Meditations and Musings

Attachment and desire, as we have seen (for instance, in Forty-Four), are the root of human suffering. It is a cliche to point to the many examples of decadence in American society as a sure sign that we are in the twilight of our existence as a nation. Whether this assertion is true or not, I don’t know. But we are certainly bombarded by instances of indulgence beyond the pale on a daily basis. The voyeuristic rise of “reality” TV provides us with countless examples. Nothing says withering culture like an “eating” contest, though. Rewarding fools for horrid acts of gluttony to me is the pinnacle of American overindulgence. We are a culture that actively opposes the principle of “enough is enough.”

Stillness and tranquility set things in order in the universe.

I am sure you have experienced this feeling that good order is somehow tied to stillness and tranquility. In our everyday lives, the bustle of activity, the noise of constant action and interaction, the scampering of busybodies, and the shrill voices of unrealized goals dominate our attention. When we finally reach a moment of stillness, we necessarily think that some order has been achieved in the world around us.

But this experience of stillness is quite different from what Lao Tsu is pointing to here in Chapter Forty-Five. It is not that stillness comes from order in the universe, but that stillness and tranquility set things in order. A very different proposition indeed. This concept is at the heart of meditative practice. By achieving stillness, we in some way make things right in the world. Or perhaps, stilling ourselves, we sync up with the universal stillness - the tranquility of the absolute, the eternal present. I like that phrasing best, I think. The truth of the mystic.

As the second of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths tells us, it is through Upādāna, or attachment, and the craving that it leads to that suffering arises. The answers to the three questions that Lao Tsu poses in the first stanza of this chapter make little difference; they all characterize various attachments. All of these lead inevitably to suffering.

He who is attached to things will suffer much.

In my marginal notes I have scribbled this tidbit from Ben Wren:

Hasidic saying: There are only two sorrows in the world, never to have achieved what is desired and to have achieved it.

I have no idea if this is really a Hasidic saying or not, but the point is very Buddhist. If we accept this characterization of sorrow, then the very idea of desire is suspect. Certainly, if these are in fact true sorrows, no good can come of desiring, unless one is French. In which case, the perfect recipe for maudlin has been discovered.

Forty-three is one of those chapters that encapsulates the Tao Te Ching nicely. It’s one that comes to mind when thinking about Taoism in general. In this very concise chapter, we have the idea of wei wu wei, along with the concepts of yin and yang, and also the idea of teaching without words. While I was reading and meditating on this chapter, I focused on the idea of no-substance presented in the quote above. One might think of spirit or soul in the classical sense as something which has no substance in this way. At least we might see it as being nonphysical allowing it to be where there is “no room.” This ridiculous idea is very unappealing to me.

Instead, what came to mind when I was thinking about what this sentence might mean was the idea of a “string” in String Theory from modern physics. Oversimplifying horribly, string theory holds that all events in the physical world are ultimately caused by the various “vibrations” of extremely small multidimensional “strings.” One of the problems that opponents of this theory point to is the fact that if string theory is in fact true, because strings are actually smaller than the Planck length, we cannot observe them in any meaningful sense. The Planck length, or the smallest meaningful unit of length, is equal to 1.6 x 10^-35 m or about 10^-20 times the size of a proton. Our current understanding of the physical world cannot make claims about anything smaller than this unit of length. Therefore, opponents of string theory assert, the hypotheses of string theory are not falsifiable and as a result cannot be called scientific in any rigorous sense of that word. One could not prove string theory is wrong because the hypotheses associated with it cannot be tested. Therefore String Theory is more like an ideology than a scientific theory.

What in the hell does this have to do with chapter Forty-Three of the Tao Te Ching? Well, not much, except that when I think of things without “substance” in the usual sense, I don’t think about souls, I think about strings. If a string is smaller than the Planck distance then you could fit as many as you like “where there is no room.” Kind of like the old jab at the Scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages, “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

The ten thousand things carry yin and embrace yang.
They achieve harmony by combining these forces.

The notion of balance is one common in most bodies of wisdom. I believe this is our first meeting with yin-yang, at least by name; the ideas have been there throughout, of course. Whether we describe them as feminine and masculine the moon and the sun, shady and sunny, or passive and active, I think even in western culture we are familiar with these concepts of complementary opposition. I like the idea of thinking of these as process rather than state. In truth, we are always experiencing the interplay of these forces rather than existing in some static composition of the two. Somehow, Lao Tsu tells us, the ten thousand things may achieve harmony through this interplay.

Perhaps we can take the teaching of the final stanza to be the outcome of discord when the harmony of the second stanza is not achieved. As Lao Tsu says, “A violent man will die a violent death!” Never believe a man who would say, “We will go to war to achieve a lasting peace.” The morons who believed George W. Bush when he said we needed a war in Iraq to fight terrorism should have heard and taken to heart Lao Tsu’s teaching. I imagine these assholes call themselves Christians, as well. Could you imagine Jesus of Nazareth saying he would go to war to achieve peace? I imagine Jesus was the kind of guy Lao Tsu had in mind when he prefaced his teaching by saying, “What others teach, I also teach.”

The wise student hears of the Tao and practices it diligently.
The average student hears of the Tao and gives it thought now and again.
The foolish student hears of the Tao and laughs aloud.
If there were no laughter, the Tao would not be what it is.

Clearly, Lao Tsu had me in mind when he wrote this chapter. I can’t help but think that I am at best an average student, bordering on foolish. When I read a line like this, “The perfect square has no corners,” I want to laugh aloud. Does this make me a foolish student? Isn’t that line ridiculous by any rational standard? What could Lao Tsu mean that isn’t totally ridiculous?

The structure of Forty-One is at least familiar to us by now. The second stanza is a list of aphorisms juxtaposing opposites as we have seen in several other chapters. Are we any less baffled just because we have seen this sort of thing over and over? Some of these at least seem to make some sense to me. My marginalia from Ben Wren’s class bring the line, “Great purity seems sullied” to attention. In my commentary on an earlier chapter, I mentioned the symbolic use of the lotus in relation to this idea. The beautiful lotus is perfectly happy floating on the surface of a stinking cesspool.

Virtue plays a central part in this chapter, as in: “The highest Virtue seems empty.” Certainly, the virtuous person never thinks of virtue. The state of living virtuously never depends on one consciously regulating one’s behavior in regards to some moral principle. The principle has been internalized. In a very real sense, one simply is virtue. These kinds of people are notoriously bad at explaining the state of living virtuously. When they do so, we get statements like those found in this chapter. To learn virtue, live in the presence of the virtuous.

Returning is the motion of the Tao.
Yielding is the way of the Tao.
The ten thousand things are born of being.
Being is born of not being.

Halfway. At the midpoint of the Tao Te Ching, we come again to what I think of as the central mystery of Taoism. From nothing, everything. In the margin of my text, I wrote during my Zen class with Ben Wren a single word: “Femininity.” The ideas central to this chapter are often considered feminine qualities, returning and yielding. And most importantly, the pregnant void. The Void that is the mother of us all.

In Infinity and Mind, Rudy Rucker talks about the infinite “Mindscape” out of which the human mind creates the content of the conceptual world. In his sense of the term, humans participate in a special way in the unboundedness of the infinite. This concept and similar representations of it in Descartes’ Meditations and Noam Chomksy’s reinvisioning of Rationalistic theories of mind have contributed greatly to my own understanding of the ideas so central to Chapter Forty of Lao Tsu’s work and of Taoism in general. If we each and every human have a kind of mirror of this pregnant void somehow in ourselves, perhaps the idea of being from not being is not so outlandish. From the point of view of language, the subject matter of both Descartes and Chomsky’s discussion of these ideas, we all can see the truth of the fact that it is not so hard to formulate a meaningful sentence that no other human being has ever uttered. For Descartes and Chomsky, the native creative impulse within us made us very special beings indeed. By analogy, perhaps we can apply this feature of the human mind to a picture of Being as a whole. In this sense, is it so outlandish to believe that “Being is born of not being”?

In Thirty-Nine, Lao Tsu begins with one of his parallel lists. The lists are bound together by the idea of wholeness - the Oneness of the Tao. Heaven, Earth, Spirit, The Valley, The Ten Thousand Things, and the Rulers all have their essential quality by which each attains “wholeness.” Without that essential quality, each of these things would be divided, broken apart, exhausted, or made to fall down.

From these “humble” beginnings the base quality through which each thing excels and becomes Whole, the highest things are made to rise up. “Do they not depend on being humble?” The simplest things deserve our attention. These small things are inevitably connected to the entire web of life and existence. We cannot know the One without knowing it in the simplest of things

Chapter Thirty-Eight is one of the most difficult and yet important chapters of the Tao Te Ching. After carefully considering several translation, I think I like Feng and English’s best. The fourth stanza in particular is a convoluted set of statements that form a logical progression exposing false piety and empty ritual for the sham they are.

Therefore when the Tao is lost, there is goodness.
When goodness is lost, there is kindness.
When kindness is lost, there is justice.
When justice is lost, there is ritual.
Now ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty, the beginning of confusion.
Knowlege of the future is only a flowery trapping of Tao.
It is the beginning of folly

My marginal notes from Ben Wren’s Zen class are interesting. There’s a big-ass star next to this fourth stanza, and scribbled under it is “Anti-Confucian.” On the other side of the page are “Heidegger” and next to it, “Metaphysics precedes Ethics.” Having forgotten much of what I once knew about Heidegger, I’ll leave that bit of marginalia alone. The bit about anti-confucianism is what I’d rather focus on. Confucianism is often seen as focusing on ritual in regulating the behavior of the people, especially in its political modes. Though one might argue that the spirit of Confucianism is in line with Lao Tsu’s statements in the fourth stanza of this chapter, we can easily see that in actual practice ritual is often empty of meaning for many practitioners. Having been raised in the Fucking Catholic Church, as I fondly name it, I think I can understand Lao Tsu’s sentiment. I remember being forced to endure horendous suburbanite masses with empty-headed parishioners hoping to get out of church before kickoff, walking like zombies in line to receive the “flesh” of their god magically transubstantiated by a child-molesting asshole in a robe.

If ever there was a religious husk, it is the Catholic Church in America.

So what is it that Lao Tsu means? As we have seen in other chapters, the development of morality in civilization is for Lao Tsu a kind of veneer that obscures the truth of being, the Tao. The Tao is the rightness that flows underneath this veneer and lends these social artifacts whatever credence they have. Goodness, Kindness, Justice, and Ritual are each one more step away from the Truth of Being. This mediation comes to a vapid end with ritual, the husk of faith.

The connections between and among the ideas of non-action or “effortless doing,” formlessness, and the quelling of desire are very intriguing to me. In Chapter Three we were first introduced to the concepts of wu wei and wei wu wei. This action without action embodies the deep flowing strength of the Tao, like the power of water flowing over time. A drip of water is supple, a tear on a child’s cheek. But drip after drip after drip over thousands of years and behold! — The Grand Canyon!

And if the wise ruler observed this principle, returning to the formlessness of the Tao, there could be no desire. Having no desire, all things would be at peace. Desire is the result of differentiation — the application of form in the creation of the ten thousand things. One Mind, no desire.