Tao Te Ching XLV

Great perfection seems chipped,

yet use will not wear it out.

Great fullness seems empty,

yet use will not drain it.

Great straightness seems bent,

great skill seems awkward,

great eloquence seems tongue-tied.

Restlessness overcomes cold, stillness overcomes heat.

Limpid and still,

one can be a leader in the empire.

The Tao does not have ideals, for ideals exist outside of life—in the mind’s imagining of what life never is—and all the Tao cares for is life.  In life, even sunsets get tedious after 15 minutes.  What the people are impressed by—what they call great skill or eloquence—is usually that which affirms their vanities.  True eloquence, perfection, skill—they stumble like water over the rough rocks of ideals.

So greatness never comes from a straightforward walk in the sunshine, but through circuitous routes in manifold terrains and conditions.  And if one is truly great, one doubts whether one has arrived anywhere.  One probably doesn’t care.

And should greatness be achieved, emptiness is the reward.  Greatness’ chief attribute is emptiness—whether the greatness is achieved through art, war, love, money, or sacrifice.  And when emptiness comes, what then?

Tao Te Ching XLIV

Your name or your person—

which is dearer?

Your person or your goods—

which is worth more?

Gain or loss—

which is a greater bane?

That is why excessive meanness

is sure to lead to great expense;

too much store

is sure to end in immense loss.

Know contentment

and you will suffer no disgrace;

know when to stop

and you will meet with no danger.

You can then endure.

Does the Tao ask questions and frequently not answer?  The Tao doesn’t care to choose, so questions for it are simply different ways to articulate statements of itself.

Is the Tao so naïve as to believe in earthly justice, particularly of such a guaranteed causal kind that states meanness and greed will lead to retribution?  Does it seem to think that it will provide the retribution?  The Tao doesn’t particularly care about individual things—whether lords or dogs, this particular river, that particular prince.  Does this mean the sage freely cuts individuals down?  Why would she do this?  Is not the one who cares about individual things—and cares about his own individuality above all—the one who freely cuts things down?  All things call out their destruction—stockpiling calls out depletion, exuberance calls out despair.  A hoarding grasping merchant may look at his stockpile grow throughout his life and on his deathbed say to himself, I have been mean but I have died a rich man.  But someone meaner comes along and the merchant’s grandson is set aside.  The Tao looks at the life of a stockpile, of meanness, of love and lust—without blinding itself to any related aspect in time or space—and then speaks the way it does.

The Tao lacks the twins, romance and tragedy.  The Tao points to life but no particular kind of life other than all—continuous repetitive contradictory themed stretching-but-limited life.   There might be comic life but romantic and tragic life is a debunking of life, a preference of death over life, and the Tao doesn’t prefer.  For the Tao, there is simply life, simply enduring life; there is no concept of life as something to be sweetened, embittered, soured, or salinated … no concept of human life, tree life, baby seal life, machine or aesthetic life as superior to any other …  no sweet and sunny life, though this is included … no cold and brutal life, though this is included … no fiscal or impoverished life, though these are acknowledged.  Only life.  Water endlessly pouring over awards and monuments, titles and company cars.

Tao Te Ching XLIII

The most submissive thing in the world can ride roughshod over the hardest in the world—that which is without substance entering that which has no crevices.  That is why I know the benefit of resorting to no action.  The teaching that uses no words, the benefit of resorting to no action:  these are beyond the understanding of all but a very few in the world.

Esoteric knowledge.  Those with the distinctive and elite guardianship of truth’s murky core.  Artists or warmongers.  Spiritualists or madmen.  Scientists or martyrs.  Certain perspectives, arcane theses, obscure formulae and phrases.

Yet the collectivity of sages crawls only into the perspective of all perspectives, thereby reaching an emptiness that is not a nihilism but an empty fullness, in the manner of mystics and children.  Words collapse, not from any despair but from their own emptiness.  Action dissolves, not from any futility but from its own weightlessness.  Words are used, action happens; but it is not more important than the silence and stillness that precedes and follows.  They are equal in volume and effectiveness and while the sage knows both, she teaches from the side of the murky myriad one.  This is what makes her a sage.

Tao Te Ching XLII

The way begets one, one begets two, two begets three, three begets the myriad creatures.

The myriad creatures carry on their backs the yin and embrace in their arms the yang and are the blending of the generative forces of the two.

There are no words which people detest more than solitary, desolate, and hapless.  Yet lords and princes use these to refer to themselves.

Thus a thing is sometimes added to by being diminished and diminished by being added to.

What others teach I also teach:  the violent will not come to a natural end.  I shall take this as my precept.

A mathematics exists apart from that found in ledgers and calculators.  It begins with 0, moves to 1, then to 2, to 3, and finally to countlessness.

0 is the way and the object of fear for the Greeks and Christians—a secret the East let loose in the Middle Ages, causing ecstasy, chaos, discovery, and desperation in the West.  The West’s modern structures are largely built from a blending of the older firm structures of 1 and the recent chaotic responses to 0.  0 is the limits of knowledge; the ineluctable fact of death; the insignificance and dissolution of all things; our fundamental inability to grasp anything.  0 is the circle and yin and female.

1 is the monolithic Judeo-Christian God; the subjection of life and flesh to idea and metal and system; the structures of the furthest reaches of desire before it breaks and returns.  1 is the line and yang and male.

2 is mind’s perception and naming of humanity’s fundamental tensions:  good and evil, male and female, order and chaos, time and eternity.  2 is the endpoints of the line.

3 is the lords and princes and kings that bind the myriad creatures.  3 is the triangle—the borders of government and law that delineate the people in their swirling pool of flesh.

The myriad creatures bear the weight of humanity’s ever-increasing tensions and hungrily clasp their desire for what doesn’t tangibly exist.

There is a mathematics of a different order.  The operators of this mathematics—the additions, subtractions, multiplications, and divisions—do not function in the manner of spreadsheets:  sometimes you add and subtraction occurs, sometimes you subtract and the sum is greater.  Thus the sage knows all the numbers and so avoids violent means.

Tao Te Ching XLI

When the best student hears about the way

she practices it assiduously.

When the average student hears about the way

it seems to him one moment there and gone the next.

When the worst student hears about the way

he laughs out loud.

If he did not laugh

it would be unworthy of being the way.

Hence the Chien Yen has it:

the way that is bright seems dull,

the way that leads forward seems to lead backward,

the way that is even seems rough,

the highest virtue is like the valley,

the sheerest whiteness seems sullied,

ample virtue seems defective,

vigorous virtue seems indolent,

plain virtue seems soiled.

The great square has no corners.

The great vessel takes long to complete.

The great note is rarefied in sound.

The great image has no shape.

The way conceals itself in being nameless.

It is the way alone that excels in bestowing and in accomplishing.

Is the way a mask or that which wears the mask?

Even as life hides in death, death in life; evil in good, good in evil; male in female, female in male; so the way hides in the named; it wears the named and is the mask it wears.  It hides in and behind, confusing grammar and geometry.

How can one say that the way alone accomplishes when all the accomplishments we know are attributed to names?  And does this way’s comprehensive accomplishing not sound suspiciously like the Christian god’s—claiming all for itself and nothing for the myriad creatures?  Yes, but the way can sound suspiciously like anything.  The way does not claim, though some who speak about the way makes certain claims about the way.

If the best student practices the way assiduously, how can it be the way—for isn’t the way natural and simply what something or someone does or is, not what one strives to become?  But it is the way because it readily refuses such questions.

So the way can be accused of being slippery, a charlatan, deceptive, absurd, impossible, ignorant, naïve, ridiculous, Machiavellian, cunning, circuitous, bottomless, elusive, risible, lacking morality, dirty.  And so it is.  But it is not just this.

The people laugh because the way seems outlandishly outlandish, as if they’re hearing that the world is run by marshmallows.  So all the deep systems are strange to the world’s political and common ears.  And the Tao is the non-system which runs beneath them all—stranger, darker, quieter, deeply ungraspable.

Tao Te Ching XL

Turning back is how the way moves; weakness is the means the way employs.

The myriad creatures in the world are born from something and something from nothing.

How can it be said that the Tao is all when the Tao moves in certain ways and employs certain means?  Doesn’t this limit the Tao and isn’t the Tao limitless?

When does one turn back, why, and to what extent?  One turns back when one sees one’s roots in one’s destiny; one turns back because one sees they are the same and going forward requires effort and causes destruction while turning back requires less effort and causes less destruction; one turns back to one’s roots and becomes them—past the acquisitiveness of maturity, past the exuberance and despair of adolescence, past the belching and climbing of childhood, past being a babe, into the dark vermiculous soil that pushes, and aerates, and is stepped on.

Turning back is not necessarily turning back to things once familiar; it can be turning back to things long forgotten; it is turning back to the dark inarticulate mysteries of the valley.  Not dark in that they’re fearful, not inarticulate in that they seek expression, not mysterious in that they inspire reverence; but dark in that they never reach the light, inarticulate in that they cannot be changed to words, mysterious in that they exist between the reaches of the human and the reaches of desire.  This is how the Tao is limited and only how.

So weakness is not to be without claws.  It is not the negation of ambition, money, power, reputation, or security—though it seems to people that it negates because it stands apart from these.  It affirms these in the way it affirms all by acknowledging them.  But it does not identify with them and that is the weakness it chooses.  Like a bicyclist winding through urban traffic, so the sage winds through life.  A bicycle is not considered strong next to a car, is it?  So the sage is not considered strong next to a president, guru, or entertainer.

There is a continuous movement from darkness to elusiveness to the named; from inspiration to creation to commodity.  This movement exists as readily in love, justice, art, religion, business, and thought as it does in individuals and cultures.  Yet because something has become named does not mean that the darkness has left it, just that the darkness has hidden itself.  So the people are surprised when it reaches a long invisible hand from the valley and stabs them.  But the sage is not surprised for she lives in the valley and the darkness is her sight and so in not-seeing sees.

Tao Te Ching XXXIX

Of old, these came to be in possession of the One:

Heaven in virtue of the One is limpid;

Earth in virtue of the One is settled;

Gods in virtue of the One have their potencies;

The valley in virtue of the One is full;

The myriad creatures in virtue of the One are alive;

Lords and princes in virtue of the One become leaders in the empire.

It is the One that makes these what they are.

Without what makes it limpid heaven might split;

Without what makes it settled earth might sink;

Without what gives them their potencies gods might spend themselves;

Without what makes it full the valley might run dry;

Without what keeps them alive the myriad creatures might perish;

Without what makes them leaders lords and princes might fall.

Hence the superior must have the inferior as root; the high must have the low as base.  Thus lords and princes refer to themselves as solitary, desolate, and hapless.  This is taking the inferior as root, is it not?

Hence the highest renown is without renown.

Not wishing to be one among many like jade nor to be aloof like stone.

The sage is neither limpid nor settled nor potent nor full nor alive nor a leader.  She in virtue of the One is one; without what makes her one she might be heaven or earth or a god or a valley or a myriad creature or a lord.

If you wish, you may think of the superior as superior but it is not; if you wish, you may think of the inferior as inferior but it is not.  If the superior must have the inferior, how can it be superior?  Picture the One as a circle, the superior as sections in the upper half, the inferior as sections in the lower.  A lord is not a lord because he is better; he is a lord simply because he is a lord.  Only those splintered divorce parts of the circle from the other parts that make it a circle.

By making and giving and keeping, it is not meant that the One doles out limpidity, settlement, potency, fullness, aliveness, and leadership as a manager or the government might dole out funds, benefits, awards, or praise.  Each exists as it is because of its context not because of itself.  This is so though it may claim—as it often does—that it exists as it is largely or solely because of itself.

So the One came to be perceived as separate and history is the accumulation of separations and the increasingly audible derision of context.  For as there is more to see so it becomes more difficult to see the One.

Tao Te Ching XXXVIII

A person of the highest virtue does not keep to virtue and that is why she has virtue.

A person of the lowest virtue never strays from virtue and that is why he is without virtue.

The former never acts yet leaves nothing undone.  The latter acts but there are things left undone.

A person of the highest benevolence acts but from no ulterior motive.

A person of the highest rectitude acts but from ulterior motive.

A person most conversant in the rites acts but when no one responds rolls up his sleeves and resorts to persuasion by force.

Hence when the way was lost there was virtue; when virtue was lost there was benevolence; when benevolence was lost there was rectitude; when rectitude was lost there were the rites.

The rites are the wearing thin of loyalty and good faith

and the beginning of disorder;

foreknowledge is the flowery embellishment of the way

and the beginning of folly.

Hence the person of large mind abides in the thick not in the thin, in the fruit not in the flower.

Therefore she discards the one and takes the other.

Even as everything dies, everything, gradually, eases away from the space that doesn’t require names to a space that demands names and uses force—of whatever means:  physical, emotional, mental—to attempt full conformity to the demanded names.

Look around you.  In the halls of politics, education, business, religion, art, media, family, philanthropy, friendship, eros.  See the tyranny of names and rituals.  Watch how seeming kindness and cooperation turn to brutality and vengeance when the required names and rituals are bypassed or transgressed.

The one who stays in the loose airy space of no-naming does not avoid names and rituals; she does not move or think like the animals.  But for her they are not required and the solid spaces of demand that others live within and fight over are to her light and diffused.  This is why she walks alone and wears a cloak that others cannot see.  Words fall lightly on her like rain; they form puddles and return to the earth.

Between the loose light space and the myriad solid spaces is a spectrum of spaces.  The supposed sage preaches some of these with conviction and many paragraphs; the nameless sage laughs, the spectrum turns to dark light, a rainbow of dubious visibility and beauty.

To plan is nothing special.  The sage aligns herself with life—which acts but doesn’t plan, which thickly grows and regards death no differently than a radish.

Thoughts on Memorization on the Ides of May

At the end of posting Book I (Vignette XXXVII) of DC Lau’s translation of the Tao Te Ching and my meditations on it, I would like to comment briefly on my experience of memorization—before writing each meditation I memorize each vignette and am working toward having the full text memorized, hopefully finishing sometime this year.  Historically, it’s not a big feat—there are only 81 fairly short passages and many mnemonic devices throughout.  Nevertheless, while in some sense we are very much a memorizing culture (I listen to my sons quote entire Simpsons episodes to each other), we do not typically memorize texts much anymore.

I had read the Tao Te Ching well over a hundred times and over many years before I decided to memorize it.  Growing up as a Christian and formally studying the Bible for many years, the Tao attracted me as a living concept and as a text … it seemed to me to articulate the human experience in spiritual terms from an almost completely different orientation than the bulk of the Judeo-Christian tradition.  Its core concepts—including its relationship to the earth; its attitude toward humanity’s place in the cosmos; its weighing of elitism, equality, and humility; its indistinction between politics and spirituality—seemed foreign, enticing, and somehow, despite various antiquated curiosities, true.

Yet having a text outside of you and having it inside of you are two different things.  If you eat Big Macs all the time, the cells in your body will—metaphorically at least—be made of Big Macs; you will, in a weird yet true sense, become a Big Mac.  So as the text of the Tao Te Ching migrates and stays inside me, I, in a weird yet true sense, become the Tao … or at least the principles intimated in the Tao become more natural to me and the principles I’ve associated with the West, with Christianity, and with myself—of assertiveness, volition, firm distinctions, rationality, causation, striving, knowing—begin to dissipate.

A text inside—especially one like the Tao, which is murky, meditative, slow, and calm—modifies not just one’s mind and heart but one’s body.  A text moves in the blood and feels like the blood.  It feels like the eyes … or the eyes behind the eyes.  It wraps other words in itself and slowly digests them.  Things inside become liquid, gaseous, and so nothing to be clung to, but simply part of the transient flow and vapor of existence.  This particular text becomes the nature that is lost in the city—the nature that affirms one in one’s insignificance and in this affirmation diffuses restlessness and weaves a murky thread throughout the self and the world.  It strips me down to darkness, a darkness that doesn’t seem like the fearful night of the child but a darkness that lies quietly at the center of light, a darkness that is light.

None of this is really possible when a text is outside.  Outside, it’s still something of an object, a commodity, an it.  Inside, it talks at odd times and fornicates with other inside things.  Inside, it begins to grow and gradually replace dying cells of words, cognition, attitudes, and behaviors.  Inside, it blurs distinctions and so becomes love.  Not necessarily a love of laughter and hope, but a love of drowsy acceptance and muddy days.