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.

Tao Te Ching XXII

Bowed down then preserved.

Bent then straight.

Hollow then full.

Worn then new.

A little then benefitted.

A lot then perplexed.

Therefore the sage embraces the One and is a model for the empire.

She does not show himself and so is conspicuous.

She does not consider himself right and so is illustrious.

She does not brag and so has merit.

She does not boast and so endures.

It is because she does not contend that no one in the empire is in a position to contend with her.

The way the ancients had it—bowed down then preserved—is no empty saying;

truly it enables one to be preserved to the end.

The One the sage loves is no middling balance, no average of the difficult extremes, no part of the whole, no thing expressed in words, no idea.  It is only the reality of fully lived experience.  It includes all the opposites and so, in inexperienced hands, is schizoid even as the empire, in inexperienced hands, is schizoid.  But the sage is so comfortable with the nature of reality—the nature of government, civilizations, cultures, societies, organizations, families, the human psyche, nature, reality, dreams, herself—that nothing phases her.  What is schizoid to others is one to her.

It is because of this familiarity that she does not act like the average person—overtly or covertly asserting herself, overtly or covertly competing, raising herself up, pushing others down, smiling as she is successful in doing this, frowning as she isn’t—but like a sage, doing none of these things—not from volition, instruction, force, actual or potential gain, but naturally.  The sage is conspicuous, illustrious, meritorious, enduring simply because she is rare.  The rare is beautiful and virtuous, not according to the vast preponderance of beauty and virtue—those common images and words which the masses fall sway to—but according to some other thing.

Tao Te Ching XXI

In his every movement, a person of great virtue follows the way and the way only.

As a thing the way is shadowy, indistinct.

Indistinct and shadowy, yet within it is an image.

Shadowy and indistinct, yet within it is a substance.

Dim and dark, yet within it is an essence.

This essence is quite genuine and within it is something that can be tested.

From the present back to antiquity its name never deserted it.

It serves as a means for inspecting the parents of the multitude.

How do I know that the parents of the multitude are like that?

By means of this.

The Tao is nested into itself and all things, even as all things are nested into themselves and the Tao.  To be a thing is to not be shadowy, yet the Tao is a shadowy thing.  Though it is a shadowy thing, it hides within itself reflections, substances, and concentrations—each of these having at least a semblance of tangibility.  Yet within these reflections, substances, and concentrations, there is yet something else—something else unnamed—and this unnamed thing is somehow verifiable.  What sort of experiment might you construct to verify the presence of this thing within the image within the shadowy thing within the sage?  And how might one follow such a thing within a thing within a thing within a thing?  And how could one tell such was being incessantly followed?  And where in any text on psychology, healing, or religion might one find such an elusive definition of virtue?  Nowhere, for though words do not desert it, it eludes words; though the multitude ignores it, it inspects the multitude through its origins.

Imagine the council of original begetters, lined against the wall dressed in their most dubious selves.  Something not quite there pacing back and forth in front, its name tucked inside its pants, performing strange inspections.  Would you stand against that wall?  How do you know?

The Tao is nested through the liminality of itself in everything, of the twilight that infests all certainty and the doubt that thrives at noon.  The Tao does not live in the mirror; it is the mirror—its frame, casing, glass, source, void, and contents.  It is a method that precedes, infuses, and succeeds science ontologically and historically.

The Christian, the Jain and Hindu, the Moslem and Jew, the Buddhist, the Confucian and humanist … all must deviate from their ways, for their ways are ways and all walk but one way—the way of ways, the way of the body, life’s murky sensate path; the one who follows the Tao, though, follows the broadest possible way—without narrowness, without eradication, without rules, without scriptures, without priests or gods, without idols and ceremonies and structures, unreliant on the false gods of art and technology, unconcerned with money and reputation, giving time only a passing glance,   The way is not narrow but broad, for life is broad; most walk the narrow ways from fear and indolence, but the sage sees life and does not stray from its breadths, heights, or depths.  So she follows the virtue that is not named virtue and walks the way that is not named a way.

Not surprising, then, for such indistinction to avoid the clarity that grammarians demand with their crisp call for neon antecedents.  The Tao shrugs at such demands.  You ask, Like what? How?  It may respond, Like this.  By means of that.  If you follow the Tao, you know the that and this; you’ve seen and touched them, used them as tools and measures, been measured by them, followed them.  They are as genuine as pi and berries, as real as LSATs and wombats.

Tao Te Ching XX

Between yes and no, how much difference is there?

Between good and evil, how great is the distance?

What others fear, one must also fear.

The multitude are joyous,

as if partaking in a feast or going on an outing in spring.

I alone am inactive and reveal no signs and wax without having reach the limit,

like a baby that has not yet learned to smile.

Listless, as though with no home to go back to.

The multitude all have more than enough,

I alone seem to be in want.

My mind is that of a fool—how blank;

vulgar people are clear.

I alone am drowsy,

vulgar people are alert.

I alone am muddled—

calm like the sea; like a high wind that never ceases.

The multitude all have a purpose,

I alone am foolish and uncouth

and value being fed by the mother.

Here the ambiguity of morality is accepted, long before good and evil were surpassed and ambiguity proclaimed as some revelation.  It is not as if the way refuses morality, but that it quietly acknowledges the relative insignificance of all things—oneself as much as anything—and the complex intertwinement of all things—effect, cause, shadow, light—and in these quiet acknowledgements knows that a wrong turn, a misplaced book, or unrequited love can lead to ecstasy, even as fulfilled ambition, a glorious finish, or a benign prognosis can lead to misery.  Those who take credit for their fortune and talents—even as those who blame others for their misfortune and lack—fear the vast architecture of unseen causes and the elastic randomness of time.  For sometimes there are thousands of leagues between good and evil, sometimes a nanometer.  How great is the distance?  The question is unanswered because there are an infinite number of answers.  If you know why you say yes or no, you play at god … and the way smirks at such unacknowledged play and returns to the play of the wind.

So the one who follows the way is no more alone than others but knows her solitude—not as something to be overcome but as something that is.  She sees the blistered demarcations the people build between ideas, the sacred walls between words, the firm objectives, moral certainties, hardened judgments.  She sees them not as the people see them—as blisters, monuments, guiding stars, pedestals, and tribal cement—but as bubbles in a storm.

Inactive, impoverished, drowsy, confused, foolish, coarse, strange—look for these attributes in some obscure human resources database in some obscurer job description.

When the way is disused, alertness and clarity, purpose and knowledge, activity, opinions, sophistication and signs, acquisitiveness and independence are valued.  But the one who still seeks the way in such times doubts the superiority of such things—doubts the superiority of so many things—and in this doubt may even find the way.  Yet, in seeking and maybe finding, she also even doubts the way.

The sage is profane even as the mother is profane.  She does not know and her only knowing is this.  A slight upturn of the lips, a gaze that sees but doesn’t grasp, a soul that cannot be found for it hides in the entire universe.