Tao Te Ching LI

The way gives them life.

Virtue rears them.

Things give them shape.

Circumstances bring them to maturity.

Therefore the myriad creatures all revere the way and honor virtue.  Yet the way is revered and virtue honored not because this is decreed by any authority but because it is natural for them to be treated so.

Thus the way gives them life and rears them,

brings them up and nurses them,

brings them to fruition and maturity,

feeds and shelters them.

It gives them life yet claims no possession;

it benefits them yet exacts no gratitude;

it is the steward yet exercises no authority.

Such is called the mysterious virtue.

Has the old man gone mad?  After convincing us that the people have separated themselves from the way and scorn virtue, clinging instead to rituals as a sorry substitute for what is natural and institutionalized paths as concrete encasements for dancing air, he now claims that everyone reveres the way!  And that they do this naturally!

Listen to what the people love!—  They love to possess no one or thing.  They expect no gratitude when they help others.  They take care of the earth, things, and people without establishing themselves as superior to the earth, things, and people.  This is what the people love!

Yet the people are not natural.  Scared of nature’s perpetual indifference, peculiar order, and ecstatic randomness, they surround themselves with artifice then become artifice themselves by absorbing what they have surrounded themselves with; they become their fear and, having become it, do not see it.

Yet surely the old man is mad; he dreams of that mythical golden age in which the people are perfectly aligned with an idealized nature; consciousness is not a breach but an integration; the illusions, catastrophes, petty victories, and follies of ambition are seen by all and laughed aside.  He lies in a field of poppies, outrageously fantasizing about a world far removed from the one we know.

Yet the people are awed by the way and honor virtue—though often posthumously, distantly, and incomprehensibly.  The way and virtue, these forces beyond the people’s gods and grasping, are aloof, mysterious, numinous, and strange.

The sage, naturally, knows that the way encompasses all things yet still is only the way and virtue’s just virtue and so continues bumbling along her path, avoiding arrogance and humility, reverence and shame, honor and disgrace.  Everything that can be named is beautiful, transient, and forgettable; nothing that can be named is honored or revered.

Tao Te Ching L

When going one way means life and going the other means death, three in ten will be comrades of life, three in ten will be comrades of death, and there are those who value life and as a result move into the realm of death and these also number three in ten.  Why is this so?  Because they set too much store by life.

I have heard it said that one who excels in safeguarding his own life does not meet with rhinoceros or tiger when travelling on land nor is he touched by weapons when charging into an army.  There is nowhere for the rhinoceros to pitch its horn; there is nowhere for the tiger to place its claws; there is nowhere for the weapon to lodge its blade.  Why is this so?  Because for him there is no realm of death.

Life is just life and not something more than life.  While human life includes fantasies about how life might be—and occasionally a few of these fantasies are partially enacted—fantasy is ultimately subject to life’s necessities, thus ensuring it is always actualized according to life’s proclivities, not fantasy’s.  As life both feeds and devours, those who cling to it will not live; they will die in any of the realms in which it is possible to die.

Modernity is a culture given to setting too much store by life; modernity devours and prolongs; hence our apocalyptic obsessions which arise from our collective intuitive sense that while talking life, we’re living death.  That, too desperate for life, we try too hard to shove death aside, fatally ignoring the inescapable reality that death is eternally the wind and we eternally leaves.

He has heard it said but never observed it as there is no one who solely excels in safeguarding her life.  Life is always stronger than any safeguard, than any individual excelling.  The one who is above accident, chance, harm, fate, the wiles of freedom, is a fantastical creation, not a product of life.  Nevertheless, one who gives herself over to life and not the way she wishes life to be—a process we might call love—can be said to live apart from death … for there is only one death that can and will affect her and this will not affect her until it does; until then, it plays no more role in her life than a flower.  So she is never harmed.

Tao Te Ching XLIX

The sage has no mind of her own; she takes as her own the mind of the people.

Those who are good I treat as good; those who are not good I also treat as good; in so doing I gain in goodness.  Those who are of good faith I have faith in; those who are lacking in good faith I also have faith in; in so doing I gain in good faith.

The sage, in her attempt to distract the mind of the empire, seeks urgently to muddle it.  The people all have something to occupy their eyes and ears and the sage treats them all like children.

The sage sees her own mind as a forest, if it could see, might see a leaf on one of its trees.  The human mind is a particular limited floral configuration—perhaps beautiful, perhaps foul, perhaps rare, perhaps mundane; the only difference between the sage’s mind and other minds is that the former allows the forest to overcome it and does not presume its leaf to be greater than the forest.  Human minds are dusty reflections of nature—increasingly dusty as nature recedes as a living environment, replaced by technology—and in their totality is the Tao, though dirty now, almost unrecognizable, warped.  But the sage sees the Tao in the vast collection of minds in the city and hides in what she sees and gives herself over to becoming her sight.

While creativity is the rage in business, academia, and the arts, the sage dives into the center of transformation and creates what few entrepreneurs or artists do ... goodness from evil, faith from mistrust.  How?  Through the hot nimble furnace of the Tao.  When the people encounter evil, they respond with evil; when they encounter bad faith, they respond with bad faith; but this only increases strife.  They do not create, but recreate; they do not seek returns and origins but the endless turmoil of time; they talk but do not do; they assume the attributes of their enemies and so become their enemies; they take on the form of the content they despise and so mock any claimed virtue in their content and any purported seriousness in the dispute as a whole.  Instead, the sage transforms something into nothing then nothing into something by virtue of stuffing that which requires transformation into the Tao and pulling it out the Tao’s opposite side.  For the Tao contains and connects all and the one who resides in it uses it to do what she cannot alone, what only the power of all polished minds together can accomplish—the rustling of a billion leaves, in which all individual sounds are given to the forest’s full and desolate symphony.  So the sage devotes herself to polishing all mirrors and this is what she does.

The people, inhabited with desire and noise, are balanced on existence’s strange seesaw by the sage.  The people talk of clarity but are muddled; the sage attempts to muddle, not particularly caring for or believing in clarity.  Why does the sage seek to muddle the empire’s mind, particularly when that mind might be the very one she takes as her own?  Who would muddle her own mind?  The sage would and would even make this self-muddling her primary task, for she knows her mind alone assumes too much, usurps what is not its own, devours as much as presents itself simply to show itself to itself as paramount and true, deceives itself and others to no good effect, and thereby must be muddled to slip past truth’s golden ruse by means of the vast rustling of the endless ancient minds.

Tao Te Ching XLVIII

In the pursuit of learning one knows more every day; in the pursuit of the way one does less every day.  One does less and less until one does nothing at all and when one does nothing at all there is nothing that is undone.  It is always through not meddling that the empire is won; should you meddle, then you are not equal to the task of winning the empire.

When the people think of doing nothing, they think of it in opposition to doing something—lounging on the beach in Cuba as opposed to meeting with marketing managers in Tucson;  collapsing in front of the TV after work, dinner, and kids; stepping outside the productive workforce through internal or external misfortune or external fortune.  But nothing is not something that happens in response to or escape from something but rather something is a function of nothing.  To give one’s body, heart, mind, and soul over to the world—which is to say, the Tao—is to do nothing other than as a function of the world.  This giving over is the pursuit that does not feel like a pursuit but a return, a falling, or the most natural and easy thing in the world.  To do nothing other than as a function of the world is truly what everyone does, but the people do not think this is what they do and this not-thinking is what distinguishes the people from the sage.

The sage is not some dimwit, some unconscientious objector to reason’s rigors—one who pits the body’s brutish indolence against mind’s ceaseless strivings and finds the latter wanting.  She is more a Socratic flâneur, not doing anything in particular other than not knowing more than the body permits one to know.

The soul is lost through the tyrannies of volition, analysis, knowledge, and cognition.  In the Middle Ages, God was lost through priestly intervention, sacerdotal rites, cheap fire and vision; in modernity, the soul is lost through therapeutic intervention, domestication of that which is feral and divine in humanity, expensive commonplaces and concrete ideas.  Meddlers, by virtue of meddling, assert themselves over the soul and in so doing lose it.  This does not mean that one must be a quietist—when the wind is active, the sage is active; when calm, calm.  The people think the sage acts as they do—asserting herself to obtain more, retiring when exhausted—but the sage acts for no reason other than she acts.

The soul has one organ—the eye:  the eye untainted by mind’s rabid systematizing and the body’s voracious hungers.  It is the eye the sage crawls within and why her own death is no different to her than a leaf falling or the sun performing its routine descent into that which seems to be night.

Tao Te Ching XLVII

Without stirring broad

one can know the whole world;

without looking out of the window

one can see the way of heaven;

the further one goes

the less one knows.

Therefore the sage knows without having to stir,

identifies without having to see,

accomplishes without having to act.

There are those who are middle-aged and older who joke, The older I get the less I know.  While the commonplace can produce smirks and nods, the speaker rarely believes it and the rare one who demonstrates it—that is, believes it in her body—would not likely say it.  The common trajectory is for the mind and soul to narrow—to become more brittle, less nimble—as they age in the body’s aging.  The individual’s words and opinions tend to peak at a certain point, plateau, and gradually decline.  We retreat against the onslaught of life’s cumulative randomness and pain, carving a niche of security for ourselves—an apparent solid certainty against existence’s terrifying indifferent gaseous swirl.

When one is young, one’s experience is the world; if one typically ages, this doesn’t substantially change, although one can accumulate new expressions, many of them simply required by one’s phase of life and the culture and society one moves in—such as The older I get the less I know.  But the world gives us the opportunity to make the world one’s experience.  If this reversal occurs—through the active polishing of one’s mirror—one’s particular experience does not disappear but is subject to the world in its entirety:  including all the experiences one has not had and never will have.  As even the most worldly person’s experience is only an infinitesimal part of the world’s experience, one gradually realizes that ego-knowledge is nothing compared to soul-knowledge:  that is, a trans-cognitive, trans-emotional experience and intuition of the vast reaches of life.  This does not mean that the sage knows nothing but that she knows differently.  And this different knowledge—which is nothing esoteric but passionately embodied and deeply earthy—feels like so little knowledge from the perspective of ego and mind that one can say very little from those spaces.

So with travel—modernity’s prosthetic eye and cheap cosmopolitan badge.  But as with aging, while there is opportunity, there is no necessary correlation between the amount one moves and sees, the amount one climbs and accumulates, and any knowledge.

Thus we have the human moving in time and space—from birth to death and across the globe—and we have various trajectories.  At one extreme the person who lives a long life and has travelled extensively who is small and trite; at the other, the sage who lives long enough and barely moves from her hometown but is as large and silent as the world.  Naturally, degrees exist in between and while the spectrum may be a bell curve, the pressures of ego and soul are such that few if any can give adequate attention to both.

Is the Tao advocating the one who subjects her ego to the world—not primarily through abnegation but in caprice and wonder—or to some severely rare or imaginary figure who develops both in tandem?  Is this knowledge that can be gained?

Tao Te Ching XLVI

When the way prevails in the empire, fleet-footed horses are relegated to ploughing the fields; when the way does not prevail in the empire, war-horses breed on the border.

There is no crime greater than having too many desires.

There is no disaster greater than not being content.

There is no misfortune greater than being covetous.

Hence in being content, one will always have enough.

Who is greater—the one who stretches his ambition to human limits or the one who lies content on the spherical meadow of time?  Who is greater—Caesar or Lao Tse?  We cannot say Caesar or Christ, for they are simply differently ambitious, reflecting the West’s schizophrenia regarding politics and spirit.  Caesar tries to encircle the earth, Christ tries to reach God, Lao Tse tries to do nothing.  Or rather, places himself in whatever current sweeps him along and so feels as if he is trying to do nothing.

Caesar reflects the common political ambition—Nietzsche’s lion.  Christ reflects the common spiritual ambition—the camel.  Lao Tse reflects the child.  They are popular in that order:  the majority want more money, comfort, security, pleasure and power and are envious of the few, like Caesar, who are hanged on history’s vast meat hooks; a significant minority—whether through common disgruntlement or much rarer inclination—seek self-abnegation.  The rarest of these is the mystic—Simone Weil is a classic modern case—who so successfully achieves it (physically, anyway) that she starves herself to death in her 30s.  But rarer than all these is the non-seeker, the contented one, who doesn’t particularly object to the rich and powerful any more than she objects to the anchorite, who ebbs and flows, enlarges and shrinks, not through any particular volition but through the natural ebbs and flows, enlargements and shrinkings, which are life’s.

By placing herself in life as opposed to her individual will, feelings, and thoughts, the sage conforms to the only possibly real notions of god.  Notions that are grounded, earthly, and realistic, yet also include certain traditional Western notions of god.  This grounded god is not something separate from life or earth; not something specific, nameable, or definable; not something subtractable but the sum of all things existing, possible, and imaginary; not something in itself graspable but the sum of all things graspable and ungraspable; not something benevolent or malicious though sometimes benevolent or malicious and frequently neither; not something ever static unless its constant is flux; not something abstract and beyond us by virtue of being beyond the senses but abstract and beyond us by virtue of including all senses, all memories, all things that have been and might have been and might be; not something of specific attributes and words but all attributes and words; something that feels as if it is boundless because we cannot see its bounds but something that could quite easily be bounded if something existed to bind it; not something which discounts the individual and specific but affirms all individuals and specificities; not something of particular hierarchy, ambition, scope, telos, or linear trajectory, but all hierarchies, ambitions, scopes, teloi, and linear trajectories; not something clear, though sometimes clear, but murky.

So she does not dissolve on the water, but is carried by it, and dissolves in it upon death.

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?