Or, let’s unleash Dustin Hoffman.

Heaven and earth are not kind;
The ten thousand things are straw dogs to them.

The Sages are not kind;
People are straw dogs to them.

Yet Heaven and Earth
And all the space between
Are like a bellows;
Empty but inexhaustible,
Always producing more.

Longwinded speech is exhausting.
Better to stay centered. (trans. Addiss/Lombardo)

Straw Dogs is, of course, a really disturbing Peckinpah film. If you had that mental reaction, you might be the fabulous languagehat, who seems to have investigated matters.

It can be hard to accept that we are at the mercy of forces we don’t really understand. Many religions offer a path that distills these forces into a synthetic entity that can be the object of praise, blame, fear or awe. Science offers explanations for troubling forces or events, which are often dazzling but frequently offer little comfort. It does seem like we stumble along the path of the straw dog. Endowed with the sense of our own significance that allows to live as individuals, we strain against the immensity of the world.

I had a problem for the longest time thinking about absolute death. I think my obsession with science fiction and other worlds as a kid really made a demarcation in my mind between what is solid and what is fantasy, and some kind of afterlife always fell on the latter side for me. So I was sort of a passive atheist, and all I could think about when I considered death was the total absence of thought. Not decay or physical demise, but the complete cessation of self. This terrified me to the point where the thought would come into my head unbidden on occasion and keep me awake at night.

At some point in the past few years this fear just disappeared from my life. Maybe it’s part of getting older, although I think the existence of midlife crisis sports cars suggests otherwise. Maybe I can give at least a little credit, though, to the Tao. Trusting yourself to find peace through emptiness, trusting the unstoppable motion of the invisible world even though you know it doesn’t care for you… seeing the beauty in things without regard to their personal utility. There is a small comfort in watching life without the benefit of an easy illusion, but it is a real comfort.

Thinking of the bellows of heaven and earth, I suddenly had Heraclitus pop into my head.

This world-order, the same of all, no god nor man did create, but it ever was and is and will be: everliving fire, kindling in measures and being quenched in measures.

If the world is fire, then maybe I’m an ember briefly flared by the bellow’s breath. I’m okay with that.

Or, you may not see me tomorrow.

The way is empty,
used, but not used up.
Deep, yes! ancestral
to the ten thousand things.

Blunting edge,
loosing bond,
dimming light,
the way is the dust of the way.

Quiet,
yes, and likely to endure.
Whose child? born
before the gods. (trans. Le Guin)

I hesitate to post quotes from the Le Guin, even though I like it, because it’s very interpretive. I think she took the right approach, given that she is not an expert on the Chinese language but is instead a really excellent writer in English. But it bears mentioning.

Here, though, instead of trying to explain Le Guin just seems to exalt in the mystery. “Good luck untangling this one!”

The second stanza lists three simple things undergoing entropy, then suggests finding the Way in the detritus of this entropy. Other translations make a stronger suggestion that the way is performing these acts, and Feng-English instead transforms it to the imperative.

If entropy results in final destruction, then the destruction is of something named. A knife, a knot, a day of sun. The dust remains; the material was used, but not used up, and is now something less certain. The Way that encompasses this naming and un-naming is not seen. Quiet, it is persistent and inexorable. We must participate, though we cannot really choose how. Filling ourselves and emptying ourselves, we can see it and the Names of the things it touches.

Where does the Way come from? Not even Lao Tzu wants to go there.

Or, don’t worry about those who know too much; they just get tenure.

Bestow no honors,
and reduce contentiousness.

Cling to no treasures,
and create no thieves.

Make no seductive displays,
and hearts and minds remain settled.

The sage governs
by emptying minds and hearts
and filling bellies;
by weakening wishes and strengthening bones;
by leading away from pointless learning
and the labyrinths of desire;
by inhibiting the actions of those who know
too much.

Practicing not-acting (wei wu wei)
allows natural order to be restored. (trans. Hamill)

I’ve been wrestling with this one a little bit. The uncompromising tone of the verse’s rejection startles me. But you have to like that about the Tao Te Ching; as Le Guin points out, Lao Tzu is not “softheaded”.

The America I live in today has two main narratives it offers to its members. Obviously if you don’t like these you can pick another on offer, but a lot of the more divisive ones lead to some very dark places. The two that I am thinking of are these:

1. Feed the mind and heart with the ambition for success
2. Feed the belly with luxuries bought with the coin of success

They connect nicely to one another, and they also connect people very nicely together. This is the amazing thing about capitalism; it’s very orderly, and yet to most people it involves it feels like a very light touch.

I have to admit that I like these narratives sometimes. They beat alternatives like “Fear the other above all”, although admittedly they sometimes use that narrative for convenient gain. But they are terribly, terribly difficult to escape when you have lived inside them for too long. And sometimes they can make a very simple joy very difficult to find.

I was walking down Park Street in Portland today, a part of the peninsula I don’t usually find myself in. The trees were turning, and the wind was blowing, and it was a particularly cold day. I was thinking about the idea of emptying your mind. Whenever I begin to think about this, I tend to visualize a bunch of doors closing on my skull. However silly this sounds, thinking of this makes me feel… congested. This time, I thought of the narrative of the day spinning around in my head, and the other narratives I was either trying to avoid or using to avoid. I thought of my mind just sort of slipping away from this narrative and letting it flow on above me. When I did this I suddenly realized I was happy. Not that the act had made me happy, but that letting go of everything in front of me and everything behind me let me understand that in that moment, watching the yellow leaves blow, I was just happy.

Or, Alan Greenspan and the constant Way.

The way that can be spoken of
Is not the constant way;
The name that can be named
Is not the constant name.
The nameless was the beginning of heaven and earth;
The named was the mother of the myriad creatures.
Hence always rid yourself of desires in order to observe its secrets;
But always allow yourself to have desires in order to observe its manifestations.
These two are the same
But diverge in name as they issue forth.
Being the same they are called mysteries,
mystery upon mystery-
The gateway of the manifold secrets. (trans. D.C. Lau)

First of all, let me thank D.C. Lau for blowing my mind with his translation of this stanza. Previous translations I had read had always enforced (or I had misread as enforcing) a qualitative preference for emptiness over fullness. I think I got this from Ursula Le Guin, although I hesitate to blame such a superb writer.

So the unwanting soul
sees what’s hidden,
and the ever-wanting soul
sees only what it wants. (Le Guin)

D.C. Lau was the first to really clue me in that the passage from one state to another was actually really valuable, and that perhaps one shouldn’t weigh one state over the other.

The D.C. Lau translation came into my head today, as I was reading about Alan Greenspan’s moment of mea culpa.

And I actually was thinking about his translation of the first line. Our modern society is really a truly impressive one, and I enjoy living it. But we do seem to cultivate a very dangerous idea in our best and brightest that their abilities, intelligence, and foresight are completely unlimited. I think sometimes people need this idea: the idea that literally anything is possible. It’s the core of capitalism and it makes being alive exciting. But it is also fundamentally a delusion. We are ambitious but limited creatures, and even collectively we are capable of only a little of what we might like to be.

Sometimes the failure to see this can lead to greatness. And sometimes it can also lead to disaster, as seen in the out-of-control (but very ambitious) complexity of the shadow financial system. I’ve worked in the financial world, and I don’t see any kind of malevolence in the money lost and trust shattered; just greed and pride, which just about any philosophy is skeptical of.

Of course, my blathering is interrupted by the idea of just letting Chuang Tzu say it:

Life has a limit; knowledge has none. To seek what is limitless through what is limited is perilous. (trans. Hamill/Seaton)

Yes, this was the book I was searching for in my many stacks when I started this blog.

The Tao Te Ching could probably offer an endless font of advice to Mr. Greenspan:

When beings prosper and grow old,
Call them not-Tao.
Not-Tao soon ends. (trans. Addiss/Lombardo)

But let’s stop while we’re ahead.

One of my favorite sentences in the Tao Te Ching can be found in verse 41 (when arranging things by the more common method).

The great scholar hearing the Tao
Tries to practice it.
The middling scholar hearing the Tao
Sometimes has it, sometimes not.
The lesser scholar hearing the Tao
Has a good laugh.
Without that laughter
It wouldn’t be Tao. (trans. Addiss/Lombardo)

I really love the embrace of humor (which Chuang Tzu was also a fan of) and also the wonderful, relaxed lack of need in the text. The Way is not a jealous Way.

I’ve always thought of myself as the middling scholar, and so this serves as a sort of memento mori for my next little project. I’m going to go through the Tao Te Ching and share my thoughts about each chapter; a post for each one. I don’t intend to critically analyze them or tell you what I think they mean (good luck with that). I just find the text returning to me at the oddest times and I wanted to write some of it down. Hopefully you’ll get the sense of what I’m doing as I go.