When peace is made between great enemies
Some enmity is bound to remain undispelled.
How can this be considered perfect?
Therefore the sage takes the lefthand tally but
exacts no payment from the people.
The man of virtue takes charge of the tally,
The man of no virtue takes charge of exaction.
It is the way of heaven to show no favoritism,
It is forever on the side of the good man.
The sage is a compost, receiving waste, quietly
turning it into vegetables and flowers.
Yet the sage is no magician; she cannot do this under any
conditions. She requires time
(solitude), diverse waste (carbon and nitrogen in a physical compost, dry and wet
psychic waste in a spiritual one), oxygen (silence), water (flexibility).
The way of heaven shows no favoritism, yet
favors the good. Straightforward words
seem paradoxical.
Dao is an earthy spirituality: it has no happy healing, no end of nirvana, heaven,
enlightenment or unmitigated peace. Its
spirituality is walking and water in a dusky landscape, with the only guide a
twilight shape that has no shape that someone may have told you about in a
storm in a desert in the night. The sage
does not negate or eradicate the tally, which is the law, but subverts it by
returning to the roots of the law, roots of dark justice: the justice of worms and fungi and bacteria,
the courts of heaven.
