The court is corrupt,
the fields are overgrown with weeds,
the granaries are empty.
Yet there are those dressed in fineries
with swords at their sides,
filled with food and drink
and possessed of too much wealth.
This is known as taking the lead in robbery.
Far indeed is this from the way.
The broad way is decried in the West, celebrated in the East; the narrow way celebrated in the West, decried in the East. The multitude walk the broad way in the West, the narrow ways in the East. The ease of the broad way is what makes it anathema in the West and appealing in the East. How confusing! Is the truth one or the other? Is it in some mysterious sense both? Or is all this, as the academics would have it, a matter of semantics? What might the Tao say if it could speak? Might it uphold the broad way, as in this odd vignette? Or might it uphold the mysterious union of secret and manifestation, as it seems to in other odd vignettes? The Tao is slippery; who knows?
The Tao hesitates to say that wealth, pleasure, and society are wrong—only that too much of these are wrong. Is the Tao thus communist? If it is, it is a communism which grows from the soul rather than government, that naturally emerges from within rather than something that is imposed from without.
If the empire was once the actual systems which are now known as the government, it is no longer but is rather the soul and the sage dares not tamper not with the government—though she frequently cares little for this—but with her soul. For she knows her soul is stronger than she; her soul is like water and the one thing that must be submitted to. Her soul mirrors the way.
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