Tao Te Ching XXVI

The heavy is the root of the light,

the still is the lord of the restless.

Therefore the gentleman when travelling all day

never lets the heavily laden carts out of his sight;

it is only when he is safely behind walls and watchtowers

that he rests peacefully and is above worries.

How, then, should a ruler of ten thousand chariots

make light of his own person in the eyes of the empire?

If light, then the root is lost,

if restless, then the lord is lost.

But what of the one who tosses like an unmanned dinghy on the soul’s dark seductive ocean?  Who abdicates his roots or has them torn from him and, by choice or force, explores the rootless air?  The untethered poet? The raving prophet? The nomadic bum? The capricious trickster? The feral adventurer?  Are these any less part of the Tao?

No.  They are simply, from the Tao’s perspective, lost.  Lost from rootedness and stillness.  Are the lost less necessary? Are they any less grand? insignificant? confused? hapless?  No—they are simply not sages.  The sage, she places her roots in the heavy silent center; she casts the chaos of her desires and thoughts—their violences, contradictions, and unpredictabilities—into orbit around the mysterious still center.  The center of what?  The center that you don’t find in the body’s death, in desire’s insatiability, in the intellect’s tsunami.

In an age when almost all is inverted, the sage still plants the flower in the ground and while she hardly ignores the insects and rain, the seasons and trampling, her attention is drawn to that which is below the ground, and that which does not move, that which does not have a name and never will.

Tao Te Ching XXV

There is a thing confusedly formed, born before heaven and earth.

Silent and void, it stands alone and does not change, goes round and does not weary.

I don’t know its name, so I style it the way.

I give it the makeshift name of the great.

Being great, it is further described as receding;

receding, it is described as far away;

being far away, it is described as turning back.

Hence the way is great, heaven is great, earth is great, and the king is also great; within the realm, there are four things that are great and the king counts as one.  People model themselves on earth, earth on heaven, heaven on the way, and the way on that which is naturally so.

As the West’s mythologies have been found wanting and the East’s have crawled from their previously denigrated caves into desperate arms, is it surprising that we have found what is resting in the Tao long ago:  chaos is not something to be denied but is integral to the way.  Chaos is not something be conquered, to be overcome, to be struck down with light and order.  Nor is it something to give oneself over to utterly and always.  The Tao is formed, but it is confusedly formed.  So are we all, so are all acts, so all thoughts, powers, and words.

The traveler who sojourns through the world, tasting its bitter pleasures, its salty energies, gains a cloak of weariness from the inability to escape existence’s monotonous themes, its repetitive acts, conversations, and senses.  The Tao does the same—and is worn, like the traveler—yet, unlike the traveler, remains a babe:  receptive, vulnerable, open, questioning, doubtful, capricious, inappropriate, wondrous.

The Tao is far-near and so embraces mystical notions of God.

The king is great but dubiously great as he is almost apologized for in the counting … a curious emphasis in a book not given to such emphasis.  Even further, the king is part of the earth—not heaven or the way—even as we all are part of the earth; the distance between the king and heaven is far greater than the distance between you and the king.  Any competent king knows this and acts accordingly.  These days, though, with kings diminishing, read king as one with significant political authority, with vast hierarchies churning beneath him.  The king is great only because the people need a king, whereas the earth, heaven, and the way are great irrespective of the people.  The sage, however, does not need the king; she does not even need the way … the way just is and what we all live within.

We confront the offensive and disturbing assumption that that which is naturally so exists.  Hasn’t it been disproven that human nature exists? Hasn’t it been proven that nature imitates art, revealing nature as artifice?  Hasn’t the very volume of the vast vats of inks spilled extolling our freedom sufficiently convinced us that nature’s circumference is limitless, its essence dubious?

Yet.

Replace the oceans with desire, pile words to Andromeda, pave the earth with microchips, project art on the clouds … does this do anything but increase the distance we have to travel to acknowledge the foundational reality of nature, the limitations of physical and spiritual substances.  And we are travelers, aren’t we?  Thus we increase the distance between nature and ourselves just to give ourselves new paths to walk.  The sage is she who walks the present path to the end, sees the path turning back to nature, and returns.

Tao Te Ching XXIV

He who tiptoes cannot stand; he who strides cannot walk.

He who shows himself is not conspicuous.

He who considers himself right is not illustrious.

He who brags will not have merit.

He who boasts will not endure.

From the point of view of the way these are excessive food and useless excrescences.

As there are things that detest them, she who has the way does not abide in them.

Is the Tao binary, suddenly?  Is it like some Christian moralism?  A little morsel of self-abnegation, a thick steak of judgment?  After all this odd integration and seeming acceptance of the body, do we have a strange divorce?  The Way separate and apart, peering down at the inevitable fulminations of finite souls and proclaiming them Bad?  The Way splitting with its clear and shining axe the complex world into two spheres—one of light, one of shadow?

Yes.

The Tao is large enough to include this bifurcating mode, as this mode itself is part of the way.  The difference between the Christian and the Taoist is that this mode for the former is the way while this mode for the latter is a way within the way.  It is simply a color on the vast palette of the soul—necessary, yes, but not sufficient.  And for those who would find it sufficient, they have their rewards:  virtue, knowledge, separation, clarity, lines and measurements.  They have these things.  And that is what they have.