Tao Te Ching LXX

My words are very easy to understand and very easy to put into practice.  Yet no one in the world can understand them or put them into practice.

Words have an ancestor and affairs have a sovereign.

It is because people are ignorant that they fail to understand me.

Those who understand me are few,

Those who harm me are honored.

Therefore the sage, while clad in homespun, conceals on his person a priceless piece of jade.

The language of the Dao understands language:  words, as deeds, are empty in their centers, the distance from the surface of a word to its core is infinite.  Each word spins outward until the memory of the word suffices for the word and we are right to say we know the word and have never known it and can never.

The ancestor of words, the sovereign of deeds, is no human, no god, no other word, no other deed, no recognizable thing; yet words have an ancestor and its blood is in the words, deeds have a sovereign and its policies and procedures circumscribe the deeds.  Only a fool sees words solid and isolated, deeds as independent and free.

Doesn’t the sage sound whiny here—she is not understood! she’s got an esoteric secret! others are dumb!

But this is not some juvenescent we are all eternally separate complaint against existence, not some i am special or especially special and everyone’s out to get me.

Rather, this is the sage’s reversal of societal expectations, not particularly to be subversive or rebellious or cantankerous or obnoxious or anarchist or to be anything really, but because the orders of society are naturally at odds with the orders of the sage, the latter seeming far more natural to the sage than the societal orders, which somehow erect the human above the worm, ideas about life and death above life and death.  Doesn’t Chuang Tzu say— Therefore, the sage sees his role as that of a wanderer, sees knowledge as a curse, convention as a glue, virtue as just a means, and effort as common trade.  The sage has no great plans, so what use has he for knowledge? He makes no divisions, so what use has he for glue? He has no problems, so what use has he for virtue? He has no career, so what need has he for common trade?

Most devote their lives to cladding themselves in jade, concealing homespun:  flaunting cars and homes and girlfriends and knowledge and boyfriends and children and convention and friends and publications and virtue and awards and efforts and nosejobs, concealing their desolation and solitude and haplessness.   But the sage wears her desolation and solitude and haplessness and conceals not cars and awards and plans and children and lovers and nosejobs, though she may, but that which empowers solitude and haplessness and desolation, that which cars and awards and children and lovers and knowledge and nosejobs are often designed to conceal.

So the sage lives in an order that seems disorderly to those who to the sage live in an order that seems disorderly.