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.
