Meditations and Musings

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

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.

Lao Tsu, as he often does, presents us first with a series of four opposites that are somehow necessary for each other. We have shrinking and expansion, failure and strength, casting down and being raised up, and receiving and giving. Understanding the interconnectedness of these things seems to be a special kind of perception. Feng and English translate the next stanza:

This is called perception of the nature of things.
Soft and weak overcome hard and strong.

Interestingly, the Chinese in the first line above refers literally to “light.” Waley translates the line, “This is called ‘dimming’ one’s light.” And Muller translates it as, “This is called ’subtle illumination.’” If memory serves me, this is not the first time that Feng and English ignore some literal translation involving light. Perhaps they believe that the Western baggage surrounding the idiomatic use of “light” is somehow incommensurable with the idiomatic usage of the term in Chinese religious and mystical culture. If so, it is interesting that none of the other translators I have consulted have a similar problem with using the word “light” here. Though an interesting topic for consideration, this does but little to aid our understanding of the chapter. Nevertheless, we have seen this motif throughout the Tao Te Ching before. Ideas like softness and “weakness” are often part of the feminine conception of nature. Somehow if we possess an enlightened perception of the nature of things, we will understand how the soft overcomes the hard and the weak the strong. And perhaps, as another wise man said, “The meek shall inherit the earth.”

While meditating after reading this chapter, I had an interesting experience. The sudden and exquisitely detailed image of a lotus flower popped into my head and bounced around in my mind for a few minutes. I have no idea why, but I somehow became fixated on this image and envisioned a nice idea for glazing one of the bowls I have thrown with an image of a lotus flower. The lotus is considered one of the Ashtamangala, or Eight Auspicious Signs in eastern culture and Buddhist symbolism. The lotus in particular, as the trusty Wikipedia tells us, represents purity of body, speech, and mind. One can envision a beautiful lotus flower floating serenely in a fetid puddle of raw sewage. Get the picture? What does this mean and why did it pop into my head, especially since I had only vague memory of the symbolism I mention before I looked it up to be sure. Certainly, I can see the lotus as an example in meditation - the serenity above the attachment of the mind. The image itself might be seen as a distraction that should have been let go by my grasping mind. Interesting, though.

Living my whole life in New Orleans, except for two months following Hurricane Katrina, Lao Tsu’s words seem familiar.

Passersby may stop for music and good food

It is human nature to be drawn to the pleasures of the senses. And we are drawn as well to those who show true contentment and happiness through their keeping to the Way. But these casual passersby inevitably find the work of spiritual practice bland and tasteless. For them the Tao seems flavorless and without substance. If they were to STOP! and be something more than a passerby. Then, they would realize that the Tao is an inexhaustible font of “rest and happiness and peace.”

In an earlier post I talked about the idea of Flow in psychology. In Chapter Thirty-Four Lao Tsu writes, “The great Tao flows everywhere, both to the left and to the right.” As we considered flow earlier in the text, we saw it especially as it applied to the psychology of the practitioner. Here we focus on the flow of the Tao itself. This flow informs all of creation, silently supporting the existence of the ten thousand things without taking mastery over that creation and without making a show of this support.

Over the history Western Philosophy, there has been much debate about the type of cause God is in relation to the rest of existence. For some philosophers and theologians, God is not only the original cause of existence, the speaker of that “fiat lux” - the First Cause or Prime Mover. God is also the constant cause for all being, at each moment of existence. This second way of thinking of God is closer to what Lao Tsu means to say about the Tao. All things depend upon the Tao for their existence. It is the flow of the Tao through the ten thousand things that makes them real.

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.

The Tao is forever undefined.

Lao Tsu says that in its unformed state The Tao is small, though it cannot be grasped. I am reminded of the Katha Upanishad where it is said that the Self, or Atman, is thumb-sized. How prosaic. For the modern mind intelectualizations are unproblematic. But it seems that to the ancient mind something that brings the mystical down to the everyday, like this idea of smallness in size, is a matter of course.
As we have seen in earlier chapters, our experience of the ten thousand things leads to a division in Being, and in so doing, names are required for our understanding. But this is not a true understanding.

Once the whole is divided, the parts need names.
There are already enough names.
One must know when to stop.

The wise know that the naming of the ten thousand things is not the way to knowledge of The Tao.

Good weapons are instruments of fear; all creatures hate them.

Carrying on with the idea of Thirty, Lao Tsu makes it clear that weapons and war are never prized by one who follows The Way. Living as I do in a country that is, for all intents and purposes, always at war, I am unsurprised that so many Americans have difficulty finding peace in their own lives. As Lao Tsu says, a victory at war should never be cause for celebration for it occurred as a result of great slaughter. When I hear our government officials talk about civilian casualties in Iraq being at acceptable levels, which they claim is 30,000 innocent lives, I am sickened. A recent study conducted by Johns Hopkins put the number at 650,000 innocent Iraqi civilians. Even if that number was half wrong…. Mission accomplished, Mr. Bush?

Whenever you advise a ruler in the way of the Tao,
Counsel him not to use force to conquer the universe.

As I have mentioned in earlier posts, I have found many connections between the truths of Taoism and the experience I am gaining from throwing pottery on the wheel. There is a timeless truth in the notion that the application of force can rebound upon the unwise. As a general principle of behavior, strength of character can never be gained by the application of force or violence in the world. This lesson is something that I find reflected in the process of throwing a piece of pottery.

The first step when one goes to the wheel is called “centering.” I think that it is no coincidence that we often think of good spiritual, emotional, and psychic health as being “centered.” When one centers a piece of clay on a spinning wheel, the application of force or violence will always lead to disaster. Instead one places one’s body in such a way that the clay becomes, in a sense, part of the centered being that is an extension of your body. One’s hands are placed on the clay and as a result of the centering of one’s body, the resistance provided to the spinning clay causes it to center itself. In fact, all of us in class have days when this just does not go well. No matter how hard one tries, one cannot get the clay centered on the wheel. In every case, the reason is that one is having trouble being centered oneself. I don’t mean this in a mystical sense, but instead, in a physical sense. You could argue that there is some connection between the two, and I won’t dispute that. But here is a lesson for life in general; when you push the world, the world pushes back. This is not The Way.