Poem 43
The gentlest thing in the world
overcomes the hardest thing in the world.
That which has no substance
enters where there is no space.
This shows the value of non-action.
Teaching without words,
performing without actions:
that is the Master's way.
Commentary
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| Poppy, Easter 2014, Ardgillen Park, Skerries |
What we have in the above poem are hard words - ones that contradict our lived experience. I remember an old teacher once remarking to me that there is an ancient animalistic instinct in the herd to tear the weakest member apart limb from limb. He was remarking on how certain pupils can be bullied because they are perceived as weak. However, I hasten to add here that this reported anecdote is over thirty years old and that since those times much has been done here in our schools in Ireland to write up good policies and establish equally good anti-bullying practices in our schools and work places. However, that old teacher's comments still stand. I suppose it's an ancient instinct that goes back to the survival of the herd in pre-historic times. And yet, I was more than a little surprised to get hundreds of references on Google to the topic of crushing the weak. Here is a report that appeared relatively recently in the October 21st 2015 edition of the The Tribune, which is a North Indian Newspaper published in Chandigarh, and the following quotation therefrom is worth reading in connection with our above poem:
Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday accused the Prime Minister, Haryana Chief Minister, the BJP and RSS of practising “politics of crushing” those who are weak.
“This is an attitude shared by the Prime Minister, Chief Minister of the state and the entire BJP and RSS. The attitude is if somebody is weak, he can be crushed. What you have seen is the result of this attitude,” Gandhi said while visiting the Dalit family that lost two children on Tuesday in an attack allegedly by upper caste members in Sunped village near Ballabhgarh.
Two children were burnt alive and their parents suffered burn injuries allegedly after some upper caste members set their house afire while they were sleeping.
The village today erupted in grief and indignation, with the locals blocking the National Highway 2 in protest. (See CRUSHING THE WEAK )
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| Tulip, Easter 2014, Ardgillen Park, Skerries |
I was horrified also to find that there was a Facebook page dedicated to, I quote "Crushing the Weak for Fun" and which has the following "raison d'etre" appended to it under its "About" tab: "This page is dedicated for (sic) all those who believe that the physically and intellectually superior should crush those weaker or less financially stable than they, as sport." Undoubtedly, it was set up as a "spoof" or "send up" page (I hope) judging by the only photograph on the totally empty profile page. The whole thing is devoid of content bar what I have reported here, but that the idea should have occurred to those who attempted to set it up mirrors how sick society can be at its lowest and basest level of behaviour.
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| More flowers in Ardgillen Park, Skerries, Easter 2014 |
However, I will leave it to the reader of these few words to add their own examples of how they have experienced the weak being crushed in their lives. What I wanted to illustrate here is that, more often than not, deep wisdom can contradict lived experience in the short term, in the actual "now" of experience, in the very horrific and painful occurrence of one tragedy or another. And yet, we know that there is a greater perspective, a wisdom that needs longer to play out, a reflection on experience that issues in a wisdom that is paid for in pain and tears over a longer stretch of time. That's why no wisdom tradition worth its salt offers easy answers or instant cures or miracles. I have referred in these posts before to the habit within well-established religious and spiritual traditions of setting up paradoxes, seeming contradictions and a balancing of opposites in a healthy tension that offers no easy answers but rather provokes deeper questions that search out and shine a certain little light into the darker corners of experience. It is in this sense and in this sense only that the above Taoist poem must be read. It is stating the deepest truth in a paradoxical way. Yes, indeed, gentleness is a great strength as witnessed by that great master of non-violence and peace, the wonderful Mahatma Gandhi whose practice of non-violence eventually ended in the freedom of India - though the people of all traditions had to experience much suffering in a chieving it. He showed that those who brutalised the people who demonstrated non-violence in their stance for justice were in fact brutalising themselves in the long run. And yet, we know that such methods simply could not have worked against the likes of a Hitler or a Stalin, dictators of such an evil level that it required a necessary violence to bring them down and eventually establish justice. It is then, with all of these experiences and the necessary reflection on those experiences taken into account that we read the Tao Te Chin or any other spiritual text. In short, life is as complex as the people who go to make it up. Let us resist an over-simplification of life. Let us paint it in its full complexity and proceed by contemplating the paradoxes and the tension of opposites that all deep religious and spiritual texts require us to do. There simply is no alternative to right living and right practice. Now, let us practise getting to know our deeper selves through pondering meditatively once again our chosen poem:
The gentlest thing in the world
overcomes the hardest thing in the world.
That which has no substance
enters where there is no space.
This shows the value of non-action.
Teaching without words,
performing without actions:
that is the Master's way.
Namaste, friends.
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