extends the “early retirement” themes seen in Verse 9 above, which will receive fuller treatment in Verses 55 and 80 below. It is also a commentary on the previous verse’s theme: knowing when enough is enough. We live in a time in which more is more, and nothing succeeds like excess. But Tao is perhaps most countercultural and “misfit-making” when It teaches that to “see Heaven’s Way” one does not need activity. Living with and in Tao, one is already completed, perfected, and at rest. In this knowledge, and in this mis-fit practice of “early retirement,” we find “power for peace.” No matter your age, gender, or station in life, when you are with Tao, no one can “take you for a ride,” because you have already arrived. Therefore, live with a spaciousness of mind, because no matter where you are, it is Heaven-like. The power for peace is already here; it has never been absent. One does not need to “go out” or take a pilgrimage to find what is already within.

This theme “rhymes” with a theory of education first offered by Plato in his Meno and Phaedo. Anamnesis is Plato’s word for the recovery of what you have forgotten. Human beings possess innate knowledge and wisdom (acquired before birth). Education consists of rediscovering these, already within us.

Finally, this verse reminds me of quantum entanglement—or “spooky action at a distance,” to use Einstein’s phrasing—whereby widely separated objects, those within and those without, share concurrent conditions or states.

48

Tao’s Math

I Pursuing knowledge, your routine is multiplication.

Pursuing Tao, it is subtraction.

Prune. Lose. Diminish. Keep subtracting until there is no doer, no pursuing.

With no pursuit and not-doing, pure action shows itself.

II Keep your thumb on the scale, and it is meddling upon meddling! Get out of your own way and rejoin Tao’s Way.

Perhaps perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to subtract.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand, and Stars

Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.

Martin Fischer

Now what I mean by subtraction here is the subtraction of excess in strength and volatility, and what I mean by addition is addition to fill the lack caused by pliability and weakness. Being strong without letting strength go too far, being flexible without becoming ineffective, strength is joined to flexibility and flexibility is applied with strength.

Liu I-Ming, Awakening to the Tao, translated by Thomas Cleary

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, “What will we eat?” or “What will we drink?” or “What will we wear?” . . . But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

Matthew 6:25–33

Those who seek Tao seek to return to emptiness and nothingness. When something is done, something is left out. When nothing is done, nothing is not done.

Wang Bi

Possessing much knowledge is like having a thousand foot fishing line with a hook, but the fish is always an inch beyond the hook.

Mumon Ekai, Mumonkan

Notes and Reflections

Wu-wei (), or noninterference, appears in the entire Tao Te Ching only thirteen times. This verse contains two instances of the phrase. Each of the first two lines of this verse opens with a simple wei (), or action (translated here as “pursuing”). The contrast is clear for the Chinese reader when, later in (i), there are not only two instances of Wu-wei but also a third emphasizing phrase—, “no pursuit.” Tao Te Ching contains five more such instances of . When read in conjunction with Wu-wei, we can see the lengths this short text goes to in order to persuade us of the power of not multiplying or pursuing. This power of not-doing, or retiring early, grows stronger the less we “pursue” or “meddle.” Starving one’s ego-energy by practicing Wu-wei’s subtraction leaves room for agile and enlightened leadership: the very necessary countercultural prescription for the living of these days.

49

The Yoked Leader

I Without a hardened agenda, the Sage has no interfering interests of her own.

She merges her heart-mind with the people.

II To those who trust her and do good to her—or not!—it is her nature to treat as trustworthy and good. Meeting everyone with Virtue, she ratchets up every person’s virtue.

III In governing and being a part of the world, the Sage wisely yokes her heartmind with the people. They rivet their attention on her, because the Sage nurtures them as she would a child.

The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God.

Martin Buber

Impartial everywhere that he looks, he sees himself in all beings and all beings in himself.

Bhagavad Gita 6:29, translated by Stephen Mitchell

The one who returns good for evil is as a tree which renders its shade and its fruit even to those who cast stones at it.

Persian proverb

The Sage covers up the tracks of his mind by blending in with others.

Hsuan-Tsung

When a pickpocket sees a saint, he sees only his pockets; when a saint sees a pickpocket, he sees only his innocence.

Ramakrishna

Notes and Reflections

The Chinese text for “without a hardened agenda” is , or more literally, “without a predisposed heart-mind.” This important theme in Taoism correlates with two images extolling the virtues of being unprocessed that we have seen before: raw silk and the uncarved block. These two images are the antidote to the discriminating mind that schemes politically, calculates selfishly, and hijacks a self-surrounded heart-mind. Remembering the theme of Verse 2 above, be careful of perceiving differences and distinctions where there are none. Otherwise, one acts upon hallucinations.

In (ii) above is Tao Te Ching’s first of three sayings that compare to the Golden Rule (the other two are in Verses 54[iv] and 63[ii]). Notice how the Sage does not wait to be treated well first? Were she to wait, who would take the first move of Virtue?

50

No Target

I With birth, we appear, and with death, we disappear.

II About one person in three befriends life.

About one in three is obsessed with death.

III About one in three has good intentions to pursue life, but his fixation on death colonizes him. Afraid of death, how does one live?

IV One hears about the Sage who excels at flourishing.

While abroad, wild animals do not attack him, nor do soldiers’ weapons cause him alarm.

The rhino can find no target for its horn.

Tigers cannot aim to target their claws.

Soldiers find no vulnerable target for their weapons to pierce.

Why? Because his body preserves no target for death!

When all desires that dwell in the heart cease, then the mortal becomes immortal, and obtains Brahman.

Katha Upanishad 6:14

If you grasp and cling to life on your terms, you’ll lose it, but if you let that life go, you’ll get life on God’s terms.

Luke 17:33 (The Message)

Do you not know, then, that the origin of all human evils and of the most meanspirited and cowardice is not death, but rather the fear of death?

Epictetus, Discourses of Epictetus, translated by Elizabeth Carter

I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.

Mark Twain

“I want to know about heaven and hell,” said the samurai. “Do they really exist?” he asked Hakuin. Hakuin looked at the soldier and asked, “Who are you?”

“I am a samurai!” announced the proud warrior. “Ha!” exclaimed Hakuin. “What makes you think you can understand such insightful things? You are merely a callous, brutish soldier! Go away and do not waste my time with your foolish questions,” Hakuin said, waving his hand to drive away the samurai.

The enraged samurai couldn’t take Hakuin’s insults. He drew his sword, readied for the kill, when Hakuin calmly retorted, “This is hell.”

The soldier was taken aback. His face softened. Humbled by the wisdom of Hakuin, he put away his sword and bowed before the Zen Master. “And this is heaven,” Hakuin stated, just as calmly.

“Heaven & Hell”²¹

Notes and Reflections

The text’s first section contains a puzzle. Translators have not agreed whether it should read “three in ten,” “thirteen,” or my “one in three.” One early translator, Hán Fēi, said the text should read “thirteen,” for this is the sum of one’s four limbs and nine body orifices, which are gateways to preserve life, or the body’s weak places to end it. The orifices of ear, eye, and mouth, by what they acquire, are most likely to be abused and lead to life-shortening disease. “Outwardly, the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, tongue and body gang up and beckon external ills.”²²

This verse’s final lines provide philosophical insight into the kind of training and discipline that martial arts impart. Seen in one dimension, ownership is a kind of clinging, of harboring and cultivating a sense of “This is mine.” This is but the evolution of self, however, into a target that makes one vulnerable, whether on or off the martial arts mat. Some vulnerabilities—yes!—are wonderful. Our children or loved ones make us vulnerable, but not in an off-balanced way. Some “ownership” completes us and we lose our ego. Other ownership depletes us and we compensate by clinging. Can one ever lose that to which one does not cling?

51

The Story of Creation

I While the Way (Tao) mothers all life-forms, Virtue (Te) stewards them, gives them their respective forms, and coordinates with their environment to bring them to wholeness.

Therefore, all things honor Tao and treasure Virtue.

II Honoring Tao and treasuring Virtue are spontaneous responses, not duties.

III To repeat, Tao is every life-form’s parent, and Virtue nurtures all, bringing them up, educating, sheltering, supporting, guarding, and enabling all to flourish. Virtue never tires of nurturing.

IV Tao sets the conditions where all this happens but never meddles by owning, expecting gratitude, or colonizing dependency. It just promotes without a show. This is the profound expression of Virtue.

Our language is under every rock.

Randy Woodley, United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians

The Way is what things follow. Virtue is what they attain. “Dark Virtue” means virtue is present but no one knows who controls it.

Wang Bi

The ten thousand creatures respect the Tao as their father and honor Virtue as their mother . . . the Way becomes Virtue . . . Virtue becomes the Way.

Wu Cheng

I moisten the roots of all that has grown.

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

And this our life . . . finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. I would not change it.

William Shakespeare, As You Like It

Notes and Reflections

Building on Verse 34, this verse speaks almost exclusively about that which cannot be seen, heard, or discerned. The operations side of Tao is Te—Virtue. So far behind the scenes is Tao’s creation and Te’s cooperations that to tinker with them—whether intentionally through well-meaning science (CRISPR technology, for example) or ignorantly by burning through our carbon—is to risk disaster. So it is a statement of profoundest faith for Max Ehrmann to declare, “You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.”²³

Thus this verse treats Tao as a self-regulating principle, permeating all things. It does not need our aid. We may see Its tireless rhythm and harmony in Nature, animals, seasons, and climate. Human beings—alone among the “ten thousand things” of creation—are the only part of creation to struggle against this Tao harmony. And we do, as if we could improve on Nature, as if one could force the springtime to arrive sooner or the river to flow faster. Less monkeying with the Way things are is the right course. Nonmeddling, one finds more spaciousness, more serenity, even more agreeableness. As Larry Eisenberg is known to have said, “For peace of mind, resign as general manager of the universe.” See Verse 22 for more insight.

52

Practice Eternity

I In the beginning was the Source. This Source mothers all.

II Understand the Mother and you recognize her children. Seeing yourself as her child—how your every endurance is in the Mother—is the way of no danger.

Abide in her—

silence your inner referee,

arrest your opinion maker—

and peace is your life companion.

But abandon her—

meddle . . . monopolize—

and your troubles multiply till the very last.

III Perceiving things as insignificant is enlightened.

Yielding is strength.

Practice being light, and enlightenment accompanies you with no trail of disaster.

These are the practices of Eternity.

There was once a man who was afraid of his own shadow, and had a strong dislike to his own footprints. So he tried to escape from both; but the quicker he ran the more footprints he made, and fast as he went his shadow kept up with him. He thought he was going too slowly, so he ran faster and faster without stopping, until his strength gave out and be fell dead. He did not know that if he stayed in a shady place his shadow would have disappeared, and that if he had only remained quiet and motionless he would not have made any footprints. Stupid fellow that he was.

Chuang-tzu, translated by Balfour

Do not seek for the truth; only cease to cherish opinions.

Seng-ts’an, Hsin-Hsin Ming, translated by Richard B. Clarke

Where there is so much racket, there must be something out of kilter.

Sojourner Truth, “Ain’t I a Woman?”

Notes and Reflections

In (iii), I turn aside from mainstream translations. I felt it important to link “Perceiving things as insignificant is enlightened” as complementary to (ii): “seeing yourself as her child.” Most translations lean toward a view that enlightenment is merely being able to see the small and insignificant. However, enlightenment is more firmly established in the practice of compassion: seeing as a small person sees. This verse, concerned with how the practice of enlightenment and constancy has its humble side, is strengthened by linking these two sentences. This theme of compassion correlates well with other themes of this translation: being a countercultural mis-fit who, because of one’s Tao curriculum, sees differently and then leads from that different vision. For another view of this, see Verse 39(iv–v), and compare this verse to Verse 16(iii).

This verse professes that Eternity is not a belief or a destination, but a practice of intentional peace. Section (ii) reminds one just to “abide” in one’s Source, even as one silences contrary voices. These simple actions both begin and extend Eternity awareness in time and space.

53

Sideways

I Only in utter simplicity can I walk the great Tao path. Wandering off to some sideway is my great fear.

II The great Tao path is straight and level, but people love “sideways.”

When centers of government maintain themselves in splendor, farms and fields go untended. Storerooms empty out.

Meanwhile, the fashion-minded flirt in their colorful clothes that only half-hide their swords, and overeat and drink excessively. Focused on excess, their snobbery is so much robbery!

III Really, this is not true Tao!

While the government deludes itself and its powerful allies by giving the outward impression of authority, those responsive to its authority become fewer and fewer . . . [until it is] balanced like an inverted pyramid and requires only a

push from some other self-centered group to topple it from power.

Frances Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake

When one of high rank uselessly indulges in power or markets their position, they become, in the end, only a titled beggar.

Hung Ying-ming, Master of the Three Ways 1.90 (altered)

When the court is in good repair, lawsuits abound. When lawsuits abound, fields become overgrown. When fields become overgrown, granaries become empty. When granaries become empty, the country becomes poor. When the country becomes poor, customs become decadent, and there is no trick people don’t try.

Hán Fēi

Notes and Reflections

There is great wordplay in this verse:

In section (i), Tao and path are the same word in Chinese. In (i) and (ii), “sideways” is this translator’s pun on the Chinese (meaning “side path”). The “Way,” or Tao, is implied for careful readers, but is joined with a sense of getting off the “path” or going askance: hence “sideways.” Again in (ii), the Chinese word for robbery () is also pronounced “tao,” an intentional pun. Hearers in Mandarin would get this pun because it highlights the contrast: this robbery tao is definitely not Tao’s Way! For English readers, a similar sentence would read and sound like this: Without the resolve borne of stillness, one is more likely to steal.

In the same section we find a situation we have encountered before (in Verses 19 and 32) and will again (in Verses 58 and 75). Responsibility and morally ethical action are inborn gifts of Tao and Te. We do not need decrees to teach or edicts as reminders. However, when the laws arise, it means that people have already left the Tao path for the weeds of sideways. For Tao is much easier to know than to follow. Once temptations begin, they multiply, sucking us into their sideways, and numerous laws emerge—laws that speak only to the seductive power of the sideways. But the person practicing Tao needs no such extrinsic laws; she is intrinsically motivated, for Tao, never contrived or synthesized, is naturally present.

54

Roots

I Nothing you plant with deep roots can be shaken loose.

II These pass to your descendants, who no doubt will honor you for it.

III Rooting Tao within yourself produces genuine Virtue.

Rooting Tao within your family multiplies Virtue.

Rooting Tao within your community makes for enduring Virtue.

Rooting Tao within your nation produces prospering Virtue.

Rooting Tao throughout your world expands Virtue everywhere.

IV Regard yourself through others.

Regard your household through other families.

Regard your village through other communities.

Regard your country through other nations.

Regard all that lies below Heaven through everything.

V How does one know all below Heaven?

Stay rooted.

I call heaven and Earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.

Deuteronomy 30:19

We always plant our feet carefully because we know the faces of future generations are looking up at us from beneath the ground.

Oren Lyons

If we could surrender to Earth’s intelligence, we would rise up rooted, like trees.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours

See Yourself In Others

Then whom can you hurt?

What harm can you do?

For your brother is like you

He wants to be happy.

the Buddha

We shall not be moved

On the road to freedom

We shall not be moved

Just like a tree that’s standing by the water side

We shall not be moved.

We shall not we shall not be moved

We shall not we shall not be moved

Just like a tree that’s standing by the water side

We shall not be moved.

American folk song

Notes and Reflections

In this verse’s first line, Tao is not part of the text; however, assistance from Tao is implied in the planting and not being shaken.

Just after, the fivefold use of Te (Virtue) shows its proliferation by how it expands its roots, from an embodied activity in one’s person to its deep hold “everywhere.” Notice again the natural partnership of Tao and Te: the “Way” things are comes integrated with Virtue. See how the following verse takes this up.

Finally, regarding (iv), see my “Notes and Reflections” about compassion in Verse 52. Following Tao is not a one-off or occasional practice. The more one practices the Way and Its Virtue, season after season, the more capacity and resilience one has for even more enhanced and sustained following of the Way and Its Virtue. Finally, in (iv), is the second of three times the text advances and deepens our understanding of the Golden Rule.

55

Perfected by Virtue

I When Virtue possesses a person, she resembles a newborn child, whom bees do not sting, nor snakes and scorpions attack.

Wild animals will not attack her, nor will birds of prey strike.

II Though her bones flex and her muscles are soft, her grasp is firm, and her arousal is palpable, even though she knows nothing of adult matters.

Or she may shout loudly all the day long and not become hoarse.

These certify that her potency and strength are already perfected and unhindered.

III Conforming with the changeless is enlightenment.

Growing in this constancy is a blessing, but to stockpile an overabundance of

vitality does not bode well. For when lusts and impulses tamper with your life’s power (Ch’i), expect nothing good.

IV The more exalted and controlling, the faster the decline and decay. No Tao there! Resist Tao and you’re finished!

Education is not something which the teacher does, but it is a natural process which develops spontaneously in the human being.

Maria Montessori, The Absorbent Mind

The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.

Buckminster Fuller

Those who possess the Way are like children. They come of age without growing old.

Wu Cheng

You need not, and in fact cannot, teach an acorn to grow into an oak tree; but when given a chance, its intrinsic potentialities will develop. Similarly, the

human individual, given a chance, tends to develop his particular human potentialities. . . . In short, he will grow, substantially undiverted, toward selfrealization.

Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth

Notes and Reflections

This verse is almost universally interpreted with a male in mind, especially in (ii), where the Chinese text—, —can be easily read as “erect manhood organ growing to its full perfection.” Nevertheless, I reseed this section with female imagery for inclusion purposes. Either way, it feels strange to leave unconsidered half the human population when speaking of our innate power and completion.

I translate it this way because of a rather radical and democratic Confucian doctrine. Confucius would call anyone a Sage (treated in Verse 2’s “Notes and Reflections”), whether high or low born, educated or not. Anyone, and everyone, was capable of being perfected from within their social or intellectual situation. This egalitarian attitude comes through in Taoism, especially in this verse.

Pair this verse with 40, where the text suggests that our latent abilities are enough for the demands of life. Thus young people who have not been colonized by ideologies preaching their imperfections and deficiencies (and thus they should be “prudent” and “sensible”) actually achieve greater things, unhampered as they are by societal custom, rule, and habit. This is a key point for educators. Do we consider our students already complete (though lacking in experience), or in dire need of being fixed or filled? Do we assume our students are capable of greatness, or not? The educational, parental, and human-nature implications here matter a great deal. I leave you with two images: A small fire kindled on a matchstick is no different from a larger fire over which one cooks. Nor is a drop of water any less capable of extinguishing the match than a bucket of water that dowses a cooking fire.

56

Mixing with Dust

I Those with answers do not know, and those who know do not answer. Seal the mouth; mistrust your senses.

II Smooth your rough edges to untangle complications.

Soften your stare to mix with the dust of the Earth.

This is profound Oneness.

One cannot possess, approach—or abandon—this Oneness.

One may add neither benefit nor harm, or honor or besmirch it.

Under Heaven, nothing is more prized or valued.

The mouth is surely the mind’s gate. When the mouth is not guarded closely, all of your secrets will spill over and out.

Hung Ying-ming, Master of the Three Ways 1. 217

I never did like smartass utopians. Always so much healthier and saner and sounder and fitter and kinder and tougher and wiser and righter than me and my family and friends. People who have the answers are boring. Boring, boring, boring.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home

Only an idol always answers.

Barbara Brown Taylor, When God Is Silent

What’s crazier—plants speaking, or humans listening?

Richard Powers, The Overstory

I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind.

Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam & a Tear and a Smile

Anyone who makes no mistakes in speaking is perfect, able to keep the whole body in check with a bridle. If we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we guide their whole bodies. Or look at ships: though they are so large that it takes strong winds to drive them, yet they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire!

James 3:2–5

Notes and Reflections

From the first lines of this long poem, in Verse 1, Tao cannot be located with words. Talkers are not listening, and listeners are not talking. The person who uses words carelessly will probably abuse silence and cheapen its supreme value. He will become more sure of his answers than his errors, for language can be used to conceal truth as much as it can reveal it.

When we seal the mouth, we put a guard upon it. One who mistrusts the senses maintains a strict password on all that might infiltrate the firewall that Taoists maintain on the senses. But there is a payoff: A smoother of rough edges prepares entangled things for union. One who softens their stare begins to see things as they are. One who mixes with the dust adjusts to others. See the progression? Guarding what is essential readies one’s central core to receive others. We might call it “active listening,” a skill one practices with all one’s senses. Through this skill, one reaches a “profound Oneness” with others, Nature, and self. This is compassion. This is the power for peace.

57

Counterintuitive

I The best government uses ordinary, straightforward policies.

The best army uses unconventional methods.

Through nonmeddling, you gain the universe.

II How does that work? Like this:

The more taboos and restrictions, the more poverty.

The more weapons in the land, the more fear and ignorance.

The shrewder the cunning, the more demonic things become.

Want more outlaws? Just make more laws.

III This is what the Sage learned:

When I practice noninterference (Wu-wei), people naturally transform themselves.

When I practice peace and quiet, people are spontaneously honest and fair.

When I practice doing nothing, people enrich themselves, naturally.

And when I have no desires, people return to their original “uncarved-block” state.

The really expert riders of horses let the horse know immediately who is in control, but then guide the horse with loose reins and seldom use the spurs.

Sandra Day O’Connor

Most problems, if you give them enough time and space, will eventually wear themselves out.

The Buddha

This laboring of ours with all that remains undone,

as if still bound to it,

is like the lumbering gait of the swan.

And then our dying—releasing ourselves

from the very ground on which we stood—

is like the way he hesitantly lowers himself

into the water. It gently receives him,

and, gladly yielding, flows back beneath him,

as wave follows wave,

while he, now wholly serene and sure,

with regal composure,

allows himself to glide.

Rainer Maria Wilke, The Swan, translated by Joanna Macy

Some of us think holding on makes us strong but sometimes it is letting go.

Hermann Hesse

You try to do something, you lose it. When you try to do something, it means you are concentrated on one hand out of one thousand hands. You lose 999 hands.

Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, “Right Concentration”

Give Nature a chance; she knows her business better than we do.

Montaigne, “Of Experience”

Notes and Reflections

In the first line, “straightforward” comes from , which depicts a foot walking in a direct, nonwavering straight line.

In the middle section, Tao Te Ching questions again the primacy of rules, regulations, and schemes by rulers. The text’s position is that the presence or imposition of rules means something non-Tao is already afoot. Rules may be well-intentioned fixers, but they are first the signal that Tao is lost or covered up. Additionally, the more one “messes with things” (issuing codes and laws, or prescribing meaningless or unnatural rituals), the more one sets people up to be scofflaws. People on a short leash often spend creative energy trying shortcuts through regulations and compliance. Laws trigger disobedience and the search for loopholes. The more laws, the larger the admission of the failure of justice. The principle here is the tighter one weaves or controls things, the more (loop)holes get created. Instead, rule by goodwill. Assume people are skilled enough to know how to meet their own needs. Unreal expectations correlate to dissatisfaction for everyone.

Furthermore, resisting something keeps it alive. Resistance gives energy to the resisted to keep on going. Meeting force with force and anger with anger keeps its Ch’i (Energy) alive; violence is a perpetual-motion machine.

Instead, when solving problems, invite many and diverse people to help you. Practice noninterference as others place their assessments and solutions on the table. Notice where the energy is flowing. Without interruption, just follow. Micromanaging makes for microvision. The one who uses Tao to interrupt violence (in whatever form it takes) means to understand intimately the inner

processes one wishes to change. This theme continues in the next verse.

58

A Light Touch, Pt. 1

I Governing with a light touch keeps people healthy.

Meddling with a heavy hand is hardly governing—just a means to turn people into needy connivers.

II On top of every calamity, good fortune roosts. Sown in every good fortune are the seeds of disaster. But all life is a gamble—just chance through and through. Today, the straightforward veers into perversity. Tomorrow, goodness U-turns into the monstrous. These puzzlements seem without end.

III So the Sage governs without controlling. She is

sharp without piercing,

honest but not to a fault,

single-minded without being ruthless,

lustrous with understated brilliance.

The texture of the world, its filigree and scrollwork, means that there is the possibility for beauty here, a beauty inexhaustible in its complexity, which opens to my knock, which answers in me a call I do not remember calling, and which trains me to the wild and extravagant nature of the spirit I seek.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

It’s dark because you are trying too hard. . . . Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them . . . throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly.

Aldous Huxley, Island

Injury can appear in the midst of kindness.

When happy, keep your wits about you.

The aftermath of failure can be turned into success.

When things don’t go the way you want,

Do not be quick to give up the ghost.

Hung Ying-ming, Master of the Three Ways 1.10

Notes and Reflections

First, review Verse 30’s translation for a reminder on how quickly events can “boomerang” (here, “U-turn”).

The four qualities of the Sage in (iii) are products of Wu-wei interacting with yang and yin. Each portrays action up to a point, and then retirement. Like the oceans’ high-tide levels that reach their zenith every twelve hours and then recede for twelve hours, increase and decrease are natural. What would happen if tide levels kept on increasing?

“Sharpness without piercing” probably called to mind the careful crafting of jade into a jewel. Jade was more highly prized the more it retained the sharpness of its corners, but not so sharp as to be injurious. This was a Chinese metaphor for character development.

Here is a good place to demonstrate how the original Tao Te Ching poem was one undivided text. See for yourself how the separation between this verse and the next one seems artificial. The end of this verse can be the beginning of 59.

59

The Way to Endure, Pt. 2

I Whether governing people or serving Heaven, nothing works better than restraint. Practicing restraint, one prepares for the future.

II Preparing for the future is to cultivate Virtue. Cultivating Virtue is the way to overcome any obstacle. To overcome all is to discover how nothing is impossible. Knowing that nothing is impossible is how one maintains the realm. This “mother principle” of ruling by restraint is the way to endure.

One endures with sturdy roots and a thick trunk. It’s Tao’s Way.

When restraint and courtesy are added to strength, the latter becomes irresistible.

Mahatma Gandhi

Blessed are those who trust in the Lord,

whose trust is the Lord.

They shall be like a tree planted by water,

sending out its roots by the stream.

It shall not fear when heat comes,

and its leaves shall stay green;

in the year of drought it is not anxious,

and it does not cease to bear fruit.

Jeremiah 17:7–8

I’m not really a career person; I’m a gardener, basically.

John Lennon

Statecraft that could turn the universe on its course is conducted as you might

approach deep pools or tread on thin ice.

Hung Ying-ming, Master of the Three Ways 1.132

Notes and Reflections

A recent book by Alison Gopnik, The Gardener and the Carpenter,²⁴ frames two different approaches to parenting. The carpenter parents see their child as a project. The child is a “mission” to be constructed, using a calculated series of the correct skills, right books, and optimized opportunities to engineer a particular kind of adult. This sounds good—until one asks what happens if the child does not find her true self after all her engineering.

The gardener style is less intentioned or expectant. This style provides a nurturing, safe space for the young to explore childhood, building up their capacity to figure out adulthood without the pressure.

Obviously, the latter way is more Tao. One could say for the first line of the next verse, “Raising a child is like cooking a small fish. Easy does it!”

60

Keeping Things Simple

I Governing a large nation is like cooking a small fish. Easy does it!

II Rule with Tao,

and while, under Heaven, evil spirits and deities remain,

their influence to sway and deceive people—and thus even the need for Sages— diminishes.

So with nothing to frighten, mislead, or oppose, Virtue strengthens and surfaces yet again.

If you cook a small fish, don’t remove its entrails, don’t scrape off its scales, and don’t stir it. If you do, it will turn to mush. Likewise, too much government makes those below rebel.

Heshang Gong

In order to see virtue one must have a calm mind. A calm mind sees calm, an upset mind sees upset, tossed by thoughts, little insignificant thoughts.

Natalie Goldberg, Long Quiet Highway

Notes and Reflections

The first line here shows the usefulness of Wu-wei, even though the term is not in this verse. Instead of a small fish, consider a pancake. When cooking a pancake, to flip it more than once renders the pancake dense and flat.

On a personal note, perhaps my notes and reflections for Tao are also “overcooking.” Analysis can come off as a sort of overcooking—boiling Tao down to a too-reader-friendly concoction. To overcook is to boil the mystery away. Without mystery, our minds become easily bored, and we do not duly consider these verses’ import.

The character for “evil spirits” (, kuei) contains two simpler characters: a person () in the middle of a field (). Thus a person standing in the middle of a field signifies being aimless or lost, like a ghost.

61

Feminine Diplomacy

I The power of a great state should be like a river delta, which welcomes all waters to commingle at its lowest point.

II One can compare this mingling to the feminine in Nature, who “goes low,” with her natural stillness as the key to her receptivity.

III What is the lesson here? A small state can win over a great state through service. Likewise, whenever a great state wishes to gather and protect people, it may practice this feminine diplomacy to win over a small one.

IV Nature’s way is to go low and serve with a partnering mind. This way, both great and small get what they need . . . but it behooves the great to bow first.

The Wind and the Sun were disputing which was the stronger. Suddenly they saw a traveler coming down the road, and the Sun said: “I see a way to decide our dispute. Whichever of us can cause that traveler to take off his cloak shall be regarded as the stronger. You begin.” So the Sun retired behind a cloud, and the Wind began to blow as hard as it could upon the traveler. But the harder he blew

the more closely did the traveler wrap his cloak round him, till at last the Wind had to give up in despair. Then the Sun came out and shone in all his glory upon the traveler, who soon found it too hot to walk with his cloak on. Moral: Kindness effects more than severity.

Aesop

Whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave.

Matthew 20: 26–27

Small is beautiful.

E. F. Schumacher

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Notes and Reflections

“When you enter here, become small . . .” reads a sign outside the bonsai exhibit at my local arboretum. Talking about serving the greater good is easy . . . way easier than actually putting in the time and sweat to serve the small or the local. I like publicity, my ego achievements recognized, and my deeds spotlighted. Only . . . where has it taken me?

Tao’s “Way” is to become smaller. How? Cling less. Let go. Travel lighter. The next time you go into a room or a meeting, bring less of you.

62

The Greatest Receiving

I Tao is every created thing’s refuge. It is an awake person’s pearl and a slumbering person’s protection.

II While beautiful words can peddle any novelty, only honorable actions win people—even those who are unkind—for honorable action awakens everyone.

III At the inaugurations of the Son of Heaven and his three ministers, even though they receive ritual jade tablets and ceremonial horses, these could not compare to humbly receiving Tao instruction!

IV Why did the ancients hold Tao so dear? Was it not because Tao is available to all who seek It? Does not Tao protect even the guilty?

Tao remains the greatest value this side of Heaven.

If it could be left it would not be the Tao (path).

Kong Ji, The Doctrine of the Mean

The Tao is in us all. Though good and bad might differ, our nature is the same. How then, can we abandon anyone?

Te’Ch’ing

The Word is living, being, spirit, all verdant greening, all creativity. This Word manifests itself in every creature.

Hildegard of Bingen

Notes and Reflections

The inaugurations were actual historical events. The “Son of Heaven” was a title for the Chinese emperor—beginning in the Zhou Dynasty when Tao Te Ching appeared—that denoted, along with his state responsibilities, his charge to maintain harmony between the human and spiritual spheres. Along with the Son of Heaven, the “three ministers” included the offices of grand tutor, grand preceptor, and grand protector.²⁵

Throughout this long poem the Taoist teaching about human nature is that it is originally silent, peaceful, and in complete harmony with Tao. In the second section, we see evidence of this worldview of original harmony. Because “honorable action awakens everyone,” no one is born outside the realm of Tao, incapable of sensing Tao’s original call and claim. All we are asked to do is to respond to this ancient inner tug of Tao. Of course, everyone can certainly use a wake-up call from time to time, but note the working assumption of the Taoist that one’s Tao-Virtue nature is baked-in, ever-present.

This has profound implications for governing, education, parenting, even criminal justice and the purpose of prisons. How might a simple shift in the view of human nature affect the ways we organize society and culture?

63

Beginnings, Pt. 1

I Act, but no meddling.

Strive, but no pushing.

Savor, but no indulging.

II Magnify the small.

Multiply the few.

Meet every malice with virtuous kindness.

Handle all difficulties by anticipating them.

Ensure great endings by attending to their small beginnings.

III Sages know how the most difficult problems in the world can be nipped in the bud

or how the world’s greatest affairs begin with humble roots.

IV A mediocre promise-maker is a first-class trust-breaker,

and the one who promises everything is soon beset with difficulties.

Just by living simply, Sages naturally churn out greatness.

By anticipating every complication, she encounters none!

Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

Anonymous

The road must be trod, but it will be very hard. And neither strength nor wisdom will carry us far upon it. This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. Yet it is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the

world: Small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

It’s not a question of God “sending” us to Hell. In each of us there is something growing up which will of itself be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud.

C. S. Lewis

The Master said, When words are uttered without modesty, living up to them is difficult.

Confucius, Analects 14.20, translated by Robert Eno

Notes and Reflections

In section (ii) we find the third Golden Rule parallel in this poem. Acting with Tao is to be proactive toward all people and situations.

Verses 63 and 64 seem to be one complete verse-unit. Both speak to good, simple beginnings. Begin to button a shirt wrong and it will never button up right. One must start again.

Virtue works to show Tao’s counterintuitive powers in the first section. Acting without meddling does not exhaust, and striving without pushing is not troublesome to others. Savoring without indulging leads to radical simplicity. These prevent extravagance—that condition when yin and yang are out of sync. Consider this: When not constantly consumed with being great and powerful, will we not more readily recognize and then manage small problems before they metastasize into intractable issues?

Look for an often-overlooked vein of deep wisdom in knowing how to nip problems in the bud. Every thing considered great, whether presenting as either good or bad, started out as a small matter. Only when given energy, oxygen, or nurture do they then become large. We start out as single cells, the Amazon forest had seed beginnings, and habits begin with almost accidental actions. The Taoist should be careful not to allow some small things to evolve into just anything. Wu-wei’s practice enables wise discernment here.

Finally, “a mediocre promise-maker is a first-class trust-breaker” may need

explanation. One who makes promises in a careless fashion may seem busy and committed, but they perhaps lack a peaceful center in their being. Attempting to be all things to all people usually makes one nothing to no one. Many lighthearted commitments make one into a juggler of many affairs, which drop off one by one into disappointments. Taoism’s training for the misfit prescribes a total commitment to one necessary and beneficial thing. Everything will find its place and currency after that “one thing” is practiced and established. Such practice establishes a strong capacity for the power for peace.

64

Beginnings, Pt. 2

I It is easier to manage undeveloped things.

When something has not yet emerged, it is easier to manage.

Undeveloped things are the easiest to disrupt.

Trifling matters disperse best.

Resolve things before they become unsolvable.

Order your affairs before chaos happens (and it will!).

II That large tree that you cannot put your arms around was once the tiniest shoot.

This nine-story tower began as a single brick in the dirt.

Your longest journey needs your first step.

III Meddlers ruin. Graspers lose their hold.

By not meddling, the Sage never fails.

Dominate nothing, lose nothing.

IV When near a project’s completion, do not ruin it by dropping your caution. Hence the maxim, “Care at the end, as well at the beginning, assures success.”

V The Sage’s one desire is never to aspire wrongly or chase needless luxury.

VI She practices “learned simplicity.” She restores the peoples’ mistakes and assists all beings to return to their natural selves. All this, and without presumptuous meddling!

Injuries spring from desires; though small in the beginning they swell to great dimensions. Now to know that the small will become great, and to exclude it,

that may be said to be enlightenment.

Su Ch’e

Do not be careless with small leaks,

Do not deceive in the dark,

Do not become lazy and neglectful at the end of the road.

Only with these three will you become exalted.

Hung Ying-ming, Master of the Three Ways 1.114

If someone can see an event while it is still small and can change their behavior, we say they have vision.

Hsuan-Tsung

The mistake lies in the beginning—as the proverb says—“Well begun is half done”; so an error at the beginning, though quite small, bears the same ratio to the errors in the other parts.

Aristotle, Politics, book 5

The press of my foot to the Earth springs a hundred affections.

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home.

Wendell Berry, The Unforeseen Wilderness

Notes and Reflections

This verse encourages the meditative reader to see things whole but to focus on beginnings and births. Notice how everything requires a beginning, one that shapes and informs. The person yoked with Tao is wise to understand the nature of beginnings. Later, the caution is raised not to project one’s own ego or lusts into projects. Then comes the reminder to follow through. The Taoist Sage astutely sees issues where others see none by understanding unforeseen consequences first. Work on the big picture and see the forest, but focus on beginnings.

Section (ii) contains Tao Te Ching’s most famous aphorism, most often translated as something like “A journey of ten thousand miles starts with one step.” The journey is one measured by inner—not outer—distance. It is a journey of understanding, one that begins where one stands. This inner journey of “standing under” a wisdom tradition still needs that decisive first step.

While 63 and 64 can be read as one unit, notice how the last part of this verse introduces the theme of Verse 65.

65

The Way Home

I Well-versed in the simple practice of Tao, the ancient Taoist leaders led not by tricking people but by grounding the people deeper in their naturally uncomplicated ways.

The more troublesome way to govern is to hoodwink people by feeding them worldly cleverness.

II One can govern the state by introducing competitive narratives and unending arguments—and screw things up. Or, one can simply govern honestly, without the con, to bless all.

III Knowing these two governing alternatives shows deepest and inclusive Virtue.

IV Ah, Virtue—bottomless, harmonious, and guiding! Follow its lead home.

Relax, the future is already unfolding from long-planted seeds.

Rajendra Gopalachari

As long as people in high places covet knowledge and are without the Way, the world will be in great confusion. How do I know this is so? Knowledge enables people to fashion bows, crossbows, nets, stringed arrows, and like contraptions, but when this happens the birds flee in confusion to the sky. Knowledge enables people to fashion fishhooks, lures, seines, dragnets, trawls, and weirs, but when this happens the fish flee in confusion to the depths of the water. . . . And the flood of rhetoric that enables people to invent wily schemes and poisonous slanders . . . bewilder the understanding of common people. So the world is dulled and darkened by great confusion. The blame lies in this coveting of knowledge.

Chuang Tzu, translated by Burton Watson (altered)

Notes and Reflections

Early translators and commentators framed the simplicity of Tao-practice by the Sages as something either too great or too subtle for the common people, so they translated the first part of this verse to show that the best way to govern is to keep people “ignorant,” “dull,” “stupid,” and unaware of Tao. The worldview at this time was a hierarchy with educated elites on top and the masses below. Taking cues from some governors, early Taoists may have feared a smart populace and/or mistrusted people to know Tao. Many interpretations still imply that common people need a wise and benevolent ruler to keep them innocent, childlike, and ignorant of the wiles of the world. Perhaps.

Perhaps not. I translated the first section without the wide divide between ruler and ruled to emphasize the continuum of natural simplicity that is inborn in all, not just those whose fate is to lead. It is a simplicity that dwells in the deep Virtue of the last sentences, Virtue that “leads home.” Te is not required of the ruler yet optional for the ruled. Te is active everywhere, in every thing and every person.

Maybe “the ancient Taoist leaders” felt that intelligence interfered with wisdom. Theirs was a time when rulers were seen as specially blessed by Heaven (for them, a principle, not a spiritual address) thus “higher” than the common people. However, the opportunities for abuse of power have never gone out of style. The first emperor of the Ch’in Dynasty burned all books in 213 BCE to keep the people in ignorance. The ability of power to censor has not changed, but it is not the fault of the masses. Therefore, I translated this verse intentionally: the simplicity of Tao for leaders is no different from the natural simplicity of people who—through no fault of their own—become governed by cheats who throw smokescreens of misinformation, Wizard of Oz style, to keep them distracted.

Misleading is not this verse’s intent! A good ruler leads with the least intrusion, sowing peace, not ignorance. We have seen before in this work that when people are misgoverned, they will resort to guile and evasion, making them all the harder to work with and unite. This is the justice of Tao at work!

Lessons for governance: Governments often overstock people with the false idols of personality cults, patriotism, and “emergencies” . . . extremely shortlived ghosts used to scare or manipulate. Simple honesty is the best policy. Meddling manipulation interrupts Virtue from taking good root. Proceed to Verse 66 to learn what good leaders do.

66

Power to the Low

I Consider how lakes and oceans enlarge because they, being lowest, welcome every stream and river. Naturally being the lowest is what makes them greatest.

II So the one who would be chief on high must be the humble servant of the low. By following the people is his progress measured.

III The best leader seems weightless. Her subjects feel no threat or harm, so no one tires of praising her.

IV Stay low. A king who does not strive does not offend, so no one gets defensive around him.

If you want to kiss the sky, better learn how to kneel.

U2, “Mysterious Ways”

One cannot be humble and aware of oneself at the same time.

Madeleine L’Engle, A Circle of Quiet

All streams empty into Tao, and yet it doesn’t control them.

Ch’eng Hsuan-Ying

People of the world are full of personal desires that block up the spiritual opening, polluting it in a hundred ways—how can they have a valley? Since they do not have the valley, they are confused and troubled, like drunkards or dreamers; their spiritual energy wanes away, so how can they have the spirit? Once they have lost the spirit, even though alive they are as if dead.

Liu I-Ming, Awakening to the Tao, translated by Thomas Cleary

Notes and Reflections

Here is yet another example of Wu-wei. Just by resting, serving, become wise by staying low and not being a burden around people, one practices Tao. Following the people is leading. Staying low is highest service. Assuming one is nothing is everything. When yin expands in service, as yang contracts, wisdom happens. When did achievement, superiority, and feeling one better than one’s peers become greatness? No, these are recipes for widespread discontent.

67

The Three Virtues

I All the world talks about me, saying Tao is the best thing ever, but I am unworthy.

I am greatest when people see me as useless.

Were I to present as something useful—how long would it take to become one more tedious thing?

II I have only three virtues by which I steer:

First, unconditional mercy.

Second, simplicity of wants.

Third, humility.

III Practitioners of mercy are fearless,

practitioners of simplicity are generous,

and practitioners of humility are natural leaders of all.

Practice these to perfect one’s potential, and persist.

IV These three mockeries end in certain doom:

Forsaking mercy but expecting to be fearless.

Abandoning simplicity but supposing one can still be generous.

Trying to be a leader while rejecting humility.

V The merciful are without equal in their success. Heaven guards, and even champions, those whose only policy is mercy.

Production of too many useful things produces too large a useless population.

Karl Marx, “Human Requirements and Division of Labour under the Rule of Private Property”

All . . . know the use of the useful, but nobody knows the use of the useless!

Chuang Tzu, translated by Burton Watson

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.

Thornton Wilder

Humility and human come from the Latin word, humus, dirt. A human being is someone . . . taken out of the dirt. A humble person is one who recognizes that and even rejoices in it!

Richard Rohr, Radical Grace

We’ve been filled with great treasure for one purpose: to be spilled.

Yoko Ono

He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

Micah 6:8

Notes and Reflections

Most ancient Chinese editions omit Tao from (i), though the word is certainly implied.

The “three virtues” I have used here are not the Te (, Virtue) we have seen before. The Chinese word is , which carries the connotation of “things treasured” or “cherished.” The ancient use of this term is (house) + (jade) + (cowries, used as money, or treasures in a house). In other words, the Chinese character signifies precious objects or valuable things, not qualities. By using the English word virtues, however, I have strayed from the literal text but not from its intention. These three virtues, like compasses, provide a sure guide for Taofollowers.

Followers of wisdom (no matter their ideology) will be useless unless they embody these three named virtues. Those who “own” these virtues are first of all fearless mercy practitioners, because the dehumanizing ills of the world cannot overcome mercy any more than darkness can overcome a candle flame. Second, wisdom-followers can give generously because they live simply. Extravagant generosity results from and is the proper use of one’s simplicity. Finally, their humility sets them apart. Their sort lives forever because they live for others. Because they are used for others, mercy, simplicity, and humility cannot become “tedious things,” because they are the very antidote to so many tedious ills. The skilled in mercy walk humbly and in simplicity. They just give and give. Nothing dries up in them. They metabolize the pain, disease, and humility of this world into goodness. In the words of American rapper, poet, and priest-activist Michael Franti, “All the shit you’ve given us is fertilizer.”²

Finally, read Verses 67–69 as a single unit. The three treasures in 67 appear in 69(iii); 67(v) reads well in parallel with the last thought of 69; and 68(ii) is good commentary for the two verses on either side of it.

68

How Not to Lose

I The warrior who survives is not warlike.

The skillful fighter does not weaponize rage.

A skilled champion advances her cause without belligerence.

A skilled manager changes people by serving them.

II Virtue that does not contend frees up virtues in others.

III The noncontender is Heaven’s consort. Since ancient times, Sages perfected themselves thus.

What worse evils we suffer by anger and sorrow for such things, than by the things themselves, about which those passions rise.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, translated by Francis Hutcheson and James Moor

You will not be punished for your anger; you will be punished by your anger.

The Buddha

Hostilities aren’t stilled through hostility, regardless. Hostilities are stilled through non-hostility: this, an unending truth.

Dhammapada, stanza 5, translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?

Abraham Lincoln

Notes and Reflections

Belligerence is counterproductive, as any mediator knows. To “fight against” energizes your so-called opponent. They fight back, and both of you have lost your minds to rage. Tao Te Ching is a manual on learning to contend, but with “weapons” of compassion, service, submission, and harmony. Misfits lead in this Tao wisdom and practice because one’s only goal is to reach the heart-mind of one’s “opponent.” This is the heart and goal of Wu-wei! There is no cause for destroying or killing . . . never. Peace is much more a renewable resource than engines and strategies for violence.

69

The Better Strategy

I Military specialists have this axiom: “Better to defend than to invade. Better to retreat a foot than advance an inch.”

II The secret here is

advancing without a spectacle,

rolling up one’s sleeves without a display of arms,

defeating without attacking,

seizing but without weapons.

III There is no calamity greater than belittling one’s enemy;

you just lose your three virtues.

IV Therefore, when two equally matched forces face off, the strategist of compassion prevails.

Let your heart feel for the afflictions and distress of everyone, and let your hand give in proportion to your purse.

George Washington

Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.

Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You

Notes and Reflections

For (iii) above, the three virtues one can lose are those enumerated in 67(ii): mercy, simplicity, and humility. Keeping them, in this verse, is an intentional act of Wu-wei. I am reminded of the “inner jihad” found in Islam, whereby one’s truest and most important struggle is ever with oneself. To fight an external enemy is already a failure because one has projected one’s inner struggles onto a convenient, but unreal, enemy. One fights others by using one’s own insecurities against the projected weaknesses of an opponent . . . hardly a struggle worth pursuing. The power for peace, truest leadership, and maintaining one’s misfitting countercultural wisdom all lie in keeping these three virtues. The strategist of compassion always prevails.

70

Old, Simple, Obscure

I My teachings are easy to understand, and my practices are not strict.

But no one understands or practices them in the world.

II My teachings were there when everything began, and my deeds authored the universe itself! But when people persist in ignorance about me, even their capacities to know diminish.

III The fewer the people who know me, the more treasured I become. That is why the Sage camouflages her inner priceless jade by wearing jaded clothes.

Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Matthew 6:21

Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.

Matthew 7:13–14

Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot accept my word.

John 8:43

The gentleman’s outstanding abilities are like concealed jewels or gems stored away. He should not easily reveal them.

Hung Ying-ming, Master of the Three Ways 1.3

Notes and Reflections

Truth reinforced by practice becomes the practitioner’s honed skill. Practicing piano, basketball, communication, or cooking increases one’s capacity to do and to know. Lack of practice decreases capacity, as any athlete or musician knows. Practicing Tao (yang) and understanding Tao (yin) belong together . . . two sides of a single coin. They each lead and follow each other.

Finally, the word for “I” () is found nineteen times in Tao Te Ching; its three occurrences here suggest that this verse, like Verse 20 with its seven occurrences, can be read as autobiography. The text gives us no clue to the speaker’s identity, whether Lao-Tzu or the voice of Tao or of Virtue.

71

The Agony of Ignorance

I Knowing one’s ignorance is healthy.

Not knowing—but pretending to—is disease.

II Only those who grow tired of their ignorance can awaken and go free.

III The Sage meets no affliction because he identifies ignorance as the agony that it is.

Think of him as healthy!

The Master said: Shall I teach you about knowledge, Yóu [one of Confucius’s disciples]? To know when you know something, and to know when you don’t know, that’s knowledge.

Confucius, Analects 2.17, translated by Robert Eno

It was pride that changed angels into devils; humility changes people into angels.

Augustine of Hippo, Manipulus florum

Notes and Reflections

Our text here uses the Chinese character pìng (), which means “flaw,” “disease,” “ignorance,” “sick-mindedness,” “pain,” and “sick of.” In a verse of only thirty-two characters, appears ten times, six of which are in doubledcharacter format (), thereby intensifying its meaning three times. The author wants this dis-eased relationship with the false to be infamous, to wake people up to their malady () so they become sick () of being ignorant ().

Knowing without understanding is the issue. Just “to know” does not translate to understanding. And this is a dis-ease common to all humanity. Everyone “knows” about climate change, but at this writing, few want to understand how this affects the planet. Few consider such ignorance a disease or a crisis, for it is a painless infection, at least until the end. Ignorance is contagious.

The cure or antidote, in Tao language, is humility, one of the “three virtues” of Verse 67. See the quote from Confucian Analects just above. Socrates, a half world away and a hundred years later, agreed: “I neither know nor think that I know.”²⁷

72

Life, without Fear

I Live without fear and one’s life-path opens up for yet greater wonders.

II Do not constrict anyone’s life, or squeeze livelihoods. Appreciate and do not meddle so weeds of weariness have no place to grow.

III Living without fear, Sages live in wonder and self-awareness, not to selfmagnify but to live with care. They let go of the many to live in the One.

Those who see something to fear where there is nothing to fear, and see nothing to fear where there is something to fear—upholding false views, they go to states of woe.

Dhammapada, stanza 317, translated by Acharya Buddharakkhita

From attachment springs grief, from attachment springs fear. From him who is wholly free from attachment there is no grief, whence then fear?

Dhammapada, stanza 214, translated by Acharya Buddharakkhita

Fear is the lock and laughter the key to your heart.

Crosby, Stills & Nash, “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes”

Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

When I was five years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down “happy.” They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.

John Lennon

Notes and Reflections

These lines can be interpreted for a ruler in authority (and many translators do so). This first line is most often translated something like this: “When people do not fear authority, then what follows is a worse calamity,” implying death. However, a one-thousand-year-old tradition in the interpretation of this verse focuses on the individual reader, suggesting that Tao is as efficacious for the private individual as It is in for the ruler. Leadership is, after all, a personal path first. As one is already innately great, the “life-path” in (i) could be one’s psychic center that should not be constricted by or meddled with by foreign/alien forces. Hence “authority” happens in anyone who “authors” their own life.²⁸

The very last sentence of the verse (which I have translated similarly to other translators) supports this newer tradition of interpretation. It implies that anyone can become a Sage.

Historically, this newer interpretation arose within a Chinese worldview populated with powers/deities of the universe and their spheres of influence. The microcosm of one’s interior powers and authority was a synecdoche for exterior forces, equally present and alive in both. Indeed, once one’s inner authority was neglected or died, one was seen as either dead or good-as-dead.²

I know the risks of not translating this verse as original readers may have understood it. Readers can make their own choice.

73

Inscrutable Tao

I Being fearless and taking passionate risks can get one killed.

Being ever-cautious can save one’s life.

Yet both paths appear at times advantageous and at times harmful.

II Who has ever discerned the reasons for Heaven’s inscrutable fates?

Explanations tongue-tie even the Sage.

III For Heaven’s Tao overcomes without being pushy,

responds without breaking silence,

arrives, sleeves rolled up, without a summons.

Unhurried, It shows Itself at the right time.

IV Nothing sneaks through when Heaven casts its coarsely woven net.

To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.

Sun Tzu, The Art of War, translated by Lionel Giles

I do not see what use there is in those mills of the gods said to grind so late as to render punishment hard to be recognized, and to make wickedness fearless.

Plutarch, Moralia, “On the Delay of Divine Vengeance,” translated by Andrew P. Peabody

Heaven does not consider life in its schemes or death in its work. It is impartial.

Yen Tsun

For no one can tell who will triumph tomorrow, some say God, others say nobody, one hypothesis is as good as the other, because to speak of yesterday,

today and tomorrow is simply to give different names to the same illusion.

Jose Saramago, The Gospel according to Jesus Christ

Notes and Reflections

This is a tough verse to understand, especially if we view it as a stand-alone unit. See Verse 5 for the introduction to this reiterated theme in (ii): “Heaven and Earth cultivate no preference for outcomes. They regard creations as straw dogs.” In contrast to most Western worldviews, Heaven and Earth do not take sides in the Taoist worldview. Following Verse 2’s critiques of artificial divisions, there are no “chosen people,” no “holy land,” or divinely-ordained boundaries among or within creation.

Instead, who below Heaven will take Tao’s view? I emphasize here how choosing to be on the side of Tao is a radical but “sage” choice. Tao’s “Way” is lonely, out of sync with pop culture, and leads with self-effacing humility. Only those choosing to take Tao’s view become Tao’s partners. They take the side of the soft and the weak, do not use competition as ego advancement, and know when to show up, respond, and then disappear when the news trucks appear.

74

No Delusions

I When people do not naturally dread death, no one gains by threatening them with it.

II Suppose they are taught to dread death and then someone who breaks the law meets their just executioner: Who might dare break the law then? That executioner is appointed for justice.

III To usurp Heaven’s ways is no different from trying to impersonate a skilled carpenter with his tools. It is likely the first thing you will do is cut your hand!

Heaven appears most partial; but in reality its dealings are most just.

Yinfujing (Clue to the Unseen, or Yin Convergence Classic), a Taoist text that predates Tao Te Ching

The high, the low, of all creation, God gives to humankind to use. If this privilege is misused, God’s justice permits creation to punish humanity.

Hildegard of Bingen

Notes and Reflections

The verse’s meaning defies easy interpretations, perhaps because of its emphasis on “just executioner.” The verse begins with a discourse on the fear of death, then concludes with Heaven’s law as executioner and the justification of it. What seems to hold the two together is the upholding of law, be it that of the state or Nature. Break either and expect misfortunes, whether by state justice or by natural disaster.

Capital punishment was common in ancient China, though Lao-Tzu was not its supporter. I doubt Verse 74 serves as a proof text for state-sponsored executions. Moreover, the text of Verse 75 returns to this wonderment of why people seem to fear death so little. The take-away: If one disregards the guardrails that state and Nature provide, prepare for injury. Or worse.

On another level, this verse continues Verse 73’s assertion of Tao’s inscrutability and of other recent verses in which fate over matters of life and death is fluid and well-nigh undiscoverable. One way to identify the executioner may be to return to Verse 73’s mysterious last line: “Nothing sneaks through when Heaven casts its coarsely woven net.”

75

A Light Touch, Pt. 2

I People starve because their rulers waste their taxes, and people waste away.

They rebel when their rulers intrude with regulations that meddle with people’s lives. This is why people deviate.

People appear casual about death only because they dismiss their rulers’ wrong emphases on what makes a life “good,” so they seem nonchalant about death and are hard to manage.

II Here is the truth: contrivers and clingers miss life’s value.

Let go. Life’s value shows up in the loosening.

How many hundreds of years ago was this book written? And yet still this chapter must be written in the present tense.

Ursula K. Le Guin, commentary on Verse 75, Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching

If you are here unfaithfully with us, you’re causing terrible damage. If we are unfaithful to true self, we will extract a price from others. We will make promises we cannot keep, build houses from flimsy stuff, conjure dreams that devolve into nightmares, and other people will suffer—if we are unfaithful to true self.

Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak

That government is best which governs not at all; and when citizens are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience”

When one family has weapons, it affects its village. When a village has weapons, it affects its state. When a state has weapons, it affects All under Heaven. When All under Heaven have weapons, chaos is preordained.

Wang Zhen, The Tao of War, translated by Robert D. Sawyer

When you step but lightly through the world, you are but lightly affected by it.

Hung Ying-ming, Master of the Three Ways 1.2

Notes and Reflections

This verse carries Wei (, pursuit, contriving, meddling) forward enough to rhyme (in concept) with the Buddha’s First Noble Truth about the origins of suffering: clinging. All clinging causes spiritual rope-burn. The Buddha taught “desire management.” The ones with no desire live with cleared heart-minds, in opened spaces, not driven by high-maintenance lifestyles. Desires make us vulnerable targets. Remember Verse 50’s teaching not to be a target for all that would place targets on you and injure you.

Undisciplined desires make us into karma-targets and increase our vulnerability. Our untamed impulses soon attract unwanted attention. Power lives in those who have no clingy neediness for it. Verses 10, 16, 57, and 58 also provide essential commentary.

76

Life’s Way

I A person growing and full with life remains supple and tender.

A person not growing stiffens and dies.

II All living things such as grass and trees, while alive and growing, are supple and tender.

Dying, they become shriveled and brittle.

III In suppleness and tenderness are life. In the stiff and rigid are death.

IV Two paradoxes:

(1) Headstrong and prideful soldiers are easy targets; they do not last.

(2) Consider the tree that, once full-grown, attracts only the logger’s ax.

V Look down! How the rigid and “mighty” fall!

Look up! How the supple and “weak” rise!

He not busy being born is busy dying.

Bob Dylan, “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”

Confucius . . . saw a man dive into the water and, supposing that the man was in some kind of trouble and intended to end his life, he ordered his disciples to line up on the bank and pull the man out. But after the man had gone a couple of hundred paces, he came out of the water and began strolling along the base of the embankment, his hair streaming down, singing a song. Confucius ran after him and said, “At first I thought you were a ghost, but now I see you’re a man. May I ask if you have some special way of staying afloat in the water?”

“I have no way. I began with what I was used to, grew up with my nature, and let things come to completion with fate. I go under with the swirls and come out with the eddies, following along the way the water goes and never thinking about myself. That’s how I can stay afloat.”

Chuang-tzu, translated by Burton Watson

The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.

Albert Einstein

The concept of death is simple: it is when a living thing no longer entertains experience.

John Henry Abbott, In the Belly of the Beast

Once yin and yang have separated, the energy of life decreases day by day and the energy of death increases day by day. As the energy of life decreases more and more while the energy of death increases more and more, in the end there is only death.

Liu I-Ming, Awakening to the Tao, translated by Thomas Cleary

Notes and Reflections

This verse is chiefly commentary on yin and yang and their balance. The several contrasts between life and death are testaments that the Taoist is keenly aware of their interbalance. How has being “strong” and “unyielding” ever been of benefit? Consider a muscle builder who focuses only on one section of her body. That part becomes strong—yes—but inflexible and injury-prone. The rest of her body atrophies. Choosing flexibility and nimbleness works every time (and it keeps opponents off-balance!). Just ask a cat!

The same is true for the engineer who designs expansion or suspension bridges to sway and flex, or else they fail in the first gale.

The two paradoxes in (iv) are apt examples: soldiers or trees with too much yang (and out of balance) become candidates for rapid life changes, as the last lines attest. See also Verses 61 and 68.

77

Original Balance

I Is not Heaven’s Tao comparable to flexing a stringed bow?

When one draws the bow, the bowstring bends the top nock down in sync with it lifting the bottom nock up. Nothing too tense, nothing too loose.

II Likewise, Tao’s ever-adjusting and impartial style subtracts from privilege and adds to privation.

But human beings, when forgetful of Tao, practice another “tao”: empty out the poor to top off the tanks of the rich.

III Who can integrate Heaven’s abundance into the world?

Only those living Tao’s abundance.

IV So the Sage performs her works without the prejudice that ownership triggers.

Watch, without self-promotion or publicity, how her excellence is in play!

When soldiers become farmers, wealth naturally distributes and equalizes.

Wang Zhen, The Tao of War, translated by Robert D. Sawyer

If there is an “owner” then there is something that can be “owned.” But if from the beginning there never has been a “self,” then what “owned” can there be?

Saraha

Notes and Reflections

This verse invites understanding of the way things tend to get out of balance when we exchange “another tao” for Tao. To address how to reestablish balance, we should return to the theme of nonmeddling (Wu-wei). The reason things are the way they are is because we allow those with influence to grow their interests beyond sustainable levels. Their meddling in laws, tax policies, and building codes shores up the culture in which the better part of this world’s abundance concentrates in the already-rich (for more, see Verses 19 and 44).

The task to return to nonmeddling is ours, not just that of “leaders.” Leadership is everyone’s duty in Tao’s logic. Here are four witnesses to this truth:

No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.

—Stanislaw Jerzy Lee, More Unkempt Thoughts

The single raindrop never feels responsible for the flood.

—Douglas Adams

Drops of water turn a mill. Singly none, singly none.

—Pete Seeger, “Step by Step”

Few are guilty, but all are responsible.

—Abraham Joshua Heschel

78

Water’s Way

I Nothing is more submissive and pliant than water.

For overcoming the most unyielding, nothing compares.

II It is easy to understand how the weak overcomes the most forceful, and why soft wears down hard, but few practice this.

III So the Sage declares:

Those who serenely bear the nation’s humiliations deserve to preside at the country’s altars.

Those who calmly accept the nation’s disasters deserve to be its king.

IV These truths are paradoxes, like the way of water.

If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.

Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey

Well, water is the most flexible molecule in the universe. And because it’s so flexible, all kinds of things can attach to it. . . . And we are 76% water.

Betsy Damon

Love is the water that wears down the rock

Love is the water that wears down the rock

Love is the power that won’t be stopped

Love is the water that wears down the rock

Pat Wictor and Brother Sun, “Love Is the Water”

Water is the blood of the Earth and flows through its muscles and veins. Therefore it is said that water is something that has complete faculties. . . . It is

accumulated in Heaven and Earth, and stored up in the various things (of the world). It is concentrated in living creatures.

Therefore it is said that water is something spiritual. . . . Humans are water. . . . There is not one of the various things which is not produced through it. It is only the person who knows how to rely on water’s principles who can act correctly. . . .

Hence, the solution for the Sage who would transform the world lies in water. When water is uncontaminated, people’s hearts are upright. When water is pure, people’s hearts are at ease. The people’s hearts being upright, their desires do not become dissolute [and] their conduct is without evil.

Hence the Sage does not teach people one by one, or house by house, but takes water as his key.

Kuan Tzu

The wise one should be acquainted to an extent with embracing impurity and accepting stain.

Hung Ying-ming, Master of the Three Ways 1.76

Notes and Reflections

What would water do? Stay low. Is it not the case that direct confrontation has a high failure rate? There are no quick fixes to, or assured interventions with, intractable problems. Strugglers for justice need to understand they are engaged for the long haul . . . wearing away the opposition, outlasting the institutional prejudices. So in this verse, we are reminded quite forcefully about the power of the low, of Wu-wei’s quiet but wise action. We have seen several times in this poem the power in water—to seep into and persist in every crack of injustice. Water erodes these hard places . . . quietly.

Parents, servants of the common good, and good people who work outside the public spotlight know how their vocation is to be “serenely” present and “calmly” accepting of the good and the bad times. A leader is the one who is mindful in the fray, even though she may be criticized for the way she bears burdens and shows character in disasters. Like water, her first job is to adapt or shape-shift to understand her problem or opponent thoroughly. Like water, she can wash away impurities. This verse undergirds the unpopular struggler-leader who stays the course and does not quit her tasks in the most difficult of situations . . . like water. Hard cannot win because it cannot adapt itself to soft, but soft cuts through hard because it adapts.

Good parents see their job as lasting decades. A good leader knows that aiming for the quick turnaround and easy product is unrealistic. Proper means, proper ends. Time takes time. That’s what water knows.

Many interpreters tag the last line in (iv) as an orphaned phrase that could fit Verses 41 or 45 better, or even open up Verse 79. I have tried to render it as an

integral part of this verse’s message.

79

Keeping Faith, Not Score

I Once you’ve made peace after a bitter dispute, why keep circulating bad blood? How do you repurpose any lingering resentments toward your common good?

II Consider how Sages hold gracefully to their positions in contracted obligations.

They keep faith by not pressuring the other party.

The virtuous focus on their obligations with others. Win-win.

The unvirtuous focus only upon the scorecard of what others owe them. Loselose.

III Heaven’s Tao plays no favorites. Anyone keeping faith is already synchronizing with Tao.

Even after all this time the Sun never says to the Earth, “You owe me.”

Look what happens with a love like that. It lights the whole sky.

Hafiz, The Gift, translated by Daniel Ladinsky

The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.

Voltaire

Notes and Reflections

The “contracted obligations” (, literally, “left side contract”) reference ancient Chinese moneylenders’ use of bamboo “split tally sticks” to record a debt. (This practice was common around the world, especially in preliterate Europe.) These they broke in two, and each party retained half. The debtor got the left side, containing the debt information, and the lender got the right, containing the amount owed him. Since the splintered break point on the bamboo was unique, it was easy to match lenders’ claims with debtors’ obligations.

Next, most translations declare that Tao takes no sides and plays no favorites, then go on to say Tao does take sides with the good person! It sounds more consistent to me that Tao, attested throughout this text as inscrutable, is not the side-taker one might wish. Just as a natural consequence, the seasoned Tao practitioner chooses Tao’s side, not vice versa. Let us be careful not to anthropomorphize; Tao does not choose! The better question is not what Tao is up to but what occurs within good people centered naturally within Tao.

In other words, whose worldview is served here: the Western ones that portray God or the universe as personal and thus prone to taking sides, or the Eastern ones that portray the universe as impersonal and neutral? In which worldview do human beings and all Nature thrive best?

80

Better Where You Already Are

I May your country be small, with a modest population.

Even if you possess laborsaving devices to increase your economy by ten or one hundred times:

Do not use them. Let them all decay.

Limit your travels. Consider only the value of your lives now, here, where they are.

May your boats and wheeled vehicles have nowhere to go and so fall into neglect. The same for armor and weapons . . . no displays, no uses, just dust collectors.

Restore the old codes of knotted ropes to communicate and keep accounts.

II Delight in your food.

Appreciate the beauty of your clothes.

Find enchantment at your hearth.

Discover your joy in a modest life.

III Even though you can hear barnyard animals from the nearby village, it is better where you already are,

until your last day.

I should be suspicious of what I want.

Rumi, The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

Anyone discontented in one place will seldom be happy in another.

Aesop

The one is the way to the many.

The specific is the way to the spacious.

The now is the way to always.

The here is the way to the everywhere.

The material is the way to the spiritual.

The visible is the way to the invisible.

Richard Rohr, Just This

The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, “Look, here it is!” or “There it is!” For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.

Luke 17:20–21

One who drinks in the law lives happily with a serene mind: the Sage rejoices always in the law, as preached by the elect.

Well-makers lead the water wherever they like; fletchers bend the arrow; carpenters bend a log of wood; so wise people fashion themselves.

Dhammapada, stanzas 79–80, translated by Max Müller (altered)

Geese appear high over us,

pass, and the sky closes.

What we need is here. And we pray, not

for new Earth or heaven, but to be

quiet in heart, and in eye, clear. What we need is here.

There is a day when the road neither comes nor goes,

and the way is not a way, but a place.

Wendell Berry, “Wild Geese”

We vow to remain all our life with our local community. We live together, pray together, work together, relax together. We give up the temptation to move from place to place in search of an ideal situation. Ultimately there is no escape from oneself, and the idea that things would be better someplace else is usually an illusion. And when interpersonal conflicts arise, we have a great incentive to work things out and restore peace. This means learning the practices of love: acknowledging one’s own offensive behavior, giving up one’s preferences, forgiving.

Benedictine Vow of Stability

Notes and Reflections

“Knotted ropes,” along with notched sticks, were ways of communication in China as well as among ancient Near Eastern and Incan cultures before their development of written symbolic language. Historians think that such preliterate communication was limited mostly to financial, business, or administrative transactions. In China, “knotted ropes” would have been popular five to ten centuries prior to the writing of Tao Te Ching, still within historical listening range of the writing of this text.³

The significance of this verse: One does not find peace while on the run. What we need—balance, strength, quiet, constancy, and endurance—is already here. This is a difficult passage for we who love the new, maintain a busy passport, consider ourselves adventurous, and feel imprisoned by daily routine. This is our invitation to deepen the connective roots we already have, where we are, for Tao goes deeper before It goes wider. All is taprooted into Tao; the common water table of creation and humanity’s resources are right under our feet. It’s all here. No passport can bring it closer.

The truth of this verse may be forced upon us in the coming generations of climate change reckoning, when fossil fuels will no longer be an energy source for travel.

81

Serving the Flow

I True words are not beautiful.

Beautiful words are not truthful.

Listeners do not quarrel.

Quarrelers do not listen.

The educated may not be wise.

The wise may not be educated.

II Sages do not accumulate, because the more they pour themselves out for others, the richer they become.

Just giving, they receive even more.

III Heaven’s Tao flows in abundance, without pinch points.

Tao’s Sages serve Tao’s flowing, and do not block It with striving or competition.

That’s all.

Has anyone by fussing before the mirror ever gotten taller by so much as an inch? If fussing can’t even do that, why fuss at all? Walk into the fields and look at the wildflowers. They don’t fuss with their appearance—but have you ever seen color and design quite like it? The ten best-dressed men and women in the country look shabby alongside them. If God gives such attention to the wildflowers, most of them never even seen, don’t you think he’ll attend to you, take pride in you, do his best for you?

What I’m trying to do here is get you to relax, not be so preoccupied with getting so you can respond to God’s giving. People who don’t know God and the way he works fuss over these things, but you know both God and how he works. Steep yourself in God-reality, God-initiative, God-provisions. You’ll find all your everyday human concerns will be met. Don’t be afraid of missing out.

Luke 12:25–31 (The Message)

The Master said, Those who possess virtue always have teachings to impart, but those with teachings to impart not always possess virtue. The person of ren [humane virtue] will be valorous, but the valorous are not always ren.

Confucius, Analects 14.4, translated by Robert Eno (altered; for more on ren, see my “Notes and Reflections” on Verse 8)

Notes and Reflections

Here ends this enormously influential and insightful Chinese wisdom text. After about five thousand characters, which begin with an admonition against words, is the end of it all, the “secret sauce”: Let words fade away. Serve. Give. Focus on others’ good. The worlds we make are no more than waves rising for a moment on the ocean. All one has is what one gives up. Give in to Wu-wei. Stay balanced in yang and yin. Whatever struggles and triumphs occur, we soon merge back into the great ocean of Tao. So be of good cheer; love, and serve while you can. What more important things can one ever do?

Afterword

[Gandalf] used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary.

—J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

The Tao is the Way; the way to live is Tao. Seen one way, It is the most difficult of roads to find and follow; seen in another light, It is logical, natural, and easy because Tao is everywhere. There is no place one can be and be without or apart from It.

Tao constitutes the deepest and oldest knowledge tradition of China, and It has aged well. It invites people still to a spiritual assessment of their life and times and to a transformational pilgrimage through them.

If one pays attention to only a popular sense of Wu-wei, one can get the notion that this pilgrimage will be an easy road of “not doing.” And it can be for a few. However, for most of us, deeply enmeshed as we are in the entangling alliances of ego and competition, and the uncertainties of this age, the call of Tao is difficult to hear and more difficult to follow. Its path requires full-on commitment—no vacations—and is rewarding only after great perseverance. Tao’s path of Wu-wei leads to reverse action, reverse-engineering, inverse thinking, and inviting our world to re-verse its mad narratives. This is not easy. Still, we must plant seeds, and tend them with diligence until harvest.

“Your longest journey needs your first step” (Verse 64). On this long and sometimes lonely path, trust that you will meet companions along the way.

Notes

1 Most lists of what constitute yang and yin start off with “male” as yang and “female” as yin. For this translation to speak clearly in today’s climate of opinion, I discount the ideas of yang being exclusively the male and active and yin’s close association with the female and inactivity. Conceived and written in a period two millennia before Western Enlightenment, women’s liberation, and equality of sexual identity/expression, Tao Te Ching is a rare spiritual text extolling the power of the female and feminine nature. The text expresses this most in Verse 6, but echoes it throughout the text, in Verses 11, 25, 28, and 36. Additionally, I chose to break rank and reframe Verses 55 and 61 in nonmasculine ways to keep the integrity of the text’s overall preferences for female resources, energy, and wisdom. The worldview that produced Tao Te Ching valued the feminine as a creative, even divine source; however, its individual women qua human beings were not so valued. Carried forward to the twenty-first century, misogyny from another time and place can come through to readers as an authoritative text preferring the male spirit, which is lazy interpretation! Indeed, the text does not spare its critiques against “traditional” male traits of competition, struggle, courage, and assertiveness. Tao Te Ching is the world’s preeminent wisdom text with a predisposition for wisdom’s feminine source.

2 When Western Christian missionaries in China translated the Bible into Chinese, they used the Tao character for the New Testament’s most theological assertion about the nature of God: “Logos” or “The Word,” or Jesus as the eternal God made flesh. John 1:1–2 uses Tao four times, and once in the summary statement of John 1:14: “, , . ” (vv. 1–2 [emphasis mine]; In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God); “, ” (v. 14 [emphasis mine]; And the Word became flesh and lived among us). Most Chinese translations retain this use of Tao. Additionally, where John 14:6 asserts Jesus as “the way, and the truth, and the life,” translators used Tao () again: “, , ” (emphasis mine). All Chinese scripture quotations are from the Chinese

Standard Bible (Traditional) translation, a joint project of Global Bible Initiative and Holman Bible Publishers.

How are Tao and God related? “The Greek word Logos is translated into Chinese as Dao [Tao]. Prof. Xie Fuya, a noted scholar of East-West studies said, ‘To match the Chinese concept of Dao with the Logos in Gospel John, the translator must have got mysterious inspirations’ . . . because the meaning of ‘Dao’ shares subtle similarities with Logos in almost every way. ‘Lao Tzu’s Dao and Logos are twins in ideology of the East and the West, because they both represent the principle, reason and wisdom of the universe.’” Zhou Peiyi, “Comparative Study of Dao de Jing and the Bible,” Intercultural Communication Studies 13, no. 2 (2004): 61–62.

3 The Chuang Tzu (also written as Zhuangzi) is an ancient Chinese text from the late Warring States period (476–221 BCE) containing anecdotal commentaries that characterize the untroubled nature of the ideal Taoist Sage. Named for its traditional author, “Master Chuang” (Chuang Tzu), it is—along with Tao Te Ching—one of the foundational texts of Taoism.

4 Herrlee G. Creel, Chinese Thought from Confucius to Mao Tse-Tung (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 106.

5 Richard Powers, The Overstory (New York: Norton, 2018), 460.

6 Joel J. Kupperman, Classic Asian Philosophy: A Guide to the Essential Texts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 119.

7 Many readers may have heard this quote first from Martin Luther King Jr.,

who made it popular in his lifetime.

8 A good place to begin is with James Robson’s Daoism, The Norton Anthology of World Religions, edited by Jack Miles (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017).

9 Exodus 3:14 (Amplified Bible).

10 The etymology of is easily understood. On the left is the Chinese radical for a person. The number two is on the right side. Thus two people in relationship suggests the morality of being humane to each other. Another even more visual etymology of the character could be one person with their two arms reaching out in compassion.

11 For more on the philosophical and other disputes between Confucianism and Taoism, see Alan Chan, “Laozi,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 1997–, article published December 15, 2001; last modified September 21, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/y3au3bqt.

12 Jim Manney, God Finds Us: An Experience of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2013), chap. 4.

13 “Conforming to the Virtue-Power” is discussed above in Verse 21(i). In section (iii) of the current verse, the last line is the exact same as the one in 17(ii), but the change in context suggests a different, more personal quality to trust. One of the ancient texts, Mangwatui, omits the last line in this verse, perhaps because the same line has already appeared.

14 Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953), 76.

15 Craig Lewis, “The ‘Buddha of Oakland’ Transforms California Neighborhood,” Buddhist Door, December 20, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/y5pbhbso; see also “Oakland Neighborhood Sees Improvement after Buddhist Shrine Moves In,” KPIX-TV, September 17, 2014, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdJIV28_NUo.

16 Arthur Waley, trans., The Way and Its Power: Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching and Its Place in Chinese Thought (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 250–251.

Additionally, Sung Ch’ang-Hsing tells us that “the system of ritual devised by the ancient kings treated the right as superior and the left as inferior. Being superior, the right represented the Way of Victory. Being inferior, the left represented the Way of Humility. But victory entailed death and destruction. Hence [rituals] on the right were in charge of sad occasions, while those on the left were in charge of happy events.” And Jen Fa-Jung says, “‘Left’ refers to the east and the power of creation, while ‘right’ refers to the west and the power of destruction.” (Both quotes are found in Red Pine’s translation of Lao-tzu’s Taoteching, [San Francisco: Mercury House, 1996], 63.)

17 Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. Thomas Clearly (Boston: Shambhala, 1988), 53.

18 Robert Eno, trans., The Analects of Confucius: A Teaching Translation, accessed September 9, 2020, https://chinatxt.sitehost.iu.edu/Resources.html.

19 Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” in Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition, ed. and introd. Malcolm Cowley (New York: Viking Penguin, 1959), section 51.

20 Alan Watts and Huang Chung-Liang, Tao: The Watercourse Way (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), 19.

21 “Zen Story: Heaven & Hell,” Balance by Buddha Groove (blog), accessed September 10, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/yyazhaxh.

22 Liu I-Ming, Awakening to the Tao, trans. Thomas Cleary (Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 2006), 17.

23 Max Ehrmann, “Desiderata,” 1927, https://www.desiderata.com/desiderata.html.

24 Alison Gopnik, The Gardener and the Carpenter (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2016).

25 Jonathan Star, trans., Tao Te Ching: The Definitive Edition (New York: Penguin, 2001), 221.

26 Lyric from Michael Franti and Spearhead, “Yell Fire,” © 2006 Boo Boo Wax.

27 Plato, Apology, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1902), 13.

28 “Authority is granted to people who are perceived as authoring their own words, their own actions, their own lives, rather than playing a scripted role at great remove from their own hearts.” Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach (New York: Jossey-Bass, 2009), 33.

29 Baldrian Hussein Farzeen, “Taoist Beliefs in Literary Circles of the Sung Dynasty—Su Shi (1037–1101) and His Techniques of Survival,” Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie 9 (1996): 15–53.

30 Paola Dematté, “The Role of Writing in the Process of State Formation in Late Neolithic China,” East and West 49, no. 1/4 (December 1999): 241–272.

Selected Bibliography

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Byrns, Tormond. The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu. Accessed September 30, 2020. https://terebess.hu/english/tao/byrn.html.

Chan, Alan. “Laozi.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University, 1997–. Article published December 15, 2001; last modified September 21, 2018. https://tinyurl.com/y3au3bqt.

Creel, Herlee G. Chinese Thought from Confucius to Mao Tse-Tung. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953.

Eno, Robert, trans. The Analects of Confucius: A Teaching Translation. Accessed September 9, 2020. https://chinatxt.sitehost.iu.edu/Resources.html.

Farzeen, Baldrian Hussein. “Taoist Beliefs in Literary Circles of the Sung Dynasty—Su Shi (1037–1101) and His Techniques of Survival.” Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie 9 (1996): 15–53.

Henricks, Robert G. Lao-Tzu Te-Tao Ching: A New Translation Based on the Recently Discovered Ma-wang-tui Texts. New York: Ballantine, 1989.

Heysinger, Isaac Winter. The Light of China: The Tâo Tèh King of Lào Tsze, 604–504 B.C.: An Accurate Metrical Rendering. Philadelphia: Research, 1903.

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Karlgren, Bernhard. Analytic Dictionary of Chinese and Sino-Japanese. New York: Dover, 1974.

Kohn, Livia. Early Chinese Mysticism: Philosophy and Soteriology in the Taoist Tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Kupperman, Joel J. Classic Asian Philosophy: A Guide to the Essential Texts. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

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Le Guin, Ursula K., and J. P. Seaton. Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way. Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 1998.

Liu, I-Ming. Awakening to the Tao. Translated by Thomas Cleary. Boston: Shambhala, 2006.

Liu, Wu-Chi. A Short History of Confucian Philosophy. New York: Dell, 1955.

Martin, William. A Path and a Practice: Using Lao-tzu’s Tao Te Ching as a Guide to an Awakened Spiritual Life. New York: Marlowe, 2005.

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Miller, James. Daoism: A Beginner’s Guide. New York: Oxford–One World, 2003.

Mitchell, Stephen. The Second Book of the Tao. New York: Penguin, 2009.

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Robinette, Isabelle. Taoism: Growth of a Religion. Translated by Phyllis Brooks. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.

Robson, James. Daoism. The Norton Anthology of World Religions, edited by Jack Miles. New York: Norton, 2015.

Seng-ts’an. Ming Hsin-Hsin: Verses on the Faith-Mind. Translated by Richard Clarke. Buffalo, NY: White Pine Press, 2001.

Star, Jonathan, trans. Tao Te Ching: The Definitive Edition. New York: Penguin, 2001.

Waley, Arthur, trans. The Way and Its Power: Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching and Its Place in Chinese Thought. New York: Grove Press, 1958.

Wang, Bi. [Tao Te Ching]. Accessed September 9, 2020. https://tinyurl.com/y34z4ve6.

Watts, Alan, and Huang Chung-Liang. Tao: The Watercourse Way. New York: Pantheon, 1975.

About the Author/Translator

Marc S. Mullinax lives in Asheville, North Carolina, and teaches courses in the academic study of religion at Mars Hill University. He studied written classical Chinese in Korea during his twenties and maintains both this and the Korean language in his many recent residencies in Korea as a professor of East Asian spiritual traditions (Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and shamanism) at Ewha Womans University in Seoul.