Normally this is the sort of thing I’d put in a Facebook note – it’s what I think of as my more personal blogging outlet. However Interrobang was conceived as a place for serious discussion of serious matters, and as such, my thoughts on the Tao Te Ching after spending nearly three months reading a chapter daily, or almost daily (I forgot once or twice) have to belong here and not there.
When I decided to get a copy of the Tao, I didn’t know what I was looking for, per se. I’m still not entirely sure what I was searching for out of all this – I’ve never been a particularly spiritual person, if only because of a lack of exposure to truly meaningful spiritual texts. I may have gone to a Christian high school, but quite frankly, I don’t think essentially forced attendance at church services whose theme is...wait for it...rice carries any sort of religious or spiritual weight. If you believe in God and love him (I refuse to capitalise that), then good for you for finding something real in Christianity. I never have. I started questioning God pretty much at the same time I started questioning Santa. As such, I’ve been pretty firmly an atheist for around a decade – I learnt the word in year 7 R.E. and started applying it to myself somewhere in the next six months to a year.
But of late, specifically as I began reading more Ursula Le Guin’s older, more sci-fi based work mid-last year, I began to realise I was getting something more out of her work than just pleasure at her skill and imagination. That ‘something’, I realised, was Le Guin’s long-term connection with Taoism. With an anthropologist for a father, she stumbled across the Tao Te Ching as a child and essentially grew up with it. Its ideals are integral to her writing, and it was those values that I found fascinating, and most importantly, interesting from a spiritual perspective. And when I discovered Le Guin had done her own translation/rendition of the Tao, I knew that this was it: my way into this intriguing thing I could sense behind her fiction. Up until then, I don’t think I’d quite realised I was looking for a way in.
So I got the book, got some tips from our friend the internet and went from there. The early passages I devoted a lot of time to, often trying to memorise them so I could recite them to myself during the day and so work my way through the denseness of the language. Because by all reports, Lao Tzu wrote things in a dense, deceptively simple way, and anyone who’s ever tackled a Le Guin novel knows that she does a very similar thing, and that it sometimes alienates the reader. So with the two of them together, it could often be quite a challenge to even absorb the words on the page, regardless of their apparently straightforward nature.
“The way you can go
isn’t the real way.
The name you can say
isn’t the real name.
Heaven and earth
begin in the unnamed;
Name’s the mother
of the ten thousand things.
So the unwanting soul
sees what’s hidden
and the ever-wanting soul
sees only what it wants.
Two things, one origin,
but different in name,
whose identity is mystery.
Mystery of all mysteries!
The door to the hidden.”
I have to admit that when I read this, the first chapter of the Tao, I was more than a little transfixed by it. At that point, it seemed very much like I would something worth understanding in the little book. As a writer, I still look at it and love the beauty of it. In truth, it’s probably the above passage and the one below, which came second, that struck me most deeply.
“Everybody on earth knowing
that beauty is beautiful
makes ugliness.
Everybody knowing
That goodness is good
makes wickedness.
For being and nonbeing
arise together;
hard and easy
complete each other;
long and short
shape each other;
high and low
depend on each other;
note and voice
make the music together;
before and after
follow each other.
That’s why the wise soul
does without doing,
teaches without talking.
The things of this world
exist, they are;
you can’t refuse them.
To bear and not own;
to act and not lay claim;
to do the work and let it go:
for just letting it go
is what makes it stay.”
I think what makes the above passage so interesting to me is that it is talking about something I can and do readily accept as ‘fact’. The chapter is to some extent with the nature of yin and yang as a constantly shifting balance. I can no longer remember where I read this explanation of the concept, but if you throw a stone into a pool, there will be ripples. We all know that, but if you think of how the high points of the ripple and the low points in between will swap places as the ripple spreads outward before finally returning to quiescence. In other words, what was yang (to oversimplify a bit, the high points) will become yin (the low points) and vice versa before both revert back into a single whole. It’s a fascinating idea to me, if only because it ties in with a conclusion that I’d already come to on my own: that the universe has a sort of flow that shifts direction according to its own whims. Maybe I’m getting a bit esoteric now, but in the concept of yin and yang, I see the ‘shifting flow’ that I had already perceived myself.
As I progressed through the Tao, I began to interact with it less as a spiritual tract and more as a thought for the day. I was less struck by entire chapters and more by individual lines or stanzas. In short, I started to get less out of it, the more I read. I’m not sure if this was simply the nature of my life getting in the way of me properly absorbing the work, the part of me that is a bit of more hardcore about the atheism than the rest tearing things down, or the fact that I actively disagreed with a certain amount of the ideas presented. I think it’s probably a combination of the first and third things. My atheism is largely a hazy-edged thing and I don’t think I was really dismissing what I was reading so much as only truly connecting with some of it. As the book goes on, the unity described in the first two chapters slowly gets deconstructed and discussed at length. For some reason, I found it easier to understand and appreciate the earlier chapters, ‘the whole’ than I did the increasingly smaller pieces. And of course, Lao Tzu says himself in that first chapter, and in later ones, that the Way is inherently elusive.
But then there were simple, basic moments that simply felt right to me – “To give no trust/is to get not trust” (17 and 23) is a case in point. In all honesty, reading the Tao Te Ching was like trying to find stones at the bottom of a rushing river – the water is pleasantly cool, but nothing you can easily catch hold of. You can grab the stones, but they’re at the end of the day only part of what you can see in the river itself. Here are some other little maxims I picked up along the way (pun intended).
“Forget the rules
Be untroubled.” (19)
“Self-satisfied people do no good,
Self-promoters never grow up.” (24)
“To enjoy using weapons
is to enjoy killing people,
and to enjoy killing people
is to lose your share in the common good.” (31)
“The great square has no corners.
The great vessel is never finished.
The great tone is barely heard.
The great thought can’t be thought.” (41)
“All you grasp will be thrown away,
All you hoard will be utterly lost.” (44)
“When the world’s on the Way,
they use horses to haul manure.
When the world’s off the Way,
They breed warhorses on the common.” (46)
“Seek, you‘ll find it.
Hide, it will shelter you.” (62)
“The nine-storey tower rises
from a heap of clay.” (64)
“I have three treasures.
I keep and treasure them.
The first, mercy,
the second, moderation,
the third, modesty.
If you’re merciful you can be brave,
if you’re moderate you can be generous,
and if you don’t presume to lead
you can lead the high and mighty.” (67)
“We ought not to live in narrow houses,
we ought not to do stupid work.
If we don’t accept stupidity
we won’t act stupidly.” (72)
To some of the above, I simply went, “Yes, that’s right,” or “Huh – I never thought of it that way before.” All I know is that they make sense to me on a very basic level. The excerpts of 67 and 72 are very much reflective of the way I try to approach life – perhaps I wouldn’t have chosen words like mercy and moderation to explain the way I want to do things, but modesty is certainly very deeply ingrained into my being. And I’ve never had much time for stupidity or senselessness, rightly or wrongly.
So what did I actually get out the Tao Te Ching? To be honest, I’m not sure. Ideas, I think. That sounds so basic, but I think that’s what happened – I absorbed the concepts, the spirit engendered in all the 81 chapters without really deeply interacting with them. I think certain amounts of it will resurface down the track, and I think it’s probably already positively affected my outlook on life to an extent. I was surprised how many little pieces I felt I had to mention above, how much of I felt was important, was central. I suspect I’m like many of Lao Tzu’s readers, just managing to grip a few stones in the river.
Am I a Taoist? No, I don’t think so. I think a certain amount of my own perceptions of the greater universe are inherently Taoist. The eternal interplay of yin and yang I embrace fully, just as I do the pacifist nature of parts of the text. The recurrent point that the Way is difficult to properly comprehend I definitely get. But some of it, for example the passages about the correct way to govern, I simply didn’t agree with. Maybe ignorance is the easiest means to a simple, full life on the Way, but as Lao Tzu puts it, “The great way is low and plain/but people like shortcuts over the mountains.” I like shortcuts over the mountains. I am a curious being by nature and I would never try to suppress that in myself. Thus, I cannot follow that particular part of the Way, amongst others. I don’t think that’s a failure on my part, or that the text is inherently wrong on this point. I just would never try to stifle my personality in pursuit of a spiritual goal. If you have to change or ignore parts of who you are at your core in order to follow a belief system, then you should not follow it. Which, when I think about it, is why I never connected with Christianity – so much of the brand of it which I encountered was so incredibly mired in restriction, in forbidding people from their own natural inclinations on every level. Of course the Tao is not like this; hence I found something real in it. This excerpt from chapter 21 is probably the best summation of how I now perceive the Tao:
“How the Way does things
is hard to grasp, elusive.
Elusive, yes, hard to grasp,
yet there are thoughts in it.
Hard to grasp, yes, elusive,
yet there are things in it.
Hard to make out, yes, and obscure,
yet there is spirit in it, veritable spirit.
There is certainty in it.”
I guess what I’m trying to express is that in the past three months, I found something solid in the Tao Te Ching, and in the Way. It just wasn’t the all-consuming, life-changing thing I expected it to be. And quite frankly, I’m glad that it wasn’t. I don’t believe I’m made for a deep and constant connection with spirituality. I think in my life, it belongs in the background, as a comforting underlying knowledge – there when I need it, but quiet and almost unnoticeable if I don’t.
