Tao Te Ching XLII

The way begets one, one begets two, two begets three, three begets the myriad creatures.

The myriad creatures carry on their backs the yin and embrace in their arms the yang and are the blending of the generative forces of the two.

There are no words which people detest more than solitary, desolate, and hapless.  Yet lords and princes use these to refer to themselves.

Thus a thing is sometimes added to by being diminished and diminished by being added to.

What others teach I also teach:  the violent will not come to a natural end.  I shall take this as my precept.

A mathematics exists apart from that found in ledgers and calculators.  It begins with 0, moves to 1, then to 2, to 3, and finally to countlessness.

0 is the way and the object of fear for the Greeks and Christians—a secret the East let loose in the Middle Ages, causing ecstasy, chaos, discovery, and desperation in the West.  The West’s modern structures are largely built from a blending of the older firm structures of 1 and the recent chaotic responses to 0.  0 is the limits of knowledge; the ineluctable fact of death; the insignificance and dissolution of all things; our fundamental inability to grasp anything.  0 is the circle and yin and female.

1 is the monolithic Judeo-Christian God; the subjection of life and flesh to idea and metal and system; the structures of the furthest reaches of desire before it breaks and returns.  1 is the line and yang and male.

2 is mind’s perception and naming of humanity’s fundamental tensions:  good and evil, male and female, order and chaos, time and eternity.  2 is the endpoints of the line.

3 is the lords and princes and kings that bind the myriad creatures.  3 is the triangle—the borders of government and law that delineate the people in their swirling pool of flesh.

The myriad creatures bear the weight of humanity’s ever-increasing tensions and hungrily clasp their desire for what doesn’t tangibly exist.

There is a mathematics of a different order.  The operators of this mathematics—the additions, subtractions, multiplications, and divisions—do not function in the manner of spreadsheets:  sometimes you add and subtraction occurs, sometimes you subtract and the sum is greater.  Thus the sage knows all the numbers and so avoids violent means.

Tao Te Ching XLI

When the best student hears about the way

she practices it assiduously.

When the average student hears about the way

it seems to him one moment there and gone the next.

When the worst student hears about the way

he laughs out loud.

If he did not laugh

it would be unworthy of being the way.

Hence the Chien Yen has it:

the way that is bright seems dull,

the way that leads forward seems to lead backward,

the way that is even seems rough,

the highest virtue is like the valley,

the sheerest whiteness seems sullied,

ample virtue seems defective,

vigorous virtue seems indolent,

plain virtue seems soiled.

The great square has no corners.

The great vessel takes long to complete.

The great note is rarefied in sound.

The great image has no shape.

The way conceals itself in being nameless.

It is the way alone that excels in bestowing and in accomplishing.

Is the way a mask or that which wears the mask?

Even as life hides in death, death in life; evil in good, good in evil; male in female, female in male; so the way hides in the named; it wears the named and is the mask it wears.  It hides in and behind, confusing grammar and geometry.

How can one say that the way alone accomplishes when all the accomplishments we know are attributed to names?  And does this way’s comprehensive accomplishing not sound suspiciously like the Christian god’s—claiming all for itself and nothing for the myriad creatures?  Yes, but the way can sound suspiciously like anything.  The way does not claim, though some who speak about the way makes certain claims about the way.

If the best student practices the way assiduously, how can it be the way—for isn’t the way natural and simply what something or someone does or is, not what one strives to become?  But it is the way because it readily refuses such questions.

So the way can be accused of being slippery, a charlatan, deceptive, absurd, impossible, ignorant, naïve, ridiculous, Machiavellian, cunning, circuitous, bottomless, elusive, risible, lacking morality, dirty.  And so it is.  But it is not just this.

The people laugh because the way seems outlandishly outlandish, as if they’re hearing that the world is run by marshmallows.  So all the deep systems are strange to the world’s political and common ears.  And the Tao is the non-system which runs beneath them all—stranger, darker, quieter, deeply ungraspable.