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.

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.