Tao Te Ching XIX

Exterminate learning and there will no longer be worries.

Exterminate the sage, discard the wise, and the people will benefit a hundredfold.

Exterminate benevolence, discard rectitude, and the people will again be filial.

Exterminate ingenuity, discard profit, and there will be no more thieves and bandits.

These four, being false adornments, are not enough …

and the people must have something to which they can attach themselves.

Exhibit the unadorned and embrace the uncarved block,

have little thought of self and as few desires as possible.

Here the sage, so extolled, so much the embodied mirror of the Tao—the Tao, the great way, the mother of the named and nameless—recommends her extermination for the betterment of the straw dogs.  Education, wisdom, goodness, creativity, capitalism—the pillars of progress, health, and truth—are obliterated for the sake of some hypothetical Edenic state.  Who would be sufficiently naïve to practice such annihilation?  Who would promote the eradication of what has been built up over so much time, with so much blood?  Who would sacrifice that rarest of noble specimens—the sage—for those most prosaic, vulgar, and common citizens—the people?  Does this all not sound too much like the way of the cross?

But there is no cross!  The sage eats and drinks and makes love and laughs and governs or bangs pots without discrimination and lives to a ripe old age or dies young—whatever.  She looks at firm breasts and buttocks, bulging sacs and colorful quesadillas, thinking, Ah, how lovely and ripe is the world.  Though she may just as easily run off and sit on a bench, thinking of nothing.  When she becomes a sage, the sage is exterminated; there is no more sage … this is why she is the sage.  Extermination occurs not through some masochistic denial, some suicidal pact, but through the dissolution of opposites (learning and ignorance, sagacity and foolishness, goodness and avarice, creativity and routine, profit and loss) by means of immersion in the opposites.  You can tell the sage because she does not believe in the sage even as you can tell the true believer by the one who doesn’t believe.

There is a thing in a shadow in a thing in a shadow at the center of things; this thing is stretched in time and the stretching we call learning, wisdom, goodness, creativity, business.  Would the sage cut the stretching of time and civilization with the Tao’s dubious scissors to see the circle of progress burst and the saggy center exposed?  The sage is not out to cut and burst!  The sage is the sage simply because she sees the circumference, she sees the center, and she sees no difference.  Thus she lives in the center for that is where she lives.  The people live on the line stretching from the center to the outer boundaries of the present—what is commonly called progress—for that is where they live; if they did not, they would not be the people and there would be no line.

The people, however, must attach themselves to things; this is why they are the people and know who the sages are, where there is profit, why learning and creativity are necessary, and how goodness is expressed.  They might themselves be better if they did not know who or where or why or how; they might be less anxious, more filial, less greedy.  So the sage laughs at such knowledge and in the laughter there is absolute death.

For the wisdom that is not wisdom, go to the one who has lost its definition and listen to what she doesn’t say.