Tao Te Ching XXIX

Whoever takes the empire and wishes to do anything to it I see will have no respite.

The empire is a sacred vessel and nothing should be done to it.

Whoever does anything to it will ruin it,

whoever lays hold of it will lose it.

Hence some things lead and some follow;

some breathe gently and some breathe hard;

some are strong and some are weak;

Some destroy and some are destroyed.

Therefore the sage avoids excess, extravagance, and arrogance.

The external empire—the one politicized, institutionalized, departmentalized, democratized, commercialized, and industrialized—no longer exists as something that should not be tampered with.  Instead, it has become that which must be tampered with—that which has as its very function, being tampered with.  The externalized empire has evolved to a point at which it cannot survive without incessant, rabid, and comprehensive tampering; in short, it has become the property of the vessels, whose very nature is tampering with what-must-be-tampered-with.  The vessel and the external empire exist in symbiotic relationship and cannot tear themselves away from each other without fundamental destruction of both.

What then has replaced the external empire as that about which nothing should be done?  Something has surely replaced it, for the vast scales that balance the vagaries of the universe demand an equal weight of passivity to counter activity, an equal weight of destruction to creation, strength to weakness, gentleness to hardness, leading to following.

Life is now being lived on the other side of the mirror:  we live in technology not nature, art not God.  So the empire has crawled from the visible elements of land and monarchy to the invisible elements of soul and psyche.  No one other than the bureaucraticized mad believes in the sacredness of the external empire; its profanity is well established.

Now, whoever attempts to tamper with the empire of the soul will have no respite.  Whoever does anything to it—whether by technical, medical, or spiritual means—will ruin it.  Whoever attempts to grasp it will lose it.  The soul’s boundaryless kingdom is elusive, ungraspable, contradictory, changing in detail and relation but not in its entirety of energy and composition, sacred.  Whatever singular entity thinks it possesses the intelligence, perspicacity, knowledge, and power to tamper with something so vast and unknowable has no intelligence, perspicacity, knowledge, or power.  The sign of intelligence, perspicacity, knowledge, and power is yielding to the empire and accepting its greatness.  This is the closest a human can get to the center of the universe and, with the external world mapped and profaned, the journey is now within.

The empire—whether external or internal—is no reducible beast.  Despite the constant global attempts to reduce the empire to these words, these signs, these ideas, these passions, these tendencies—and the masses’ predilection to believe these reductions to maintain and increase their comforts—the empire is never anything but the sum of all words, signs, ideas, passions, and tendencies about, toward, and for it.  So some preach peace and some war, some preach proactivity and some quietude, some wildness and some restraint, some usurpation and some generosity.  But the sage preaches nothing, leaving preaching to the empire.  The empire speaks, but with a trillion tongues and a trillion eyes and many of these are silent and many of these are closed.

Tao Te Ching XXVIII

Know the male but keep to the role of the female and be a ravine to the empire.

If you are a ravine to the empire then the constant virtue will not desert you

and you’ll again return to being a babe.

Know honor but keep to the role of the disgraced and be a model to the empire.

If you are a model to the empire then the constant virtue will not be wanting

and you’ll return to the infinite.

Know the white but keep to the role of the sullied and be a valley to the empire.

If you are a valley to the empire then the constant virtue will be sufficient

and you’ll return to being the uncarved block.

When the uncarved block shatters it becomes vessels.

The sage makes use of these and becomes the lord over the officials.

Hence the greatest cutting does not sever.

The great quest for unity—as articulated here in the triad of infant, infinite, and monolith—refuses to fit into the compartmentalized unities of the teeming religions, spiritualities, ideologies, philosophies, systems, and desires.  Here, forced male unity becomes masked, contradictory female unity; honor, convention, and respectability pay their respects to disgrace, subversion, and disreputability; white becomes sullied.  Unity exists in the Tao, but beyond words, time, thought, and laws; it may exist in the body, it may in water or the wordless soul; it may exist in calm doubt, spontaneous action that loves other creatures as much as oneself; it may exist on the elusive scales that balance the heavy weight of desire and the weightless freedom of none.  It may exist in these things or it may not.  It may exist if the mass of human civilization and power could speak and said upon seeing you in your totality of actions—this one is larger than us, this one that does not speak and lacks a name; this one that is confused about its own name—this one provides empty spaces upon which we build ourselves.

Nature—as the empire, as the soul, as the sage—is a complex and irreducible unity.  Humans—being nature but other than nature; being given to nature but antagonistic toward it—are the one entity that specializes in reducing the unity of nature to component parts that it abstracts from nature, externalizes and internalizes, and identifies with.  This process of reduction, abstraction, externalization and internalization, and identification is the process of vesselification.  The vessel thinks it makes use of nature—that in specialization it becomes lord, though all it becomes lord of is its little bundle of tangible abstractions, those who reify those abstractions—but … no … it is made use of.  By nature and the things that are close to nature—infants and timelessness and old old stone.

Tao Te Ching XXVII

One who excels in traveling leaves no wheel-tracks.

One who excels in speech makes no slips.

One who excels in reckoning uses no counting rods.

One who excels in shutting uses no bolts, yet what he has shut cannot be opened.

One who excels in tying uses no cords, yet what he has tied cannot be undone.

Therefore the sage always excels in saving people and so abandons no one;

always excels in savings things and so abandons nothing.

This is called following one’s discernment.

Hence the good person is the teacher the bad learns from

and the bad person is the material the good works on.

Not to value the teacher nor to love the material,

though it seems clever, betrays great bewilderment.

This is called the essential and the secret.

Travelling, speaking, reckoning, shutting, tying—while these are no longer skills at which we can excel (for there is always exhaust; stumbles are captured, replayed; reckoning requires a laboratory; shutting and tying are the very jobs of machines), these excelings have been replaced: so, now, one who excels in acting leaves no doubt.

But the sage’s role has not changed and does not change—people and things always need to be saved.  Saved from what?  Themselves?  Life?  Death?  To themselves, life, and death?  This “to and from themselves, life, and death” is the Tao.  This is no proselytizing salvation, no active message, no evangelizing.  There are no saved and damned in the Tao, unless we are all saved and damned—neither eternally nor ontologically, but in moments and only moments.  You lie in the ditch, you have no money, you are bereft of pots to bang on, you require a night of sweaty love; who saves you from the ditch, poverty, pots, and isolation?  The Tao, through heaven, through earth, through the myriad creatures.  Yet, even so, the myriad creatures, the earth, heaven, and the Tao also push you into the ditch, strip you of your acquisitions and your pots, shove you into the abyss of yourself.

So the sage doesn’t distinguish between the pulling and giving and the pushing and shoving—she values and loves both; she doubts the distance between the teacher and the material; she doubts whether she is the sage and this may be a reason she is the sage.

These days, as many days, there is talk of the secret.  Esoteric knowledge, codes in numbers, alien messages in letters; the image, the formula, the leader, the program, the lover, the drug to bind it all, lurking in and behind life’s thorny facts.  The Tao says “yes”—there is a secret … but it is a secret not because it is hidden but because people hide it though it manifests itself daily through all acts and in everything.  In the horrible glorious democracy of life, the reality but transience of salvation, beneficence, and goodness; the equal reality and transience of damnation, falling, and evil; the blurring of our pretty distinctions; the illusion of cleverness; the institutionalization of bewilderment; the fact that the secret is no secret but our lives.

Tao Te Ching XXVI

The heavy is the root of the light,

the still is the lord of the restless.

Therefore the gentleman when travelling all day

never lets the heavily laden carts out of his sight;

it is only when he is safely behind walls and watchtowers

that he rests peacefully and is above worries.

How, then, should a ruler of ten thousand chariots

make light of his own person in the eyes of the empire?

If light, then the root is lost,

if restless, then the lord is lost.

But what of the one who tosses like an unmanned dinghy on the soul’s dark seductive ocean?  Who abdicates his roots or has them torn from him and, by choice or force, explores the rootless air?  The untethered poet? The raving prophet? The nomadic bum? The capricious trickster? The feral adventurer?  Are these any less part of the Tao?

No.  They are simply, from the Tao’s perspective, lost.  Lost from rootedness and stillness.  Are the lost less necessary? Are they any less grand? insignificant? confused? hapless?  No—they are simply not sages.  The sage, she places her roots in the heavy silent center; she casts the chaos of her desires and thoughts—their violences, contradictions, and unpredictabilities—into orbit around the mysterious still center.  The center of what?  The center that you don’t find in the body’s death, in desire’s insatiability, in the intellect’s tsunami.

In an age when almost all is inverted, the sage still plants the flower in the ground and while she hardly ignores the insects and rain, the seasons and trampling, her attention is drawn to that which is below the ground, and that which does not move, that which does not have a name and never will.

Tao Te Ching XXV

There is a thing confusedly formed, born before heaven and earth.

Silent and void, it stands alone and does not change, goes round and does not weary.

I don’t know its name, so I style it the way.

I give it the makeshift name of the great.

Being great, it is further described as receding;

receding, it is described as far away;

being far away, it is described as turning back.

Hence the way is great, heaven is great, earth is great, and the king is also great; within the realm, there are four things that are great and the king counts as one.  People model themselves on earth, earth on heaven, heaven on the way, and the way on that which is naturally so.

As the West’s mythologies have been found wanting and the East’s have crawled from their previously denigrated caves into desperate arms, is it surprising that we have found what is resting in the Tao long ago:  chaos is not something to be denied but is integral to the way.  Chaos is not something be conquered, to be overcome, to be struck down with light and order.  Nor is it something to give oneself over to utterly and always.  The Tao is formed, but it is confusedly formed.  So are we all, so are all acts, so all thoughts, powers, and words.

The traveler who sojourns through the world, tasting its bitter pleasures, its salty energies, gains a cloak of weariness from the inability to escape existence’s monotonous themes, its repetitive acts, conversations, and senses.  The Tao does the same—and is worn, like the traveler—yet, unlike the traveler, remains a babe:  receptive, vulnerable, open, questioning, doubtful, capricious, inappropriate, wondrous.

The Tao is far-near and so embraces mystical notions of God.

The king is great but dubiously great as he is almost apologized for in the counting … a curious emphasis in a book not given to such emphasis.  Even further, the king is part of the earth—not heaven or the way—even as we all are part of the earth; the distance between the king and heaven is far greater than the distance between you and the king.  Any competent king knows this and acts accordingly.  These days, though, with kings diminishing, read king as one with significant political authority, with vast hierarchies churning beneath him.  The king is great only because the people need a king, whereas the earth, heaven, and the way are great irrespective of the people.  The sage, however, does not need the king; she does not even need the way … the way just is and what we all live within.

We confront the offensive and disturbing assumption that that which is naturally so exists.  Hasn’t it been disproven that human nature exists? Hasn’t it been proven that nature imitates art, revealing nature as artifice?  Hasn’t the very volume of the vast vats of inks spilled extolling our freedom sufficiently convinced us that nature’s circumference is limitless, its essence dubious?

Yet.

Replace the oceans with desire, pile words to Andromeda, pave the earth with microchips, project art on the clouds … does this do anything but increase the distance we have to travel to acknowledge the foundational reality of nature, the limitations of physical and spiritual substances.  And we are travelers, aren’t we?  Thus we increase the distance between nature and ourselves just to give ourselves new paths to walk.  The sage is she who walks the present path to the end, sees the path turning back to nature, and returns.

Tao Te Ching XXIV

He who tiptoes cannot stand; he who strides cannot walk.

He who shows himself is not conspicuous.

He who considers himself right is not illustrious.

He who brags will not have merit.

He who boasts will not endure.

From the point of view of the way these are excessive food and useless excrescences.

As there are things that detest them, she who has the way does not abide in them.

Is the Tao binary, suddenly?  Is it like some Christian moralism?  A little morsel of self-abnegation, a thick steak of judgment?  After all this odd integration and seeming acceptance of the body, do we have a strange divorce?  The Way separate and apart, peering down at the inevitable fulminations of finite souls and proclaiming them Bad?  The Way splitting with its clear and shining axe the complex world into two spheres—one of light, one of shadow?

Yes.

The Tao is large enough to include this bifurcating mode, as this mode itself is part of the way.  The difference between the Christian and the Taoist is that this mode for the former is the way while this mode for the latter is a way within the way.  It is simply a color on the vast palette of the soul—necessary, yes, but not sufficient.  And for those who would find it sufficient, they have their rewards:  virtue, knowledge, separation, clarity, lines and measurements.  They have these things.  And that is what they have.

Tao Te Ching XXIII

To use words but rarely is to be natural.

Hence a gusty wind cannot last all morning and a sudden downpour cannot last all day.  Who is it that produces these?  Heaven and earth.  If even heaven and earth cannot go on for ever, much less can humanity. That is why one follows the way.

A person of the way conforms to the way; a person of virtue conforms to virtue; a person of loss conforms to loss.  She who conforms to the way is gladly accepted by the way; he who conforms to virtue is gladly accepted by virtue; he who conforms to loss is gladly accepted by loss.

When there is not enough faith, there is lack of good faith.

But!

In this age of words, to use words incessantly is to be natural.  To cast oneself into the production, dissemination, gobbling, digestion, excreting, transformation, and production of words is to be relevant and modern.  Words are the artifice that have become natural and he who would conform to the world, to evolution, to power, must conform to words’ productive circulative necessity.  The natural is not a fixed fate, a static fact, an existential incarceration … but our creation, an urgent freedom, a matter of definition—maybe the matter of definition. 

Is the sage then about to be extinct?  If not, should she be?  This is the same as asking whether trees should be extinct.  Or air.  Or garlic or horses or dandelions or children. 

The sage looks at words, definitions, change, and present mores as you might look at the weather in the North Sea—here, there, come, gone, wet, dry, bright, dark, cool, warm.  And in each state the people nailing words to the clouds and the clouds heaving off to rain the words in the ocean where they are diluted and disappear.  The sage is a way of looking at words such that words lose their weight and substance.

The sage does not speak for the trees the way an ecologist might; for the ecologist typically is interested in the trees because he is interested in humanity.  Any commonsensical person knows that the trees have a better chance of being on earth far longer than we do—no need to worry about them.  But the sage is no more interested in humanity than the trees, no more interested in the Internet than in stone, and no more interested in ethics than sleep.  This is why the sage is not committed to the modern enterprise of communication, why she does not privilege words over water or talk over death.

If the sage were committed to virtue, she would not be a sage; if committed to suffering, she would be some other thing also.  If she were committed to anything that could be named, she would be no sage but whatever the naming calls forth as the expert or devotee in that naming.  So the virtuous affirm each other in their virtuousness, dancers in their dancing, peach merchants in their peach merchandizing, gamers in their gaming, thieves in their thieving, lovers in their loving, and saints in their sanctifying.  But no sage affirms the sage if she is truly a sage; any words are only smirking doubts.  Her only affirmation is silence and a caprice that is often gentle, and for these she waits.

If she is committed to anything, the sage is committed to shadows and that which has no name; so words are nothing special and she uses them when she feels like it, which isn’t all that often.