daodejing 81

Truthful words are not beautiful, beautiful words are not truthful.

Good words are not persuasive, persuasive words are not good.

He who knows has no wide learning, he who has wide learning does not know.

The sage does not hoard.

Having bestowed all he has on others, he has yet more.

Having given all he has to others, he is richer still.

The way of heaven benefits and does not harm.

The way of the sage is bountiful and does not contend.

Dao quietly overturns what might be described as the West’s mantra— 

Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

It overturns the mantra millennia before the above lines were written and about the same time the roots of this mantra were being developed.  It overturns by recognizing the polymorphousness of language, its undependability as a ground, long before Wittgenstein.  It overturns by saying that the whole world recognizes the beautiful as the beautiful yet this is only the ugly; it overturns by returning to the gate where names diverge.

In returning, harm is deconstructed, contention dissolved through a withdrawal from clinging to anything that can be named.  The empty way, which use doesn’t drain, the beginning, the mother of the world, is the watery way we walk.

tao te ching lxxx

Reduce the size and population of the state.  Ensure that even though the people have tools of war for a troop or a battalion they will not use them and also that they will be reluctant to move to distant places because they look on death as no light matter.

Even when they have ships and carts they will have no use for them and even when they have armor and weapons they will have no occasion to make a show of them.

Bring it about that the people will return to the use of the knotted rope,

Will find relish in their food

And beauty in their clothes,

Will be content in their abode

And happy in the way they live.

Though adjoining states are within sight of one another and the sound of dogs barking and cocks crowing in one state can be heard in another, yet the people of one state will grow old and die without having had any dealings with those of another.

Vignette LX speaks of the spirits not losing their potencies when the empire is ruled in accordance with the way but that these potencies will not harm the people.  The spirits attribute the sage for this restraint, the sage the spirits—a mutual accord.

So, here, we also have forces; instead of spirits, we have tools of war, travel, ships and carts, armor and weapons, power and movement and speed and complex trans-state transactions.  So, here, we have a gap, infinite in practice, between the capacity of the force and its use.  Like muscle that doesn’t crush people but instead uses its capacity to build sustainable local environments, the key to humanity taking its place on the earth—that is, withdrawing and refraining from usurping the places others (species and things, such as swamps and lakes and trees) quite naturally have—is not a reduction or numbing of energy, but a redirection of energy, a building of spiritual steam engines, a transformation of the relations between potency and work, energy and object, existence, death, and contentment.

How do we reduce the size and population of the state without genocide and war and famine and superbugs?  Or, in other words, how do we bring about return without catastrophe?  Isn’t this the strategic question facing our species, the drumbeat of our day?

dao de jing lxxix

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.

tao te ching 78

In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water.  Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong, nothing can surpass it.  This is because there is nothing that can take its place.

That the weak overcomes the strong

And the submissive overcomes the hard

Everyone in the world knows yet no one can put this knowledge into practice.

Therefore the sage says,

One who takes on himself the humiliation of the state

Is called a ruler worthy of offering sacrifices to the gods of earth and millet.

One who takes on himself the calamity of the state

Is called a king worthy of dominion over the entire empire.

Straightforward words seem paradoxical.

  

Submission, weakness, humiliation, calamity.  Like desolation, solitude and haplessness, who would want them?  The sage takes these on, not as woeful weights but as rightful fashions to navigate the way she must walk; they are the unfashionable fashions of the way, fashions the sage refashions in her navigations.

What is this knowledge that our reputedly powerful species contains but cannot enact?  Is it the suppressed knowledge of feebleness’ hidden powers?  How do we transform our incapacity into impossible practice?  It has already been thought and written and, having been thought and written, done:  through returning.

To speak truly is to reunite the contradictions of silence in words; to speak falsely is to verbally resolve—that is, to fragment—the inherent contradictions of our existence.

Dao sides with water over stone and in so siding offers sacrifices to the earth, the visible sphere of the empire.

daodejing 77

Is not the way of heaven like the stretching of a bow?

The high it presses down,

The low it lifts up,

The excessive it takes from,

The deficient it gives to.

It is the way of heaven to take from what has in excess in order to make good what is deficient.  The way of man is otherwise.  It takes from those who are in want in order to offer this to those who already have more than enough.  Who is there that can take what he himself has in excess and offer this to the empire?  Only he who has the way.

Therefore the sage benefits them yet exacts no gratitude,

Accomplishes his task yet lays claim to no merit.

Is this not because he does not wish to be considered a better man than others?

 

The difference between heaven in Daoism and heaven in Christianity is a matter of geometry and possibly genitals—or at least their corresponding spiritual potencies.  In Dao, heaven collapses—through a radical relativizing—the relation between things (the relation between relations), and so any expected moral hierarchy, by drawing a circle around heaven and earth.  In Christ, man sustains the expectation of moral hierarchy by drawing arrows (teleologies, etiologies) between heaven and earth.  Time, death, origins are central monuments, inexorable, in Christ; they are as wispy and nomadic as words, in Dao.

 

Yet we have in both this notion of good, of justice.  In Dao, of goodness apart from its opposition to evil, of justice apart from its opposition to the law (of words apart from their opposition to silence, of things apart from their opposition for their opposition is a part of them).  A goodness without center or end; a goodness that, if it has a means, its means is not particularly known, other than as one knows the memory of a dream.

 

The sage does not offer what she has essentially, only what she has in excess.  Yet if the sage has anything essential is no clear outline.  Regardless, the sage does not offer what she has in excess to the deficient or the low, but to the empire, bypassing the rough dualities of high and low, heaven and earth.

 

This is the only authentic democracy.  The tree is the tree and does not consider itself better than the cockroach.  The human is the human; why should it be better than the slug or a bog?  I am i; why should i be better than you?

 

If i am muscled, beautiful, successful, rich, talented, famous, fortunate, how easy it is for me to take credit for my state, to draw taut lines of causation.  I am powerful because of my will, my drive, my virtue, my persistency, my blood and heritage, my intellect, my kindness, my perspicacity and judgment.

 

But Dao collapses such pleasant conclusions, such self-serving satisfactions.  Was not this person formed this way, in the same way as a particular tree (by genetic formula and context—in the case of the tree­: wind, soil, environment; in the case of the human: culture, home, environment)?  How can he then take credit for what has been formed into him, what he has been formed into, when he is the murky sum of a formula and a context, a tentative addition, a transient conglomerate of murky inputs and tangled roots?

 

Dao dissolves virtue and morality through their absolution.  It places humans in their place—not slightly lower than the angels or made in the image of God or the unacknowledged legislators of the world or a virus to be eradicated or something to tell the oceans how to live their lives … but as a myriad set of somethings among myriad sets of myriad sets of somethings.  And who can be better in such a context?  One only is, on a sea of is-ness.  This is the way.