Meditations and Musings

As the second of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths tells us, it is through Upādāna, or attachment, and the craving that it leads to that suffering arises. The answers to the three questions that Lao Tsu poses in the first stanza of this chapter make little difference; they all characterize various attachments. All of these lead inevitably to suffering.

He who is attached to things will suffer much.

In my marginal notes I have scribbled this tidbit from Ben Wren:

Hasidic saying: There are only two sorrows in the world, never to have achieved what is desired and to have achieved it.

I have no idea if this is really a Hasidic saying or not, but the point is very Buddhist. If we accept this characterization of sorrow, then the very idea of desire is suspect. Certainly, if these are in fact true sorrows, no good can come of desiring, unless one is French. In which case, the perfect recipe for maudlin has been discovered.

Forty-three is one of those chapters that encapsulates the Tao Te Ching nicely. It’s one that comes to mind when thinking about Taoism in general. In this very concise chapter, we have the idea of wei wu wei, along with the concepts of yin and yang, and also the idea of teaching without words. While I was reading and meditating on this chapter, I focused on the idea of no-substance presented in the quote above. One might think of spirit or soul in the classical sense as something which has no substance in this way. At least we might see it as being nonphysical allowing it to be where there is “no room.” This ridiculous idea is very unappealing to me.

Instead, what came to mind when I was thinking about what this sentence might mean was the idea of a “string” in String Theory from modern physics. Oversimplifying horribly, string theory holds that all events in the physical world are ultimately caused by the various “vibrations” of extremely small multidimensional “strings.” One of the problems that opponents of this theory point to is the fact that if string theory is in fact true, because strings are actually smaller than the Planck length, we cannot observe them in any meaningful sense. The Planck length, or the smallest meaningful unit of length, is equal to 1.6 x 10^-35 m or about 10^-20 times the size of a proton. Our current understanding of the physical world cannot make claims about anything smaller than this unit of length. Therefore, opponents of string theory assert, the hypotheses of string theory are not falsifiable and as a result cannot be called scientific in any rigorous sense of that word. One could not prove string theory is wrong because the hypotheses associated with it cannot be tested. Therefore String Theory is more like an ideology than a scientific theory.

What in the hell does this have to do with chapter Forty-Three of the Tao Te Ching? Well, not much, except that when I think of things without “substance” in the usual sense, I don’t think about souls, I think about strings. If a string is smaller than the Planck distance then you could fit as many as you like “where there is no room.” Kind of like the old jab at the Scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages, “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

The ten thousand things carry yin and embrace yang.
They achieve harmony by combining these forces.

The notion of balance is one common in most bodies of wisdom. I believe this is our first meeting with yin-yang, at least by name; the ideas have been there throughout, of course. Whether we describe them as feminine and masculine the moon and the sun, shady and sunny, or passive and active, I think even in western culture we are familiar with these concepts of complementary opposition. I like the idea of thinking of these as process rather than state. In truth, we are always experiencing the interplay of these forces rather than existing in some static composition of the two. Somehow, Lao Tsu tells us, the ten thousand things may achieve harmony through this interplay.

Perhaps we can take the teaching of the final stanza to be the outcome of discord when the harmony of the second stanza is not achieved. As Lao Tsu says, “A violent man will die a violent death!” Never believe a man who would say, “We will go to war to achieve a lasting peace.” The morons who believed George W. Bush when he said we needed a war in Iraq to fight terrorism should have heard and taken to heart Lao Tsu’s teaching. I imagine these assholes call themselves Christians, as well. Could you imagine Jesus of Nazareth saying he would go to war to achieve peace? I imagine Jesus was the kind of guy Lao Tsu had in mind when he prefaced his teaching by saying, “What others teach, I also teach.”