Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 67

Poem 67

Some say that my teaching is nonsense.

Others call it lofty but impractical.

But to those who have looked inside themselves,

this nonsense makes perfect sense.

And to those who put it into practice,

this loftiness has roots that go deep.

I have just three things to teach:

simplicity, patience, compassion.

These three are your greatest treasures.

Simple in actions and in thoughts,

you return to the source of being.

Patient with both friends and enemies,

you accord with the way things are.

Compassionate toward yourself,

you reconcile all beings in the world.

Commentary

Like many other readers of these reflections, I have long loved reading biographies, autobiographies, memoirs and collections of letters by way of getting an insight into the meaning or purpose of life, or at least another angle on things anyway. Obviously, there are many other ways to make sense of human existence from forging relationships, designing and creating things, going on journeys and so on. Stanza 1 above puts these introductory thoughts wonderfully into perspective, especially in the two lines:

But to those who have looked inside themselves,

this nonsense makes perfect sense.

Indeed, the opening lines of my commentary could be dismissed as being nonsense from a certain practical, down-to-earth realism that sees no meaning at all in life outside surviving it.  However, if you have been reading these reflections, you don't belong to that grouping. There have been many great books throughout history that have explored the meaning of life, and perhaps one of the best early ones must surely be the Confessions of St Augustine of Hippo which were written between 397 - 400 A.D.  There have literally been hundreds of thousands if not millions of them written since.

The second stanza comes to the point swiftly by making three succinct points about what is important in the spiritual life:

(i) Even in the business world, experts recommend that complex issues must be turned into, or at least explained in, the simplest terms.  As a teacher, one must often attempt to break down complex stuff into as simple terms as one possibly can within reason.  Study methods recommend Spider diagrams and Mind Maps to give order or skeletons or bones to complex bodies of material. So simplicity makes sense.  In meditation, life is broken down or reduced to the very simplicity of sitting in the Now of things, of concentration on the simplicity of the very act of breathing.  In most religious traditions, the breath of life is its very essence.  The Old Testament speaks about the Lord of life or God himself breathing the breath of life into the mythical first human beings. Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama bear witness to a simplicity in their approach to living despite the official structures that could make them captives of the system.

(ii) Patience is a great virtue and one only learns it slowly by practice.  After all, as the great Aristotle put it, we become better persons through practice.  In other words, we become more virtuous through education and habit.  Patience is a virtue that lies between the two vices of (a) sloth (deficient vice) and (b) reckless impatience (excessive vice.)  As a parent, nurse or teacher, one must learn to be very patient in how we interact with our children, patients or students respectively.  However, from experience, patience does pay off, but again it is a virtue that can live with a certain level of incompletion, imperfection and disorder. A perfectionist will find it very hard to be patient with others.

(iii) The third virtue recommended by our Taoist poet is that of compassion.  Compassion is at the very heart of all religions and spiritualities worth their salt.  The Dalai Lama puts it succinctly thus: "Compassion is the wish for another being to be free from suffering; love is wanting them to be happy."  Again, one must have compassion for oneself as well as for others.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 65

Poem 65

The ancient Masters

didn't try to educate the people,

but kindly taught them to not-know.

When they think that they know the answers,

people are difficult to guide.

When they know that they don't know,

people can find their own way.

If you want to learn how to govern,

avoid being clever or rich.

The simplest pattern is the clearest.

Content with an ordinary life,

you can show all people the way

back to their own true nature.

Commentary: 

This poem contains sentiments that are found in other religious and spiritual traditions. When one writes about spirituality, no matter from one tradition or another or even from a neutral stance, one will find that certain themes repeat themselves.  Our Taoist poet refers to what is called in the early Christian tradition the "docta ignorantia" or a "learned ignorance." St Augustine of Hippo was the first among the early Fathers of the Church to use this phrase which occurred in one of his sermons.  The full sentence in Augustine's wonderful Latin runs: "Est ergo in nobis quaedam, ut dicam, docta ignorantia, sed docta spiritu dei, qui adiuvat infirmitatem nostram."  A translation would run: "There is in us, therefore, a certain learned ignorance, so to speak, but one taught by the Spirit of God, who helps us in our infirmity."  In other words when we talk about the divine we are never in a territory which is systematically mapped out.  The only guidelines in this spiritual province would be divine inspiration or divine revelation for St Augustine.  A similar line of thought in traditional Christian theology is that of the "via negativa" where we mortals can only deduce attributes of the Deity by declaring all that an infinite, all-powerful and all-loving Being cannot be. Another term for this approach in the mystical tradition is Negative Theology or more elaborately Apophatic theology that proceeds by describing God by negation, speaking of the Divine only in terms of what He/She is not (apophasis = repudiation or denial) rather than presuming to describe what God is.  It is in such a way that our Taoist poet writes in the first stanza of the above poem:

The ancient Masters

didn't try to educate the people,

but kindly taught them to not-know.

The way of "not-knowing" also fits in nicely with the Socratic tradition of declaring one's ignorance constantly in  any matter before proceeding to learn about it incrementally by research and learning.  To present oneself as the repository of all knowledge is obviously a very egotistical thing to do and a very weak approach to epistemology or any valid theory of knowledge.  Again this Socratic approach is to the fore in the second stanza:

When they think that they know the answers,

people are difficult to guide.

When they know that they don't know,

people can find their own way.

In a sense as we grow as human beings we have to unlearn many of the prejudicial opinions and beliefs we have acquired during our early life.  This is the experience of most adults as they grow older and wiser.

All religions and spiritual approaches to life advocate the sufficiency of an ordinary plain life, unencumbered by great riches and power.  In  the end we all end up dead, and dying and death as as natural as living and life.  In pondering the former we learn to appreciate the latter better.  In short, we learn to value our very breath as human beings.  This is the sense I get when reading the final stanza:

If you want to learn how to govern,

avoid being clever or rich.

The simplest pattern is the clearest.

Content with an ordinary life,

you can show all people the way

back to their own true nature.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 47

Poem 47

Without opening your door,
you can open your heart to the world.
Without looking out your window,
you can see the essence of the Tao.

The more you know,
the less you understand.

The Master arrives without leaving,

sees the light without looking,

achieves without doing a thing.

Commentary

Windvane on the lungomare in Catanzaro Lido, January 2016

It is becoming increasingly hard  to come up with new insights with respect to the Tao Te Ching and consequently avoid boring the reader unduly by too much repetition.  I have referred to the balance of opposites many times here already.  However, a central pair of polar opposities that springs to mind is that between Inner and Outer. Indeed, this polarity is quite common in early philosophy and theology in general.  The great early Christian scholar St Augustine of Hippo (354 - 430) was one of the scholars within the early Church to highlight its importance.  Augustine was a restless seeker who sought the meaning of life both in the outside material world and also in the inside spiritual world.  According to his own account of his quest for meaning which he delineated in his wonderful classical biography The Confessions he found the former, while sensually stimulating, to be spiritually stultifying:

Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you.  And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged in to those lovely created things which you made.  You were with me, but I was not with you.  The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you they had no existence at all. You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness.  You were radiant and resplendent - you put to flight my blindness.  You were fragrant, and I dew in my breath and now pant after you.  I trusted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you.  You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.

Admittedly, Augustine went on to condemn the material things of this world, most especially those related to the body as vitiated with evil and to elevate the spiritual realm to a rather esoteric stratosphere.  In other words, I believe he did not manage to hold the two poles in a healthy balance.  However, whatever about our criticisms of Augustinian philosophy and theology, we cannot overlook his insight that a spiritual dimension inheres within us.  In fact, Augustine spoke of his community of fellow friars as being on a shared journey to God and that this same God could be met in their code of practice (moral behaviour), the priciples they subscribed to (the Christian creed) and in their cultic practices (what I mean here by the word "cult" is any particular system of religious practice or worship: religious ceremones like Mass and so forth). He aslo recommended a life of prayer and meditation that followed a process which he called "interiority," namely that it was by a process of "going within" in prayer that one communed with God.

Now back to poem 47.  Our Taoist author is in essence doing exactly as St Augustine recommended above, namely that he suggests that we can be open to the Tao without physically opening our door and going outside.  Even without doing that, we can open our hearts out to the whole world.

Again, the idea of humankind's ignorance is an old epistemological tenet dating back many years.  Socrates encouraged his hearers to continually declare their ignorance as they sought out deeper and wider knowledge.  That knowledge could best be discovered by a process of asking tough questions to elicit ever clearer answers.  Augustine built on Socrates through Plato by recommending what he described as a "docta ignorantia" or "learned ignorance." This is the sense of the second stanza which declares that "the more we know, the less we understand." If one imagines a sphere as being the amount of accumulated knowledge learned by humankind then as knowledge grows the sphere obviously grows and while we have amassed more knowledge and wisdom there is a gowing surface of knowledge over against an ever-expanding universe of unknown knowledge and wisdom.  In that very same sense, it is often said that the more we know, the more we know what we don't know. This is, in effect, the epistemological thrust behind the lines of the second stanza.

Sometimes we need to rest and to cease from all activity to be open to life.  To be busy is a great pastime but it can often lead to mindlessness and drift on the one hand or an obsession with work or with pleasure on the other.  It is in this sense that we must read the lines of our final stanza:

The Master arrives without leaving,

sees the light without looking,

achieves without doing a thing.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 26

Poem 26

The heavy is the root of the light.

The unmoved is the source of all movement.

Thus the Master travels all day

without leaving home.

However splendid the views,

she stays serenely in herself.

Why should the lord of the country

flit about like a fool?

If you let yourself be blown to and fro,

you lose touch with your root.

If you let restlessness move you,

you lose touch with who you are.

Rocks on Donabate Beach

Commentary

As we have outlined many times before in these pages, spiritual writers like to proceed by way of pardox, by setting up contradictions to make the reader or aspiring disciple think, ponder, meditate and contemplate.  Spirituality engages all faculties, not just that of the intellect.  It takes into account all the dimensions of the human being - intellect, heart, feelings, the unconscious, the non-rational and the irrational at times.  The last two lines make me ponder and wonder and they are worth re-quoting even at this close juncture to their former mention:

If you let restlessness move you,

you lose touch with who you are

These lines in the third stanza of the 26th poem brings the early philosopher and theologian St Augustine of Hippo to my mind.  Augustine (354 - 430 A.D.) often described himself as a restless seeker more so than a systematic and profound thinker.  He tells us in his Confessions that he restlessly sought out the truth (or the Good or God) behind the so-called world of the senses.  He declared that he had sought God everywhere, in his many travels around the then known world and in his relationships - some of them failures in worldly terms - and studies.  He tells us that he finally found God in the stillness of his own heart - within himself rather than in the world without. Those Augustinian thoughts seem to contradict outright what the Taoist poet is getting at. Once again, the contradiction is only apparent at one level.  I constantly refer to the predilection of spiritual writers with the healthy tension of opposites.  We have it here, both in Augustine and the Taoist poet. Augustine realised finally that truth or the Good or God could really only be found within his inner self, or heart or soul. So restlessness led Augustine to find rest for his weary soul within his own soul or heart through prayer of meditation, a process of contemplation or meditation he called "interiority" or the "interior way."  In this sense, he is actually in agreement with the Taoist author.

Icon of St Augustine of Hippo

In ways, even if we do not travel in a physical sense, we can travel in our inner selves or minds.  If we are seekers of peace, we shall certainly only find it within ourselves after much meditation and facing and integrating our own individual shadow as Carl Gustav Jung recommends. 

If we are overwhelmed by the weather, it is often good to recall that it is the inner weather of our minds that is the most important thing in anyone's life.  Then, no matter where we go, we will not need to complain about the outer weather.  A good traveller is one who is "at home" in his or her own mind, comfortable with themselves, happy with the lives with which they have been gifted.  In this sense, then, a good traveller never gets homesick.  Let us now add to the above paradoxes by suggesting that a person who stays at home because of some anxiety or depression or other mental problem can be a very restless traveller in his/her own mind.  In fact, they simply are not "at home" with themselves - and this is a very painful mental disequilibrium.

Once again, I invite any reader of the above lines to read over the above Taoist poem and let a word, phrase or line vibrate like a mantra in their minds for at least five minutes of peace and restfulness.