There is an interesting connection in the opening lines of the Tao Te Ching and the Christian Gospel According to St. John.
“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.”
“In the beginning was the Word: and the Word was with God: and the Word was God.” John1:1
I’ve always appreciated both of these opening lines; though they diverge in meaning, both recognize a problem with the human capacity for understanding. Perhaps problem is the wrong word–maybe it’s a feature and not a bug (to borrow a programmer’s saying). The Fiat Lux is a Word. Compare this to the first line of the Tao Te Ching. Lao Tsu sees that our minds close off and compartmentalize the real. When we use language whether spoken or thought, we necessarily limit the limitless. If we can speak it, it is not the Tao. It is the void, this “nameless,” that is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of Wan-Wu, the ten thousand things. I’m tempted to make a connection with Western Philosophy’s fascination with dualisms of appearance and reality, but I am convinced this would miss the point.
I have been deeply impressed by this first page of the Tao Te Ching. It just rings true to me. The nameless and the named, Lao Tsu tells us, spring from the same source: “The gate to all mystery.” It is clear that if we are to meet the Tao it is not going to be through thought, that is, through naming things. All that there is is born of a kind of pregnant emptiness.
The connection with human language as a creative process is also a mirror of this truth. The mind, as Chomsky pointed out, is an infinite font of creative power–the human mind has the surprising capability to be originative in its expression. Thus, the ten thousand things. By naming we make the ten thousands things real. Perhaps we can make an equivalence here: the empty yet pregnant mind just is the Tao. As Lao Tsu says, the named and the nameless, the desireless and the desiring, “These two spring from the same source but differ in name.” The gate to all mystery.
