Ten - Be as the Newborn Babe
Chapter Ten is a very difficult chapter for me to take in. For each of the translations I consulted, there was a (sometimes radically) different interpretation of Lao Tsu’s words. Lao Tsu is trying to communicate what Feng and English call “the Primal Virtue” or what Waley calls “the Mysterious Power.” Mysteries, of course, are not, by virtue of their status as mysterious, the sort of thing anyone can communicate in words. So rather than focusing on the chapter as a whole I will use one of the phrases from the text as a jumping off point that might lead to or at least gesture towards a coherent interpretation of the chapter.
“Attending fully and becoming supple, Can you be as a newborn babe?”
Though the original Chinese centers around the idea of chi, or breath, Feng and English interpret the line as having to do with
“attending.” This interpretation is interesting to me. Clearly Feng and English take the term chi to be metaphorical here. In considering what it means to attend fully and be as a newborn babe, I am reminded of the famous chapter on attention in William James’ masterpiece Psychology. James’ work was a seminal text in the birth of modern psychology. As James puts it, one of the essential features of the mind is attention. He describes the mind of a newborn babe in its experience of reality as “a blooming, buzzing, confusion.” And by “confusion” he means in the literal sense con-fusion, the intermixing of all things into mass of experience, unfiltered and unedited by the mind in any way. One of the earliest developments in the origin of the mind in a child is the power of attention. When the mind attends to things it delineates boundaries that make the world meaningful in a mature psyche.
I’d like to apply this conceptualization of the newborn babe’s experience to Lao Tsu’s words above. I think we can equate “attending fully” to the blooming, buzzing, confusion James remarks on. In a very real sense, being like a newborn is opening oneself up to the real without any delineated boundaries artificially placed on Being to edit and simplify it for the mind so that it can apply “meaning” to it. In this sense, we have become supple and open, lacking the rigid boundaries of the developed ego. Attending fully we are One.