Meditations and Musings

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.