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.