Tao Te Ching LXVII

The whole world says that my way is vast and resembles nothing.  It is because it is vast that it resembles nothing.  If it resembled anything it would, long before now, have become small.

I have three treasures which i hold and cherish:

the first is known as compassion,

the second is known as frugality,

the third is known as not daring to take the lead in the empire.

Being compassionate, one could afford to be courageous;

being frugal, one could afford to extend one’s territory;

not daring to take the lead in the empire, one could afford to be lord over the vessels.

Now, to forsake compassion for courage, to forsake frugality for expansion, to forsake the rear for the lead, is sure to end in death.

Through compassion, one will triumph in attack and be impregnable in defense.  What heaven succours, it protects with the gift of compassion.

The sage, the I of the three treasures, resembles something and so is small.  But she places herself on the way all creatures walk and so, like all creatures, resembles nothing.

Dao is the great square that has no corners, the confident tentativeness, the teeming and immeasurable nothing.

A bird named Vast flies across the world; its wings span the oceans, it soars into the southern darkness, the pool of heaven.  Vast changes into a fish and rides the water as it did the air.  If the wind dissipates, there is water; if the water dries, there is land; if the land floods, there is always fire.

Unlike the silly modern ideas of identity, of selfhood, of reputation and name, the sage slips from mask to mask, from atmosphere to atmosphere, element to element, mood to mood, without concern for an essential or core self, an authentic i, for the i is all and nothing.  The sage slips into and out of i’s like a swimmer and water.

If one god flees, if a mask loses its efficacy, another steps in, another hangs in the wardrobe.  Why would one wish to be like the bishop in Fanny and Alexander, wedded to a mask he cannot remove?

Who am i?  I am a leaf you may have seen once passing by a car, a mist in the mirror, tea leaking from the crack of a forgotten teacup, a butterfly playing by a drug cartel slaughter.

Dao is vast, the sage swims in the fathomless ocean, flies on clouds and words, and death is just another mask and name.

So the tragedy of Dorian Gray is averted—as is the sentimental glorification of suffering in Wilde’s De Profundis (and so much rigidity, seriousness, abuse and pain)—by experiencing that-which-seems-to-be-not in that-which-is and that-which-is in that-which-seems-to-be-not:  nothing in vastness, vastness in nothing; death in life and life in death; courage in compassion, expansion in frugality, leadership in following.

For the Dao does advocate roots:  emptiness as the root of fullness, the heavy the root of the light, the still of the restless, desolation and solitude and haplessness the root of strength, and compassion as the root of victory.  It suggests that by following the common guru’s advocacy of volition, communication, courage, and activity, one inverts nature—the mother of masks and freedom—and binds oneself to debilitating gods who maintain the appearance of strength but become weak without their prosthetics, when removed from their familiar environment, when their mask cracks, when the ideas to which they are committed fall into the void of mind and dissolve.

True:  the way of heaven, the perspective of endless masks, the vision of clouds and oceans, is not the view of the beetle, the dog, or Bishop Vergérus.  Nor is it the preferred way of the myriad creatures.  But it is a way open to human consciousness through the apertures of nature remaining to us, far from the body shops and manicurists and bars … yet also there, in the body shops and manicurists and bars.

There is nothing in the world larger than an autumn hair.