Meditations and Musings

The wise student hears of the Tao and practices it diligently.
The average student hears of the Tao and gives it thought now and again.
The foolish student hears of the Tao and laughs aloud.
If there were no laughter, the Tao would not be what it is.

Clearly, Lao Tsu had me in mind when he wrote this chapter. I can’t help but think that I am at best an average student, bordering on foolish. When I read a line like this, “The perfect square has no corners,” I want to laugh aloud. Does this make me a foolish student? Isn’t that line ridiculous by any rational standard? What could Lao Tsu mean that isn’t totally ridiculous?

The structure of Forty-One is at least familiar to us by now. The second stanza is a list of aphorisms juxtaposing opposites as we have seen in several other chapters. Are we any less baffled just because we have seen this sort of thing over and over? Some of these at least seem to make some sense to me. My marginalia from Ben Wren’s class bring the line, “Great purity seems sullied” to attention. In my commentary on an earlier chapter, I mentioned the symbolic use of the lotus in relation to this idea. The beautiful lotus is perfectly happy floating on the surface of a stinking cesspool.

Virtue plays a central part in this chapter, as in: “The highest Virtue seems empty.” Certainly, the virtuous person never thinks of virtue. The state of living virtuously never depends on one consciously regulating one’s behavior in regards to some moral principle. The principle has been internalized. In a very real sense, one simply is virtue. These kinds of people are notoriously bad at explaining the state of living virtuously. When they do so, we get statements like those found in this chapter. To learn virtue, live in the presence of the virtuous.

Returning is the motion of the Tao.
Yielding is the way of the Tao.
The ten thousand things are born of being.
Being is born of not being.

Halfway. At the midpoint of the Tao Te Ching, we come again to what I think of as the central mystery of Taoism. From nothing, everything. In the margin of my text, I wrote during my Zen class with Ben Wren a single word: “Femininity.” The ideas central to this chapter are often considered feminine qualities, returning and yielding. And most importantly, the pregnant void. The Void that is the mother of us all.

In Infinity and Mind, Rudy Rucker talks about the infinite “Mindscape” out of which the human mind creates the content of the conceptual world. In his sense of the term, humans participate in a special way in the unboundedness of the infinite. This concept and similar representations of it in Descartes’ Meditations and Noam Chomksy’s reinvisioning of Rationalistic theories of mind have contributed greatly to my own understanding of the ideas so central to Chapter Forty of Lao Tsu’s work and of Taoism in general. If we each and every human have a kind of mirror of this pregnant void somehow in ourselves, perhaps the idea of being from not being is not so outlandish. From the point of view of language, the subject matter of both Descartes and Chomsky’s discussion of these ideas, we all can see the truth of the fact that it is not so hard to formulate a meaningful sentence that no other human being has ever uttered. For Descartes and Chomsky, the native creative impulse within us made us very special beings indeed. By analogy, perhaps we can apply this feature of the human mind to a picture of Being as a whole. In this sense, is it so outlandish to believe that “Being is born of not being”?

In Thirty-Nine, Lao Tsu begins with one of his parallel lists. The lists are bound together by the idea of wholeness - the Oneness of the Tao. Heaven, Earth, Spirit, The Valley, The Ten Thousand Things, and the Rulers all have their essential quality by which each attains “wholeness.” Without that essential quality, each of these things would be divided, broken apart, exhausted, or made to fall down.

From these “humble” beginnings the base quality through which each thing excels and becomes Whole, the highest things are made to rise up. “Do they not depend on being humble?” The simplest things deserve our attention. These small things are inevitably connected to the entire web of life and existence. We cannot know the One without knowing it in the simplest of things