Thirty-Three - Know Thyself
Knowing others is wisdom;
Knowing the self is enlightenment.
For any philosopher the ancient Greek aphorism carved on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi is a familiar thought, one which is well-worn and comfortable like a favorite walking stick. But any good philosopher sees the problem with the statement right off. Just what is knowledge, and even more problematically, what is the self? Certainly one would be partially right in arguing that the statement is meant to be taken in an everyday sense, but I think this would miss something important that Lao Tsu is trying to tell us. Clearly this is a very different kind of knowledge than we are used to considering in the everyday sense - here it means “enlightenment,” to use the word chosen by Feng and English. Other translations use the related word “illumined.”
I have also been reading the Upanishads recently and I think we can find some illumination from the Katha Upanishad here. Lao Tsu ends this chapter by writing:
To die but not to perish is to be eternally present.
In the Katha Upanishad Nachiketa goes to the world of the dead to speak with the King of the Dead. After he waits for three days and three nights, the King appears and finding Nachiketa deserving, he says he will answer three questions. The third question Nachiketa asks is about the secrets of death. Throughout the dialog, we learn about the realization in enlightenment of Atman, the Big Self, as opposed to the little self (which is more like our everyday understanding of our “self”). The stillness of meditation is like the death of this little self, and enlightenment is the realization of our inseparable participation in Atman, the Big Self. In a real sense we die but do not perish; in fact, in this realization we truly live.