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.