Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 76

Poem 76

Men are born soft and supple;
dead, they are stiff and hard.

Plants are born tender and pliant;

dead, they are brittle and dry.

Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible

is a disciple of death.

Whoever is soft and yielding

is a disciple of life.

The hard and stiff will be broken.

The soft and supple will prevail.

Commentary

One cannot but love metaphors as they resonate with many levels of meaning, and depending on either the time of day or the mood the reader is in they offer up differing insights.  Rigidity versus flexibility are wonderful metaphors for ways of being in the world. As such they have much to teach us.  Let's take the ego by way of example by looking at the person who believes he or she knows the one way or the correct way to do something.  To be a "know all" can lead very quickly to our downfall as we will quickly learn from lived experience.  It is often better to declare our ignorance before we start to solve a problem because that way we are open to all lines of inquiry, and we shut out no avenue of exploration no matter how improbable that may seem at first sight.  This is the long known approach of the great Socrates. First, he says, the inquirer must always declare his ignorance and proceed in logical steps from there.  So flexibility in thought is much to be advised.

Likewise, flexibility in feelings is also much to be desired.   To stubbornly and inflexibly follow one path just because we dislike or even hate another person and deep down know we are wrong is another form of ignorance.

Likewise, look at the way some leaders function. Good leaders learn to motivate others through being flexible in their approach to leading their staff rather than rigid.  Being rigid often sets us up for defeat.  Did you ever work with someone who was a control freak, who couldn't let go or who could not delegate?  I worked with one such person once and he ended up working himself into an early grave.  I still work with a few control freaks.  They seek in vain to micro-manage things. Unfortunately,  or rather, very fortunately, the world simply does not work like that.  The forces of life work so much differently, and they don't spend too long teaching us the error of our ways. That's how people get all those psychosomatic illnesses from peptic ulcers right across the board to high blood pressure, nervous breakdowns, panic attacks and actual heart attacks.

How many times have we heard the age-old advice that we must learn to "go with the flow"? Flow theory was popularised by Mihaly Csikszentmihali who really discovered nothing new. Rather, he was open enough to recognise this process, give it a name and describe it in detail and then popularise it.  Here is a Ted Talk he has given on this interesting theory if you are interested: TED TALK.  

Thankfully, I learned early in my teaching career just how much I can control, when to ask for help, when to take action according to how serious something is.  One has to learn to become open to observation, to learn to read the signs, pick up the clues and interpret them properly.  That, of course, can only come with experience.  There is a Zen recommendation that it is better to be flexible like the grass rather than rigid like a tree in the wind.  Indeed, this is very old wisdom and even Aesop had a fable about it.  An old proverb runs that it is "better to bend than break," or even that "reeds survive the wind while mighty oaks do fall." Obviously, the same wisdom is found in the above short poem.

So softness is often preferable to hardness, gentleness to strength, flexibility to rigidity if we are to survive our journey through life.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 69

Poem 69

The generals have a saying:

"Rather than make the first move

it is better to wait and see.

Rather than advance an inch

it is better to retreat a yard."

This is called

going forward without advancing,

pushing back without using weapons.

There is no greater misfortune

than underestimating your enemy.

Underestimating your enemy

means thinking that he is evil.

Thus you destroy your three treasures

and become an enemy yourself.

When two great forces oppose each other,

the victory will go

to the one that knows how to yield.

Commentary

Once again our Taoist poet is pushing us to the edge of incredulity and asking us to jump.  It is so hard to jump into the sheer irrational! There is a link here somewhere with Kierkegaard's "Leap of Faith," though commentators say that he spoke rather of a "Leap to Faith." It would appear that Kierkegaard was appealing to his reader, and to himself, to stop over-thinking, to stop thinking about thinking and getting all tied up in knots - as we are  so prone to getting caught up in philosophical, theological and even spiritual knots, it is surely better to just have faith, that is, take the leap to faith.  All of this is so hard to do as we lesser mortals need to prove so much to ourselves; we need to have the dubious satisfaction of having worked it out on our own; we simply are gripped so often by the childish need to shine up our egos.

Once again our Taoist poet is appealing to the wisdom of generals.  However, I don't know what generals he may be referring to as in the little I have read about war, mostly about World War I and World War II and the generals that were around then very few if none acted like the generals our poet mentions above. Those referred to above would never win any war with such a ridiculous strategy.

And yet, once again as we are becoming adjusted to the perspective of a Taoist take on life, we can glimpse a certain amount of truth and wisdom.  Even if all that's written above contradicts our reasoning we suspect there is a deeper wisdom being adumbrated by the poet.  I have always loved the wise saying: "This, too, will pass."  This piece of wisdom has been attributed to so many that it is hard to be exact about its provenance.  It bears similarity to the phrase "sic transit gloria mundi," or "thus passes the glory of the world," a phrase used at papal enthronement ceremonies from the fifteenth century right up until 1963, namely a warning to the Pope to realize that he too is very mortal indeed. However, these small points of not so useful information can be duly forgotten, but not their meaning or import, namely, that life is all too transient and fleeting.  With this wisdom in the back of our minds we may now read our poem again.  With this perspective or bird's eye view attained, we may swallow what has been presented to us in the above poem.

It is hard to take much of the above seriously with respect to war in the twentieth century, especially the lines:

When two great forces oppose each other,

the victory will go

to the one that knows how to yield.

Hitler and Stalin especially gave the lie to the sentiments expressed here. Think of Neville Chamberlain coming back to London, having swallowed all of Hitler's lies, saying to his nation and to the world from the steps of Downing Street on the 30th of September, 1938: "My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Go home and get a nice quiet sleep."

Once again, this poem is pushing us to the edge of the cliff and asking us to jump; asking us to have faith; or to take the leap to faith; asking us to trust in a deeper or higher wisdom despite the evidence of our all too human eyes.  

In the final analysis we are a people of contradictions, and one suspects that Friedrich Nietzsche was right when he opined that we are only fruitful when we are "rich in contradictions.

The rest, my friends, is SILENCE.

NAMASTE!