Tao Te Ching XXVII

One who excels in traveling leaves no wheel-tracks.

One who excels in speech makes no slips.

One who excels in reckoning uses no counting rods.

One who excels in shutting uses no bolts, yet what he has shut cannot be opened.

One who excels in tying uses no cords, yet what he has tied cannot be undone.

Therefore the sage always excels in saving people and so abandons no one;

always excels in savings things and so abandons nothing.

This is called following one’s discernment.

Hence the good person is the teacher the bad learns from

and the bad person is the material the good works on.

Not to value the teacher nor to love the material,

though it seems clever, betrays great bewilderment.

This is called the essential and the secret.

Travelling, speaking, reckoning, shutting, tying—while these are no longer skills at which we can excel (for there is always exhaust; stumbles are captured, replayed; reckoning requires a laboratory; shutting and tying are the very jobs of machines), these excelings have been replaced: so, now, one who excels in acting leaves no doubt.

But the sage’s role has not changed and does not change—people and things always need to be saved.  Saved from what?  Themselves?  Life?  Death?  To themselves, life, and death?  This “to and from themselves, life, and death” is the Tao.  This is no proselytizing salvation, no active message, no evangelizing.  There are no saved and damned in the Tao, unless we are all saved and damned—neither eternally nor ontologically, but in moments and only moments.  You lie in the ditch, you have no money, you are bereft of pots to bang on, you require a night of sweaty love; who saves you from the ditch, poverty, pots, and isolation?  The Tao, through heaven, through earth, through the myriad creatures.  Yet, even so, the myriad creatures, the earth, heaven, and the Tao also push you into the ditch, strip you of your acquisitions and your pots, shove you into the abyss of yourself.

So the sage doesn’t distinguish between the pulling and giving and the pushing and shoving—she values and loves both; she doubts the distance between the teacher and the material; she doubts whether she is the sage and this may be a reason she is the sage.

These days, as many days, there is talk of the secret.  Esoteric knowledge, codes in numbers, alien messages in letters; the image, the formula, the leader, the program, the lover, the drug to bind it all, lurking in and behind life’s thorny facts.  The Tao says “yes”—there is a secret … but it is a secret not because it is hidden but because people hide it though it manifests itself daily through all acts and in everything.  In the horrible glorious democracy of life, the reality but transience of salvation, beneficence, and goodness; the equal reality and transience of damnation, falling, and evil; the blurring of our pretty distinctions; the illusion of cleverness; the institutionalization of bewilderment; the fact that the secret is no secret but our lives.