dao de jing lxii

 

The way is the refuge for the myriad creatures.

It is that by which the good man protects

and that by which the bad is protected.

Beautiful words when offered will win high rank in return,

beautiful deeds can raise a man above others.

Even if a man is not good, why should he be abandoned?

Hence when the emperor is set up and the three ducal ministers are appointed, he who makes a present of the way without stirring from his seat is preferable to one who offers presents of jade disks followed by a team of four horses.  Why was this way valued of old?  Was it not said that by means of it one got what one wanted and escaped the consequences when one transgressed?

Therefore it is valued by the empire.

One of the astonishing aspects of the Tao to a traditional Westerner is how little it cares about whether a person is good or bad.  The Tao acknowledges the distinctions:  some people are oriented to behavior we typically call good, others to behavior we typically call bad; whether these interpretations and naming are socially constructed, whether genetically defined, whether rooted in some objective reality is largely beside the point:  the roots of the causes of our naming, as is typically with the Tao, aren’t particularly relevant.

Unlike the Christian god, who supposedly rewards good and punishes evil—though we see little evidence of this on earth—the Tao (perhaps because it tends to being the this-worldly spirit of nature rather than the other-worldly spirit of spirits) neither rewards nor punishes, but quietly accepts.  So the sage quietly accepts, but does not do so stupidly—as the naïve and inexperienced might—but as one who has sojourned through the cold-hot expanses of the human soul and says without despair or exuberance, Well, this is it, this is existence … oh well.

But this subversion of the traditional western polarities—good and evil, of course, only being one—is not done to be subversive, not performed from some theoretical tour de force, not arrived at through nihilism or amorality … but is maintained as the best possible way to survive.  If you stroke the good for being good, they begin to behave well to be rewarded (then, naturally, they are no longer good); if you punish the bad for being bad, they naturally feel alienated and vengeful and one way or another, from time to time at least, the punishment will return to confront the punisher.  So the sage doesn’t flash and bribe, doesn’t scorn and destroy, but walks alongside the seemingly eternal struggles of society and accepts them the way she accepts water.

dao de jing lxi

 

A large state is the lower reaches of a river—

the place where all the streams of the world unite.

In the union of the world,

the female always gets the better of the male by stillness;

being still, she takes the lower position.

Hence the large state, by taking the lower position, annexes the small state.

The small state, by taking the lower position, affiliates itself to the large state.

Thus the one, by taking the lower position, annexes;

the other, by taking the lower position, is annexed.

All that the large state wants is to take the other under its wing;

all that the small state wants is to have its services accepted by the other.

If each of the two wants to find its proper place

it is meet that the large should take the lower position.

When one falls into the boggy depths of consciousness, one finds mud.  There are those who say that, upon emerging (should one emerge), one wears the cloak of light—spun from detachment and freedom from desire.  Hippies, New Agers, the Buddha, and an eclectic mix of charlatans and earnest well-intentioned fools.  Others, far more rare, such as the Judge in Blood Meridian, emerge in puissant darkness.

But in mud there is neither light nor darkness, morality nor immorality, male nor female, life nor death.  So the sage, having visited the muddy way and never really feeling inclined to leave, promotes nothing in particular—not war, not peace, not good, not evil.  The sage knows the enlightened one is bound to the unenlightened, the redeemer to the unredeemed.  The sage, though, being bound only to mud and its murkiness, sidesteps allegiances and the common opposites of the human spirit.

So the Tao recognizes that in the world there are pieces—large and small, annexing and annexed—which need each other.  Without the small, the large is excessive, imbalanced; without the large, the small is insecure, imbalanced:  finding each other, they temporarily unite that which is irreconcilable in the world and so find balance for a time.  Of course, the rule of the world is such that they rarely find each other, the one too obsessed with its excess, the other too insecure to act.  So the sage, finding the irreconcilable reconciled in mud, stays in mud and lets the world do what it is inclined to do.

dao de jing lx

 

Governing a large state is like boiling a small fish.

When the empire is ruled in accordance with the way, the spirits lose their potencies.

Or rather, it is not that they lose their potencies but that, though they have their potencies, they do not harm the people.

It is not only they who, having their potencies, do not harm the people.  The sage also does not harm the people.

As neither does any harm, each attributes the merit to the other.

The soul is a many-headed many-faced many-tongued beast.  Each head is a god, each face a spirit, each tongue a demon.  The processes of education and enculturation typically are processes of numbing—of building internal and external barriers between individuals and their souls, between selves and the divine; this numbing is for good reason:  the soul easily devours the faint-hearted, the serious, the glib, the naïve, and the coddled.  The primary function of society—its processes and structures—is to offer this protection.

Yet those who do not wish to be numbed, to be protected, against the soul’s vastness, its dark empty spaces, its potencies and surprises, must themselves develop strategies to avoid destruction, for the soul is always larger than anything that inhabits it.  We have a sufficient number of great explorers of the soul—from Baudelaire to Nietzsche, from Kierkegaard to Simone Weil—to know how it treats those who neither numb themselves nor appeal to the method as large as the soul—the way that accepts and walks but does itself become any aspect it sees.  Thus the soul’s potent spirits—whether they’re named Apollo or lust, Yahweh or pride, Aphrodite or despair—are not ossified, succumbed to, worshipped, or ignored … but simply acknowledged.  The sage knows the words and methods of each spirit, each god, each demon; she knows them but does not feel inclined to identify with them.  She walks, and in walking she passes from voice to voice, spirit to spirit, potency to potency … and in passing does not harm.

dao de jing lvix

 

In ruling the people and in serving heaven it is best for a ruler to be sparing.

It is because he is sparing that he may be said to follow the way from the start.

Following the way from the start he may be said to accumulate an abundance of virtue.

Accumulating an abundance of virtue there is nothing he cannot overcome.

When there is nothing he cannot overcome no one knows his limit.

When no knows his limit he can possess a state.

When he possesses the mother of a state he can then endure.

This is called the way of deep roots and firm stems by which one lives to see many days.

Western causation—scientific, measurable, reproducible, abstract—differs from the way’s causation, which is mysterious, elusive, and embodied.  The Tao begins in restraint and ends in life, passing through an overcoming which is no transcendence but an immanence, no acquisitiveness but an abundance, no leadership but a following.

Physical survival at the writing of the Tao Te Ching was far more dubious than it is now for those living behind the increasingly precarious fortress of the First World.  Yet look at what many of the world’s privileged are focused on—extending life, maintaining and increasing health.  But this is presently done not by being sparing but by being excessive, not through virtue but through extravagance, not through serving but through arrogance.  Individual physical survival may no longer seem like an issue for the world’s entitled, but our species’ survival is—and so each individual is bound.  Thus in ruling ourselves and in serving the earth, it is best for us to be sparing; we might then endure and live to see many days.  But, first, we have to know that it is not better to be a human than a butterfly, to be a ruler than a bum.

dao de jing lviii

 

When the government is muddled the people are simple,

when the government is alert the people are cunning.

It is on disaster that good fortune perches,

it is beneath good fortune that disaster crouches.

Who knows the limit?  Does not the straightforward exist?  The straightforward changes again into the crafty, and the good changes again into the monstrous.  Indeed it is long since the people were perplexed.

Therefore the sage is square-edged but does not scrape,

has corners but does not jab,

extends himself but not at the expense of others,

shines but does not dazzle.

Clarity, truth, honesty, precision … aren’t these the values of the evolved and noble?  Murkiness, confusion, slipperiness … aren’t language and love—aren’t society, technology, and culture—designed to eliminate these undesirable traits?  But the Tao in its very roots and eyes uses language but trusts it no more than anything else, including itself; accepts the world’s cornucopia but does not give it more credence than death.

The sage is not particularly surprised when an enemy becomes a friend, when his highest love betrays him.  The soul is a hydra and humans, should they ever be able to achieve emptiness, might then realize that emptiness is what is said about it and no conclusions, proofs, or assurances live there, but only the very experience of emptiness itself.  The sage knows that love is often draped over a thousand fences and that which society celebrates is often born in that which society despises, that time is just a function of geometry, and science a symbolization of what we already know in our vision.  But the light of our vision is not enough and so we try to stuff the light into our minds and there it becomes imprisoned and dies.

And if it was long since the people were perplexed, it may be even longer now, in an age when doubt—not as intellectual inquiry but as the ground of experience—is derided and one’s volition has become the one true indicator that one exists.

The sage possesses the necessary tools to damage others and things but rarely uses these tools and if she does so does so sadly.  She knows that emptiness leads in itself to the monstrous as easily as to the good and that the causes we tell ourselves, whether moral or otherwise, often simply serve ourselves.

Why does the sage, then, not use the tools at her disposal, when it seems patently obvious that such equipment exists to further herself and that the normal path is, as one advances in years, to ensure one is protected and to transfer the naïve exuberance of youth into systems of control and oppression for all and comfort for oneself?   Why does she not?  If you were to find a sage and ask her, she would not give you any clear answer, for no clear answer exists; rather, she might smile and offer you an orange.

dao de jing lvii

Govern the state by being straightforward; wage war by being crafty; but win the empire by not being meddlesome.  How do I know that it is like that?  By means of this.

The more taboos there are in the empire the poorer the people.

The more sharpened tools the people have the more benighted the state.

The more skills the people have the further novelties multiply.

The better known the laws and edicts the more thieves and robbers there are.

Hence the sage says,

I take no action and the people are transformed of themselves.

I prefer stillness and the people are rectified of themselves.

I am not meddlesome and the people prosper of themselves.

I am free from desire and the people of themselves become simple like the uncarved block.

There are the techniques of the specialties in the world—techniques of being this way or that way, of being taciturn or assertive, of being restrained or abandoned, of being an academic, rock star, lawyer or bum.  These are all prescribed and to deviate from the respective prescriptions is to diminish or remove one’s impact in one’s specialty.  But there is the non-technique of the whole, of seeing rather than action.  This is the sage’s means and she moves in murky ways.

The Tao, while hardly being anarchist, is neither inclined to regulation.  So the sage knows that in attempting to regulate herself, she lessens herself; in condemning and praising, she subverts herself; in willfully expanding her skills and knowledge, she warps herself.  The sage is constantly doubtful about more and better, about almost all morality and causation.

The management techniques of the sage are similar to and different from the management techniques of Machiavelli.  Both are ruthless, distant, and devoted wholly to their path without regard for consequence.  But the prince is ruthless for her own ends, distant to enhance the fear of the people and the perception of her superiority, devoted to carving his name on stone; the sage is perceived as ruthless because she doesn’t pamper the people, distant because that is what she is for that is what is, devoted to turning names into air—which involves no effort, for that is what names are.  So the prince constantly strives and struggles and the sage does not; they may look at each other as somewhat foolish across the odd void between them, which is natural—the people may or may not view them similarly and the prince and sage, if they are truly princes and sages, have looked into the darkness that forms all things and not flinched; but after having looked the prince returns to the world and must dominate it, the sage may return to the world but must do no particular thing. 

dao de jing lvi

 

One who knows does not speak, one who speaks does not know.

Block the openings.

Shut the doors.

Blunt the sharpness.

Untangle the knots.

Soften the glare.

Let your wheels move only along old ruts.

This is known as mysterious sameness.

Hence you cannot get close to it nor can you keep it at arm’s length; you cannot bestow benefit on it nor can you do it harm; you cannot ennoble it nor can you debase it.  Therefore it is valued by the empire.

The Tao uses words but isn’t particularly impressed with them; knowledge may exist somewhere but if language is its tool, it’s only one of them.  So the Tao has slippery causation and dubious antecedents.  Its therefores, hences, and thuses defy the firm relationships modern thought demands and in their place places bridges with spans of water at both ends.  Its its seem to point but the object of their pointing seems to be far below the water’s surface, if at all.  With the Tao, there are no ends, guarantees, or origins; there is movement.

As it is with the Tao, so it is with love, art, self, god.  Those who attempt to get too close or keep too distant, to benefit or harm, to ennoble or debase are unacquainted with the soul; those who do not attempt have been too close, too distant; received benefit and done harm; been ennobled and debased; been to every aspect of the soul and no longer have any need to fulfill any particular aspect again but only the soul in its glorious horrible indifferent entirety.

dao de jing lv

 

One who possesses virtue in abundance is comparable to a newborn babe.

Poisonous insects will not sting it.

Ferocious animals will not pounce on it.

Predatory birds will not swoop down on it.

Its bones are weak and its sinews supple yet its hold is firm.

It does not know of the union of male and female yet its male member will stir.

This is because its virility is at its height.

It howls all day yet does not become hoarse.

This is because its harmony is at its height.

To know harmony is called the constant.

To know the constant is called discernment.

To try to add to one’s vitality is called ill-omened.

For the mind to egg on the breath is called violent.

A creature in its prime doing harm to the old is known as going against the way.

That which goes against the way will come to an early end.

Virtue is not a mental concept, but a physical orientation; not a code but a state; not a judgment but a celebration; not an institution but a laugh; not morality but mysterious caprice; not stone but water.  To attempt otherwise is to stand existence on its head.  Yet such inversion is now the order of existence; ill omens and violence are the norm and while talk of harmony abounds what is meant by it is often adding and egging:  truth is something which can be obtained through communication and goodness isn’t goodness unless it’s named, photographed, copied, and broadly disseminated.

The virtuous are flexible—emotionally, intellectually, practically, structurally, ontologically, fiscally, geographically, culturally, aesthetically, erotically—not because they believe in flexibility as a goal or idea but because their bodies are rooted in the way.  The falsely virtuous know and thus prescribe, the virtuous do not know and thus exist.

The soul—that possibly threatened murky repository of the human:  contradictory, shifting, impossibly one, desirous and still—is not dissimilar to the Tao in its once and future proclivities.  Nor is it dissimilar to the historic Yahweh—calm, like a high wind that never ceases.  East and West poles staked early in the ground of time.

With the poles now magnetized and fibre optics strung between them, with Yahweh in a test tube and the Tao a freeway, the soul—like almost everything—has become subject to the clinicians’ incessant analysis:  the forced stuffing of that-which-cannot-be-stuffed into mind’s metallic ordering—an ordering that overturns existence’s dark vibrancy for those who don’t walk increasingly large and rocky detours around it.

This analysis and ordering include diagnoses like bipolar, manic-depressive, mentally unstable, schizophrenic.  If these false laboratory priests’ labeling, induced by fear, is listened to, those listening will view themselves as something to be fixed, take pills and therapies—and so seal themselves more thickly from the source of life.

The Tao is a turning back, a stripping away.  It does not add names, prosthetics, and theories, but subtracts them.  In subtracting it finds not mental illness, but murky life.  It does not damn the river or deny it, but becomes it.  So the sage is diseased according to those who would name the way.  So she is unconscious, fulminating, and silent in Yahweh’s masculine bush.  But in the Tao the river flows and every thought and feeling passes through her and they are not her but the world, so she is not disturbed.  As the world is not there to be healed but to exist.

dao de jing liv

 

What is firmly rooted cannot be pulled out,

what is tightly held in the arms will not slip loose.

Through this the offering of sacrifice by descendants will never come to an end.

Cultivate it in your person and its virtue will be genuine.

Cultivate it in the family and its virtue will be more than sufficient.

Cultivate it in the hamlet and its virtue will endure.

Cultivate it in the state and its virtue will abound.

Cultivate it in the empire and its virtue will be pervasive.

Hence look at the person through the person, look at the family through the family, look at the hamlet through the hamlet, look at the state through the state, look at the empire through the empire.

How do I know that the empire is like that? By means of this.

The incessant alteration of fashion, the subtle perpetual morphing of language, the orgy of novelty, the sags and slings of our outrageous bodies—these lead the common mind to the conclusions that life is in constant flux, that the only constant is change, and that the wise or at least pragmatic person (and these too, to such a one, seem as one) thus accepts change as good.  And these conclusions are not wrong.

But the sage passes on the embodied elusive knowledge of that which is deeply rooted—not by negating flux but by seeing it as the other face of that which does not change.  For despite our attempts to control, despite our narratives of freedom, despite our fear that we may have already articulated the essential and be largely unable to incarnate it, we remain humans and the soul remains the soul.  It is this knowledge—held silently and deep within the sage, even as it is within rocks and words—that makes the sage the sage.  So everything reveals itself as itself and it is this revealing that will never come to an end.

dao de jing liii

 

The court is corrupt,

the fields are overgrown with weeds,

the granaries are empty.

Yet there are those dressed in fineries

with swords at their sides,

filled with food and drink

and possessed of too much wealth.

This is known as taking the lead in robbery.

Far indeed is this from the way.

The broad way is decried in the West, celebrated in the East; the narrow way celebrated in the West, decried in the East.  The multitude walk the broad way in the West, the narrow ways in the East.  The ease of the broad way is what makes it anathema in the West and appealing in the East.  How confusing!  Is the truth one or the other?  Is it in some mysterious sense both?  Or is all this, as the academics would have it, a matter of semantics?  What might the Tao say if it could speak?  Might it uphold the broad way, as in this odd vignette?  Or might it uphold the mysterious union of secret and manifestation, as it seems to in other odd vignettes?  The Tao is slippery; who knows?

The Tao hesitates to say that wealth, pleasure, and society are wrong—only that too much of these are wrong.  Is the Tao thus communist?  If it is, it is a communism which grows from the soul rather than government, that naturally emerges from within rather than something that is imposed from without.

If the empire was once the actual systems which are now known as the government, it is no longer but is rather the soul and the sage dares not tamper not with the government—though she frequently cares little for this—but with her soul.  For she knows her soul is stronger than she; her soul is like water and the one thing that must be submitted to.  Her soul mirrors the way.

dao de jing lii

 

The world had a beginning

and this beginning could be the mother of the world.

When you know the mother

go on to know the child.

After you have known the child

go back to holding fast to the mother

and to the end of your days you will not meet with danger.

Block the openings,

shut the doors,

and all your life you will not run dry.

Unblock the openings,

add to your troubles,

and to the end of your days you will be beyond salvation.

To see the small is called discernment.

To hold fast to the submissive is called strength.

Use the light

but give up the discernment.

Bring not misfortune upon yourself.

This is known as following the constant.

The Taoist sage can seem surprisingly and perhaps disturbingly like a bourgeoisie:  doing all to avoid misfortune, never excessive or exuberant, balanced, boring, vacantly content.  If this is so, the key difference between the sage and the bourgeoisie can be seen by randomly changing their circumstances.  Rip away the savings, house, car, career, and spouse—the bourgeoisie breaks down and possibly jumps from a window, the sage sings a little tune and moseys on.

The difference, then, is not be in outward circumstances, but inward ground.  The bourgeoisie’s ground, in fact, is not within him, but in his prosthetics; thus when his prosthetics disappear, he falls.  The sage’s ground, however, is the way, and should her prosthetics disappear (if indeed she has any, for she doesn’t particularly care), she does not fall for there is nowhere to fall.

The bourgeoisie knew the mother—the void of creation—as an infant, then moved on to know the child of society and culture.  But he gets stuck there and thus returns to acting like an infant when his things are taken away from him.  The sage, however, after knowing the child, returns to the mother—not as a grasping infant, but as an adult whose mother is the world.  This is why she blocks and shuts, sees and holds fast, uses but gives up, believes in light but not distinction—she has no need to build worlds around her; she has the world.

However, in modern times, with so much data and so many artifacts having been erected between the individual mother of our physical infantility and the collective mother of spiritual maturity, who can claw her way through and back?  Who can negotiate the mass seduction of sensual and intellectual knowledge in such a way as to say no, instead following a distant way?

dao de jing 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.

dao de jing 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.

dao de jing 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.

dao de jing 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.

dao de jing 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?

dao de jing 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.

dao de jing 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?

dao de jing 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.