Meditations and Musings

I guess three out of seven ain’t bad. Of the seven lines of Chapter Twelve, I think I may have a relatively clear understanding of three. I think I understand what Lao Tsu means when he says racing and hunting make our minds mad, just look at the behavior of the adults at a Little League Baseball game almost anywhere in America. Americans have made a religion of competition. Not that this is unique to America, it’s just what I know from my limited experience. There is little better place to observe akrasia than at a competitive sporting event. And, I have to agree with Lao Tsu that competition is a kind of madness, all things considered. Certainly this follows when we take altruism and compassion as the highest moral goods.

I also think I understand what Lao Tsu means by, “Precious things lead one astray.” Here again, I think we have a statement of what will become the Buddhist principle that our grasping nature (Samudaya) leads to suffering (Dukkha).

And finally, I think I understand, although through a glass darkly, what Lao Tsu means by, “Therefore the sage is guided by what he feels and not by what he sees.” I think Feng and English’s translation is less than accurate here, though. The literal word used here in the Chinese is “belly” or “gut” instead of “what he feels.” I think the literal translation is more enlightening than Feng and English’s. Other translations use the more metaphorical “center,” which I like as well. Mystical navel-gazing in the cliche. The Sage trusts his gut over his “higher” senses. This I can buy

When the Emperor of China asked Daruma what the first principle of Buddhism was, Daruma replied, “Vast emptiness, nothing holy!” (See Collecting the Art of Zen.) I love the paintings of Daruma (Bodhidharma) by Fugai; Daruma is depicted as a lump of a man with a thick fuzzy beard. In Japanese, Mu means emptiness or negation. Lao Tsu has already introduced us to the Valley Spirit, the emptiness that gives birth to all things. Here again in Chapter Eleven we are confronted with this idea of negative space, holes of all sorts. Being an amateur potter, I consider this idea as Lao Tsu presents it all the time:

“Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.”

Sometimes, because I have not yet mastered the art of throwing pottery, this emptiness expresses itself in ways I did not plan and a would-be vase becomes a floppy plate whose negative space contains an entire hemisphere of the universe, as it were. The Zen master makes use of our intellectual discomfort with the idea of nothingness. If nature abhors a vacuum, the human mind abhors the idea of no-thing. Is it even possible for us to think nothing? This is not a trivial question. When I try to meditate by emptying my mind, I am reminded of this difficulty each and every time.

The Zen koan of Joshu goes like this: A monk asked Joshu, “Has a dog the Buddha-Nature?” Joshu answered, “Mu!” I’ve never been a fan of koans in general, but I understand their purpose, I think. They are shocks to the mind, jarrings which unsettle the listener. The Rinzai sect of Japanese Zen Buddhism employs them extensively. The Mu koan in particular is interesting to me; it brings to mind this mystery of nothingness we have been considering in this chapter of the Tao Te Ching. It is an idea we will have many other opportunities to consider as we continue to explore Lao Tsu’s work.

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.

Our “Fill ‘er to the rim with Brim!” culture stands in stark opposition to the teachings of Lao Tsu. Perhaps this is unfair. It’s clear that Lao Tsu’s China of the 6th Century BCE had a comparable problem. Perhaps there is something in “human nature” (if we can use such a term in a non-trivial sense) that gives us a propensity for surfeit. Enough is rarely enough in American culture. If it was bad in 6th Century BCE China, I think it is much worse in 3rd Millennium CE America, the richest country in the history of human civilization.

Lao Tsu’s words are nothing unique. Many traditions teach the mean as somehow ethically or even spiritually superior to excess. As Daedalus warned Icarus, “Fly the middle course,” so Lao Tsu tells us that excess will lead to ruination. Easier said than done; just ask Icarus (or the flattened pancake on the bottom of the sea, sticky with melted wax, that is what is left of Icarus).

Lao Tsu ends the chapter by writing:

“Retire when the work is done. This is the way of heaven.”

I have made a concerted effort over the last year to make this a principle by which I try to live my life. I think we can look at this principle as a corollary of the principle to live always in the present, to do just what it is one is doing and nothing else. When I come home from work, it is time to be with my family, to leave my work behind and to retire to the comfort of my loving family. It is a disservice to them and myself to be thinking of work when I should be thinking of building things with Legos, or drawing, or reading aloud with the kids. At some point there will be a time when one of my sons asks me, “Dad, will you build Legos with me?” and that will be the last time he ever asks me to play Legos with him. I don’t want that to be a time when I say, “I can’t because I have to work.” Again, this is easier said than done. And we can rationalize excuse after excuse for why we have to work now even when we are at home and want to be with our families. But, in the end, in my experience, the work will still be there when I am ready to go back to it. The same may not be true of my family, especially if I were to rob them of my attention when I am at home. So, the principle, “Retire when the work is done,” has become a principle by which I choose to live my life. As we say in Zen, this is a practice, not just a goal. It is a guide to present action. Implementing that practice is difficult, but of great importance.

In New Orleans we have a special relationship with water. We are surrounded and suffused by it. It clings to our bodies and fills our lungs. It makes our vegetation lush, so much so that I swear I can see the plants growing. Though Lao Tsu focuses on the benefits of water and on its nature as gentle flow, we know that it can have devastating effects. Hurricane Katrina hurled a twenty foot wall of water that indeed found its way into every nook and cranny of a great deal of our beautiful city. She pummeled my house with sheets of water at 100 mph hour and flung a tree on my roof. So when I think of water, it is more than just a gentle flow that is content to run into every low place. But my experience does not take away the gentleness of water or the gift of life that water brings. Lao Tsu says that water is like the Tao in that it brings life to the ten thousand things, but it does not struggle. It flows gently down to the places we shun. Even there, the Tao flourishes.

Comparing the different translations I have linked in the first post of this blog, we find stark differences in how the second stanza of this chapter is translated. There is clear variance in meaning that results from these differences in translation. I think, though, that the final sentence of the chapter can help us with the meaning of the stanza above it. Lao Tsu writes, “No fight: no blame” (Feng and English) or “If you do not wrangle, you will not be blamed” (Charles Muller’s translation). I think that Lao Tsu is giving us an imperative in this chapter about how we should lead the good life. Therefore, I think that the stanza above this line is a list of similar imperatives (somewhat like the Noble Eightfold Path of the Buddha). Some of the translators lose the imperative voice. Feng and English make the imperative explicit:

“In dwelling, be close to the land.
In meditation, go deep in the heart.
In dealing with others, be gentle and kind.
In speech, be true.
In ruling, be just.
In business, be competent.
In action, watch the timing.”

As a set of imperatives, I don’t think you can go wrong with Lao Tsu’s list. I especially like Feng and English’s translation of the first item of this list. Other translators emphasize the idea of building a house on firm ground, but when I think of how Feng and English phrase this imperative I make a nice connection with the idea of our stewardship of the planet and its biosphere. Living one’s life close to the land carries with it a clear responsibility to recognize the interconnectedness of all life on earth. I have always deeply felt this interconnectedness. I am thankful that my parents chose the name Clay for me because it carries with it the very idea of earth. My own name is a constant reminder of my responsibility to our planet.