Tao Te Ching XLIV

Your name or your person—

which is dearer?

Your person or your goods—

which is worth more?

Gain or loss—

which is a greater bane?

That is why excessive meanness

is sure to lead to great expense;

too much store

is sure to end in immense loss.

Know contentment

and you will suffer no disgrace;

know when to stop

and you will meet with no danger.

You can then endure.

Does the Tao ask questions and frequently not answer?  The Tao doesn’t care to choose, so questions for it are simply different ways to articulate statements of itself.

Is the Tao so naïve as to believe in earthly justice, particularly of such a guaranteed causal kind that states meanness and greed will lead to retribution?  Does it seem to think that it will provide the retribution?  The Tao doesn’t particularly care about individual things—whether lords or dogs, this particular river, that particular prince.  Does this mean the sage freely cuts individuals down?  Why would she do this?  Is not the one who cares about individual things—and cares about his own individuality above all—the one who freely cuts things down?  All things call out their destruction—stockpiling calls out depletion, exuberance calls out despair.  A hoarding grasping merchant may look at his stockpile grow throughout his life and on his deathbed say to himself, I have been mean but I have died a rich man.  But someone meaner comes along and the merchant’s grandson is set aside.  The Tao looks at the life of a stockpile, of meanness, of love and lust—without blinding itself to any related aspect in time or space—and then speaks the way it does.

The Tao lacks the twins, romance and tragedy.  The Tao points to life but no particular kind of life other than all—continuous repetitive contradictory themed stretching-but-limited life.   There might be comic life but romantic and tragic life is a debunking of life, a preference of death over life, and the Tao doesn’t prefer.  For the Tao, there is simply life, simply enduring life; there is no concept of life as something to be sweetened, embittered, soured, or salinated … no concept of human life, tree life, baby seal life, machine or aesthetic life as superior to any other …  no sweet and sunny life, though this is included … no cold and brutal life, though this is included … no fiscal or impoverished life, though these are acknowledged.  Only life.  Water endlessly pouring over awards and monuments, titles and company cars.